Sydney Noir

by John Dale

Frank drew his phone from his inside pocket and clicked on his contacts list. “Two suppliers. Seventy-eight clients. All yours.” He placed the phone beside the duffel bag. “But on one condition,” added Frank, drawing the revolver from his inside pocket.

  Jimmy flinched. He went to say something but stopped himself.

  “Look, I never did time for the murder.” Frank stepped closer. “Nell took the rap.”

  Frank leaned forward and held the gun out handle first, but Jimmy backed away. “Can you imagine the cocksucking guilt I’ve had all my life? It’s a fucking Greek tragedy!”

  Jimmy glanced frantically around the room, then fixed his eyes on the mobile phone and the bag of money.

  “You haven’t got the guts, have you?”

  The kid ran a hand through his hair. He sat on the windowsill and then stood up again.

  “Please, son,” said Frank. “It won’t be the same if I do it myself.”

  The kid cleared his throat and spat out the window. For what seemed a long time he just leaned against the sill and gazed out over the street.

  “You know the saying, son: An eye for an eye.”

  Jimmy turned and the two men stood staring at one another.

  Finally, Jimmy extended a trembling hand to Frank. He slowly took the gun and held it in both palms.

  Frank raised his arms, as if in surrender.

  Jimmy lifted the revolver and aimed it straight at Frank’s head. “What the fuck?” he said. He let out a crazed laugh. “You’re not my real father anyway.”

  GOOD BOY, BAD GIRL

  by John Dale

  Newtown

  Jazz came out onto the porch in bare feet to watch the dogfight. Day or night, there was always something going on in this park. That’s why her nan kept a special chair outside with a leather cushion; most mornings she sat out here pulling faces at people who passed. Jazz leaned on the spear-tipped fence and watched a man and a woman struggling to separate their dogs. Finally the man pulled his boxer off by the collar, yelling, “Good boy, bad girl!” The tiny white shih tzu stood her ground, baring her teeth, and her owner, an old woman with see-through hair, patted her dog’s flank and said in a voice loud enough for Jazz to hear, “Clever girl.”

  Backpackers were lying around on the grass smoking dope and drinking goon. In an hour or two they’d make their way down to the clubs, pubs, and cheap eateries on King Street. Jazz had lived in her nan’s house all her life and she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Memorial Park and St. Stephen’s Church with its graffitied sandstone walls was her front yard, though recently at night the park attracted ice addicts and undercover cops.

  Newtown was the place to be, but it wasn’t always so. When Jazz was a kid, it was a different world. Her nan would call from the kitchen, “Jazz, go get your father for dinner,” and she’d run barefoot up Church Street to the Shakespeare, push on the heavy wooden door with both hands, and through the fug of cigarette smoke find her way to the back bar where the TAB was; she’d weave a path between the big bellies and tug her dad’s sleeve, looking around at the faces of the council workers and the coppers from the Police Youth Club. When he was done drinking, her dad would squeeze her hand and she would lead him home down Crooks Lane. Most nights ended peacefully with her dad snoring in his armchair, but there were other nights when he broke a glass or chipped a tooth and his mood would turn on a sixpence, and she and Nan would retreat to their bedroom and watch TV together on the portable set, fiddling with the rabbit ears, while her father vented his rage on doors and crockery, cursing her mother for dying on them.

  It still surprised Jazz how many people knew her dad, for he never became a household name, but he always gave it a go, and at his memorial service in St. Stephen’s there were over three hundred people in attendance: stand-over men, boxing trainers, Bluebags supporters, battlers from the housing commission flats, and that little rooster fella from 2GB who told everyone that “Spearsy had the heart of a champion, was a champion bloke.”

  Afterward there were egg sandwiches that Jazz had cut the crusts off herself, and she heard one wag say that, “Spearsy wouldna come to his own funeral if he’d a-known there was no grog.” She’d wheeled her nan home and at five o’clock she began her shift at Liquorland.

