Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘You’ll need to meet,’ said Marvin, ‘a man named Lindsay Heath.’

  ‘Is he on the Licensing Commission?’ I asked.

  ‘Not exactly. He’s sort of a . . . consultant. He’s got a few businesses of his own. An accountancy thing. And a security company. But he was a cop once, so he knows how it all works, and who to talk to. He can set it all up.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And there’s the normal licensing fee to be paid. Plus another fee, to be allowed to pay the first one, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘And how much is the second fee?’

  Marvin smiled. ‘That’s where it gets nasty.’

  So we talked money. It was only afterwards that it would even occur to me what a bizarre situation it was. A member of parliament and a journalist openly discussing the payment of a bribe, and neither one for a moment questioning the other’s intentions. Marvin seemed not to even consider that I might actually report on what I was hearing. And I never considered that Marvin was actually guiding us through the pitfalls of his own corrupt administration.

  In fact, Charlie was the only one who had even momentary doubts.

  ‘And you’re sure all this is okay?’ he asked, when faced with the details.

  Marvin was all sincerity. ‘Charlie, of course it is. Shit, this is the way it works for everyone. And we’re covered from every angle. That’s why it costs so much in the first place. Everyone gets a cut. The police in the licensing division, the boys on the board—Christ, a percentage of it even filters up to the bloody commissioner. I know the man! It’s standard procedure.’

  But there was still the actual money. A lot of it. Charlie and I would be struggling to raise the excess we needed. Especially as it would more or less disappear as far as tax purposes went.

  ‘Lindsay can help out with paperwork and stuff,’ Marvin offered, ‘but for the actual cash . . . this is where I come in.’

  And he announced he wanted to be our partner.

  We were amazed. What did Marvin need with a restaurant?

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘I’ve got irons in the fire everywhere. I’m not gonna live on my fucking MP’s salary, am I? And I like you guys. I wanna see this restaurant thing get going. I want a place I can feel at home, a place I can keep the bar open as long as I want. Shit, we all like a drink, so there’s no problem there. And think of the trade I’ll bring in.’

  He was right. Marvin was perfect for someone like us. So we became a threesome. A foursome, really, because without Charlie or I quite realising it, Lindsay would end up an investor as well.

  The overhead lights flicked on again as we were shaking hands on the deal.

  ‘There you go,’ said Marvin, looking up.

  It was midnight. The power was back on in Queensland. It seemed a good omen.

  Marvin drained his glass. ‘So how about we head out and celebrate?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There’s a place I go over in the Valley. The thing is, I told Lindsay we’d probably meet him there tonight anyway. I got my car outside.’

  So the three of us drove across to the Valley. The power was on again everywhere, but even though midnight had only just passed, Brisbane looked as desolate as if it was four in the morning. Traffic lights flashed a neutral orange—switched off because even by this hour there was hardly any traffic. I stared at the dark windows of the pubs and restaurants, watched the occasional lone figure glide by on the footpath, and wondered, despite everything I’d heard, how people like us could really survive in this town. It was like battling against prohibition.

  Which started me thinking. I turned and studied Marvin, propped up behind the wheel of his car and struggling to peer over the dashboard. We’d just agreed with him upon the breaking of the law. Yes, the law was ridiculous, but still . . . how far could something like this go? Surely not too far, not with a member of parliament involved. But there was something about Marvin. A certainty and a confidence, no matter how incompetent he looked. An indifference to legalities. Were we doing the right thing, involving ourselves with him, or with his friend Lindsay? This wasn’t just about serving alcohol. This was about joining a system. A big, entrenched system that in its sheer scale was undoubtedly criminal. Even if we stayed at the bottom of it, what did that make Charlie and me?

  Then we were in the Valley. Marvin parked his car beside a large building that appeared to be a gym. We climbed the stairs and knocked on a door. A man opened it, took one look at Marvin, and then . . . and then we were ushered into what, for Charlie and me, was our very first illegal casino. I saw people, heard noise, smelt beer and cigarettes, all in one warm, confused rush of cheap fluorescent light.

  ‘Drinks are on the house,’ said Marvin.

