Black Tide

by Peter Temple

  We all sat down and went back to drinking beer.

  At 6.30, a car hooted outside. Three hoots. I said my goodbyes, went out with Charlie. His granddaughter Augustine’s car was at the door. She leaned over and opened the passenger door.

  ‘What did trade unions do to deserve this striking woman?’ I asked. Gus was a rising star in the union movement. She looked like Lauren Bacall with brains, a sight to soothe any old worker’s eye.

  ‘What did Taub’s Cabinetmaking do to deserve the most fetching man ever to mate two pieces of wood?’ said Gus.

  ‘They are both the undeserving,’ I said. ‘We are the deserving. Can we be brought together?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Charlie, fighting with the seatbelt. ‘In Kooyong, the library. You remember.’

  ‘I thought you made that up.’

  ‘People who look for criminals, they make up. Yesterday, this wife rings up. The man, he’s gone. But she wants it still. Measure up next week.’

  ‘I’ve got tables to finish. Little tables. Day’s work for a man who actually works. More for someone like me.’

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘Take him away, Gus,’ I said. ‘He’s ruined a spiritual moment.’

  ‘It’s a gift,’ she said. ‘The whole family has it.’

  4

  On the way home, sense of achievement gone, I went via a place in St George’s Road for some takeaway Chinese comfort food. They know me there. I don’t have to order. As I come in, Lester barks, ‘How many?’ Until recently, the answer was Two. These days, it’s One.

  Opening the front door at home, I surveyed the scene with distaste. The minimally converted stable where I live was cold and untidy and unclean, battered leather furniture buried under newspapers, books and items of clothing put down, temporarily.

  Friday night is the second-worst night for being on your own. Saturday night is the big one. By Sunday night, you think you’re getting the hang of it.

  The answer lies in action. I switched on lights, checked the answering machine, got the heating going, went outside for firewood, started a blaze.

  Looking for red wine in the unpacked boxes, I found the surviving bottle of ’89 Maglieri shiraz. It had been in an unopened carton not two metres from the explosive device that almost removed the top floor of my previous dwelling, an old boot factory in North Fitzroy. Eleven bottles fragmented, glass splinters travelling ten metres, a dark purple spray covering everything. The first people on the scene thought it was blood, enough for at least two. But one bottle was mysteriously spared, a small abrasion on the label. A memento of the end of another bit of my life.

  Linda’s absence on the answering machine signalled the closing of yet another piece.

  This wasn’t the moment for the Maglieri. That called for something to celebrate. The start of something new, perhaps. Now I was at the fag-end of something old. At the back of a cupboard, I found a bottle of Penfolds 128. About right. I put on a Charlie Parker CD.

  Home. It means something when you have to do economy class time in planes, sit for hours in small hired cars, sleep in cardboard-walled hotel rooms sprayed with chemicals to mask the smell of other chemicals.

  I cleared an armchair and sat down to eat in front of the fire, just in time to watch a weather report. It was delivered by a person who wanted to be a witty weatherperson, not a wise ambition for someone without wit. Still, he clearly relished what he did: waved a pointer vaguely while reading off placenames and temperatures from an electronic prompter. An idiot could do it and an idiot was doing it, a rare example of intellectual capacity and occupation dovetailing.

  I fully intended to ring my sister but she beat me to it.

  ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘I’m in contact with the living Jack Irish? This is he? Him? Don’t tell me. I’m going to faint.’ She paused. ‘Don’t flesh and blood mean anything to you?’

  ‘A piece of prime sirloin, well hung, it has meaning to me, yes.’

  ‘Well hung,’ she said. ‘Well hung’s just a memory. I’m lucky to meet badly hung. Hung at all is a blessing.’

  ‘The incredible shrinking men. You may be inside some kind of zone of contracting genitals. A beam from space. The aliens are clearing a landing ground in Toorak. First they shrink the dicks of the rich, then…’

  ‘They send in the alien shocktroops, humanoids hung like Danehill, to be ecstatically welcomed by the rich women. Speaking of rich women, how’s Linda?’

