The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  The disturbing thing about Alan — apart from the fact that his eyes seemed to be looking in two different directions, he was rank, had cradle cap and enough plaque on his teeth to make, well, a plaque to poor dental hygiene — was the malevolence he carried about his eyes and mouth.

  He had the look of a boy who’d just set fire to the local church and was wetting his Y-fronts waiting for the fire truck to arrive. Wee-wah, wee-wah! And his eyelashes were very dark and very thick, as if they’d been drawn on with a child’s crayon. Both top and bottom lashes were of equal length. I had met men whose eyes were totally framed by thick eyelashes. They were invariably arsonists, or scam artists, or animal torturers, or had a future in cross-dressing. Or they were murderers.

  ‘Come in,’ he said in a flat voice.

  I was dry, retching. I could see, beyond him and into the house, towering piles of old, yellowing newspapers and bags of garbage and, I think, a rat gambolling on the linoleum bench in the dim kitchen.

  ‘Let’s take a walk, Beechnut,’ I said, and grabbed him by the flannelette arm. It was wet with old, cold sweat.

  ‘You got a warrant?’

  ‘Cork it, Alan. I got two fists the size of Christmas hams. That do?’

  ‘You’re hurting me.’

  ‘Be a good boy, Alan.’

  I let go of his arm and he reluctantly followed. He had the sullen look of a lad whose favourite choo-choo train had just been broken.

  We went down to the water. I sat at one end of a park bench and ordered him to seat his rump at the other end. Even through the fishy stench of the bay I could smell him and his house and his dead mother.

  ‘Friend of Father Dillon’s, were you, Beechnut?’

  ‘I don’t have to say nothing.’

  ‘You seemed a pretty happy chappy for a bloke at another man’s funeral.’

  ‘I could call the cops.’

  ‘And I could pin those ears of yours back permanently, without surgery. You get my drift?’

  ‘You a cop? You talk like some TV cop or something.’ He stared out at the water. His left toe was jiggling away inside his sandal. The toe gave him away. People trying to hide something should never wear sandals.

  ‘I’m the man who can put your egg inside a milk bottle, Alan.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. So tell me, how’s your Mammy?’

  At this, his body stiffened and those eyes came alive. Not just alive — they burned with a heat you could roast a marshmallow over.

  ‘You loved your Mammy, didn’t you, Alan? Yesss. Poor little Alan. Tell me. Did Father Dillon do a nice job at the funeral?’

  Beechnut just stared at me. And I saw, as I had at Dill’s funeral, that crooked corner of his mouth. If I had to continue in this religious frame of mind, the only emotion that could produce such a hateful, malevolent, murderous face was pure, organic wrath.

  ‘Don’t talk about my mother,’ said Beechnut, finally.

  ‘No? Why not?’

  ‘Don’t talk about my mother.’ His voice had changed. It now had the guttural whine of a toy losing its battery power and had a deeper timbre. It went to the heart of the Beechnut.

  ‘I’m just curious, Alan. Why you chose Father Dillon to perform the service, all the way down in South Brisbane, when I’m sure you’ve got perfectly adequate priests and churches and caskets and ground to bury people in, or rose bushes to scatter ashes under, here in delightful Scarborough.’

  His toe stopped. He got up and started walking back to his fibro cesspit.

  ‘Alan!’ I shouted after him playfully. ‘Pweese come back, Alan!’

  He strode off, hunched and purposeful. But I wasn’t done with Beechnut yet.

  It took hours, but my surveillance paid off. At dusk he pedalled down the side of the house and into the street on a Malvern Star that should have been in a glass museum cabinet.

  I waited until he reached the end of the street and turned out of sight. I waited another few minutes.

  Then I entered the house of death. Why do I do these things? Why is it so?

  ~ * ~

  5

  I tiptoed through the back door of Maison Beechnut, hit the Maglite torch button, and instantly recognised the depth and quality of screwball I was dealing with.

  Oh, My Analyst would have loved this little Scarborough seaside shack. There was at least a decade’s worth of work for her in the maze of Beechnut’s psychoses. There was also at least a decade’s work here for my bum-lush cleaners. A quick bench wipe, a run over with the mop and a swig of Bombay Sapphire this was not.

  Alan Beechnut was not next to godliness, let’s put it that way.

  Luckily I had found some of my emergency leftover face masks from the swine-flu scare tucked away in the Kombi. I snapped one on in Beechnut’s foul kitchen, yet the house’s pungent gruel of dead air still managed to creep through the sieve and thicken my tongue.

