by Chris Flynn
I was about to put the phone away when it flashed again.
???
Oscar Mike.
And that is?
On the move, ffs.
Yessir, general.
I was a corporal.
Is that higher or lower?
Stop txting now. I’m going in.
Righto. Maintaining radio silence as of now. X
Knocking on a meth dealer’s front door and politely informing him I would be his boss from that point on was hardly an option, unless I fancied picking a shiv out from between my ribs. I wanted to have a good look around in there first, see what sort of set-up he had, decide if it was even worth my while muscling in on his piss-ant operation.
Satisfied no one was home, I slipped the phone into my pocket and walked quickly across the road, careful to avoid the pools of light under the streetlamps.
No one saw me as I approached the house. Gilgandra was asleep.
After the Kingdom had closed for the night, it hadn’t taken much to persuade Steph to come on the surveillance detail. She was in with both feet now. A ruthless streak was emerging in her. It would be interesting to see how far she was prepared to go.
Matt had emerged from the house only a few minutes after we’d pulled up around the corner. I’d been prepared for an all-night vigil but he’d jumped in his crappy Toyota and taken off. We were in Steph’s Datsun, low-key enough for a surveillance op. She followed him at a sensible distance with the headlights switched off while I became a sentinel.
I tracked along the side of the house, navigating through piles of garbage bags and boxes. I paused to examine the rubbish. Dozens of empty Codral packets had been crushed and piled into a larger cardboard box. Amateur cooks often extracted pseudoephedrine from cold and flu tablets, though why they would leave such an obvious marker out in the open for any fucker to find was beyond me. They might as well have put a sign up on the front lawn inviting the AFP in for a snort.
The back of the house gave out onto a long yard overgrown with native plants. A battered old couch sat in the middle, covered in overflowing ashtrays. A meth pipe lay on its side on a rickety wooden table, next to a copy of Zoo Weekly.
I picked up the pipe and sniffed. The sharp odour almost made me gag. This was rough stuff they were smoking. There was a pitiful-looking lemon tree in one corner of the yard but it did nothing to mask the stench emanating from the house. I covered my nose and mouth as I approached the back door.
My intention had been to smash the glass with my elbow so I could reach in and undo the latch but the fucken door was unlocked. Asking for it, they were. Just waiting for someone like me to roll up and set them straight.
All of the lights in the house were off and after only a couple of steps I kicked something that skittered across the kitchen tiles. I stopped and took my phone out again so I could use the display as a weak torch. The kitchen was a predictable mess of empty bottles, cans and takeaway containers, most of which still had food welded to their insides. The sink was piled high with dishes. Blowies buzzed over plates and pots, revelling in such fertile breeding grounds. It was disgusting.
I followed my nose to the bathroom, along a carpeted hallway. I pushed the door open gently and shone the phone inside, still reluctant to switch on any lights. The bathroom had been set up as a primitive lab and the smell was so strong that my first instinct was to crack open the window. If Matt or some other skinny prick were cooking up in such a confined space, it would only be a matter of time before they dropped dead from inhaling such toxic fumes. How they had survived this long was a miracle.
The house would surely have to be condemned after they cleared out or expired. No one would want to buy it. You can never get rid of that smell. Best thing to do would be to put a match to the place and stand well back. That’s what happened with most amateur labs in the end, anyway. A little carelessness or inexperience mixing chemicals and boom—obliterated, like someone had called in a targeted drone strike.
Carefully closing the door behind me, I continued to search the house. The lounge room at the end of the hallway wasn’t in as bad a state as I expected. Matt probably conducted a lot of his deals there and that required some semblance of order. A large flat-screen television had been attached to one wall. I didn’t recognise the brand—it was probably one of those cheap knockoffs they sell at JB. Half a dozen game controllers littered the coffee table. It could easily have passed for any unkempt share-house lounge room, if not for the omnipresent stench of meth.
