The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  I wandered into the kitchen. Over time I have learned that there’s nothing sadder than a bachelor’s kitchen. With Zim, it was a bit different. He had no cookbooks on display, no dishes drying on a rack, no glass containers of rice or pasta on show, because Zim never ate at home. I mean never. He took his breakfast coffee at a favoured café down on Albert Street, and ventured out for both lunch and dinner. If he felt peckish late at night, he merely phoned down to the restaurant housed on the ground floor of his apartment building, which had a sort of ‘room service’ arrangement with certain occupants. Zim was one such occupant.

  So his kitchen was immaculate, and not just because of lack of use. Under the sink I found an enormous variety of rags and sponges, cleaning utensils and liquid abrasives. He cared for it like the altar in a church.

  His bedroom was similarly immaculate. A standard queen-sized bed and lamps. Built-in cupboards. Another print of a baked fowl and vegetables above the bed head. The gathering winds thumped against the sliding doors off the bedroom. The curtains were closed, but I could see the camera flash of lightning at their frills.

  He had one book by his bedside — a 1949 edition of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste. He had mentioned Brillat-Savarin to me on many occasions. Too often, when Zim got deeper and deeper into his philosophies on food and cooking, and quoted obscure texts and gourmands at me, I switched off. But I remembered Brillat-Savarin, because he sounded like a very funny man.

  ‘You would know of him, of course,’ Zim had said one evening over some delicious Cantonese dishes in a restaurant on Margaret Street, just metres from his apartment.

  ‘Why would I know of him?’ I said, fumbling with my chopsticks. ‘The meals of my working-class childhood were a procession of bread and dripping. Mutton. Peas and spuds. Then I became a policeman. The closest I got to gourmet in those years was when a pie came in its own tin-foil plate and not just a paper bag. Are you getting the picture, Zim?’

  ‘He was the man who coined the phrase “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Heard of that?’

  ‘Of course I’ve heard of that.’

  ‘Well, that’s a start.’

  ‘What am I, Zim?’

  ‘You? On Brillat-Savarin’s scale? A barbarian, barely out of the cave.’

  ‘Always a pleasure dining with you, Zim.’

  ‘And me? What am I from your observation?’

  ‘You? You’re the man who’s going to pay the bill tonight, that’s who.’

  We finished our mains and Zim spent an age considering the desserts. He never felt it necessary to ask me what I might like. He ordered for both of us.

  ‘You know, Brillat-Savarin also had another famous quote,’ he said. ‘“A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with one eye.”‘

  How peculiar it was to learn that Zim, when his heart had exploded amongst the vineyards on the Gold Coast, had fallen face first into the flowering vines, and had had an eye cleanly removed by a piece of errant wire hidden amongst the leaves. A police mate told me confidentially that the eyeball had given the young female constable who was first on the scene a terrible fright. God can pull some horrible practical jokes when He/She so chooses.

  The storm was over the city now. The wind didn’t just howl, it moaned about Zim’s apartment building, and I could hear a thudding through the air-conditioning vents.

  I sat on the edge of Zim’s perfect bed, and opened The Physiology of Taste at one of the pages he’d bookmarked. He had underlined a quote in a chapter about the pleasures of eating, and the table. ‘At the first course everyone eats and pays no attention to conversation; all ranks and grades are forgotten together in the great manufacture of life. When, however, hunger begins to be satisfied, reflection begins, and conversation commences. The person who, hitherto, had been a mere consumer, becomes an amiable guest, in proportion as the master of all things provides him with the means of gratification.’

  Poor Zim. I should have paid more attention to you.

  A mighty crack of thunder shook the building, the lights flickered, and as I wandered out into the lounge room, I noticed the front door wide open.

  ‘What the ...’ I said.

  Then I heard a high-pitched scream and something — a baby gorilla? A small, hyperactive child? — was on my back. I swung around, he swivelled on my neck, and I whacked him flush in the face with the hardcover Brillat-Savarin.

  It fell to bits in a spectacular flurry of pages and dust motes and long-dead weevils, and fluttered over my unconscious child assassin. The first thing I thought was that I must get Zim a replacement copy. But dead men don’t need books.

  The second was, could I persuade my wife Peg that knocking out children wearing fake moustaches counted as a retirement ‘project’?

  ~ * ~

  4

  I’d seen some funny things during my time in law enforcement, but I never expected, in my retirement, to be extracting with tweezers the carcass of a Second World War vintage bug from the weeping eye of a janitor named Joe Santorini in the apartment of a dead friend.

  Joe thought I was a burglar. I didn’t know who he was. Perhaps a circus performer, or an old-looking child on a permanent diet of red cordial. When he had attached himself to my back, he’d given me a fright, and copped a face full of the writings of Brillat-Savarin.

  When everything had calmed down, and soon after little Joe came to, he began clawing at his eye. He was crying profusely, whimpering like a small boy.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I said. I genuinely felt for him. He was wearing his little janitor’s outfit — slate-grey shorts and a matching shirt, with the word JANITOR embroidered above the pocket. The creases in his pants and on his sleeves were so fine and sharp you could have cut a slice of Gateau Savarin with them. If it hadn’t been for the JANITOR giveaway, he could have been a lad on his first day at school.