  It wasn’t a question I wanted to be asked. I slid down the sofa, put my right foot out and moved a log closer to the core of the fire. ‘That’s not a question I wanted to be asked,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve answered it anyway. A friend of mine saw her with Rod Pringle at a television thing.’

  Rod Pringle was the hottest thing in commercial television current affairs.

  ‘Just business,’ I said.

  ‘He kissed her ear.’

  ‘They’re like that in television. Kiss your ear, kiss your arse, kiss any part of you. Means nothing. Like size.’ I drank some red wine. It seemed to have gone sour.

  ‘Jack? You there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that.’ A pause. ‘Here’s a number I’ve been looking for. Madame Corniche.’

  ‘Please God,’ I said, ‘not seances. Recovered memories before seances.’

  ‘Cranial massage. Did you know the plates in your skull can be moved?’

  ‘Rosa,’ I said, ‘if the Good Lord wanted us to pay people to move our skull plates, he wouldn’t have given us the front bar of the Royal in Footscray. You want to eat one day? Lunch?’

  ‘You’re inviting me to eat? Soon you could be introducing me to your friends. Male friends.’

  ‘I don’t know any men I’d like to be related to by intercourse,’ I replied.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I’d rather be introduced to men by a warder at Pentridge. Or wherever they put the crims now. Lingalonga Social Adjustment Facility Pty Ltd.’

  ‘They’ll be the same people I know,’ I said. ‘Former clients.’

  ‘Funny thing with lawyers,’ Rosa said. ‘The respectable ones I know don’t have former clients. They have clients. It’s only the ones like you who have former clients. Former because someone shot them dead or because you couldn’t keep them out of jail.’

  ‘Respectable?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you knew respectable lawyers. Name one.’

  ‘I can name one. One of many. I was at the races with one two weeks ago, in fact.’

  ‘Laurie Phelan. I saw you at Flemington with Laurie Phelan.’

  ‘Exactly. A commercial lawyer. Why didn’t you show yourself?’

  ‘Trying to avoid guilt by association. Know what they call Laurie? They call him Mr Omo. Why is that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Because he washes whiter than white. He launders money for drug dealers.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Well,’ Rosa said, ‘he’s got nice hands.’

  ‘Must be using a kind soap powder. Donelli’s in Smith Street, Collingwood. Sunday, twelve-thirty. In the courtyard.’

  ‘Courtyard? A courtyard in Collingwood? I don’t think you’ve got a full grasp of the courtyard concept. They don’t have courtyards in Collingwood. Courtyards don’t have Hills hoists in the middle. With big old underpants and bloomers and bras like jockstraps for elephants hanging on them.’

  ‘Don’t bring Laurie Phelan.’

  ‘You bastard.’

  I caught the last ten minutes of ‘On This Day’. Rod Pringle’s dense and shining hair kept sliding over his quizzical right eyebrow as he tried to get the Premier of New South Wales to concede that you could buy planning permission in Sydney’s western suburbs.

  The Premier was confident, serious and convincing. Then an overhead camera zoomed in on his sweating scalp, showing the transplanted hair plugs, like an enhanced CIA satellite picture of a failing crop in Afghanistan. After that,
he didn’t seem quite so convincing.

  After a commercial, Linda came on, fetching in dark blue, standing in front of a flashy Sydney building. She pointed over her shoulder.

  This building, called Cumulus, is Sydney’s newest and most dramatic. It belongs to a private company owned by one of the most private millionaires in Australia, Steven Levesque. We hear little about him from year to year. Yesterday, he came into the spotlight as the buyer of a forty per cent shareholding in Sanctum Corporation, the country’s fastest-growing property development company. But Mr Levesque is more than a businessman. He is also said to speak directly into ears at the highest levels of politics.

  The camera cut to a vast minimalist office, dwelt for a moment upon a large Storrier canvas, then went to a man sitting behind a glowing slab of 300-year-old jarrah, a handsome man in his forties, perfect navy suit, blue shirt, red tie, lean and tanned face, squared-off chin.

  Linda opened with a fast inswinger.

  Mr Levesque, people say that you have far too much influence over both the Prime Minister and the Premier of Victoria. Why is that?

