The Empty Beach

by Peter Corris

  I called Sackville from a phone booth outside the police building and then I called Ann Winter. She coughed as soon as she answered.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve been smoking non-stop. What’s happening?’

  ‘Not much. A pretty smart cop is on the job. Can I come over and hear the cassette?’

  ‘I’m at the dump; there’s no recorder here. Look, come over and get me. We can go to my people’s place and play it. I don’t want to stay here tonight, anyway.’

  I drove back to Bondi and located the dump, which it was. The street was two-thirds taken over by apartment blocks and Ann’s place was a set of semi-detached, two-storey houses that looked as if their owners had decided to sell later when the price was right. The houses were blighted; guttering drooped, slates were missing on the roofs and a couple of the windows were blanked out by sheets of tin nailed up behind shattered glass. The brick fence had collapsed and the concrete path to the door of the house on the right was cracked and lumpy. It was a good bet that the other paths would be the same. The whole lot was waiting to be levelled so that ten storeys of glass and pre-poured concrete could rise on the site.

  I knocked on the ramshackle door and Ann came down some creaking stairs to open it. A smell of fried food and damp wafted over me.

  ‘Choice, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  She gave me an address in Point Piper and I drove there, trying to hold myself together against the culture shock. We pulled up in front of a high wall that looked as if it was shielding half a million dollars worth of house. It was like taking Cinderella away from the housework and up to the palace.

  8

  ANN Winter’s daddy’s house was the sort of place you could visit late at night without waking anyone up. It was built in wings around a swimming pool and a couple of courtyard gardens. I upped the price to three-quarters of a million as we moved through it. We went in by some floor-to-ceiling glass doors and down a carpeted corridor to a bedroom. From the familiar way she threw her cardigan onto the bed and kicked her shoes off against the wall, I took this to be Ann’s room. It had just about everything you’d want: books, a big TV set, a double bed, an exercise bike, a turntable, big speakers and a cassette player.

  ‘D’you want a drink?’ She waved a hand at a cupboard under the bookcase.

  ‘No, I want to hear the cassette.’

  She took it out of her bag and slipped it into the machine.

  ‘I’m going to wash.’ She punched the ‘play’ button and went out of the room. Bruce Henneberry’s drawling voice blocked out the sound of water running.

  ‘October 3,’ he said, ‘One pm. Two items for Cliff Hardy. One, Leon. Talked to him this morning. He knows things and he’ll talk for money. I got an interesting sample—social security scam. Two, the Mellow Yellows. Ashram on Salisbury Street. Guy I saw is Brother Gentle. Off the planet but knows the oldies. Have notes. Have to run, will fill in later.’

  I played it through again. Ann came back into the room with a freshened-up look. She leaned against the wall and listened.

  ‘Pretty cryptic,’ I said. ‘Was it always like that?’

  ‘No, that’s just a notes tape. It’s not cryptic. Leon, he’s a wino who lives near Bruce. He’s the real thing—picks up cigarette butts in the street, pisses in public. He’s been charged with exposing himself hundreds of times, does a few days or weeks and they let him out. He’s around, no-one notices him, he probably hears things.’

  ‘Mellow Yellows?’

  ‘Meditation freaks. Salisbury Street, as Bruce says. Said.’ She stopped and looked at me. I was sitting on the bed and I wondered if she was recalling being in it with Henneberry.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit, shit, shit. You still haven’t told me how Bruce died. Was he shot, or what?’

  ‘He was stabbed,’ I said.

  ‘It would be something sneaky like that. He was so brave, you know?’

  ‘I know. I saw him in action.’

  She gave a sour laugh. ‘He came over here to avoid the draft initially. Then he went back and came out again. He was so nice. Some of the kids …’ She broke off and went over to the cupboard, which turned out to be a small refrigerator-cum-bar. She got out a can of beer and held it up. I nodded and she got another one. We popped our cans and I suppose we drank a toast to the late champ.

  ‘You make him sound like a crusader,’ I said. ‘Crusaders in that business get stomped on.’

  She shook her head hard. ‘He wasn’t crusading.’

