Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘The police service,’ he corrected, and I recalled that they’d changed the name, after all the troubles, in an attempt to salvage their public image. It hadn’t worked. ‘I’ve been in thirteen years.’

  ‘Then it would have been not so long after you started. Charlie was arrested in 1988. For tax evasion.’

  I had their attention, but they still weren’t getting it. Graham only waited, as if it would all be better coming from me.

  ‘And corruption,’ I sighed. ‘After the Inquiry.’

  It was enough. In police circles, as well as in the political and media worlds, there were only two time-scales that defined Queensland. Before the Inquiry. And after it.

  ‘Ah . . .’ said Kelly, and turned to his colleague. ‘That Charles Monohan.’

  Everything changed, as I’d known it would. Charlie as an innocent victim, strung up and savaged, that was one thing. Charles Monohan, as the police knew him, that was something else. His life, his death, his body . . . it all changed.

  ‘How long was he in prison?’ Lewis asked, musing.

  ‘The sentence was four years,’ I answered. ‘I don’t know how long he served. I haven’t seen him since he went in.’

  Kelly was counting on his fingers. ‘He was with that third lot, wasn’t he? Marvin—he went to jail as well. And Lindsay, but Lindsay skipped out. There were a couple of others . . .’

  Graham was leaning back in his chair and regarding me sadly.

  I said, ‘I was one of them too.’

  Kelly stared at me, his fingers still in mid-count. ‘You?’

  And his partner was pointing. ‘George Verney. You were the journalist.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Kelly was nodding now. ‘But you didn’t get any jail time, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  I was guilty all the same, by association at the very least, and the two detectives considered me with new, unfriendly eyes.

  Graham stretched in his chair, reasonable. ‘He didn’t go to prison, but then it’s debatable if he committed any serious crime, and he did still lose his job and everything else. For the last ten years he’s been quiet as a mouse up here working on our little paper. So don’t be too quick with any ideas.’

  Lewis wasn’t convinced. ‘But this changes everything.’

  Graham nodded. ‘It does. Just remember, though, a lot of people got burned back then, police as well as civilians. Not all of them deserved it, not by any means.’

  And I detected in that the barest hint of a kindred soul. He was right, a lot of police had fallen under the Inquiry’s sway, too, senior men; and unlike the two detectives, Graham was old enough to have known some of them.

  ‘But you’ve kept an eye on him?’ Kelly wanted to know.

  ‘Sure I have,’ said Graham.

  ‘Charlie Monohan,’ Lewis wondered, gazing at me. ‘How many clubs did he own in the end?’

  ‘He didn’t own any clubs. He owned three restaurants, and that was it.’

  ‘Oh, come on . . .’

  ‘You were in partnership with him,’ Kelly put in, ‘and it was more than just restaurants.’

  ‘We weren’t exactly partners. We were friends and I invested some money in his business . . . but we weren’t exactly partners.’

  And was a cock crowing somewhere in town, three times?

  ‘But you were still part of things,’ Kelly insisted. ‘And here’s Charlie, dead outside a little nowhere town where you just happen to live.’

  ‘Am I under arrest?’

  Kelly considered me for a moment. ‘Where were you last night?’

  ‘At home.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘A friend. Do you want her name?’

  ‘We will. Eventually.’ He pulled up a chair and sat down in front of me. ‘But first, how about you refresh our memories a little about those old days. Your associates, for one thing . . .’

  He raised his fingers, ready to count again. One hand wouldn’t be enough. Six fingers, that’s how many he’d need.

  ‘Let’s see, there was you and there was Charlie and there was Marvin and there was Lindsay. There was some old guy, too, someone in the premier’s department. I can’t remember his name.’

  ‘Jeremy Phelan.’

  He nodded. ‘And a woman. There was a woman, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There was a woman.’

  But Charlie was the first.

  The saddest thing was, of all of us, he was the only one who looked like a criminal. In the TV sense, anyway, and in the sense that when a jury got a look at him, after watching all that TV, they had no doubts about it either. He looked like a thug, a door warden at the sort of clubs he would later be convicted for owning. Something of a curse for a man whose dream was to run restaurants. And that’s all it was, in the beginning.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Maybellene,’ I said. ‘May.’

  But first it was just Charlie and me.

  And alcohol.

  And Queensland itself.

  FIVE

  Alcohol and Queensland. And the restaurant business.

  It took the combination of all three to bring Charlie and me together

  In any other state, in any other business, it wouldn’t have happened. And if there’d been no wine in the back room, if I hadn’t gone there that night, if Charlie hadn’t realised who I was . . .

  Lots of ifs and all of them pointless.

  It was the early 1970s, and it was Brisbane. The disasters that would be visited on Queensland were, for the most part, still in the future, but all the groundwork had been laid, systems were already in place. Charlie and I knew nothing about the majority of them, not then. We’d both only just turned twenty. I was a cadet journalist working for a community paper. Charlie was working in a small Italian bistro his parents owned in Paddington. We knew some things, of course, the things everyone knew—that Queensland was different from the rest of Australia, that things worked in Queensland in a way they didn’t anywhere else. But we didn’t know why. Or more importantly, we didn’t know who.

