Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘You haven’t seen him in ten years?’ the detectives had wanted to know.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You weren’t close any more?’

  ‘We . . . we just didn’t see each other.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It all went bad. At the end there. You know how it was.’

  ‘What about the others? You see any of them? Marvin? Lindsay?’

  ‘I haven’t seen anyone from those days.’

  ‘You think any of them would do something like this to Charlie?’

  ‘Why would they? And why now? It was all years ago.’

  ‘What about you, then? Would you do this?’

  ‘What reason would I have?’

  ‘You tell us.’

  I had no reason. I’d already done all the damage to Charlie I could ever have wanted to do. And the others? As far as I knew, they had no reason either. Charlie was harmless and it was all finished and surely no one cared any more.

  ‘We’ll be talking some more,’ the detectives had said. ‘Just as soon as we get the deal from the forensic team.’

  And they let me go.

  I waited in my car. The students and their parents had all melted away, and I was the only one left parked in the street. The afternoon deepened and fingers of mist crawled down the hillsides, pale grey amidst trees turned black. I huddled in my seat. Over time three or four of the teachers came through the gate. I knew them all, at least by name, and they all knew me, but none of them glanced my way. I waited. Finally the principal emerged, and pulled the gate closed behind her. I watched as she worked with the padlock. Like so many things in Highwood, the padlock wasn’t really needed. No one had ever robbed the school, and anyone could easily step over the gate if they wanted to, no matter how securely it was fastened. But some years ago a few youths had got onto the sports oval with their motorbikes and torn up the grass. Everyone had known who they were, and they were made, to their great embarrassment, to reseed the damaged sections, but ever since then the front gate was locked at night. And it was the principal’s duty to lock it. She was always the last out.

  I watched. She seemed preoccupied, shoulders hunched against the cold and head facing the ground. She began walking away from me up the street. I started my car and followed her. Mrs Klump was her name. She was known to the children, I’d heard, as Mrs Hump. There was nothing visibly misshapen about her back, but obviously the students had heard some sort of rumour, and since she was in charge of discipline at the school, in charge of punishment, some sort of threatening alias was required. And although in reality there was nothing at all of the witch about her, she seemed to go along with idea. She liked to dress in severe black suits, wore her hair tied back in a bun, and let her glasses hang permanently on a chain about her neck, although she hardly needed them, except for driving at night.

  I pulled up beside her. She turned, saw it was me, then came over to the passenger window, her eyes full of concern.

  ‘George,’ she said, ‘I was going to call as soon as I got home.’

  ‘I couldn’t wait.’

  ‘Graham rang me this afternoon.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry about that. They needed to know where I was last night. And who I was with.’

  We looked at each other for a moment. She was thirty-eight years old and widowed, and though to her students she was all austerity and cool command, she wasn’t anything like that to me.

  ‘Emily,’ I said, ‘can you come over?’

  And I was surprised at my voice. I hadn’t meant it to come out as nakedly as that, but the day had been long and endlessly cold, and I found that now I was even shivering. My self-possession was almost at its end.

  In answer she opened the door, climbed in and kissed me warmly on the lips, and for all that everything was understood and settled, that was something she rarely did in public.

  ‘Of course I can,’ she said.

  I’d heard it expressed somewhere that in reaction to death a human being would always reach out for the physical comfort of another, but it wasn’t something I’d directly experienced before. Increasingly throughout the day, however, with the police and in my house alone, I’d been thinking of her. The urge was instinctive and irresistible. It wasn’t for sex, exactly, nor was it just for companionship. It was the need for contact. The need to feel living flesh, to wrap myself in it, to feel a heartbeat and breathing and movement.

  I drove Emily home in silence. And while it was true that the need to talk was there, first it was just touch I wanted, wordless and clutching, tugging away the clothes to get closer to her skin. And though it did indeed turn into sex, it was a longing and vain attempt, like trying to grab onto life once and for all and keep it forever, or to burrow so deeply into her warmth that I would never fall out of it. Both were impossible, and in the end it had to be enough just to hold her, huddled under the covers of my bed as darkness fell outside, and to feel that at least someone and something stood between me and an end so desolate.

  ‘He was your friend?’ she asked finally, my head on her breast, and her hands moving in my hair.

  ‘My best friend, once.’

  ‘From those old times?’

  ‘That’s right. But I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘You haven’t seen anyone from those days, not that I’ve ever met.’

  She was wondering, I knew, about my life before I met her. It was the one great unspoken thing between us, though she knew a little, as much as was public knowledge. Over the years she’d told me everything about her own life, and there’d been times when I’d been close to telling her in return . . . but somehow it had never happened. I didn’t want her to know, to see me that way. There were too many things that seemed to have no place in the life I’d made in Highwood, and it had always seemed dangerous to dredge them up to Emily, as if they were evil talismans, still holding the power to mar and spoil even after so long. Keeping them secret had done another sort of damage, I supposed. And now one of them had turned up anyway. Worse than I could ever have imagined.

  ‘Did he work with you on the paper?’

  ‘No. He was a chef, I guess you’d say—well, he ran restaurants, anyway, very successful ones. Amongst other things.’