  ‘You doan understand,’ he said. ‘I gotta blocked tear duck condition. Now there something in my eye. My eyeeeeeee. ‘

  It turned out I had pulverised into his face an ancient insect from the book. I got most of the bug out. He didn’t seem happy.

  ‘What the hell you doin’ here anyway?’ said Joe. His eye continued to pour a single salty stream down his cheek.

  ‘Zim’s solicitor sent me, to take care of his estate.’

  ‘He dead,’ said Joe, lowering his face, the permanent river of tear somehow fitting.

  ‘Yes, he dead,’ I said. Joe sniffed. We had half a minute’s silence for Zim. ‘Now. Can I ask you the same question? What the hell are you doing here? A blocked sink?’

  ‘Is Mr Zim’s wine,’ he said. ‘I come for the key.’

  ‘Key?’

  ‘To his wine. Downstairs. It has to be moved away. I sneak him a storage cage downstairs for his wine, see? Sometimes he give Joe a bottle. A present. “Here, Joe, this for you,” he sometimes say. Now the room, someone want to use. So I have to move the wine. But Mr Zim, he lock the cage. I need the key.’

  ‘Boy,’ I said. ‘You city slickers move fast around here when someone drops off the perch.’

  ‘Hey, space, she the premium in the inner-city nowadays, mate.’ He pronounced it marrrt, like the word had suffered a flat tyre.

  Zim had admirable organisational skills. We both went into his office and opened his filing cabinets. There, in a small freezer bag, in a folder marked WINE — KEYS, we found the wine keys. I liked Zim’s logical mind. In the cabinet, I would later discover, were the secret table notes he took on every meal in every restaurant he’d ever reviewed in his career. Zim and I were some of the few men left in the world who used five- by three-inch index cards. He scribbled his notes on these, holding them in his lap as he ate and pondered each course. Every card was numbered and dated. And he kept them, I presume, for litigation purposes. Or a future book. They were his diary, and many were covered in the small food splashes and droplets of the meal under review at that moment.

  ‘You w
anna see the wine of Mr Zim?’ Joe said, wiping the tears from his cheek. We went to the basement.

  I followed Joe to a storage cage behind the lift well. There were several other cages on either side of it, open and exposed to the underground car park, stuffed with people’s junk beyond the wire. But Zim’s was the only one that had been lined with flimsy sheets of plywood. He had wanted his privacy. Or wanted his wine to have some privacy. Expensive wine can have a strange effect on people. They’ve been known to kill for a good vintage. Or perhaps he thought the temptation might be too great for thirsty teenage hoons. (On reflection, would today’s teenage hoons even know what wine was? ‘Oi,’ I can hear them say. ‘This stuffs two years old — it’s orrrf. It’s gaaayyy!)

  Joe fiddled with the lock and we entered the cage. He pulled a light cord and a single bulb came on. Before us were hundreds of bottles stacked neatly on wooden racks.

  ‘Mr Zim, he no alcoholic, just so you know,’ said Joe, lowering his gaze ‘He a good man.’

  I scanned the racks and a cluster of bottles caught my eye. Faced with a wall of blank black wine bottle tops, both cork and screw-on, these stood out. On the top of the cap each had the stamped symbol of VW, the car manufacturers. I pulled a VW bottle from the rack.

  Now I’m no wine buff. Peg once tried to get me involved in a fine-wine tasting club on the Gold Coast. She thought it could be one of my retirement ‘projects’. I went to the first meeting. It involved some plonker (I know it’s a bad pun, but it’s the only way I could ever think of him) swishing about various wines in large glasses and rinsing his teeth with the wine before spewing it into what became a very messy and stomach-flipping bucket of warm human discharge. He was, he said, looking for bouquets, delineating vintage, seeking what notes lay behind the wine and travelling — via his palate — through the vines and down into the soil. One’s tongue, he said, could be trained as a sort of living archaeologist. What tosh. I raised my hand and said that if one’s tongue was to dig deep into the soils of a hillside in Stanthorpe or a slope in the Hunter Valley, shouldn’t we train it to be a geologist? He did not talk to me for the rest of the class.

  Nevertheless, I swigged and spat, and tried to excavate soil sub-stratas for tannin and saddle-sweat and hints of gravel. But it wasn’t for me. I had of course embarrassed Peg. I had, she later told me repeatedly, become boorish in my old age.

  ‘I tried to introduce you to a civilised “project” and what do you do? You spit it back in my face.’

  ‘I spat it in the bucket.’

  ‘I thought you might make some new friends,’ she said, sulkily. I didn’t tell her that I liked people who actually drank the wine, not flushed it about their mouths like a haywire lavatory cistern.

  But the VW bottles in Zim’s cellar — they interested me. On the label was a lovely pale watercolour of your standard grape vines, but parked on a ridge in the distance, small as a lady beetle, was a pale red Bay Window Kombi van. The wine came from a vineyard in the Gold Coast hinterland.