  The image of Henneberry on his living-room floor was still sharp in my mind and I didn’t want to talk about him in case I let it slip that ‘stabbed’ wasn’t exactly right. I pointed to the cassette player.

  ‘Who would have heard this besides you?’

  She drank some more beer, showing me that nice neck again.

  ‘Hell, I don’t know. People at Manny’s could have heard it. They play music tapes on the same machine. Our stuff gets mixed up with it sometimes.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound very secure.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, but Bruce said it was. You hide shit in the barnyard, he said.’

  Yanks, I thought. ‘Did you leave tapes every day?’

  ‘No, not every day. But he was going to turn up with one today for sure.’ She finished her beer and set the can down on the floor. Then she dropped down beside it and let her long legs sprawl out on the thick, white carpet. She bit her lip. ‘Sometimes he’d just sing the “Star Spangled Banner” or quote a poem …’

  I nodded. ‘Did he ever make copies of a tape?’

  ‘Yes, if it was something important. One for him and one for me.’

  I thought back to the layout in the flat. No cassettes around.

  ‘Would it upset you too much to play it again?’ I asked.

  She scrambled across to the fridge. ‘I’m going to get pissed tonight. Let’s hear it again.’ She got a half bottle of Southern Comfort from the bar and a nice Swedish-looking glass. She asked me if I wanted a drink, I said, ‘No’, and she rewound the tape and played it again. She poured out a big dollop of the booze and knocked it back while I listened closely, trying to pick up background noise. There was traffic, conversation and the sound of things being put down.

  ‘Manny’s?’ I said.

  ‘Could be.’

  I reached over to recover the tape, but the machine was too complicated for me. She pressed the right button and I lifted the cassette out. I was very conscious of her, close and smelling of tobacco and Southern Comfort. She had a patterned cardigan on over a skivvy; her jeans were white but dirty and her feet were bare. She looked more like a gypsy than ever with her hair tangling down onto her shoulders.

  ‘Do you like this room?’ she asked suddenly.

  I glanced around critically. ‘I’m too poor to like it,’ I said.

  She emptied her glass and topped it up. ‘Bruce didn’t like it, and he was rich.’

  I could feel the cracks opening in her tough facade and the development of a jumpy, unpredictable logic that might help her through her pain but that only she could follow. I’d seen it before.

  ‘Well, there’s a lot here …’

  ‘Here!’ She waved her free hand at the walls that had posters on them that looked hand-painted and the shelf of hard-cover books. ‘There’s nothing here, nothing! You should see the rest of the place. Wanna see it?’

  When it came to prostitution and drugs she was as tough as she needed to be, but death was another matter. Maybe she’d never had any direct contact with it before, coming from that Point Piper cocoon. An instinct told me that no comfort from me would be welcome.

  ‘Another time. I’ve got to go. Will you be all right?’

  ‘D’you mean will I take pills or something?’ She gave a skittish laugh and raised her glass. ‘Not me. I’ll bomb out on this. I’ll be back in Bondi tomorrow.’

  ‘Why don’t you give yourself a few days off?’

  ‘It’s worse here than there, believe
me. Come on, I’ll show you back out to the real world.’

  We went back the way we’d come, noiselessly.

  ‘The police’ll be onto you soon. I was a bit vague about you when I talked to them. I’d be grateful if you could be a bit vague about me.’

  ‘No worries,’ she said. ‘I’ll be feminine, it’s the only way with cops.’

  I drove off wondering how feminine wiles would work on Frank Parker. Then I wondered how masculine wiles would work on Ann Winter.

  Hilde was still up and watching television when I got home.

  ‘That killing in Bondi,’ she said. ‘I saw it on the news. Nothing to do with you, was it?’

  ‘You didn’t really see it. Yeah, it was everything to do with me. I found him.’

  ‘Ugh. How was it?’

  I was tired and frustrated, full of confused half-thoughts with no connections. Like most people, I take those moods out on someone else and Hilde was the nearest to hand. ‘How do you think it was?’ I snapped. ‘It was fucking messy. You work in a pink and white world don’t you, Hilde, love?’

  She tried to weather the storm with a light touch. ‘There’s some yellow in it.’

