by Tom Keneally
This was a grievous comment, but, as his Uncle Tim would have said, Docherty could feel the truth of it in his water.
‘That’s up to them,’ was all he could say.
‘Ah, so long as your conscience is comfortable, eh?’
‘I’d rather be effective,’ said Docherty. There was a long silence. ‘I’d dearly love to be effective. I don’t want to be a hand-wringer on the sidelines.’
‘But you might have to beat someone up to get anywhere. And it’d be against your pacifist principles.’
Docherty shook his head. ‘You know how to rattle a cage.’
She had cast all his careful consultations with Passerelli as gestures of impotence, as he knew they were.
She said, ‘I have to thank you for introducing me to the Cosgroves. Paul risked letting me meet his mother.’
‘You’ve been active,’ said Docherty. ‘Good!’
‘Yes. It was a hell of a sight more important than that psychologist I didn’t go to. Jokes aside, it was important. For me, and for her. They told me about the other man, Brian Wood, too. We’ve all got a common demon.’
‘It was all I could think of, to introduce you to each other.’
‘And it was a good idea,’ said Sarah.
‘Watch out, you’re veering towards approval.’
‘They haven’t shown me yet what her son wrote.’
‘You should ask Paul,’ suggested Docherty.
‘Yes. He’s a good-looking fellow, that Paul.’
‘I don’t know if he’s up to your weight.’
‘I don’t have a weight. I’m a phantom. Look, could we meet up tomorrow – that coffee shop? By the way, unless you prove terminally annoying, I promise to take you to the airport. And despite what I said … my shout!’
‘That’s very humane of you. But I’m not certain …’
‘You bring a copy of the letter,’ said Sarah. ‘You can do that. I don’t want to keep it. I just want to see it. I’m ready to face it.’
Docherty weighed this.
‘I’ll ask Mrs Cosgrove,’ he told her.
‘No, ask Paul, as you suggested. I didn’t want to read it in her presence. She’s sensitive. Tell Paul I’d like that, that it would help me. Bring it to me tomorrow in a folder and I’ll give it right back.’
Sarah rang off. Docherty called the Cosgrove home. Liz uttered a bleak hello in a slack voice, all tension and expectation leached from it.
He told her he was leaving in a few days, but he wanted to say a proper farewell and to let her know how much Sarah had got out of talking to her.
‘Yes,’ said Liz. ‘We got a lift out of her while she was here.’
He could hear in her voice the paucity of that lift. He did not know whether by now Paul had reported to his mother the disheartening answer from the cardinal, or the fact that he had put Leo Shannon’s name into an official record. And, God knew, that there might be charges one day.
‘Is Paul there?’ he asked. He was. Dutiful son to a mother who couldn’t be consoled.
‘Hello,’ said Paul when he took up the phone. ‘Look, I’m sorry about Wood.’
Docherty assured him on that, and asked if he could show Sarah Stephen’s note.
‘She didn’t ask me,’ Paul said.
‘She felt awkward asking in front of your mother. I think it might help her,’ said Docherty. ‘I understand that sounds strange.’
‘I suppose you can. But I think you should get it back, and I reckon you ought to destroy your copies before you leave. I don’t want any stray ones lying around. I want the chief one remaining to be the one the cardinal has, burning a hole in his desk.’
Docherty promised. ‘And I’ll keep in touch. Apart from everything else, I owe your mother a great deal for all that fundraising years ago.’
‘Freeing sex slaves,’ said Paul. ‘She was proud of that.’
‘She picked her targets well,’ said Docherty. ‘She had a fine nose about whom she could tell the truth to – and the truth was that we were buying out children from the Calcutta brothels. But some people would have been too shocked by that idea and we had to tell them we were freeing enslaved children. Both stories were the truth.’
‘And then,’ Paul murmured, ‘she wasn’t aware my brother would be an enslaved child too.’
For a while Docherty’s throat was closed off. ‘It’s too damn sad entirely,’ he said eventually. ‘My heart breaks for the two of you. I’d say Christ’s heart breaks, too.’