  I had seen this bottle before. On the night we’d come back to Zim’s place after our last ever monthly meal in Brisbane, and we’d knocked the tops off a few bottles of some of his ‘secret gems’, discovered over the years on tours of wineries and in various restaurants, then watched Field of Dreams together, both of us melancholy and weeping deep down inside with the memories of our fathers, he had shown me one of these Kombi bottles. He had produced it, excitedly, because there was a Kombi being driven by Kevin Costner in the movie, and he popped on his spectacles and pointed to the little red Kombi on the ridge in the wine label.

  ‘Is it wine or motor oil, Zim?’ I asked.

  ‘It has been recommended to me by a very, very fine nose,’ said Zim.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘A man with an impeccable palate. A peerless nose for bouquet. A man born to be a winemaker, or at the very least a sommelier. It’s his little investment, in the hills behind the Gold Coast. It has been a well-kept secret in local wine circles. But soon everybody will know about it. It’s the best wine ever made in Queensland.’

  ‘So it was made last month, instead of last week?’

  ‘Trust me. They will shower it with medals.’

  ‘This nose of yours, what does he do for a real crust?’

  ‘He’s a very powerful developer—’

  But I didn’t let Zim finish, because the movie was just getting to the part where James Earl Jones gets invited into the cornfield to see ‘the other side’, and I loved it when he went with the ghostly baseball players to find out what it was like in heaven.

  ‘Imagine it, Zim. Heaven,’ I said.

  ‘Yesssss,’ said Zim. ‘I should like to go there, just like James Earl Jones.’

  Not long after that final get-together I like to think he did. Not a cornfield for Zim, but a vineyard. I also hoped Zim ate well in heaven, drank wonderful vintages that he’d only ever read about in books, and perhaps even met his hero, the pioneering gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and exchanged notes on the meaning of wine in life, and good cheeses and the best desserts in history.

  It wasn’t until I sat in the filthy office of Rufus T. Firefly, proprietor of the Marx Brothers Auto Shoppe, that I saw a bottle of that Kombi wine once again, on an otherwise bare shelf behind his office desk, standing in between what appeared to be a knuckleduster and a small pile of naked lady cigarette lighters.

  And if I squinted hard, I could see the tiny red Kombi parked on the ridge, a clot on my future.

  ~ * ~

  5

  You may not have noticed, but at the moment there’s a lot of money to be made in nostalgia. Why? I’m no sociologist, but I have a theory. The world has lost its regard for the past. We don’t treasure it. We don’t warm our feet by it. We don’t treat it with respect. Today there is no past.

  Poppycock, you say. (Now that’s a word from the past.) But at the risk of sounding like a winsome old geezer repeating the generational adage that the past was always rosier, that its water was sweeter, and its values strong and true, I’m going to lay it down for you. The fact is the current generation has no affection for the past, has no understanding of it, because they don’t know what it is. How can you blame them? Their lives are predicated on an exact moment in present time. Life to them is what they see on a computer screen — itself an illusion, for what is a computer screen and that which appears on it but a pixellated, illuminated nothingness? What is the World Wide Web but a connecting tissue of lights and sounds, a ‘thing’ that has no feet in the actual world except for the cord that connects it to an electrical socket? Tell me what happens when the power goes off, then the computer battery dies? Poof. All gone. The show’s over.

  The youngsters have their mobile phones, too. Oh, do they have their phones. All these words and images streaking from tower to tower across the world, finding their targets, all creating an unending and dreary ‘present’, the great language of Shakespeare abbreviated to the point of incomprehension, the slander and slang, the blips and beeps of a whole slab of youthful humanity with no thoughts beyond the moments of their connectivity. Once upon a time we got excited by a letter turning up in the postbox. Once, we collected stamps. How quaint it all seems now. Today, kids get hundreds of letters a day on their phones. When life speeds up, some very human joys are lost forever.

  Moan on, old man, I hear you say. But to eliminate the past. Well, there are enough cliches on that endeavour that don’t need to be repeated by me. Yet I can’t help but feel we have left behind some of the crucial essences of what it is to be human — to communicate via speech and ear, to look at the world with our own eyes, to anticipate, to genuinely feel. For some of us, nostalgia is a path back to that state. A return to being sentient.

  Thus my yearning for a Kombi. And thus my uncomfortable meeting with Mr Firefly at the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe. I loathed him on sight, as I’ve said. I knew from years of experience he was a bad man, permanently disconnected from hu
man decency. I resented that I had to go through his repulsive self to get to my dream. I had no doubt, too, that this place of business was a good, old-fashioned chop shop, and not the edible kind but the recycled-vehicle variety. Cars were being stolen and reborn here. Parts taken off legitimate vehicles and screwed onto illegitimate ones. It was an unending puzzle of truth and lies. Places like this, and people like Firefly, if that was his real name, leached off people’s dreams. Sucked the marrow out of their ambitions. He was nothing but a bottom feeder, and a waste of good oxygen. Outside of prison, the community paid for having grubs like this in its presence. Inside prison, they paid as well. There was always a levy for men like Firefly.

  There was only one way to deal with him. You had to let him at least sense you might be prepared to get down on his scabrous level of humanity.

  ‘That bus you looking at, she’s ten grand cash, money up front and you drive away,’ he said.