  ‘You dirty little boy, Beechnut,’ I mumbled through the mask. The torch beam picked up a great V-shaped fan of fat on the wall behind the ancient stove. It went up the wall and extended a short way across the ceiling. There was fifty years of grease here, a grand slick of it the colour of nicotine. I burped through the mask. There were sauce bottles on a shelf that had stopped being made when Menzies was prime minister. There were tins and boxes of powdered mustard and jelly that collectors would have bid for on eBay. Just a fragment of the filthy linoleum floor would have excited scientists in any self-respecting disease research unit. I was not amazed that Alan Beechnut lived here. I was amazed he was still alive in this filth.

  I passed the bathroom. I didn’t even want to look in there. I imagined the drains filled with human hair plugs. I burped again.

  I inched my way down a short hall, squeezing past huge stacks of bundled newspapers, then entered what should have been a lounge or dining room. And there it was — the epicentre of Alan Beechnut.

  In my time as a police officer I saw many strange things, let me tell you. You get access to private dwellings and you’re going to witness some weird stuff. You wouldn’t believe the half of what I stumbled upon. Altars. Grottos. Indoor temples. Hundreds of candles around a single photograph or object. Porcelain-cat collections, jam-lid collections, collections dedicated to Elvis, stones, suggestively shaped vegetables, forgotten pop stars, even a dust collection. The strangest was a penthouse suite in Double Bay that venerated a particular breed of merino ... Well, I won’t go into that here.

  But I had never, until Beechnut, come across a shrine to public transport.

  I whistled through the mask. Public transport en masse would have been odd enough. But, no. Beechnut’s worship was focused. He was, it seemed, in love with the Brisbane tram.

  A third of the room was filled with the sawn-off, snub-nosed front end of a real Brisbane tram — a little three-window cabin with a single headlight. I imagined Beechnut sometimes donned a small, stiff white cap and ding-dinged his way down the Queen Street of his imagination. He had shelves and shelves filled with little handmade tram models. On his wall were framed tram-route maps and, curiously, an old advertisement for Vincent’s headache powder.

  In a tall bookcase he had neatly placed dozens and dozens of thin, red-coloured notebooks. I pulled one out from the middle shelf, opened it and strafed the contents with my torchlight. There were dates in a left-hand column and notes in tight, cramped handwriting, the letters teeming on the page like sugar ants. The notations were tedious, strangely abbreviated diary entries for tram rides taken in the city of Brisbane dating back to the mid-sixties. I checked the top-shelf notebooks. These were in different handwriting and went back to the late thirties. Perhaps his father’s missives. On the bottom shelf the last notebook ended on 13 April 1969.

  One book was different from all the others. It was a facsimile of a ledger simply titled Fatal Book 1897. You’re a wack job, Beechnut, I said to myself.

  On another shelf were neatly filed green notebooks. These were crammed cover to cover wi
th the handwritten minutes of the Scarborough Tram Society. Each meeting was run by the president of the society, A. Beechnut. Each resolution was seconded by A. Beechnut. The minutes were recorded by A. Beechnut. Guest lectures were delivered by special guest and world tram authority, A. Beechnut. I had a sickening feeling the Scarborough Tram Society had a membership of one.

  Beside this bookshelf on the wall was a black and white photograph of a street scene. It showed a small crowd with one man holding up a hand-drawn sign — ‘Scrap the Jones Administration, Not the Trams’. And in front of this man was a small boy with very large, shell-like ears waving to the camera. The picture was dated 13.4.69.

  Jones. Jones? Clem Jones? Could it be the same Clem the Clem7 tunnel was named after? The tunnel in whose vent my dear friend Father Dill was found in six pieces?

  I stood over Beechnut’s large desk and riffled through stacks of paper. Here were more tram-route maps. But halfway through the pile were detailed drawings and maps of the Clem7 tunnel. There were complicated engineering drafts, cross-section diagrams, geological surveys. And underneath them were documents relating to the Brisbane City Hall — maps, old architectural plans, plumbing and electrical data, drawings of foundations, doorways, ladders, stairwells, hatches. There was a business card stapled to some of the paperwork. It belonged to a council engineer, a Mr Barrie Barry. I issued a double burp into the swine-flu mask, an accidental homage to the twin-named council worker.

  Beneath the desk, next to several cans of red paving paint, I found a small cairn of books that were the property of the Redcliffe City Library. They were all about one person. Mary MacKillop, the primary candidate to become Australia’s first saint.

  I stood in the centre of the room, turned off the torch and had a quiet think.

  I recalled a conversation I had had with my police friend at Roma Street about the murder of Father Dill.

  ‘How did his body get into the Gibbon Street shaft?’ I had asked.

  ‘We don’t know,’ the officer said.

  ‘Is it freely accessible? To the public?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’d need special access?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘When will the tunnel be finished?’

  ‘First half of 2010.’