‘Frank, no offence, but if Christ has anything to do with this Church, he can shove his heart.’
Docherty felt the weight of that, of the destruction that had been done beneath the great bland claim of redemption. He felt sweat between his shoulders, the fear of his life’s nullity. ‘Well, there’s the Church as we have all suffered it,’ he admitted, ‘and then there is Christ, something different. As for priests, I don’t have to tell you. We’ve been exalted above our merits. We have been given too angelic a burden for ordinary creatures and the thing turns rancid in us. You know that.’
‘Yes. But don’t overdo it, Frank. You’re not rancid. Father O’Hanlon … he’s a decent man.’
‘Yes,’ said Docherty. ‘I’m happy to be counted in his company.’
The next morning Docherty took the bus with his book, Antony Beevor’s The Spanish Civil War, the letter in a folder, and his Canadian contact details. He dismounted and was close to the Powerhouse Museum when he was hit from behind in the lower back. It was for all the world like an old-fashioned round-the-thighs rugby tackle. It winded him, both his hands went out to meet the pavement, and he dropped the folder. Instinctively he curled in his head as he rolled forwards and turned onto his backside. He sat there on the cement grunting, and reached for the folder. He had a glimpse of a bear-like, blond young man, the man who had felled him, but then he was gone, sprinting towards Chinatown.
Docherty got up and shook himself. He inspected the pavement. The folder was gone.
Sarah rose to her feet when he came into the coffee shop rubbing the elbow that had collided with the pavement.
‘What happened to you?’
‘I was mugged. In Sydney! He’s going to be disappointed. All he got was the … Well, all he got was the suicide letter and my contact details.’
‘He’ll know better than to contact you. And if he does, he’ll get you doing some sort of a Gandhi act on him. That’ll teach him.’
Docherty settled himself and looked at Sarah. Her hair seemed smooth as a seal’s, as Maureen’s had. He felt more alive for seeing it, and even for the pungent experience of colliding with a hard surface. He thirstily drank the coffee she ordered for him.
‘You’re all right?’ she asked, assessing him.
‘Yes. But that kid … What could he have thought was in my folder? So I don’t have the letter now. Maybe Mrs Cosgrove or Paul can show you a copy, after all. You’re going to see her again?’
‘Yes. Misery loves company. But, I mean … Do you think this was a hitman from the Church?
‘Of course not,’ he assured her.
‘I wouldn’t put anything past them.’
‘Hitman!’ he said, laughing.
She shrugged.
‘Have you thought any more about that psychologist?’ he said.
‘Stop nagging,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about other things. I’m going to try to go back to teaching. The state system.’
He relaxed his shoulders and spread his hands. ‘Well, that’s an astonishing development.’
‘Bad news for some headmaster. Or mistress. But I must find out who I would have been had I never met the monsignor.’
‘That’s a very good thing to find out,’ said Docherty. ‘In fact, it’s wonderful,’ he told her softly. ‘Yes. I suppose you call it progress.’
She said, ‘We have to report this to the police. We can’t have you knocked about in broad daylight.’
‘Nonsense,’ he insisted. ‘He was gentle with m
e. No fuss, please.’
The suicide note was out there, he thought. On the street, as they say. Hopefully in a litter bin by now. He would have to let Paul know, and the realisation brought him to a further plan.
‘Look, why don’t you all sit down together. Liz, Paul, you and this Wood fellow. Why don’t you talk it out together, to the limit, putting everything on the table, looking at all possibilities? You would be such a help to each other.’
Sarah closed her eyes a while to think the proposal through.
‘We would if you moderated us,’ she suggested.
‘Nonsense.’
‘Aren’t you a clinical psychologist? You could help us reach a little further. Without interfering every time we say we’d like to see Monsignor Shannon stretched on a bed of ants.’
‘Okay. I would like to do that, as a facilitator. But I have to warn you, I haven’t earned the right to issue instructions on anything.’