  We were just a couple of years out of school, and what was politics to us? My little paper covered purely lifestyle issues and real estate. We had two food columns—a fine dining section, a staff position which was sought after, and a cheap eats section, which no one wanted at all and had fallen to me. So all I was after that first night was an inexpensive meal. All Charlie wanted was a good review for his parents’ bistro. Beyond that we only had the one thing in common.

  We had a flair for drinking.

  Which put us in an odd position in the Brisbane of those days. To all appearances, especially to unknowing youths such as ourselves, it was a puritan town. Bars were allowed to open only from ten in the morning to ten at night, except on Sundays, when it got worse, a mere four hours of trading permitted. A few restaurants were licensed to sell their own drinks, but generally they were the expensive ones, and the rest had to survive on customers bringing their own. Even then, when it came to buying your own supply, there were no liquor stores or off-licences. Only hotels could sell the product, and only during the same hours as the bars. If you drank then, you drank to very restricted hours in limited venues, or you drank at home. Brisbane after ten p.m. was a ghost town of empty streets, haunted by a few unhappy drunks either wandering around with nowhere else to go, or carrying that last bottle home to the wife and kids. Sundays it was like everyone had left the planet.

  Charlie’s bistro did not have a full licence, but it was BYO, otherwise I would never have gone there at all. I took three bottles of beer with me that night, and I only expected to be there an hour. I had more beer waiting for me at home. It didn’t seem unusual—I never questioned any of the restaurant laws at the time, I just made sure I always had my own supply. What bothered me more were the pubs and the bars, and the fact that they all closed so early. I didn’t understand that at all.

 
But I ate my meal and was just finishing off the second bottle of beer and reaching for the third when Charlie emerged from the kitchen and came my way.

  ‘You from the paper?’ he demanded.

  I looked up, startled. ‘Yes.’

  That’s how much of an investigative reporter I was.

  But really it was that Charlie himself was so alarming at first sight. He was in dirty kitchen whites and he was squat, all beef and muscle. His hair was cut prickly short on a square head that was already going bald, and his voice had a thin, whispering edge to it. I thought he might be a boxer. And I wondered why they had sent the dishwasher out to threaten me.

  But Charlie had never hit a soul in his life, not then, not ever.

  Still, people would always react to him that way. I don’t know that he was ever aware of it himself. I certainly never saw him try to intimidate anyone physically. The idea would have appalled him. But the way things worked out . . . he was so right for the part he ended up playing. Not on his own behalf, perhaps. More for Marvin and for Lindsay and the others. He was so right for what they wanted.

  But once he smiled at you, you knew it was all an illusion.

  And that night Charlie smiled at me and shook my hand and sat himself down at my table.

  ‘Thought I’d seen you round,’ he said. ‘What’re you gonna say about us?’

  So we talked.

  About the meal for a little, but then more about Charlie.

  Even in those first few minutes it was obvious that his body had nothing to do with the rest of him. He wasn’t the dishwasher, he was an apprentice chef under his father, and in fact his father was ill and really Charlie was half running the place. Nor was he Italian, he was Irish Catholic, same as me. And he had plans for much bigger and better places one day.

  ‘I’d want somewhere licensed, for one thing,’ he said, looking at my bottle of beer.

  ‘You want a glass?’

  ‘Sure.’

  So we drank the bottle. There was hardly anyone else in the restaurant, and Charlie was only called away a couple of times to deal with customers, but you could tell how much he liked striding the floor between the tables, and how people, after their first resistance, warmed to him. He was a natural with an audience, and in what was a rare moment of insight for me I understood that his real future didn’t lie hidden away in the kitchen.

  He kept coming back and sitting down.

  ‘You know,’ he said, when the beer was gone, ‘the folks keep a few cartons of wine out the back. Strictly private supply.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  And so we drank a bottle of wine. The other customers drifted away. Charlie’s mother poked her head out of the kitchen and said she was going home. So it was just me and Charlie.

  And all that wine.

  Maybe that’s all it was at first. Genuine friendship would always take time, but there were other connections that could be instantaneous. And for all that I could sense the quick mind and gentle heart that dwelt perversely under all the muscle, and for all that he obviously saw something he liked in me, it was only when he went and fetched the second bottle of wine that we first considered each other in that certain, special way. A drinker’s way. And it was really only after we’d emptied that bottle, and Charlie had asked me if I felt like a third—it was really there and then, in that moment. If I’d said no, I would have been making it clear that I wasn’t serious when it came to drinking, that I would let things like the late hour or work the next day get in the way of the next glass, if the next glass was available. If Charlie hadn’t offered that third bottle, he would’ve been telling me the same thing. And that would have been that. I doubt we would have crossed paths again.