  ‘Could it have been a tunnel worker? With access to the shaft?’ I went on, thinking out loud.

  ‘It could have been.’

  ‘What was Dill doing in that part of Brisbane anyway, when he lived on the coast?’

  ‘He’s either been murdered somewhere on the Gold Coast and his body cut up and transported to South Brisbane, or he’s made his way to Brisbane — perhaps he was lured — and murdered somewhere in the city and his body dumped at the vent. He didn’t have a car.’

  ‘But why the vent? South Brisbane?’

  ‘The body was stacked, not dumped. It was a sign. A symbol of something, the way the body was presented for discovery. The tunnel, or the area, meant something to the killer. He or she is telling us something.’

  ‘He or she is telling us he or she is out of his or her frackin’ mind,’ I said.

  In Beechnut’s dark living room I tried to establish a case narrative. Dillon’s old parish was South Brisbane. He’d been dumped and ushered out after years of service there. And he ends up an anatomical display. Back in South Brisbane. O beloved Mary. Sweet Mary. Give me strength, Father Dill had said to me.

  ‘Come on, Dill, throw us a miracle here. A bit of divine intervention,’ I said quietly to myself, my olfactories longing for some fresh air inside the swine mask.

  I turned the torch back on and started to make my way out.

  The torchlight caught on a tiny picture frame at the end of the room. I clambered around an old slatted tram seat and had a closer look. In the centre of the cheap frame was a small yellow rectangle.

  I whistled through my mask. I pulled out the little cardboard ticket I’d found in Dill’s confessional, and held it up beside the one under glass.

  ‘Thanks, comrade,’ I said.

  Then the back door creaked open.

  ~ * ~

  6

  IT WAS NICE to see my Jack again. He was sitting quietly in the chair beside my hospital bed when I regained consciousness.

  ‘Hello, son,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  ‘Fancy seeing you here,’ I said.

  ‘And fancy seeing you here,’ he said.

  ‘Where am I?’ I asked.

  ‘Hospital, Dad,’ he said.

  ‘Been here long, have I?’ I asked.

  ‘Day and a half, Dad,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ I said. ‘Any idea why I’m here, son?’

  ‘Yes, Dad,’ he said. ‘You were found naked and unconscious in the back of your Kombi down at Redcliffe.’

  ‘Is that so?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘Naked, you say?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  I ran my hand through my hair and felt yet another half-grapefruit on the back of my head. I ached from tip to toe. It started to come back to me. Trains. No, trams. Smell. A bad smell. Rats. A picture. No, a little rectangular ticket. Alwin Beernut? Alvin Barebutt? Yes! Alan Beechnut! The rogue, the swine, the dirty little street-scrapper.

  ‘Been well, son?’

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘What you doing there, son?’ My boy was hunched over his mobile phone, tapping away with both thumbs.

  ‘Tweeting, Dad.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said. I could hear the gadget clicking. ‘Tweeting. What is that? Some sort of young people’s code for something?’

  ‘It’s social networking, Dad. Twitter. You send tweets to your friends and they send tweets back. ‘

  ‘Nothing to do with birds?’

  ‘No, Dad.’

  For a moment I was back in the room at Beechnut’s filth palace in Scarborough. I’d heard the back door creak open. I’d frozen. I’d thought of hiding in the sawn-off tram chassis. Then again, he might want to play driver and toot-toots, and there was no way the two of us would have fitted in there. I’d thought I might dash out the front door, but I didn’t know where it was in that jumbled shrine to public transport. I’d clicked off the torch and waited. I’d blind him with the Maglite and push through the kitchen and out. I’d zap him and flee. He had turned on the kitchen light and I could see his long shadow spilling into the tram room. He’d walked slowly across the linoleum. The shadow had grown. Then he was in the doorway.

  ‘Social nitpicking, you say,’ I said to my son.

  ‘Social networking.’

  ‘What is that, son?’

  ‘Yes, Dad. It’s keeping in touch with friends via the internet on a computer, or your mobile phone. You send text messages, post pictures, web links, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Why don’t you just ring them up if you want to talk to them, son?’

  ‘This way, Dad, you can keep in touch with a lot of people simultaneously.’

  ‘That’s very social,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Dad.’

  ‘Are you bleeting now?’

  ‘Tweeting.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Jack said. ‘I’m telling everyone that I’m a sitting here in a chair beside your hospital bed.’

  ‘Oh. That’s nice. And your friends would find that interesting, son?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Read it to me.’

  ‘“Sitting in a chair beside my father’s hospital bed.”‘

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Short and tweet,’ I said. He didn’t laugh.

  ‘With each tweet, Dad, you can use a maximum of 140 characters.’