‘Only 140?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Who says?’
‘That’s the rules.’
‘What can you say with 140 characters? That doesn’t sound like a lot, son.’
‘That’s the way it is.’
‘What are you writing now?’
“‘Explaining tweeting to my sick father.’”
I’d had the torch ready to blast Beechnut. He’d stopped in the doorway. Perhaps he could smell me. Perhaps he’d detected something different in the soupy bouquet of excrement and urine and dead rodents and filthy dishes and rotting food that was his life, like a hint of soap or deodorant on a human being who actually thought washing and cleanliness were a part of everyday civilisation.
I’d hit the torch button.
‘Thank you, nurse,’ I said. A nice nurse had wheeled in my lunch. I sat up. I lifted the steel tray cover. Roast lamb, peas, mashed potato and some boiled carrot. I belched. Rather loudly. My head pounded.
‘What are you writing now, son?’
“‘My father is having disgusting hospital roast dinner for lunch.’”
‘You wrote that?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
I nudged the peas with my fork.
‘What are you writing now?’
‘“Lunch smells like dog sick.’”
‘Your friends would find that interesting?’
‘Yes, because I’m tweeting it.’
‘So because you tweet it they will find it interesting. I see. What now?’
“‘My father issues foul belch.”‘
I was growing suspicious of Jack and his tweeting. Just 140 characters. I noticed that he hadn’t stopped tweeting since I’d woken from my stupefaction. He hadn’t looked me in the eye. He hadn’t looked at me at all. And his responses to my questions were snappy, clipped, truncated. He was answering me in 140 characters or less. And all the while his thumbs were hammering away at a furious pace.
I still didn’t understand what this twittering business was all about. Lunch? Belches? How could that be of any interest whatsoever to a sensible, sentient, halfway intelligent person? Had the world gone mad? You just blithered away to each other on a computer or phone screen? Whatever happened to meeting people face to face? Chatting over a coffee or a wine? Enjoying the pleasure of another person’s company? How could they call it social networking? Antisocial networking would be more appropriate.
I looked to the hospital door, and again recalled Beechnut’s place. For it wasn’t Alan, the president of the Scarborough Tram Society, who’d taken the full brunt of my torch beam. It was one of the most beautiful, curvaceous, well-proportioned — dare I say generously proportioned in this politically correct age — women I had ever seen in my life. Small. Brunette. A Veronica Lake-inspired fall to her hair. Sheer black cocktail dress. High heels. She made you suck in your breath for a fraction of a second. And she smelled, for the brief time I was conscious in her presence, of a combination of Chanel No. 5 and a very expensive cigar.
She’d smiled. Then her martial arts kick to my head had sent me all a’twitter. And into oblivion.
‘Ha!’ Jack roared.
‘What is it, son?’
‘One of my followers just sent through a tweet. Pretty cool, whatever it means.’
‘What does it say?’
“‘Tell your father — Murder, she tweeted.’”
~ * ~
7
During those restful days in hospital, as my bruised melon returned to its normal size and the stiletto puncture wound to my neck healed nicely, I resorted to my age-old method of detective work. I wrote each pertinent fact on a small five- by three-inch index card and placed each one in front of me on my little tray table like a solitaire player.
What did I have?
I had rekindled my friendship with Father Dill after a chance encounter at his chapel in Marilyn Monroe Drive. He seemed disturbed about a recent event, something to do with an old tin box given to him for safekeeping. Within days Dill was dead, sliced up and stacked like grain-fed wagyu beef intended for an organic-butcher shop window. But not anywhere near Marilyn Monroe Drive. The dismembered cairn of my dear friend had been located in a tunnel vent in Gibbon Street, South Brisbane — a street that had once fallen into the orbit of Dill’s former parish, before he was abruptly relocated around the time of the metal-box discovery.
Dill had told me about a peculiar family called the Beechnuts, Mammy Beechnut having recently passed away, and at Dill’s funeral I’d caught sight of that reprobate Alan Beechnut. I had interrogated the cross-eyed public transport fanatic and turned up little, though an inspection of his Scarborough house, the smell of which would have made the eyes of vultures and hyenas water, had exposed his peculiar fetish. I’d discovered what might have been a clue to Dill’s murder in the old framed tram ticket. Then a long-haired siren had stepped into the picture, and sent me to hospital with one swift kick of her beautifully shod foot. To add to the humiliation she — or was it Beechnut, the putrescent little pervert — had stripped me starkers and left me in my Kombi.
I had not seen Peg enter the room, so enmeshed was I in the twists and turns of this peculiar mystery.
‘Hello, darling,’ she finally said.
She sat in the chair my twittery son Jack had occupied a couple of days earlier.
‘When will this end?’ she asked.
‘I hope to be around for a few years yet, Peg,’ I snorted. ‘No rush is there?’
‘Not your life, you goose. This ... this ... mayhem.’