  Other things indeed. But not now. I couldn’t talk about it now.

  ‘And do you know why he ended up like . . .’ Her hand paused in my hair. ‘Like that?’

  ‘No idea. No idea at all.’

  But I didn’t want Charlie there in bed with us. Instead I sat up, pulled back the covers and stared down at her lean, pale body. I hadn’t studied it like this for a long time, and it suddenly seemed such a vital thing. She lay there and watched me gravely. She could be shy about her body, and in our early days had preferred me not to see it. There were broad scars on her shoulders and back of which she was ashamed, worse than a hump, if her students had known. But there’d been too much between us for that to matter any longer. I ran my hand over her skin, trying once more to imprint it in my mind, to have the moment to keep. It seemed important to appreciate everything about her. As if she, too, might be gone in the morning. Another body in another empty room in another town.

  I’d met her, like Charlie, through my work. One of my duties at the Highwood Herald was to cover all the school news. I recorded their sports carnivals, their fetes, the announcement of their school captains, the installation of new blackboards— things I would never have touched in my day, but this was the stuff of which small town newspapers were made. Emily was my contact. After my first year or two at the Highwood Herald, we knew each other well enough for me to invite her around for dinner without things seeming forced, and nothing had ever been forced from there.

  And they were strange things, small towns.

  Highwood was conservative in almost every way that mattered, possessive of its own, and protective. I once would’ve thought that the idea of a primary school teacher—a guardian of five and six-year-old minds—openly sleeping with an unknown city
journalist, under no suggestion of marriage, would have been cause for at least comment, if not outright scandal. But it hadn’t turned out that way. For one thing, Emily was a local girl, born and bred, and locals were always given a leeway that strangers weren’t. More importantly, she was a hero. That is, her husband was. Leo—a local boy, a dairy farmer. He and Emily had been childhood sweethearts. Everyone knew them, and when they married at twenty-two, half the town was at the wedding. I’d seen the photos.

  They’d enjoyed four years together. They were young and healthy and by the sounds of it they’d been the ideal country couple, involved in all of the town’s clubs and societies and dance committees, its sporting teams and its volunteer groups. One of the latter happened to be the Highwood Volunteer Bushfire Brigade, an important body in a small town surrounded by forests. One summer, not long after their fourth anniversary, a bushfire swept down from the hills to threaten outlying houses, and both Emily and Leo had joined their crew and rolled off in a water-truck to fight it. It wasn’t their first fire or even their biggest, but on a narrow firebreak trail the wind had turned on the crew just as they were running low on water. Everyone had dashed back to the truck and grabbed on to whatever they could, but the driver had barely got into gear before the wall of flame hit. And bushfires were notoriously fickle. Those in the cab came through virtually unharmed. Those clinging to the mid-section, Emily included, came through with burns of varying severity to their backs and legs and arms. One man had only got a hand to the rear of the water-truck, and he didn’t come through at all.

  There was a monument to Leo in the park in front of the courthouse. It was sizeable and sincere, but Emily laid flowers only at his grave, on their anniversary—I’d never seen her even glance at the memorial. But that was where Highwood surprised. Leo had died for the town and he was a hero, sure enough, but the cost of that fell mostly on his widow, and all of Highwood knew it. People thought she might pack up and leave, escape the memories, and they would have forgiven her that. But once she was out of hospital she went right back to teaching, went back to all the clubs and societies and everything about her old life, with the sole exception of the Fire Brigade. For that they respected her, quietly and voicelessly, but deeply. They wished her nothing but happiness. For years there’d been no other men in her life, but when finally she’d chosen to dally with an out-of-town journalist, it seemed there wasn’t a soul, even the meanest, who was going to question her about it. They glared a bit more sternly at me, perhaps—I wasn’t worthy of her, no one doubted that—but it was decided that after all she’d lost, what little she chose to take was firmly her own and no one else’s business.

  Most of this, of course, I discovered only after Emily and I were already an item, which was thankful, otherwise I might have felt the whole town in bed with us those first few times. Which was maybe why she’d picked me in the first place. I was an outsider and saw her just as a person, not as an object of pity, or respect, or anything else. Nor had I ever known her husband. Nor, to be honest, did I care about him. And while she had certainly loved him, and mourned him, in a town where she had to walk past his monument every day, and face all his friends and family and legacies, he was like a prison cell. So for Emily, I assumed, I offered some sort of escape.

  And for me she was . . . I wasn’t sure what she was. Except that, like the town itself, she was part of my second attempt at life. A decent life. Without Charlie or Marvin or Lindsay. Or Maybellene.

  She was also my alibi. On the previous evening she had come over for dinner and we’d sat in front of the fire until half an hour past midnight, and then she’d gone home. If the time of death was one a.m. then maybe that cleared me for Charlie’s death, maybe it didn’t. I didn’t care either way. All I felt was bad that, even to the least degree, the whole thing had involved her at all.

  I stared at her on the bed, and it was too cold to be lying around naked.

  ‘Can you stay over tonight?’ I asked.

  She nodded and the moment, whatever it had been, was over. She sat up and I swung my legs out of the bed.

