The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  Frustrated, and not sure what Zim knew, Flick had to supervise the killing himself. At the winery restaurant. A heart attack. Right there in front of the lunchtime crowd. Flick knew a thing or two about human nature, I’ll give him that. When Zim went down, the diners didn’t rush to his aid or run about screaming and waving their arms in the air. They did what most people do. They kept on eating, and felt both sorry and embarrassed for the old guy out in the vines. They thought briefly about their own mortality, in between dessert and the cheese plate. And that was that. It would have been bad manners to watch as his body was removed on a stretcher. Zim’s VW wine had been poisoned with something that promoted the illusion of sudden death by heart attack. But those few words on the index card — they were worse than a bad review. And they had survived, and I had retrieved them. Zim. He was a true journalist to the end.

  What nobody knew was that when Zim encountered a bad restaurant experience, he gave the establishment the professional courtesy of returning for a second time to test the first experience. Maybe they’d had an off day. He’d been there once before, you see, and filed away his first set of notes. And he’d returned to those exact notes, after his extended tipple in the backbencher’s room at Parliament House, and jotted down some explosive gossip about a German developer called Flick. And there they stayed, in the file drawer.

  ‘Do you enjoying reviewing restaurants, Zim, even after all these years?’ I had once asked him. And he said resolutely, ‘It’s the job to die for.’

  The Kombi made it to the Tweed border before the crank shaft seized and she died on us. Peg hadn’t even finished filing her nails.

  As I kneeled down at the back of the van, peering into the engine cavity and pretending I knew what I was looking for, my wife, standing behind me, let out a little exhortation of surprise.

  ‘Have you been dyeing your hair?’ she asked, shocked.

  Ahhh, I thought. Isn’t it nice to be noticed, albeit belatedly?

  ~ * ~

  FOUR

  MURDER SHE TWEETED

  ~ * ~

  1

  It is said that when grown men are about to meet their maker, they cry out for one of two things — God, or their Mammy.

  I have discussed this with my long-suffering wife, Peg — being the post-modern, non-sexist, egalitarian metrosexual that I am. I would probably holler for a doctor. If my doctor happened to be my Mammy, even better. Who would women shout for at their time of death? Their saviour? Their father? ‘Their hairdresser,’ said Peg. I had a feeling she wasn’t taking me seriously.

  But I was taking me very seriously. I had been thinking about death a lot. I mean a lot. When you ponder the grim reaper during the drinks break of a cracker 20/20 cricket match, you know what’s in the forefront of your mind. And when you have a dream in which a figure who looks remarkably similar to Ricky Ponting, in a black hooded cloak wielding a scythe, is chasing you through a misty wood at midnight, you know it’s playing on your subconscious. (That would have to be better than Merv Hughes with a scythe, my analyst reasoned. Thank you, I said to her, but can you save the sport-themed gags for a time that’s not on my coin?) And when you awaken bolt upright and lathered in sweat from the aforementioned dream, holding your index finger in the air and shouting ‘Out!’, you know you need professional help.

  It was Peg’s idea, the analyst. Peg’s theory was that my retirement had become some sort of subconscious frustration that I could only salve by creating the drama of my previous working life, and that this in turn may go back even further — to a possible undiagnosed post-traumatic disorder relating to the violence inherent in my career as a police officer and the vast quantities of human carnage I had taken on board over the decades. Either that, or I had an undiagnosed tumour short-circuiting my brainbox.

  That’s how I met My Analyst, as I called her, who had a small consultation room between a plastic surgeon and an ice cream shoppe at Main Beach.

  During this time of my personal angst, my beloved Peg was considerate. During my cricket death dreams she assigned me to the fold-out bed in the guest room. Fair enough. She said if I started calling for a third umpire I’d be in the garage.

  ‘What is it with you and death at this time of year?’ Peg said. ‘You’re supposed to be happy, full of yuletide warmth, a cuddly Christmas feeling. This is a time for family, not thoughts of death.’

  ‘And when is your mother arriving again?’

  For that little gem I was sent to the garage anyway.

  But hey, I have every reason to be skittish. Is it any wonder why, in my sixties, I’m thinking about eternity a little more than usual after all I’ve been through in the past few years? What is it about Queensland? I came up here to enjoy what my colleagues and friends called my ‘autumnal period’, and I’ve been shot at more in the past three years than in the entire thirty-seven I spent in the New South Wales police force. And that’s taking into account the era in which I served, especially around Kings Cross and Surry Hills, when bullets rained like, well, rain. They were tough times, kiddo. You needed a shotgun and a hardhat just to cross the road from the station to buy a cream bun from Madame Petrovsky’s continental bakery on Macleay Street. (Madame Petrovsky, on the other hand, needed no weapons — not with that steely single black whisker squiggling out of a mole on her chin, and a gaze hard enough to slice clean through a block of borodinsky rye.)