‘Hardly mayhem, dear.’
‘Naked and unconscious. In the Kombi. At Redcliffe. And at your age?’
‘Yes,’ I double-snorted. ‘Should have gotten those curtains fitted in the old bus after all, eh? Funny, the oddities life throws at you.’
‘So this is an annual thing of yours now, is it? These oddities, as you call them.’
Dogs can scent a coming storm. My storm scent was twitching. Luckily, Peg always telegraphed her building rage with her left eyebrow, which lifted up and down with gathering frequency. I won’t say some parts of my anatomy beneath the lemon-smelling hospital sheet didn’t shrivel at the sight, but at least the agitated brow gave me some warning.
‘Now, darling—’
‘Don’t darling me. I had expected to see out my years with a husband who aged gracefully. With someone I could share some time with. Not an old cop with a death wish. You can’t let it go, can you?’
I had no answer to that. We were silent in the room for ten minutes before the eyebrow lowered and she got up. She dropped a heavy bag on my swivel tray.
‘The books you asked for,’ she said, and left.
Peg was right, of course. It got me thinking. Ever since I’d come to Queensland, people around me had got killed. Last year it was the raconteur Westchester Zim. A week ago, Father Dill. I was a deity of death. A death lord of the underworld. I looked down at my spherical waistline holding up the hospital sheet. Yes, I was the original Under Belly.
Then the nurse brought me a custard tart and I got back to business.
I took the books out of the bag, and there she was — Mary MacKillop. Blessed Mary, as Father Dill had cryptically said.
I read the story of her life with awe. What an extraordinary woman. Born in Fitzroy, Melbourne, in 1842 to Scottish immigrants, she’d dedicated her life to educating poor children with the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, constantly on the move in Australia and Europe, full of courage and hope.
My son had been on the internet, and inside one of the books I found a print-out of a feature story from the Brisbane Courier published in February 1883. It was written by Julian Thomas, a pen name for John Stanley James, a journalist who had pioneered fly-on-the-wall newspaper writing in Australia. He also wrote under the name ‘The Vagabond’. In the feature my son had discovered — titled ‘An Australian Order’ — Thomas had done an in-depth first-hand account of the Sisters of St Joseph of t
he Sacred Heart, and had actually interviewed MacKillop, the woman most likely to become Australia’s first saint, in South Australia.
‘We are welcomed by “Mother Mary”,’ he wrote, ‘the superioress and founder of the order.’ She had given him a tour of the order’s ‘refuge for fallen women’.
‘It is far better that we should take these children, and bring them up properly, than that their mothers should neglect them to be reared in misery and vice,’ she’d reportedly said. Thomas told MacKillop that it appeared to be a great struggle to keep the Sisters of St Joseph running, to which she’d replied: ‘But if we gave this up, what would become of the poor creatures?’
MacKillop had regularly faced difficulties with both the church and state bureaucracies of the day. She was excommunicated for supposed insubordination, but this was later reversed.
And, incredibly, she’d attempted to spread her good work in Brisbane, arriving in this rough colonial town in late 1869, just a decade after Separation.
‘In the northern colony I heard a great deal of the good they [the Sisters of St Joseph] had done, but for some cause or other they incurred the displeasure of the late Bishop Quinn,’ wrote Thomas. ‘A controversy as to his authority ensued. I remember a dear friend of mine, a Catholic priest, once saying to me, “We have to obey our Bishop, but we needn’t love him.’”
So Mary suffered grief in early Brisbane. Why didn’t that surprise me? I thought of that Catholic priest over at South Brisbane having his own ideological stoush with the bishop not long ago. And his church was St Mary’s, too, wasn’t it? The more things change ...
Still, I was fascinated with Mary. She was beatified in 1995 by Pope John Paul II, and one miracle had been attributed to her. But she needed two for canonisation, a second ‘intercession through prayer’.
Just last winter she’d been made patron of the Brisbane Catholic archdiocese.
I put down the paperwork and closed my eyes. Saints. Miracles. A little tin box. The crucified Father Dill. For someone who’d decided to simply dip his toe back in the religion of his past, I was suddenly all at sea in faith. Maybe Peg was right. Maybe it was time I let it all go and looked to the future.
When I opened my eyes Jack was back in the chair beside the bed. He had just appeared. Miraculously.
‘Hello, Dad.’
‘Nice to see you, son. Still twitching?’
‘Tweeting, Dad.’
‘Ah yes.’
‘Got another few from your friend.’
‘My friend?’
‘The murder tweeter.’
‘Ah yes. What do they say, son?’
‘“Ding-dong, you’re dead.’”
‘That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?’
‘And, “For whom the bell tolls.”‘
‘Good movie. Gary Cooper. Ingrid Bergman.’
‘Whatever,’ Jack said.
‘Come to think of it, didn’t Bergman play a nun in The Bells of St Mary’s?’
‘Dunno, Dad.’