  ‘I’ll get the fire started,’ I said. ‘And there’s a bottle of red in the kitchen, if you want.’

  ‘Good, I could use a drink.’

  And there was a fractional pause that still caught us, even now.

  It was true that I no longer drank, but Emily did. Just a glass or two at a time, at least around me. I didn’t really know if it bothered her. I suspected that in her earlier days she and Leo had drunk much more, and maybe she still did, on her own time—she kept something like a cellar of wines in a cupboard at her house—so it was possible I was an inhibiting influence. It wasn’t what I wanted, though. Alcohol had been my own disaster, not hers. So I kept wine in my house as well, and she drank it, and we pretended that it didn’t matter to either of us.

  It wasn’t the truth. Sometimes I could taste a hint of the wine on her lips when we kissed. The memory it roused could almost be fond, but at other times it pricked a darker, sourer emotion, and for a moment I’d think of another woman entirely, and feel another sort of passion, much more painful and long suppressed. I’d have to pull away, and Emily would look at me, knowing.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she’d said to me once. ‘You don’t have to keep all that control around me, George. You can let it go sometimes.’

  But I couldn’t. Not with Emily.

  I watched as she dressed and headed for the kitchen. I listened to the rattle as she searched through the drawers for a corkscrew. I heard the pop of the cork.

  And I yearned for all things lost.

  SEVEN

  The next day dawned with wind and rain and cold, as if winter never planned to leave. Mercifully my sleep had been dreamless. I’d woken a few times to the moan of air gusting about the old house, and later to the drumming of rain on the tin roof, and I’d stared up at the blackness, afraid. Each time, however, there’d been the warm presence of Emily, curled up next to me, and I’d sunk almost instantly back into sleep. She was gone when I finally woke, back to her own house to prepare for school, and the bed seemed cheerless without her. But on the bedside table the digital clock—reset from the power failure—told me it was nearly eleven, and through the window came a grey light, muttering with rain. The night had been survived.

  And Charlie was still dead.

  The shock of it, the disbelief, had receded. But the fact remained, and I lay in bed, wondering what it was I should be feeling now.

  The reality was, until the previous morning I hadn’t even known for sure that Charlie wasn’t already dead. There’d been no contact between us, no phone calls or visits, nor did I know where he was living or what he was doing. I’d safely assumed that we would never meet again. Neither of us would have wanted it. The things that had gone wrong could hardly be made right by any apology or understanding—and for most of what had gone wrong, I was the one responsible. Charlie had made that clear. He had laid something like an actual curse on me, that last night in the hospital. If I’d been unable to deal with it back then, if it had driven me to run away . . . then what was the use of embracing it all over again now? Only now he was dead. And it was here, virtually on my doorstep.

  Was that my responsibility?

  I didn’t know. Apart from Highwood itself, what was there to link his death to me? And that could have been a mere accident, a chance of locality . . . it was possible. But somewhere inside me an old weight lingered, ready to press down again.

  I dressed and ate, then drove back down into town, rain beating against the windscreen. Crossing the bridge I looked down at the creek and saw it swollen, red with topsoil. Up in the hills the streams and waterfalls would be flowing apace, but the hills themselves were lost in cloud. Unlike other times, I had no business up there today. Instead I drove to the police station. There were more cars than usual parked outside, and within there was a tense, urgent air. Phones rang and the floor at the entrance was muddy. The Highwood district police were all in attenda
nce, familiar faces that looked harried and strange. There was no sign of the Brisbane detectives. I found Graham in his office, studying papers and drinking coffee. It did not seem that he had slept as well as me.

  ‘What have you found out?’ I asked him.

  He regarded me wearily. ‘About what exactly?’

  ‘About anything.’

  He put his cup down. ‘Are you asking this personally, or as a reporter? I’ve already had some Brisbane media in this morning. We made page three down there, not that we’ve released all the details. We’re pretending it still might have been a death by misadventure. Like he was some poor old homeless guy, just trying to get warm on a cold night.’

  And if only it could have been something that sad and simple.

  I said, ‘I won’t be covering this for the paper, for obvious reasons. Gerry can handle it. So it’s just me.’

  Gerry was the owner and proprietor of the Highwood Herald—officially my boss. In fact he was semi-retired and the reporting fell mostly to me, but he was still happy to run things if I was on holiday or in other emergencies. And this would qualify.

  Graham still wasn’t satisfied. ‘Even personally I’m not sure how much I can tell you. You know the Brisbane boys have suspicions about you.’

  ‘You talked to Emily.’

  ‘Yeah . . . look, I don’t think it was you. But those others don’t know anything about you. Or about Emily. They’re not just gonna take it on faith.’

  I didn’t answer, only watched him.

  He paused. ‘Are you sure Charlie made no contact with you at all? We’ve gotta assume there’s some link to you, to bring him up here. It can’t all be coincidence.’

  ‘Maybe not. But then maybe it is. I hadn’t heard a word from him, honestly. I’d tell you if I had. I don’t think he would even have known I live here.’

  ‘You never told him you moved up here?’

  The memory of that last abortive phone call was in my mind.