  But Queensland in the new millennium? Peace and quiet? Forget it. I should have been enjoying some quality time on my banana lounge, watching with fascination the colour change in my feet, year by year, as my circulation plummeted. I should have been left alone in my dotage to find new sprigs of hair in unexpected bodily crevices, remember nothing about the day before yet recall with excruciating clarity the wet carcasses of bunnies swinging on the rabbit-oh’s cart when I was a wee lad in South Sydney, and to discover, all of a sudden, that the only things that really matter at the end of life are food and the exact locations of public lavatories. This was no autumn, brothers and sisters. This was permanent summer, global-warming style.

  What did Queensland have against me? Is it because I’m from New South Wales? And before you get started, don’t worry. I know the history. I’ve read all about Separation in 1859 and how the resentment of New South Wales was formally introduced to the Queensland genetic make-up on that day in December a century and a half ago when statehood was formalised from a balcony in Adelaide Street.

  I know there’s blood in the soil in Brisbane. The lash across the convicts’ backs. The hanging of two innocent Indigenous men from the Old Windmill on Wickham Terrace. The murders. The barbarity. The suffering. And then there’s State of Origin. So don’t get pernickety with me.

  But there’s something about the folk up here that likes a stoush.

  Recently, Peg and I were in Brisbane town for a show and stayed overnight in a hotel. (From our window we could see the night lights of the Gabba, and I had to request a change of room. Reminders of cricket, death and all that. Peg said nothing during this, my delicate stage, but her eyebrows did move up and down curiously.)

  Anyway, early the next morning I decided to take some exercise. I happily strode the walkways alongside the river. The birds were a’tweeting. The river a’wending. The light was a glorious dawn orange. I was slap-bang in the middle of a darned Constable landscape (the only artist I knew from that period, or virtually any period, because it had been a trick question on one of our cadet police examinations, constables needing to know Constable, a joke that had circulated forever in police circles, ha ha) when, in a flash, an elderly helmeted cyclist with yellow teeth was gnashing and spitting an inch from my face.

  Why don’t you $5#@@! watch where you’re %8$#@! going you &A$#@!’

  ‘And good morning to you, sir,’ I said.

  ‘You’re walking in the *A$3(#@! bike lane you halfwitted *A7%$##@’—f?/ moron!’

  ‘Do you always cuss in clusters of symbols and asterisks at this time of day?’ I asked
him politely. ‘Get on your bike, dropkick, before I do the job your orthodontist should have done years ago.’

  He continued to rant and rave at high decibels, to the point where everything was jiggling obscenely in his baggy lycra kit. He was like an old hot-air balloon losing its flame. I won’t go into his straggly wicker. For some reason his outfit was covered in sponsor logos and various tidbits of advertising. He’d either stolen the gear, or someone was paying an enormous amount of money for this spotty old geezer to haul his bony backside up and down the Brisbane River at a little over walking pace, his knees clicking, his ancient sweat splashing the path, and his methane output making him a serious climate liability. He had to be stopped for the sake of the environment alone.

  In the end, I snapped back, which wasn’t very Christian of me, but I had to put an end to the flow of spittle. It was flipping my stomach.

  ‘Listen, Lance,’ I said, ‘I’m terribly sorry if I accidentally interrupted your interior fantasy monologue of doing that final stretch of the Tour de France down the Champs Elysees before thousands of your adoring fans despite rattling like a pharmacopeia, but you’re in Brisbane, and there is no one cheering you on, and your arse in those pants looks like a broken umbrella, and you need to get back to your job as parking meter coin counter at the council before I kick you up your velodromes and send you and your frackin’ tricycle to hospital!’

  He stopped then, offended. A reasonable response.

  ‘I don’t work for the council! I’m retired. I’m a multi!’ he spluttered.

  A multi? A multi? Did he really just say that?

  ‘Yes,’ I said in a language familiar to him, ‘a multi-#@!&*A’~!!!’ And I walked off.

  Hair triggers, I told Peg over breakfast. They have hair triggers in Queensland. She said ‘Hmmm’ between mouthfuls of fresh pawpaw.

  But how else can you explain the fact that just a week later when I was back in Brisbane on a strange religious pilgrimage, suggested to me by My Analyst, I found myself in yet another pickle. But no ordinary pickle. Oh dear me, no. This pickle would make my other recent skirmishes with psychopathic antique dealers, murderous billionaire developers, the rabid relatives of long-dead Brisbane historical figures, Kombi-loving career criminals and the killers of benign and learned restaurant critics look like a small dish of soggy cocktail onions.

  This pickle would see me drawn into a festering and fatal mystery involving church and state, a time capsule full to the brim with religious relics, and the ancient secrets of a swamp slap-bang in the middle of the Brisbane CBD. It would take me underneath the metropolis and into catacombs that you never knew existed in the Queensland capital. It would result in me being knocked out by a horse on the City Hall stage in front of the giant organ pipes. Stripped naked. And it would bring me into close proximity with an angel of death who twittered like the most beautiful nightingale, yet was as deadly as anyone or anything I’ve ever met in my meagre time on earth. Even if she did wear Chanel No. 5.

  It would also bring me precisely to where I am now: trussed — courtesy of some elaborate and impressive handiwork, I have to admit — to the inside of the primary bell in the clock tower of the Brisbane City Hall.