  Levesque smiled, put his head to one side in a puzzled way. His straight fair hair was naughtily unwilling to stay in place and he disciplined it with long fingers.

  Why is what?

  Why is this impression current?

  Is it? I can’t imagine why. The Prime Minister probably wouldn’t recognise me, the Premier of Victoria I’ve known for a long time but I don’t see much of. It’s usually on public occasions. We commiserate about golf for a minute or so. Also, he once asked me about a horse I had an interest in.

  Whether it would win?

  No. He liked its name. Momus. He wanted to know what it meant.

  The camera went to Linda.

  And could you tell him?

  Levesque: Could you have?

  Linda: Odd to name a horse for the god of ridicule, isn’t it?

  Tough point won. She smiled, showing her nice teeth. My lips knew those nice butted-up teeth. You could see why she was a big hit, why the Sydney Morning Herald TV guide called her the best interviewer on television, why the Sun-Herald said she was a thirty-something spunk who paralysed the channel-surfing finger. Belatedly, Linda was having the career success she deserved.

  I understood that the only place she could have that success was in Sydney. Melbourne hated success. It didn’t match the weather. Melbourne’s weather suited introspective mediocrity and suicidal failure. The only acceptable success had to involve pain, sacrifice and humility. Sydney liked the idea of success, achieved at no cost and accompanied by arrogance.

  In this room, I had said those things. And I’d said, ‘For Christ’s sake, take the job. It’s only a couple of hours away. If you don’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life thinking: What if…?’

  Steven Levesque was saying: I’m an ordinary member of the party and from time to time, people in the party ask my opinion on something and I give it. I imagine they seek opinions from dozens of people. And so they should.

  Last July, the Premier of Victoria took a ten-day holiday in the Caribbean. He stayed at a property on Guadeloupe called the Domaine de Thierry. My information is that you own the property, Linda countered.

  Steven Levesque laughed, a real-sounding laugh.

  I don’t. A company I’m involved with does. It owns three properties in the Caribbean. They’re for hire. Anyone can stay there. You can stay there, Ms Hillier. My understanding is that the Premier was the guest of someone who hired the Domaine.

  May we know who?

  Another laugh. Even if I knew, Ms Hillier, and I don’t, I certainly wouldn’t tell you or anyone else.

  I drained my glass. Now I could spend the rest of my life thinking: What if I hadn’t encouraged Linda Hillier to take the offer from Channel 6 in Sydney? Would it have been happiness ever after? What kind of idiot encourages a woman he loves to move away in pursuit of media stardom?

  It doesn’t pay to ponder a question like that. I switched the TV off and went to my cold and lonely bed.

  The bed warmed up after a while, the soul stayed cold. Deep in the night, I saw images of people loved. I saw their smiles, heard the sound of voices now stilled, heard our uncontrollable laughter, and felt the touches, the kisses, the hugs, the hand run lovingly over my hair. All gone. Utterly, irretrievably gone.

  I awoke before dawn, unrested, got up, made tea, went back to bed and read the last chapter of an English novel in which people were, generally, pretty despondent about the way their lives had turned out. Looking around, noting the terminally unhealthy colour of the sheets that draped me, the soiled socks dotted around the room like the droppings of an exotic animal, the white shirt sleeve hanging from the laundry basket like an inadequate surrender flag, I could sympathise with that view.

  I got up, showered, thought about how to pass the day. The days. While I was thinking, they passed. Saturday, shopping, cleaning. Sunday, lunch with my sister.

  One sister is a difficult thing. Two would be easy. Three, you’d start confusing their names. Four, you’d be the team mascot. But one sister is your mother, writ smaller and without the uncontested authority, but nevertheless equipped with the means to make you feel guilty.

  My sister has a special look. It says many things: you aren’t making the most of yourself, you’re letting us down, that tie doesn’t go with that shirt. The only way to counter the look is through a combination of evasion and attack.

  Sunday night, I cooked for the freezer, the first time in a month or more. Beef and bacon in red wine and consommé, chicken pies with olives, onion and sherry.

  5

  Early Monday morning, startled awake by something in an unrecoverable dream, I got up. Uneasy, vaguely sick at the stomach, I scoured myself and drove to Taub’s in the dark, nothing on the streets but a cab full of drunks.