I’d passed two bedroom doors en route to the lounge and I retraced my steps to check them out. The first was larger and had clothes strewn haphazardly across the floor. The bed was unkempt and filthy-looking. I relaxed. This really was just another small-time meth operation, one of a thousand the cops would never know about. Nobody was going to leap from a cupboard, Uzi blazing.
The second bedroom was smaller and had obviously been intended for a child. A narrow single mattress lay on the floor and a few meagre possessions were arranged on the carpet next to it. It was the bunk of someone passing through, a transient tweaker recruited to assist with the cook in exchange for free glass.
I was about to close the door behind me when I spotted a faded Fremantle Dockers guernsey draped over the back of a chair. I angled my phone towards it.
It was the same kind as the one Mikey had worn when he worked on the Kingdom. I lifted it to my face and inhaled the owner’s sweat but I couldn’t tell if it was Mikey or not. It was possible that he was here, yet it didn’t seem likely. The Dockers had a lot of fans in the east. And surely Mikey would have spent some of his stolen loot on a new shirt.
I scanned the room for any other telltale signs. Anyone could have been staying there, any dumb crank addict headed nowhere.
I threw the shirt down and started kicking things. I put my boot through a cupboard door and it got stuck for a moment before I wrenched it out. I flipped the mattress over and ripped the curtains down.
There wasn’t enough for me to wreck, so I went back into the larger bedroom and pulled all the drawers out of the dresser, upending their contents onto the already considerable pile of unwashed clothes. It was already so messy in there it would take the owner a couple of minutes to realise the place had been done over. Not that he was going to have that luxury, as I’d be up in his grill the minute he crossed the fucken threshold.
The fourth drawer was heavier than the rest. I flipped it over and a knot of underwear fell out, none of it particularly fresh. A plastic baggie of cash was taped to the underside. I tore it loose and tossed the drawer away. It looked like a lot of money but it was mostly fives, tens and twenties, no pineapples. The typical roll of a meth dealer. At a glance, it looked to be around a thousand bucks. Whoop-de-fucken-doo. Still, always good to have some small change for Target Ball.
There had to be a stash of meth somewhere in the house. I stalked out into the corridor to search for it when my phone began buzzing insistently. I answered it as I started my sweep of the lounge room.
‘Can you talk?’
‘Yeah. What is it?’
‘Elvis has left the building. Must have been just making a drop. Maybe having a quick bump. He’s heading back now with a friend.’
‘Good. I’d like to have a word with him.’
‘Listen, there was a bit of a ruckus over here. Raised voices.’
‘Arguing over fucken Mario Kart, were they?’
‘Boys will be boys. That’s probably it. Anyway, there’s two of them now so be careful.’
‘I’ll handle it.’
‘I’m in hot pursuit of the target now. Hey, I quite like all this skulking around. This is the best date we’ve been on in ages.’
‘Better than Cirque du Soleil? Those tickets were fucken expensive.’
‘Oh yeah, that was pretty good.’
‘So when you get here, wait outside till I call you in, just to be on the safe side.’
‘Aww, but I brought my rounders bat wi
th the barbed wire wrapped around it.’
‘You’ve still got that?’
‘Sometimes a guy comes in for a massage with the wrong idea.’
‘That would persuade him otherwise. But no sense in you being a witness to anything that might damage your delicate sensibility.’
‘My sensibility’s not as delicate as it used to be.’
‘I’m starting to get that, yeah. Look, I better get in position. They’ll be here in a couple of minutes.’
‘Righto. Save some for me, though.’
I dragged a cheap hard-backed chair to the far corner, facing the door. Next to it I placed a lamp, one of those silver Ikea ones with a flexible neck. I plugged it into the wall socket and tested it. I turned the shade downwards to the floor, so I would only be dimly lit when it came on. Satisfied I would not be noticed when they first came in the door, I removed the nine mil from the back of my pants and took a seat, crossing my legs and setting the gun on my thigh.