  ‘Well, intestines, guts, are grey and green. Did you know that?’

  She didn’t say anything, just looked blankly at the shimmering screen. She’d turned the sound down and people with orange faces and blue hair were whispering to each other. Within seconds I was sorry for what I’d said. I told her so.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You get like that. It’s stress.’

  ‘Why don’t you move in with an apiarist?’ I said. ‘I’m told they’re the most unstressed people around.’

  She examined me as she might a chipped tooth—worth saving, maybe, but a lot of work. ‘Where would I find a landlord who’d let me get so far behind with the rent?’

  ‘Well, you’re helping me defraud the income tax people.’ Saying that swung my mind back to John Singer. His tax records would be interesting. Maybe he owed a bundle and had decided to default.

  ‘Income tax,’ Hilde said. ‘I’m looking forward to paying some, lots.’

  I grunted. Youthful idealism is hard to take. ‘How’s your love life?’ I was thinking of my big empty bed upstairs, the useless stirrings and the occasional dreams with unhappy endings.

  ‘Lousy.’ She stretched up for the ceiling; her small, hard breasts rose up under her shirt and I got a glimpse of her flat tennis player’s stomach. ‘There’s a lecturer I fancy. Lovely guy with a bitch of a wife. Nothing doing.’

  ‘Probably too old for you, anyway.’

  ‘Mm, thirty at least.’

  Ancient, I thought, past it, ready for the monkey gland injections. I left her to the television and went upstairs, thinking about her and Marion Singer and Ann Winter. Tenant, client, and what?

  My bedroom was dusty and there were more coffee cups in it than in the kitchen. I made a nest of them and swore to take them down in the morning. The pile of paperbacks had toppled over on the dresser and knocked the transistor radio onto the floor. I picked it up and heard it rattle ominously when I shook it. I put it down, deciding to let the full force of that disaster wait until the following day.

  In the morning I tramped virtuously down with the coffee cups but Hilde hadn’t left the customary pot on the stove. I drank instant grumpily and leafed through the phone book until I found William A. Winter of Point Piper. After getting past a woman with strong public school vowels, I had Ann on the line.

  ‘God,’ she said. ‘I’m hung.’

  ‘Shocking. Any cops yet?’

  ‘No, they’ll be at the dump I expect. No-one much knows about the Travelodge here.’

  ‘Bruce mentioned this wino on the tape, Leon. You said you knew him too. D’you know where I can find him?’

  ‘He sleeps in a sort of chookhouse out in the backyard of a place in the street behind Bruce’s. I don’t know the number but you can’t miss it. It’s a three-storey terrace, free-standing, chunder-green.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’

  ‘What’s the time?’ Her voice was blurry and she was having trouble hitting the hard consonants. Southern Comfort.

  ‘Nine-twenty. Why?’

  ‘At ten you’ll find Leon on the steps of the Haworth Arms.’ She spelled the word out.

  ‘I’ve read the book,’ I said. ‘I’ll try there first. You okay?’

  ‘I will be when I’ve had a shower and some coffee and a hair of the dog. When will I see you next?’

  ‘What about Manny’s tonight, at six, say?’

  ‘Right.’

  My parents had lived in Bronte some time before I was born. My sister remembers it; she says that when they quarrelled he threatened to drown her at the beach. She’d just laugh at him and go off to the pub. It wasn’t so different from what I remembered happening when we lived at Maroubra. I can remember my father walking with me along that big, empty Maroubra beach while my mother was in the pub.

  I had more leisure for these pleasant thoughts on this drive to Bronte. It was a bright, mild day and the council workers carving up a section of Oxford Street were whistling. I drove through the cutting and past Bronte beach which is scaled right down from Bondi—the sand, the grass, the changing sheds, the lot—and up towards the Waverley cemetery where the dead are laid out in rows on a headland, eternally oriented towards New Zealand.

  A jogger strained up the grade and took a rest leaning on one of the sandstone horse troughs outside the cemetery. It was a long time since a horse had taken a breather there. I drove down beside the cemetery to take a look at the water before I plunged into pubs and rundown, chunder-green boarding houses. The dark blue sea, white-flecked and streaked with deep greens and silvery patches, rolled away forever to the east. The waves were high and even, occasionally rolling over and dumping with deep, resonant crashes. The board riders still defied them, but the waves could wait.