  The steam had cleared in the bathroom and Jazz dried her hair and applied mascara and her favorite dark lipstick. Her childhood was rough and ready but it wasn’t as disadvantaged as her welfare officer said. She had free range of the park and the churchyard and when she was little she’d played hide-and-seek behind the headstones. Everyone’s got misfortune in their family is what Jazz figured, and if people thought they could avoid tragedy by having truckloads of money and a four-bedroom mansion right on the harbor, they were mistaken. Her mum and dad were party people and they took her everywhere. Once they left her at the Courthouse Hotel and came back after closing time to find her eating sausage rolls and drinking lemonade with the publican’s Down syndrome grandson. You learned more about life sitting in a Newtown beer garden than you did watching Sesame Street, that’s for sure.

  Those old Newtowners were a different species, the way they spoke out the sides of their mouths, the way they expressed emotion with both hands.

  Jazz wasn’t abused or nothing like some of them Catholic kids and she had her nan. When he passed out dead drunk on Gardeners Road, Jazz’s grandfather was run over by a steamroller. Her dad loved telling that story, how he had to identify his father’s disfigured remains in the Glebe morgue.

  Jazz zipped up her giraffe-print dress, the one Lockie liked, and slipped her feet into flats. She went down the hall to find her nan sunk in her wheelchair watching Animal Kingdom, a glass of water and a box of Arnott’s crackers on her tray. Nan liked to suck on the barbecue shapes without her teeth in. Jazz changed her nan’s bag and cleaned her face with a washer. Her phone buzzed and she read the single-word message: Parking.

  “You remember Lockie, don’t you, Nan?” Her nan stared blankly at the TV. Some days she appeared to understand what was going on, but mostly she occupied a different time zone. Jazz wasn’t one of those ungrateful young women who dumped her last remaining relative in an aged-care unit; she knew how to care for old people. Before her mum died, she’d promised to buy Jazz a dog but she never did. Anyway, where would she fit a dog in a single-story, two-bedroom terrace? That’s why the park was so important. She strapped her nan’s legs securely in the wheelchair so she couldn’t fall out and squashed two ants climbing up the edge of her tray.

  “Won’t be long, Nan,” she said. Lockie had something important to tell her tonight and she suspected he wanted to ask her to marry him or else move in together now that he’d finished his law degree. She’d thought it over long and hard. Her nan would have to come with them or else Lockie could move in here, help out with the showering and toileting; it hurt her back lifting Nan in and out of the tub.

  Her girlfriends said she had snared the man of her dreams, tall, athletic, handsome, with rich parents. Mr. Perfect. Of course Lockie had his little kinks, but he certainly wasn’t her worst BF; she’d had her fair share of disasters in the past, and it was a pleasant change to go out with someone from the North Shore. Hunters Hill was as far removed from Newtown as you could get.

  The doorbell rang while Jazz was fixing her hair. She walked down the hall and opened the door.

  “You look nice,” Lockie said. He was wearing a bright pink Tommy Hilfiger polo with bone-colored chinos as if he’d dropped by for a round of golf. He leaned in close: “You smell good, what is that?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Nice,” he said. She stepped outside and pulled the door shut and he put an arm around her waist as they walked. Up close he smelled of cologne—too much cologne.

  The iron gates to the churchyard were open and the rector was chaperoning a party of Japanese guests through the grounds. The private cemetery was popular for weddings although it struck Jazz as a strange place to get married.

  Loc
kie had everything planned for the night. A few drinks and a seafood meal followed by sex in the backseat of his father’s car.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  “Later,” he said. “Let’s enjoy ourselves first.”

  She took that to mean, Don’t spoil my night, but Lockie was the one who did most of the talking. She mainly listened and tuned in and out when necessary. She was happy for him to pick the pub, book the table, and order the wine. He liked to be in control, play the grown-up. From experience, she figured it was best if she just went along with things. They walked up King Street past the Tear Down Capitalism posters, the pie and burger joints starting to fill with customers, cars and buses running bumper to bumper. When did it become fashionable to eat your dinner with a lungful of diesel fumes?

  Lockie was talking but she found it hard to hear over the traffic noise. “Sorry?”