  I’m sure the view up here during the day is very nice. But it’s dark now, in fact getting close to midnight. Has anyone below noticed that the dear old bell has not tolled the hour, or quarter, or half, for the last three hours? No, why would they? It’s New Year’s Eve. I can hear the little squalls of their laughter and hooting and happiness down in King George Square.

  You see, Peg? Do you see now why I was obsessed with the grim reaper? Lord knows I warned you, Peg. But who listens to an old former cop with his feet the colour of marbled Sicilian sausage, his memory shot, his portly frame oft shot at, and his foolish trusting heart in the goodness of the human race broken more times than white plates at a Greek wedding?

  I can, too, see my wristwatch from this uncomfortable trussed position. In exactly twenty-seven minutes my tweetering songbird will reactivate the clock, and the enormous clapper will strike my head against the waist of the brass bell. And it’s goodnight nurse for me.

  Down below, they will cheer in the New Year to the familiar sound of a much-loved donger, albeit in a slightly wet A-flat.

  ~ * ~

  2

  I’ll tell you one thing. Proximity to death certainly clears the head. And nasal passages for that matter. I found, strapped and dangling inside the City Hall bell, that my sense of smell became extremely sharp. I could pick a lamb kebab being scoffed in Queen Street a few hundred metres away. Some jasmine, probably way over in the Roma Street Parkland. And I caught a whiff of cigar smoke somewhere down below me in the clock tower. My killer, my little tweety bird, was having her last suck on a Monte Christo before the New Year.

  There, ninety metres above King George Square and its monster Christmas Tree and star, with my melon just minutes away from being dashed by a clock hammer against a 4.25 tonne bell (ding-dong, you’re dead), I thought of what Peg might put on my tombstone. He Was Never Immediately Recognised, but His Face Rang a Bell? Not even Peg would stoop that low. (Would she?)

  How did this all begin?

  It ain’t no Hollywood murder drama, I can tell you that. Life — or should I say death — doesn’t work that way. There are two main ingredients in the murder biscuit, son, a wise old homicide-squad detective once told me. Greed and sex. What about killing for pleasure? Revenge? Pure hatred? A pesky mother-in-law? A moment of madness? Too complicated, son. You’re thinking gordon blur (I think he meant cordon bleu) when you should be thinking Arrowroot biscuit, my boy.

  The things you learn in the police force.

  No, this started in church. Well, let me be specific. This started in a confessional booth in a nondescript house of worship in Gold Coast suburbia. This started with me going down on my spectacularly cartilage-challenged knees in a dull white cube of plywood and pine with a purple plastic faceted door handle in 35-degree heat in late November.

  ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned ...’ And that, I have to say, lit the fuse.

  What was I doing there? What was a grizzled agnostic with dicky knees and half a university degree in nothing much doing in a holy sweatbox in Marilyn Monroe Drive on the Glitter Strip?

  My Analyst. I blamed My Analyst.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ she had asked me the week before.

  ‘Do you know, I wish I had thought of and patented that question,’ I said, wriggling my socked toes on her studded leather couch, trying to get some colour back in my pinkies, which I knew were now whities, courtesy of the ageing process, or, to be accurate, grey-yellowish-violetish-custardish protrusions with nails the colour, quality and curvature of a hoary mythical dragon’s talons. (You now know why I don’t remove my socks very often.) ‘I wish I had a dollar for every time you’d asked that question in your professional career,’ I went on. ‘That would have to be the most repeated question in human linguistic history, apart from “How are you?”, “Can you pass the gravy?” and “Where’s the remote control?”‘

  ‘This is avoidance,’ she said. ‘You are avoiding the question.’

  I hadn’t heard her. I was, in fact, asking myself, ‘Where is the remote control?’ I’d hoped to catch a little live test cricket on the television before my session, and hadn’t been able to find the darned thing. I cursed the cleaners. Not only did they take it as part of their brief to rearrange the furniture and alter the geography of the refrigerator during each visit, but they also took the odd swig from the bottles on my drinks trolley. Oh yes, I was onto them. I marked the bottles, and I used an age-old trick suggested to me by an old friend in Fiji, who’d had similar problems with his cleaners. You turn the bottle upside down, then mark the level. They never twig, these hordes of house-cleaning lushes. I ordered Peg to sack them. She sent me back out to the camp stretcher in the garage.

  ‘Yes?’ my analyst persisted.

  ‘Yes, what?’

/>   ‘You’re avoiding the question. About God.’

  ‘What do I know about God? If Einstein couldn’t figure it out, then what do you expect from me?’

  ‘More avoidance. Let me take a wild guess. You had a repressive religious upbringing — you had heaven, hell, good and bad, black and white, you had guilt and subservience, then you went into the police force, into the wider world, saw that life wasn’t so straightforward, read a bit of Jung, toyed with a little Marx and Trotsky, rebelled against the faith of your parents, wore a beret, smoked French cigarettes and decided that was enough to rid you of your theological childhood baggage.’