Then he left.
I made a quick call on my room phone. I rang the imaginatively named council engineer Barrie Barry. I was put on hold.
While I was waiting for Barrie Barry, I flicked through one of my MacKillop books and something caught my eye. A phrase. Don’t know why. For no reason.
I crooked the phone between my ear and left shoulder and held the book open. I read a paragraph about Blessed Mary and her time in Brisbane. I read of the hardship. The sacrifice.
Then I dropped the phone and it bounced clean off the bed.
Mary MacKillop, future saint, had for a short time lived in South Brisbane.
In Gibbon Street.
~ * ~
8
While I was waiting for Barrie Barry in King George Square, I wondered where everybody was. The square was empty, except for King George on his horse and the two lions guarding City Hall. I could see people over at Roma Street, and others in the Queen Street Mall, but bubkis, diddly, nada, in the square.
Then I wondered why, as I crossed Adelaide Street earlier, it was close to thirty degrees in Greater Brisbane, and yet sitting in the newly renovated square, denuded of trees and fountains, it appeared twice that. On top of it all, I couldn’t see a darned thing through the glare that bounced off the new square’s giant pad of concrete or tiling or crushed glass or whatever it was. The clock tower was all ghostly and shimmering. If anyone ever wanted to orchestrate a world-record attempt at cooking eggs, this would be the place. It was a frying pan. The King George Skillet. I felt like an ant under a naughty boy’s microscope, and he had a face like Beechnut.
I’d arrived early for our meeting. I’d wandered the halls of City Hall. I’d never been inside. Impressive. Lots of deco curves. Veined marble. Stately columns. Hard to believe the place was sinking into the earth.
I struck up a conversation with an old boy in the Museum of Brisbane.
‘Terribly sad, terribly sad,’ he said of the crumbling icon. ‘I enlisted here as a young man. Double-you, double-you two. Down in the Red Cross rooms. Terribly sad. Terribly sad.’
He kept repeating things. It gave his conversation a powerful bedrock, which is more than I could say for the terribly sad City Hall.
‘How come she’s going under?’ I asked.
‘Built on a swamp. A swamp. Was a swamp from day one and no matter what you put over the top of a swamp, she stays a swamp.’
‘That so?’
‘Oh yes. Oh yes. A swamp’s a swamp.’
‘Then why did they build it here?’
‘Because the council owned the land. Owned the land.’
‘Simple as that?’
‘Argh, yes. Yes.’
I saw a slender figure approach me through the heat haze. It was Barrie Barry. Strange. I was having a day of repetitions.
‘You’re Barry? Barrie?’
He nodded, flicked his head, and walked straight past me towards Ann Street. I followed. We didn’t speak until we’d taken up a seat on the grass in the Roma Street Parkland. Barrie Bany was twitching and checking over his shoulder, a veritable bundle of tics and tweaks. He had a bald pate that was very shiny. Too long in King George Square and he’d be in an emergency neurology unit. I had a very silly urge to ask him if his middle name was Barrey.
‘How did you find me?’ Barrie whispered.
‘Well, Barry — or is it Barrie? I came upon you via a rather circuitous route involving a tram fanatic with stupendous halitosis and the death of a very good friend, a man of the cloth. I have a hunch you met him too.’
‘Father Dillon.’
‘Father Dillon.’
‘And Beechnut,’ Barrie Barrey Barry said.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘He came to me, Beechnut, interested in the restoration work at the City Hall. He said he was from some transport group.’
‘The Scarborough Tram Society,’ I nodded.
‘Yes. He seemed ... well ... we have, at council, the occasional difficulties with public-transport fanatics. They can become ... difficult. Any road change, bus route alteration, even modifications to ticketing systems, even the tickets themselves — they have an opinion.’
‘Each to his own, I suppose,’ I said flippantly.
‘Well, we can’t afford to be cavalier, I’m afraid. Things can get ... beyond our control. We have to be extremely diplomatic. Every change creates a reaction to some degree. Confidentially, take the tunnel projects. We’ve had fires. Burning effigies of the mayor down below. Wiring cut. Someone doesn’t want the tunnels in Brisbane. Someone wants the tram back. How do these things happen, with security and twenty-four-hour work shifts? It’s beyond me. Then again, so is dedicating one’s life to a tram.’
‘You suspect Beechnut?’
‘He is on our list.’
‘Then there’s Father Dillon.’
‘You were close?’ the councilman asked. He was checking me out, testing my authenticity. I told him stories he’d probably never hea
rd about Dill. I told him I had accidentally met him, after many lost years, in the confessional booth. I told him I had been on the brink of re-examining my faith when all this happened. Barrie Barry had tears in his eyes.
‘Father Dillon was a good man,’ he said. ‘He was my parish priest for years. I was over at Gibbon Street one day when a tunnel worker who I knew from church took me aside and gave me the tin box. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what to do.’
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