  “So many weirdos out,” he said. “It’s great.”

  She took that as a compliment from a Hunters Hill boy who went to St. Joseph’s College and then Sydney Uni. She didn’t hold it against him, having a privileged childhood; she was never envious of others because she had a theory that it all evened out in the end.

  Lockie whispered in her ear how much he was looking forward to doing it in the X5. “Hope to Christ it’s safe parked there,” he said.

  A group of shaved-eyebrow guys were staring from the Italian Bowl, checking out his rig. Unlike her previous BFs, Lockie never ogled other girls, never even glanced out the corner of his eye at a pretty girl, or commented on their attributes; it was almost as if he wasn’t interested in other women. Sometimes she asked herself if Lockie was gay, but no, he couldn’t be. He was like a horny puppy dog, always rubbing up against her, always touching her butt.

  He stopped at the entrance to the hotel, checked his app to make sure this was the correct address, confirmed it was. “The crispy soft-shell crab is the go apparently,” he said. If only he’d asked her instead of Google, she could have told him this was her father’s former local, transformed into an upmarket eatery. Downstairs still retained its sour, beery, wet-carpet odor, a few gray-faced men drinking alone at dark tables, a bluish flicker from Sky Sports, a buxom barmaid playing with her split ends. No different from twenty years ago, but upstairs—Jazz couldn’t recall there ever being an upstairs—upstairs there was light and a beer garden with potted plants and climbing vines and tables that faced an open-plan kitchen where short-order cooks flipped meat and fish and red capsicum over a stone grill; there was a wine list and specials on a chalkboard and photos plastered on the walls of what Newtown must have looked like in her grandfather’s day before he was run over by the steamroller. The twin barmaids were younger than she was and fashionably pierced.

  “What do you think, Jazz?” Lockie asked proudly, as if he’d built this rooftop courtyard himself. Like most men, Lockie liked to be praised for little things.

  “You did well,” she said.

  He went to the bar and ordered drinks: a full-strength pale ale for her and a light lager for himself.

  Never trust a man who drinks light beer, her dad used to say. Or was that her mum? Neither of them had worried about drunk driving.

  Jazz watched Lockie return—confident, broad-shouldered, attracting male glances.

  “The marinara looks awesome!” he said.

  “This used to be my dad’s old pub,” she told him. “They didn’t serve food back then, only crisps and beer nuts.”

  “So much character,” he said. “My parents would love it.”

  “I must meet them one day.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t like them, Jazz. They’re very left wing.”

  What did he mean by that? Was he ashamed of her? Did his parents even know he had a girlfriend? Wasn’t it peculiar how you could sleep with someone, go out to dinner with them, see two Ryan Gosling movies in a row, and still never really know them? Even after eleven months she didn’t know Lockie and he sure as hell didn’t know her.

  “I haven’t told you my news,” he said. “I won the Sociological Jurisprudence Prize.”

  “Wow,” she said.

  “One hundred forty dollars, awarded to a final-year law student.”

  They toasted his success. When the plates came, he talked about how this award would improve his chances of working for an international NGO. His life stretched out in front of him like a brand-new superhighway, while hers was a bumpy, winding back road filled with potholes.

  “You should do a course,” he said, sifting through his marinara for shellfish.

  “Like what?”

  “Bookkeeping. You can’t go on caring for that old woman forever.” Soon as he said it he tried to backtrack, mumbling through a mouthful of spaghetti how it was better for senior citizens to be with people their own age, that modern nursing facilities had improved their level of aged care exponentially.

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  “Let’s not discuss it now,” he said.

  “You brought it up!”

  He gave her a look to indicate her voice was loud. A couple at the next table glanced over so she breathed in deeply and said, “I know what I’d want if I was her age.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “To die in my own home.”

  He didn’t argue, wasn’t going to spoil the evening. His crab, he told her, was superb. She didn’t tell him her dish, the one he insisted she order, was bland, the seafood overcooked and drowning in a watery sauce.

  “Don’t look now,” he whispered, “but there’s a guy who keeps staring at you.”