  I felt the door close behind us, locking the everyday Brisbane out, and the real Brisbane in. At that moment all my doubts vanished. I knew I was on the right side of that door. I knew I was home. And I headed for the bar.

  TWELVE

  Twenty years after that night, and ten years after I’d been run out of town, I was back.

  The grand exile returning at last, welcomed home . . .

  Was I actually thinking that?

  Maybe a part of me was. Why else would I have booked accommodation in the middle of New Farm, of all places? For all the apprehension I’d been feeling, a part of me must have wanted to be there, to see the old places again, and find out what had happened to them. After all, I could simply have driven down from Highwood for the day, I didn’t really need to stay overnight. And especially not for the two nights I’d booked the room. And there was something packed away in the bottom of my bag that made me wonder even more about my motivations, about what I was really doing there.

  I was expecting the city to be different, of course. In ten years any city would have changed, and Brisbane had been through the Inquiry and a colossal collapse of government in that same time. The laws, the culture, they’d all been transformed. I knew Brisbane wasn’t going to be the same. But even so, I wasn’t ready. And despite all my misgivings, I was still expecting, perhaps, to feel some sense of welcome, some sense of homecoming.

  What I wasn’t expecting was the aftermath of a revolution.

  In fact it was really only after seeing the new Brisbane that I finally understood how profound a revolution it had been. Highwood had sheltered me from the truth. I’d lived through the Inquiry, perhaps, and lingered to see the old establishment topple into ruin, but I hadn’t stayed to see the new world that would emerge. And when I saw what that new world was, I realised for the first time how little I’d understood Brisbane, outside the small circles in which I’d always moved.

  That was the problem, for the Brisbane of my day was in effect two cities. There was the public face of Brisbane, a quiet country town, a million people strong, with a government whose morality declared that any sort of decadence—excessive drinking, gambling or sex—was something Queensland was better off without. The other face was the one I knew, the casinos and the brothels and the all-night clubs. Behind red-lit doors and windows painted black, they not only thrived, they thrived with official sanction, and for the official circle’s pleasure. Everyone knew about them, maybe, yet they were enjoyed only by a certain elite, patronised only on a clandestine level, by a class that wanted life’s more sophisticated delights, and yet didn’t want them shared. It was as if they were held to be dangerous pleasures, too dangerous for the common man. They were only for those who were part of an understanding, a superior minority who could look at the rest of Queensland and realise that the rules which applied for the population at large didn’t need to bother the few.

  Charlie and I became part of the few, and it felt good.

  But outside that select world, for all that I didn’t realise it at the time, a resentment and a passion were building. For thirty years those in government and their friends had, in looking after their own interests, kept Brisbane frozen in time. The city was caught in the perpetual twilight of the 1950s, as
though the ’60s and ’70s that had wrought so much havoc around the rest of the world had quietly passed Brisbane by. But it couldn’t have remained frozen that way forever. Even if the Inquiry hadn’t come along and split the state apart, something else would have given somewhere. But because it had all been dammed up and fettered for so long, it meant that when finally the regime did fall, decades of pent-up energy burst forth in a fury. It wasn’t simply a generational change. It was an explosion.

  For some it must have been joyful and liberating. For others, caught on the wrong side, like me, it was something else again. But either way the old Brisbane was levelled in the turmoil, and the city I drove into now was a new Brisbane, and it was nothing like the town I remembered.

  There were some things for which I was ready. Gambling was completely legal now, and I knew about the big new casino and the gaming machines that had flooded the hotels and bars. I knew about the relaxation of the licensing regulations. I knew that many of the censorship laws had been abolished. I knew that street marches were permitted again, I knew it was now legal to be gay, I knew the electoral boundaries had been redrawn. I knew there would be new roads and new buildings. I knew about the efforts to clean up the river and decorate its banks. I knew about the new parks and theatres and galleries.

  It was the people themselves I hadn’t expected.

