by Peter Corris
I cruised down quiet Brewers Road squinting at the numbers. The woodwork on the houses looked as if it got an annual coat of paint; the road was a polite half mile from the vulgar shopping centre; there was a big Catholic church on a rise at the end of the road and not a pub in sight.
Number thirteen was a model of the sort of place that predominated in the area: broad grass strip then a low wooden fence, freshly painted, with black wrought iron gates. Neither the gates nor the fence would keep anything out or in-the rose bushes were clipped back to prevent any suggestion of them climbing on the wood- but in that neighbourhood they were de rigeur. Inside the fence was a concrete driveway and strips of concrete ran all around the edges of the lawn and the garden beds to make the whole thing easy to mow. The house was a double fronted red brick veneer set squarely on the block. The wide Australian country verandah of yesteryear had withered away to a mean little cement porch.
I parked across the road from the conventional, respectable house, and mused on the differences between siblings. In this place wild William Mountain would stand out like boxing gloves on a ballerina, but his sister evidently fitted into the environment perfectly, like the gladioli or the shaven blades of buffalo grass.
The perfect orderliness of the street was somewhat disturbed by the rubbish bins which stood in front of the houses awaiting collection. Metal and plastic with lids neatly clipped on, they were very unlike the split, battered jobs in Glebe. But there were a few plastic garbage bags and even the odd cardboard box. As I watched number thirteen, a woman came from the back of the house carrying her rubbish bin. She rested the bin on the fence and opened the gate. A couple of steps across the footpath and she put the bin down on the grass near the gutter. This put it about a metre away from her neighbour’s bin which had a cardboard box next to it. The box might have been sitting on the boundary line between the two properties as it appeared on the surveyor’s plan. The woman looked quickly back at the houses, bent over and moved the box so that it clearly belonged in front of number eleven. I could hear the chink of bottles as she moved the box.
I watched her go back through her gate and down the driveway beside her house. She was tall, with dark greying hair and a very stiff upright stance. Bill Mountain was tall with greying hair but he had the slumped shoulders of the writer and bar-leaner.
I drove down the road, turned and came back to park directly outside number thirteen. I was in the wrong clothes to pretend to be a policeman or anything else. I took my time getting out of the car, and locked it carefully so that if she was watching she could see that I had a pride in property to match her own. I resisted the natural impulse to step over low gates; I opened this one sedately and closed it behind me. Then I walked up the carefully constructed and carefully swept concrete path to the front of the house. No bell. I took out my operator’s licence with the photograph under plastic, did up the second top button of my shirt, and knocked.
She opened the front door, but left a screen door closed on a hook between us.
‘Yes?’ Suspicion, hostility and disappointment, all crowded into one word. Standing in the raised doorway she was taller than me which meant that she’d be close to six feet on the flat. She was wearing a cotton dress with a shapeless cardigan over it. Her face was gaunt, with sunken cheeks and eyes, and the skin around her chin and neck was scraggy. An unlovely woman. I held the licence folder up for her to see.
‘Ms Mountain?’
‘Miss.’
‘Yes, my name is Hardy, I’m a private investigator. I’ve flown from Sydney today to talk to you.’
It can go either way-they can slam the door on you or open up and want to tell you the story of their lives day by day since continuous memory began. Miss C. Mountain looked as if she’d like to slam the door, but something held her back, perhaps the mention of Sydney or perhaps the loneliness that seemed to stand beside her like a silent l win.
‘Why have you come to see me, Mr…’, she peered at l he plastic through the wire mesh, ‘Hardy?’
‘It has to do with Bill, your brother.’
Her right hand shot up to grip her thin left shoulder in an oddly self-protective gesture. Her voice was a dry croak. ‘William. Yes.’
‘Well, he seems to be missing
‘He’s here. William’s staying with me until he gets well.’
10
She let her hand fall from her shoulder and then clasped both hands together in front of her at waist height. She was very still and her plain, bony face and the flat lines of her body made her look like the patron saint of disapproval. There was something wrong about her stiffness, but I couldn’t work out what it was. Her statement had caught me completely on the hop; I hadn’t given a thought to what I might say to Mountain, because I figured the moment of meeting was days away at the earliest.
‘Could I see him? Please?’ I said weakly.
‘He’s not in at the very moment. Would you like to come in and wait? He won’t be long.’
I’d picked her as the type that would send you off to your car to wait, where she could keep an eye on you from a safe distance through the Venetian blinds. Wrong again, Hardy. But in this business you have to be adaptable; I put the licence away and shuffled forward.
‘Thank you. Yes.’
She unhooked the screen door and stepped aside to let me pass her.
‘This way.’
I was in a small, carpeted hallway that held an upholstered chair and a highly polished table on which sat an intricately crocheted, cream-coloured doily. A telephone sat squarely in the middle of the doily. The carpet was thick and floral, and there were plastic walking strips covering it, which led off to a room at the front of the house. I followed her down one of the strips taking care to keep my balance so that I didn’t fall off into one of the bouquets of flowers.