  But he did offer, and I accepted, and from there he didn’t bother to ask, he just kept bringing out the bottles. Neither of us said, ‘I should be getting home.’ Neither of us said, ‘I shouldn’t be getting drunk tonight.’ The question was never even raised. The understanding, magically and effortlessly, had been made. What we talked about all night, what we actually expressed about our views of the world, the things we agreed upon or didn’t agree upon, the things that made us genuinely like each other, they mattered no doubt in the long term— even alcohol couldn’t forge a bond where one didn’t exist. But it was alcohol that got us started, and it would be there as long as the friendship itself. Later it would all become twisted, and both the drinking and the friendship would mutate into something darker. But for me the drinking would end only on the same day the friendship did. And for Charlie . . . for Charlie, I didn’t know.

  Either way, I wrote a good review the next day, and not long after that I found a job on a real paper, out at Ipswich. Charlie kept on cooking and his parents retired and the restaurant was all his. And with increasing frequency I would drop over to the place around closing time, for a late meal, and for a few glasses of wine, or a few bottles. We’d sit at a table, surrounded by upturned chairs, and look out the front window to the night and the quiet streets of Brisbane. There was nowhere else for us to go anyway. Everything was closed. There was always that one simple, baffling fact—after ten o’clock on a weekday night it seemed next to impossible for men like us to go out and get a drink. We’d talk about that, and about other aspects of the city, its strange ways that we were only just beginning to understand.

  For one thing, Charlie had applied for a licence for his restaurant, and been turned down.

  The body concerned was the Queensland Licensing Commission. It was overseen by a government minister, and staffed by representatives from the police, the alcohol industry, and other respectable members of the community. Except there weren’t really any respectable members of the community—at least, no impartial ones. I asked senior journalists at my new paper about it. I told them about Charlie’s problems, and they only shook their heads, amused, as they explained. There were just two groups on the Licensing Commission. Half of the members were hotel or restaurant owners themselves. They already controlled all the bars and the trade and had no interest in weakening the monopoly. The other half were police representatives, who had no interest in losing the kickbacks they received from the first half. A neat example, it seemed, of self-regulation.

  And just a small demonstration of the way Queensland worked.

  Charlie wasn’t overly concerned. ‘I hear,’ he said, ‘that for an extra fee to the right people, a licence can still be arranged. Apparently that’s the only way.’

  ‘Who are the right people?’

  ‘That’s what I gotta find out one day.’

  It should have been harmless. We were just friends. Tossing back the wine. Dissatisfied with the way things were. Thinking about the future.

  Of all things, it didn’t feel like the birth of a crime

  SIX

  Three p.m. and I sat in my car across the street and a little way down from the front gate of the Highwood State Primary School. The day that had started in darkness and dawned into blue skies had now turned overcast and cold. The light was already fading. Clouds shrouded the heights around the town, and later in the evening fog would probably creep down into the streets. Another night to hide away in front of fires, to sleep warmed by electric blankets. At least the power was back on. The fluorescent lights in the police station had flickered to life again around mid-morning. And Charlie . . . by now Charlie would be in a morgue in Brisbane somewhere, waiting for the knife.

  I was exhausted, as if it had been days since I’d slept. The detectives had finished with me at noon, and not knowing what else to do, I’d gone home. I didn’t know what I was hoping for but the house was frigid and empty, and even the fire couldn’t seem to warm things. I ate food and drank tea and the cold within me wasn’t soothed. Finally I’d crawled into bed and piled quilts over myself, but whenever I closed my eyes I saw things I didn’t want to see. Charlie was in my bedroom. He’d heard everything I said to the detectives. Heard my lies and evasions. It didn’t matter that they felt like the truth. Charl
ie knew better, and he kept me awake, his blank, idiot face asking an eternal question.

  A bell shrilled somewhere in the school grounds, and then another. I watched the front gate. A small crowd of anxious parents waited there. Normally, in Highwood, most of the children, even the first graders, walked or cycled home from school alone. Or if they were farm kids, they caught one of the two school buses. But not today. Today there was a flock of mothers and fathers at the gate, milling restlessly. News had got around. I didn’t know yet to what extent or in how much detail, but the air was unsettled, something horrible had happened, and if you had kids the first instinct, it seemed, was to get them home and get them safe.

  The students began filing through the gates. Parents sought out their children and clutched their hands, led them off to waiting cars. Some stooped to button up loose jackets and tug down woollen caps—as if even the cold was somehow more evil today, more to be dreaded. Up the road a distance the two buses waited, and at each bus a teacher stood, making sure all the passengers boarded safely. And it was all unnecessary. No one was out to snatch children that afternoon, at least, no one who had anything to do with Charlie and the cement block of the substation—that was something which spoke of another sort of mind, another sort of cruelty. But fear was fear.

  Parents with their children hurried past my car, and a few of them gave me short, uncertain stares. News would have spread, too, that I was somehow involved. It wouldn’t help the atmosphere that I was sitting there in my car, watching. After all, I had no children, at that school or at any other. But then everyone knew that, and knew why I was there.

  I waited. I’d given up trying to sleep back at the house, and resorted to pacing, sitting blindly in front of the television. Nothing stopped the thoughts ticking over, and my body yearned for heat. I realised that most of all I felt lonely. Lonely for myself, and for Charlie. Nothing, perhaps, was so alone as a death like that. A body left tied to a wall, naked and beaten. Whatever had happened to him, no one had stopped it, no one had tried to help. He’d had no friends when he died.