She winked, whimsically disbelieving him. ‘I’m up for it, if you are,’ she assured him.
‘It would have to be tonight or tomorrow night. More likely tomorrow. I’ll call on Brian Wood. Though I should warn you, he may not want to be part of any discussions.’
‘Believe me,’ Sarah Fagan murmured, ‘I know that won’t deter you.’
He rose from the table, taking a second to find his right hip, to be sure it was in place to take his weight. Yes, it still held. The last fatal fall of his life was, with any luck, some years away.
32
Docherty and His Mother
July 1996
Docherty and his mother walked around the western shore of Sydney Cove. On their right was the glittering acre of water between them and the Opera House. On their left were the museums and old warehouses of the original maritime town, the penal settlement that had been half-bond and half-free. And, challenging the imagination, off to the right lay an Aboriginal ceremonial site, so it was said – a stream that had run through bushland down to the old foreshore.
Docherty knew there had once been hereditary owners of the rituals of this place: Aboriginal priests, enactors, maintainers. A series of such folk, men and women, who had suffered the bad fortune of having the space travellers land here in 1788 and make this place of all places the epicentre of their European penal intentions.
Docherty had first been brought here, to the environs of Circular Quay, by his mother. She was young then. Now her bad hips caused her to force her way forward, stabbing at the pavement energetically with the rubber ferrule of her stick, heaving her other leg and her upper body to keep pace with her intent. What surprised him was, despite this struggle, how young she looked; that he could see the girl behind the effort and deterioration.
Above them was the great rivet-studded arch bridge, very close, like an ancestral god of Sydneysiders. Ahead was the international shipping terminal, and still more of the old warehouses of the mercantile port. They stopped at a plaque in the pavement that commemorated what Mark Twain had to say on Australian history. ‘It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. And all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises, and adventures, and incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.’
‘I wish it were still true,’ his mother told Docherty. ‘Australia seems a lot plainer to me. I wasn’t around when they were handing out the adventures and incongruities.’
Docherty wanted to hug her to make up for her lack of incongruities, yet he knew it would embarrass both of them.
‘How about if we get a bench and just soak this up?’ asked Docherty, sniffing the air a little more theatrically than he needed to.
‘As you wish, Captain Bligh,’ said Mrs Docherty. She settled herself on a vacant bench and Docherty took the space beside her. On the vivid water before them a replica of either the Bounty or the Endeavour, tourists on its deck, spread its sails to the wind.
‘A lot worse places to have been born, mind you,’ said his mother. ‘I admit it. And a lot worse to grow old in, for that matter.’
‘I can name some of the worst places. Calcutta, unless you’re financially lucky. And, I tell you what, in North America, try Regina, Saskatchewan, or Minneapolis–St Paul on a grey icy day.’
‘You’re still a patriot.’
‘A climatic patriot! And, by all that’s holy, a cricket patriot too.’
‘Ah,’ said his mother. ‘For a dreamy kid, you were always good in the slips field. I remember that. Your father, he was so pleased you were a cricketer. He liked all-rounders.’ This led her to predictable themes. ‘You know, he didn’t buy many successful horses. That’s what he wanted to be, a man known for the horses he bought, and the poor fellow never got that. And I never gave his enthusiasms the time of day. I’d seen how brittle all this dreaming was in the Depression, which, let me tell you, because of the lick-spittle politicians was worse here than it ever was in North America.’
Docherty made an assenting noise.
‘Have you discussed with the big boy your chance of coming back?’ asked his mother, with apparent indifference. Docherty knew that her superficial indifference always masked intense feeling.
‘In passing,’ he told her. ‘But I fear I didn’t impress him a lot.’
‘Well, let me tell you this – I want you here. I want to expire with you in the room, not in some Canadian province. Let the bugger know that.’
‘I’m working on it,’ said Docherty.
‘I get cards from your Canadian students, you know. They think highly of you.’