  As always, some peace descended upon me as I stood inside the door of the workshop and looked around. It was the feeling I’d experienced years before when, feeling my way out of the black tunnel of despair and binge drinking I entered after my wife’s death, I’d come upon Charlie’s business.

  Timber, most of it from a time carefree of any concern for the future and unobtainable now, more timber than Charlie could use if he had another lifetime, was stickered side-on against the walls. The most precious was in the rafters under the huge skylight. Charlie called the timber up there The Bank. The workshop had three workbenches, unlike any other benches, built by Charlie: 120-year-old redgum, Emmert 18-inch vices at each end, dog holes lined in 12 mm brass, dogs of lignum vitae. Behind them, the planes on their sides in their pigeonholes: thumb planes, block planes, bench planes of every size, planes for curves, planes for angles, moulding planes, multi-planes. Hanging up were the spokeshaves and drawknives. Next to them, the saws stood upright in their slots beneath two cabinets of chisels and carving tools and a cabinet of measuring and marking tools.

  Against the righthand wall were the clamp racks: at the bottom, the monster sash clamps; above them, the lesser sizes; in the next rack, the bar clamps, the infantry of joinery, dozens of them in every size; then the frame clamps, the spring clamps, the G-clamps, the ancient wooden screw clamps that Charlie loved best, and flexible wooden go-bars arranged by length. Finally, an assortment of weird clamps, many of them invented by Charlie to solve particular clamping problems.

  At the back of the shop were the machines: a Swiss sliding table saw, an old German table saw, a 24-inch thickness planer, a long-bed jointer, a 28-inch-throat bandsaw, a drill press, and a fifty-year-old English lathe. All Charlie’s machines were cast-iron, solid, true, no rock, no play, tinkered with, tuned, kept clean as museum exhibits.

  I packed the stove with paper and shavings and little offcuts and a kitchen match set it humming. By 8 a.m., I’d glued up the four small tables made of thirty-year-old American cherry, clamping them with a version of a framing clamp devised by Charlie to ensure squareness. The tables were made to Charlie’s
design, utterly simple, their elegance lying in the wood, the taper of the long slim legs, and the thin line of black persimmon inlay below the tabletops.

  I made tea. Then, without any confidence, I started planing the tabletop edges with the wooden moulding plane Charlie had chosen from his vast collection. Most workshops used routers for this work. Charlie had an irrational hatred of routers. ‘Router,’ he said once. ‘Rubbish. Spinning rubbish. And what can it do a plane can’t do?’

  ‘Whatever it does,’ I’d said, ‘it does it quickly.’

  ‘Mr Hurry,’ Charlie had replied. ‘Mr Little Phone In My Pocket. You use a machine because the hand way is too hard. Or too slow. Or the machine does it better.’

  I’d finished the edges, proud of myself, and was scraping the last tabletop with a freshly burnished scraper when Charlie arrived. He ran a hand over the perfect surfaces of the other three. ‘That’s a start,’ he said. ‘You give up the sleep too now? Don’t eat, don’t sleep. Next you give up the other thing too maybe.’

  He went over to study the tables, giant hands reaching out to test the clamps.

  ‘You don’t give up the other thing, it gives you up,’ I said. ‘Who are these tables for anyway?’

  ‘Politician, some politician.’

  ‘What’s the name?’

  ‘I forget. David, some David.’

  ‘David Fitzgerald?’

  ‘Fitz, that’s right.’

  ‘He’s the Deputy Premier.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Doesn’t the Deputy Premier expect the master himself to make the furniture?’

  Pure scorn in the look. ‘Buy a Chippendale, you think Mr Chippendale made it with his own hands? Artist’s studio this? You notice not? Customer wants four little tables the same, asks nicely, lets me do it my way, he gets them. Now that I think, you tell Rembrandt, that “Night Watch’’, I’ll take four of them, you got them too probably.’

  ‘Seeing myself as being like one of Mr Chippendale’s or Mr Rembrandt’s helpers, that cheers me up,’ I said. ‘Do you think they got paid award wages?’