She showed me into a lounge room that contained a glass-fronted crystal cabinet, a dresser made of the same dark wood, a couch and two chairs. A built-in briquet heater occupied one wall and the Venetian blinds were half-closed to keep the light down and protect the floral carpet which flowed into here from the hallway. With all the furniture exactly in place and not a book or a magazine in sight, the room had all the warmth and welcome of a prison shower block. She stood exactly in the centre of the room, as if she had marked the spot.
‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Hardy?’
‘Thanks.’ I sat on the nearest chair so that I wouldn’t wear out too much carpet by strolling around. She sat on the couch and we looked at each other in the dim light. I remembered that Bill Mountain had an engaging habit of lying on the floor, resting his glass on his chest and singing. He sang boisterously and the glass didn’t usually stay on the chest. I couldn’t imagine him in this room.
‘How long do you think he’ll be, Miss Mountain?’
She looked at her watch, which she wore with the face on the inside of her wrist. ‘Oh, not so very long. He went for a walk. Would you like some tea, or coffee?’
‘Coffee would be very nice, thanks.’
‘It’s just instant.’
‘Fine.’
‘Milk?’
‘Please.’
‘Sugar?’
‘No, thank you.’
She hadn’t smiled or nodded or relaxed her grim vigilant air for a second. She planted her long, thin legs in front of her and got up off the couch. With her mouth set in a tight, determined line, she marched out of the room towards the kitchen where I heard her making efficient sounds.
It wasn’t the sort of room you walked about in; there was the fear of dirt on your shoes for one thing, and the danger that you might knock something out of square. I craned forward from the chair to look at the photographs on the dresser. One was of an old, sprawling house, another showed a wedding party, pre-World War II, to judge by the clothes. The third was of a family group: the parents stood behind a boy and girl, who both looked to be about the same age, say ten. The father was a tall, angular character, closely resembling the B
ill Mountain of my acquaintance and looking even more like ‘Bruce Worthington’ because he wore a short clipped beard. The mother was of average height and build, and would have been nondescript except that a hint of good humour about her mouth drew your eyes to her and away from the others.
Miss Mountain came back into the room carrying a tray which she set down on the dresser in front of the photographs. She held out a delicate china cup and saucer which I took in hands that felt like grappling hooks. She resumed her perch on the couch, cradled her cup and saucer in long, bony hands and let her eyes drift across to the dresser.
‘The Mountain family in happier days,’ she said.
‘Yes.’ I doubted that Bill Mountain would have thought so. The ten-year-old boy looked aggressive and resentful and the father looked exactly the same with more to be resentful about.
‘Would you care for a biscuit?’
I had a biscuit and drank the thin coffee. It was almost impossible to think of anything to say to her. She sipped and nibbled and took extreme care that not a single crumb fell on the floor. The only possible topic of conversation for us was her brother, but I felt myself being irresistibly drawn into the insipid artificiality of her milieu.
‘Bill’s been unwell, you said?’
‘Yes.’ She leaned forward, but adjusted her hands so that there was no risk of upsetting her cup. ‘It’s a weakness, you see, that William inherited. Our father was; i strict teetotaler, very strict, but Mother, well… and the weakness came out in William. It’s an illness, you understand. Mother died of it, and I’m sure it took years off Father’s life. William came to me for help.’
She sat back as if she was embarrassed at having spoken so many words consecutively. It seemed like an opportunity to advance my investigation. ‘ When did he come?’
‘Oh, let me see… it’s been so nice having him here, getting him his breakfast in bed and making him cups of tea. Goodness, he’s been drinking a lot of tea. It seems like longer than it really is-a week perhaps, or eight days. He’s been going for long walks as part of the rehabilitation. He said he wants to be fit for travelling. He hasn’t touched a drop, I’m sure of that.’
‘Walks?’ Hasn’t he got a car?’
‘Oh yes, it’s… somewhere.’ She ran out of steam at that point and looked vague. She drank some more coffee, a little noisily I thought, and ate another biscuit. I thought I saw a faint flush in her greyish skin and the hand holding the cup and saucer trembled a fraction.
We sat. The chinks of light through the slats of the blind faded and the traffic sounds receded from occasional to intermittent and then to less than that. The oppressive cleanness and neatness of the room got to me. I wanted to smoke just to flick ashes on the furniture and to drink just to spill red wine on the carpet. The room felt as if no-one had ever cleared a throat in it, or farted.
When I couldn’t take it any more I got to my feet. ‘Can I see his room please?’
She stood up quickly, nearly as tall as me. ‘No! Oh no, you can’t!’
No point in pretending anymore. I should’ve been on to it sooner; people don’t invite private detectives into their parlours without enquiring about their business. But her announcement that Mountain was there had taken me by surprise, probably as it was meant to do.
‘He isn’t coming back, is he?’
She shook her head.
‘When did he leave?’
‘He stayed five days. He didn’t have a single drink.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘You say you’re from Sydney? We used to live in Sydney, in Turramurra, actually. You saw the photograph of the house? That was the family home. My father left it to me and I sold it and came here.’ The flush in her face mounted and her tight mouth seemed to come loose suddenly, too loose. She clasped the hands in front again as if she was trying to control the flow of words, but she couldn’t. ‘My father left everything to me, nothing to William. He’d just have wasted it, you see.’