It was deathly quiet in the house and as I waited in the darkness I thought about walking in the desert at night. The hospital where I’d spent six weeks recuperating had been far from the action. During those early days the worst thing was seeing people’s reactions to my burns. Even the staff couldn’t help but wince sometimes. I spent a lot of time wandering, trying to regain fitness, though the doctors said I couldn’t run in case the sores opened.
I would walk out past the perimeter of the hospital grounds, past the point where the grass met the sand. I wasn’t supposed to be out there but it wasn’t like on the operating posts. There were no anti-personnel mines buried in the dirt, no IEDs waiting to tear you to shreds. Nothing much at all, really.
After sunset was the time to go. The burning sensation in my chest would ease in the cold until it almost vanished completely. I realised then that I’d spend the rest of my life in the shadows. No more sunbaking on the beach, no kicking a footy around the park, no more long lunches out the front of cafés. I had to become something else. Something new.
The Toyota chugged into the driveway. Its exhaust backfired with a gunshot crack and I knew that every animal within a five-mile radius had just raised their head at the sound and sniffed the air for danger.
For most of this past year I have had trouble remembering. At first I presumed this was an inevitable result of ageing, but then it was delicately pointed out to me that I’m not terribly old—fifty-eight, which may seem ancient to some, but is still within the boundaries of middle age, technically speaking. Put it this way: if I dropped dead tomorrow, those who knew me would surely opine, ‘Oh, but he was still so young.’ At least I hope they would. In any event, fifty-eight hardly seems old enough to warrant the desolate field that now occupies the place where my memory used to be.
Under duress, I went to see someone about it a few months ago, during the Kingdom’s winter break. I joked throughout the tiresome questioning about early onset Alzheimer’s and the physician played along until it got to the part about my history with electric current. I was frank with my interlocutor and he repaid my honesty in kind. It turns out that the repeated application of dangerously high voltage to my cranium may have affected my episodic memory, in that it would appear to be in the process of erasing itself.
Perhaps I should have paid more heed to what I assumed at the time was mere alarmist chatter about possible long-term brain damage. My detractors have been proven correct, after a fashion. My semantic memory is relatively undamaged: I can recall facts, skills, languages, indeed many nuggets of useless information I’ve managed to acquire down the years. What’s largely absent is my memory of events—where I went, and what I did there. Some hazy recollections remain, sparked by a strong memory of a person who was present at the time, but these are sadly few and far between.
It’s a frustrating condition, but in a perverse way I have also found it to be liberating. We passed through Mount Gambier this year and although I know the Kingdom was there roughly a decade ago, I had no memory of the visit. Consequently the streets were new to me, as if I were seeing them for the first time. Staring into the azure waters that fill the huge volcanic crater overlooking the town was quite a thrill. I had been there before—I must have been, as I would not have passed up the chance to view such a natural wonder—but nothing of that day a decade hence remained.
It irritates no end those who would call me friend. Their allegiance to the minor events of the past has always puzzled me, however. Now at least I have an excuse when I fail to recall the afternoon we all played mini-golf in Colac after the radiator overheated on the truck hauling the Ferris wheel. The others each have their own distinct memories of the day, often so vivid they can even list what I was wearing (purple culottes, allegedly, and a red-and-white-striped cape that I honestly do not recall owning). The truth of the matter, which I would never speak aloud lest it cause offence, is that the day was likely of such little significance to me that I wouldn’t even have remembered it before my memory began to crumble.
The doctor told me that I will continue to form new episodic memories, but they too will vanish within a few years until, eventually, I won’t be able to remember what I did or where I went a fortnight ago. I will be forever trapped in the present—the ultimate Buddhist, if you will. Perhaps my life will become an inspiration for those who wish to forget.