  The man was seated alone in the corner: coarse red hair, ruddy complexion with pitted skin. She had a feeling she had seen him somewhere but couldn’t place where.

  “You know him?” Lockie asked.

  “Not sure.” The guy was wearing a tight-fitting white shirt, unbuttoned to reveal the links of a gold chain. He was chewing, deep in thought, but at that moment he glanced up from his T-bone and gave her a curt nod of recognition. She leaned back in her chair.

  “Looks like a cop to me,” Lockie said.

  Now that Lockie mentioned it, he did look like a cop. She’d met her fair share of detectives when her father was alive. His suit jacket was slung over the back of his chair and although overweight, he had the physique of a man who used to work out. He stood up, a red napkin tucked into the belt of his trousers.

  “Oh shit,” Lockie said, “he’s coming this way.”

  Jazz put on the smile she used at the bottle shop. The man stopped at their table and said, “You’re Spearsy’s kid. Jasmine, right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Just wanted to say, your old man was one of a kind. They broke the mold when they made him.” He took the red paper napkin out of his belt, wiped his mouth, then balled it on the floor near her feet. “Sorry to hear about your mother too,” he said. “Real shame what happened there. Real shame.”

  She nodded.

  “Just thought I’d say hi.” He made no attempt to move on toward the bar, seemed to be waiting for an invitation to join them, but Lockie didn’t offer any encouragement. Jazz sensed hostility between the two men. “Decent send-off, all them speeches, Johnny woulda been proud . . .”

  “Sorry, I’ve forgotten your name,” she said.

  “Kenny. Call me Kenny.”

  “Like the movie?” Lockie put in.

  “What movie?” The man gave Lockie a stare, then lowered his voice: “You wouldn’t know where I can buy some marijuana, would you, son?”

  “What?”

  “My niece has cancer, and smoking weed relieves the pain.”

  Jazz said, “There’s a guy down at Redfern Station—”

  Lockie kicked her under the table. “Sorry, can’t help you.”

  The man nodded as if he was weighing up his response. “Nice shirt, son. Is that peach?” And turning on his heels, he walked over to the bar, bouncing his keys in his hand.

  “Told you he was a co
p,” Lockie whispered.

  “He didn’t like you very much,” Jazz said.

  “Guy’s a creep. I thought he was going to pop the buttons on his shirt. And see that hair, some kind of wig—”

  “Now I know where I saw him!” Jazz cut in. “At the park.” She told Lockie about the dogfight between the shih tzu and the boxer. “The guy was the boxer’s owner but he wasn’t wearing any suit.”

  “So he is a cop!” Lockie said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You told me undercover cops patrol that park looking for ice dealers.”

  “Did I?”

  Some men were like dogs the way they took an instinctive dislike to each other and started barking. Lockie was still yapping, worked up about this stranger standing over at the bar chatting to one of the identical barmaids.

  “There’s a difference,” he said, “between entrapment and a sting operation designed to catch a person committing a crime. What he was trying to do was entrapment.”

  “But you don’t sell dope,” she said.

  “I would never ask a complete stranger in a restaurant where to buy marijuana, would you?”

  “It’s Newtown, Lockie. Forget about it.”

  “I find people like that so obnoxious.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  She led him down the stairs, through the public bar, and out onto King Street. Crowds of people swept past, car horns blaring, colored lights flashing. She felt the heat of the pavement through her shoes. They looked in shop windows and walked off their dinner in silence. When they turned onto the quiet of Church Street, Lockie was still brooding. Jazz stopped outside St. Stephen’s Church. The gate was unlocked.

  “That’s odd,” she said, “the rector always padlocks it at dusk.” She pushed on the heavy iron gate which gave a rough grinding sound as it swung open.

  “What are you doing?” Lockie grabbed at her arm.

  “I want to show you the churchyard at night.”

  “It’s trespassing.”

  She steered him past her favorite old fig tree, black shapes flitting between its branches. Clouds obscured the stars and the gravestones shone in the moonlight. She showed him the monuments she liked the best: the figure of a grieving woman, a ship ploughing through the waves.