I nodded, and she shivered and clasped both shoulders with crossed arms, but the words kept tumbling out. ‘I’m a convert, you see. That’s St Mark’s at the end of the road. You saw it of course. Such a wonderful church. It’s so quiet here. I like it here. Of course the house is too big for me, but I couldn’t live in a smaller house.’
‘No. Can you tell me why you pretended that he was still here?’
‘He asked me to. He asked me to tell anyone who came looking for him that he was still here, and to keep them waiting as long as I could.’
‘Why? Why would he do that?’
‘Do you know William very well, Mr Hardy?’
‘Not very.’
‘Does he strike you as a sane, balanced man?’
‘Is anyone?’
‘Don’t try to be funny. William… people say I haven’t got a sense of humour and perhaps they’re right, but I do know when people are trying to be funny.’
‘He’s an artistic man, talented,’ I said. ‘People make allowances for that.’
‘They shouldn’t; it doesn’t change things. Mother was said to be talented and look at what happened to her.’
‘Did you know that William was seeing a psychiatrist in Sydney? ‘
‘No.’
‘He was… is. A Dr Holmes. He told me.’ ‘Do you know where he was going when he left here?’
She shook her head; the loose-cut grey hair hardly moved.
‘No.’
I’d had enough of her and her house and her piety. I moved awkwardly past the dresser with its photographs and china cups, and headed towards the front door. She followed me, still gripping herself as if she was wearing a strait-jacket. The cream doily gleamed in the dim light of the hallway. I turned back to face her. She’d revealed so much that was painful, that I felt I owed her something.
‘Don’t you want to know what this is all about?’
‘No. I’m sure it’s dreadful. I don’t want to hear about it.’
I put my hand on the door knob. ‘I still don’t see why he asked you to go through this charade.’
Her hands flopped down from her shoulders and her features tightened into a grimace that was like putting a face on mental agony. ‘He said that it would be a fitting punishment for anyone who was after him to have to spend an hour with a dried-up, boring, frustrated old bag like me.’
11
I stopped at the first pub I came to, which was two suburbs away, and had two double scotches. I stood at the bar, looked at the racecourse picture mounted on the wall opposite, and tried to get the desperate look in her eyes and the stiff set of her body out of my mind. It was hard work. I tried to think about racehorses, and Phar Lap and Peter Pan were the only names I could recall. The barman looked closely at me when I bought the second drink. The bar was almost empty and gave the impression of not having been full since the days of six o’clock closing.
‘Are you all right, mate?’
I looked at him and had trouble remembering who he was. There were seven stools lined up beside me, all empty. I sat down on one which shook with the trembling of my legs. I felt drained of energy as if I was in a low blood sugar slump, the way my diabetic mother got when she’d been on the booze for days and hadn’t eaten.
‘Yeah, I’m all right. Is there anywhere around here I can get something to eat?’
He told me there was a Chinese cafe across the street. I drank the scotch too fast and went out into a cool night that smelled of cut lawns, watered gardens and petrol. The pub stood at an intersection with a newsagent diagonally opposite and the cafe on the other side of the road from that. The other corner was occupied by a TAB agency. These were the first buildings I’d noticed since I’d left Miss Mountain’s house with the church on the rise at the end of the road; I didn’t know what suburb I was in, but it was a big improvement on Bentleigh.
Collisions with damaged lives were part and parcel of my business, but the encounter with Mountain’s wounded sister had left me more affected than usual. In some terribl
e way she seemed to be living in her future as well as her present, and the whole thing was as sterile and comfortless as her concrete driveway. Worst of all, I felt an odd community with her, as if I was a fringe dweller on the edge of functioning humanity too. I opened the door of the cafe and confronted the sight of people in gangs and couples, drinking and eating and having a good time. I couldn’t join them; I bought a couple of dishes to take away, got some cans of beer from the pub and ate and drank in the car.
When I’d eaten the hot food and put away two cans of Fosters, I felt ready to review the day’s findings. It didn’t amount to much: Bill Mountain had achieved some kind of an alcoholic dry-out. He had a car, maybe Terry Reeves’ Audi, and he was still dropping hints and clues to his pursuers. He planned to do some travelling.
The psychiatric angle was new and disturbing. Bill Mountain was shaping as a very complex subject. I wondered what would force him to resort to professional psychiatric help if he thought he could handle as big an emotional disorder as alcoholism on his own. His treatment of his sister was another worry. For someone as fragile as she seemed to be, what he’d done was the equivalent of squashing a butterfly with an army boot. I saw her face and heard the words falling like stones from her mouth. I’d never cared much for Bill Mountain, but I liked him even less now.
I used a public phone to ring Grant Evans. Jo, his wife, sounded pleased to hear from me after all these years, which made a nice change from the receptions I’d been getting in the last few days. Years dropped away when Grant came on the line. It’s a fact of modern life, local line telephone communication means more than long distance, it’s half way to being in the same room. Grant’s voice sounded close, comforting and familiar.
‘Cliff, where are you?’
‘Near a place called Bentleigh.’
‘Jesus, why?’