‘Yes. Mind you, I suggested as a joke they write to you to get your maternal perspective. And they did. I’m lucky. Some of them come to Mass to take Communion just to prevent a poor turn-out in the parish I help in. One of them got me to officiate at the funeral of his Methodist father!’
‘You love a good funeral,’ she said with a generous light in her eyes.
‘I don’t mind weddings either,’ said Docherty.
‘Ah, the sacrament that binds two people to do each other as much harm as they can.’
‘Well, I know you’re the expert. But is that the full story? Really?’
‘By some lights,’ said his mother, laughter in her eyes. ‘In any case, I want you to do my funeral. I don’t trust the others. You won’t allow a single false note or any hypocrisy.’
‘When it comes, and if your elderly son is still living,’ said Docherty.
‘Why wouldn’t you still be living? Stop poncing around. Just say yes.’
‘I’d be proud to do it. I’ll tell the mourners what you said about marriage. That’ll get a laugh.’
‘Funerals are the big one,’ Mrs Docherty insisted. ‘Everyone involved knows it’s a rite of passage. It was a sacrament of humans long before Christianity.’
The Bounty or Endeavour, whichever it was, was rounding the little harbour island called Pinchgut.
‘What in God’s name can the cardinal have against you?’ his mother complained. ‘Except the old stuff. And, for heaven’s sake, you were right. Apartheid’s finished, and everyone says Vietnam was a catastrophe.’
‘Well, you see, he seems sincerely to suspect my work. If my report on paedophilia attracts approving comment from the Canadian bishops, then I might be in with a chance to come back here.’
‘Sometimes I think I’d prefer to have been born a Methodist,’ his mother said.
But then she looked up at him and her eyes had a genuine gravity. She wanted him home. He was her boy.
‘Someone should sue the bugger!’ said Mrs Docherty. ‘For unjust dismissal.’
‘Declan called me from Melbourne. He reckons I should sue the man. And somebody else has already. This Devitt fellow. But I don’t think his case is going so well.’
He was aware that he had not yet told the cardinal that there was a stolen copy of the letter out in the world. That would not enhance his popularity.
By now he was tentatively chiding himse
lf for his naïveté. He had reached certain conclusions about the young man who had tackled him on the pavement and taken his folder. The man had not looked homeless, or harrowed by an addiction. He’d looked like a boy from somewhere in the bush, come down to Sydney looking for work; perhaps driving taxis for a while. Yes, that was precisely what he looked like! And he meets Sarah at the taxi depot, and she pays him the time of day and asks him for a favour. And he does it, perhaps in part out of awe for her, never having met anyone quite like her where he comes from. And certainly boys from the bush know how to flatten a bloke without doing him too much harm. He was wondering … Could it have been Sarah’s means of getting a copy for herself, and taking the matter out of Docherty’s hands?
The next morning he called the cathedral chancery and asked if he could speak to the private secretary of His Eminence. The woman in the office told him that the cardinal was across the harbour at Manly, in the nineteenth-century stone house on North Head − the traditional out-of-town residence of archbishops of Sydney. There, Docherty thought, Condon was a little removed from what was coming to a head in the Supreme Court: the question of whether he, and the archdiocese itself, could be sued for the crimes of Father Guest.
‘Could you tell the cardinal that there have been some developments in the matter I discussed with him last week?’ asked Docherty.
‘The matter discussed with him last week,’ repeated the woman.
An hour or so later he got a message from Cardinal Condon’s secretary that His Eminence would like to see him the morning after next at ten o’clock at the cathedral chancery.
33
Breakfast with the Breslins
July 1996
On the morning of his last full day in Sydney, Docherty had breakfast with Maureen and Damian. Maureen answered the door again, looking up at him with that questing, undefeated expression he cherished. He felt the accustomed desire, a sense of various substantial atoms in his body involuntarily seeking a true north. The wonderful line of her naked neck was still there, though more sinewy, and she carried a small hump at the top of her spine, the first hint of old age. She took him through the house, and at their kitchen range Damian was scrambling eggs and slicing smoked salmon and tomato.