  I located the Haworth Arms in my Guide to Sydney Pubs and headed for it. The warm day wouldn’t matter one way or the other to the step-sitters; their skins would be permanently tanned from years of walking the streets and sleeping rough. Leon, with a chookhouse to doss in, would be an aristocrat amongst them.

  There were five of them on the steps, warriors of the bottle, who looked old but who probably weren’t. I addressed myself to the most awake-looking, a character with grey hair to his shoulders and a face as seamed as W. H. Auden’s.

  ‘I’m looking for Leon,’ I said.

  ‘Ain’t here. Got the price of a schooner, mate?’

  I gave him a dollar and he put it carefully into the inside breast pocket of the ancient suit coat he wore.

  ‘I heard he was always here.’

  ‘S’right, but he ain’t. First time in I dunno how long.’ He turned to a small fat man who was rolling a cigarette out of what looked like cannibalised butts. ‘Seen Leon, Clyde?’ Clyde shook his head. I wondered if he thought that was worth a dollar, but he evidently didn’t because he didn’t look up. I carry a few cigarettes with me to prove that I’ve beaten the habit fair and square. I passed two across to Clyde, who put them cautiously into his makings tin.

  ‘Ta. Leon’s sick, probably, or dead.’

  I jumped. ‘Why d’you say that?’

  ‘Stands to reason. He ain’t here, usually means a man’s sick or dead. Right, Stan?’

  The man with the ploughed paddock face nodded. ‘Right.’

  I drove back to Henneberry’s place and parked across the street. The sun hit the rounded white section of the flats, giving the building an exotic, Moorish look. I wondered how long it would take the landlord to re-let and decided it would depend on the carpet; he’d be slowed up if he had to replace it.

  Life got a bit tougher in the streets further back. The houses were small and cramped; there was no view from here but some of the buildings actually grovelled down below street level as if emphasising the fact. The chunder-green joint stood out like an elephant among mice. It s
tarted about a foot back from the street and there was just enough room between the building and the fences on either side for a skinny cat to slip by.

  I knocked on the front door gingerly. The disgusting green colour was everywhere and it had a slimy look as if it would come off on your hand. An enormously fat woman wearing a print dress and a crazily buttoned cardigan came to the door. She filled the doorway and when she spoke her three chins turned into four or five.

  ‘I’d like to see Leon, please.’

  She looked at me and two tears as big as grapes squeezed out of her eyes and began to traverse the fat.

  ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘He bloody died last night.’

  9

  HER name was Rose Jenkins. She was a talker, and she invited me back to her kitchen, where she made tea I didn’t drink. She gave it to me in great detail: she managed the boarding house in which there were fourteen roomers. Leon she let sleep in a lean-to out back for a nominal rent. Sometimes he’d come into the house to use the toilet; for the less serious calls of nature, he’d use the backyard. I was beginning to get a rounded-out picture of Leon.

  I persuaded her to stop drinking tea and talking and show me the relevant scenes. The lean-to smelled bad. You could have called it airy and in winter it would be only marginally better than being out under a tree. There was a tattered mattress on the concrete floor with a heavy tweed coat, fashionable between the wars, thrown over it. The pillow was a pile of newspapers. The toilet was off a first-floor landing. Leon had come down from that level the short way, and his neck had been broken.

  ‘Did anyone see the fall?’ I asked.

  Mrs Jenkins shook her head and the fat bounced and jiggled. ‘No, none of them what lives in the back part of the house was home when it happened. Mr Brass come home at about eight and he found the poor soul there. He was all hunched up against the wall and terrible broken up, they said.’

  ‘You didn’t see him?’

  She shook her head again and looked away from the stairs. I walked up them counting, thirteen in all. The toilet had a light burning inside it and some light seeped out through the cracked door. There was a light switch on the landing; I flicked it and a sixty- or seventy-five-watt bulb came on above the top stair. There was a threadbare but intact carpet outside the toilet and a runner in the same condition on the stairs.