My physician also suggested I document what memories remain clear now, before they are whisked away. He claimed this would be a useful and enjoyable exercise, but that I should not expect reading them in the future to trigger any emotional response. Once my memories are wiped, they will be gone forever. When I read over my notes in later life, what I have written will be unknown to me. I will believe it to be pure fiction. Yet I wonder—isn’t it the same for everyone? Don’t we reinvent who we were all the time? Aren’t our memories little more than a series of misremembered anecdotes, exaggerations and wishful thinking? Perhaps I shall not be so very different to anyone else.
Preservation of the past has been one of humankind’s chief preoccupations for centuries, although I am not convinced much of it is worth preserving. As for my own stories: when I sit down in my trailer with a pen and paper to record them before they are forgotten, my feeling toward much of what has happened to me in life is one of ambivalence. I am haunted by the inescapable truth that little of what I have done has mattered to anyone. To the casual outsider my existence as a sideshow act on a travelling carnival may seem the antithesis of boring—but upon reflection, I see I have had an unremarkable life. Much of it is not even worth recording. Who would I be recording it for? Myself, in dotage, bored by the past of a man I fail to recognise? I prefer to let most of it fade away. In some cases, it is perhaps preferable to forget.
Please don’t mistake my cynicism for regret. There have been moments worthy of the annals, of that there can be no doubt. They are simply tricky to recall. Tragedy touched my life, of course, but also comedy, and love, and friendship. What did Robert Louis Stevenson say? ‘Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?’ Now that is a sentiment I would firmly echo.
All that remains to me now are my friends—my family on the Kingdom. They are not phantoms but real, physical beings, a constant reminder of who I am, and sometimes of who I used to be. This is why it pleased me so that a man I have known since he was only a slip of a lad, a man, in fact, whose very birth I witnessed, sought me out for advice. He is a walking repository of my memories, carrying them within him now that I am unable to do so myself. When I see him, I remember.
Benjamin paid me a visit shortly after that young ragamuffin recruit of his had absconded with a considerable sum of his funds, not to mention his lady friend’s motorcar. It had been some time since he had darkened my door. In fact the date of his last visit eludes me, like so much else. I did not harbour any ill will on this account. Evidently, his nose had been pressed firmly to the grindstone.
‘Alakazam, stranger.’
‘Alakazam, Huw.’ He was
the only person whom I tolerated using my real name. ‘What you fiddling with there?’
I turned the object over and held it up to the light.
‘This is a medium-voltage expulsion fuse with an element fashioned from copper. Normally filled with boric acid, this one was unfortunately spent earlier this year whilst testing some equipment, causing some rather noxious gases to be expelled from the tip. Not ideal for the person staring into it at the time.’
‘I’m guessing that would be your former assistant.’
‘The long-suffering Veronica. A lass of exemplary fortitude, though she had her shortcomings. An accident was inevitable, I’m afraid.’
He sat down on the step next to me. I let him be for a few moments before broaching the subject all and sundry were chirruping about.
‘I heard about your misfortune. Any news of the scoundrel’s whereabouts?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Someone will surely spy him out. No doubt he will be profligate with his windfall and draw attention to himself.’
‘He couldn’t have gone far in that old Datsun anyway. It’s on its last legs.’
‘As are we all. You have my sympathies, my dear boy. If you ever catch him, my electric chair is at your disposal.’
That prospect seemed to cheer him somewhat.
‘The loss of an assistant can be most vexing. It hasn’t been the same around here since Veronica left.’
‘There were rumours you and her…’
‘Don’t be preposterous. I was more than thirty years her senior.’
‘Still. She was easy on the eye.’
‘I will concede that point, yes. I don’t wish to be indiscreet, but her assets, if you will, were useful in drawing a crowd. However, there are plenty of naïve young fools out there who would make perfectly suitable replacements. You will find one too, I’m sure.’
‘That’s not the point. After all I did for him, that little prick betrayed my trust. I’m going to find him, and drag him back here so he understands exactly what that means.’