  It was a Sunday, early afternoon. In my day Sunday afternoon was the epitome of all that was wrong with Brisbane. Nothing was open and nothing was happening and people stayed home to watch the football or cricket on TV, and the streets would be deserted. But now, as I drove towards the centre of town, the traffic on the main roads was heavy. Staring out my windows I saw people everywhere, eating lunch, or strolling about in the sun. The shopping strips had bloomed with cafes. In my time cafes in the modern sense had been a rarity. There had been pubs, and there had been restaurants, and that was about it. Visitors from the south had pointed out plaintively that there were no casual venues anywhere, that a relaxed drink or a decent coffee were an impossible dream. Now there were chairs and tables spilling out onto the footpaths in a way that had been strictly forbidden back in the early 1980s. Customers in loose summer clothes lounged about sipping coffee in all shapes and sizes and, for that matter, all sorts of wines and beer. Alcohol seemed to be on sale everywhere, in wine shops and off-licence liquor stores and boutique bars. All of them new.

  Here and there on familiar corners I spotted the old pubs and restaurants I remembered, but even they weren’t the same. A philosophical shift had taken place. The pubs I’d known had always been dark places, colonial, rejecting the sun, like caves into which you retreated to drink. The ones I saw now had opened themselves up, with broad awnings and outdoor tables. Picture windows had been knocked through the thick old walls, the narrow doorways widened, beer gardens extended and brightened with colourful sunshades and umbrellas. It was all light and glass, as if there was nothing to hide any more, as if heat and sunlight were no longer an enemy.

  Woolloongabba passed by, and then I was in Kangaroo Point, up along the cliffs. Traffic slowed to a crawl, and I gazed out over the Brisbane River. Broad and muddy, it had always wound its way through the city, but it had never been like this. Now it was lined with boardwalks and new parks and marinas teeming with yachts. There were riverbank trails busy with bike riders and roller-bladers. Sleek ferries cruised back and forth, their decks packed. Along the cliffs themselves families were having picnics, watching climbers and abseilers go up and down the rocks. And across the river was the city centre. Not only were there plenty of new office and apartment blocks, but they looked grander, they’d been designed, not just thrown up like the cement piles I remembered. They had spires and ornaments, they gleamed in the sun. At their feet a whole new esplanade of restaurants and bars fronted the river. And people, people everywhere I looked. Ambling about, at ease, out of their homes.

  I sweated in my car, somehow disturbed by it all.

  I told myself it was just the crowds and traffic. Ten years in a small town and I wasn’t used to it any more. I told myself it was just the heat.

  And it was hot. Like an early heat wave had struck the city. My shirt was plastered to my back, and the air shimmered up from the bitumen. But no one else seemed to notice it. In the old days, Brisbane would have fallen into a torpor on afternoons like this. But now . . . it was as if the heat didn’t matter. I saw shirtless bodies and bikinis. Eskies full of beer. Kids dashing about under their broad-brimmed hats. And for some reason I couldn’t grasp, it bothered me.

  It only got worse. I crossed the bridge into the Valley, and the first thing I saw was the building which had once housed my newspaper. It was gone. That is, the building was still there, but now it was filled with luxury apartments. And all the old journalists’ pubs that once surrounded it had magically turned into cafes and bars full of youth and music. There was a new mall, new trees, new bookstores. A crowded market spilled people onto the road. The Valley had been something akin to a slum; now it seemed to be reborn and shining. Even the big Carlton and United brewery that had suffused the whole area with the stench of yeast and beer—even it had vanished. The site was all luxury apartments once again, and cafes, cafes. How could they all survive? How could people eat and drink this much?

  Then I was turning down Brunswick Street into New Farm. New Farm—my beloved, dirty, half-crazed and occasionally dangerous New Farm—had disappeared completely. In its place was . . . I didn’t know what it was. I inched down Brunswick Street in a traffic jam. In my memory it was a long seedy street of boarding houses, pawnshops and streetwalking prostitutes. They had all been swept away. The entire street, virtually from the Valley right down to the park and the river, seemed to be lined with cafes and art galleries, sushi bars and designer stores. There was barely a single building I could place. And then there was the park, which was still just a park, but had it ever been that full of people? New Farm Park had always been for the junkies and alcoholics. What were families doing there? What were people doing jogging there, or walking dogs, or playing cricket? And what about the junkies and alcoholics and boarding-house old men, and all the other folk that had peopled the New Farm I knew—where had they all gone? Where had all these fit bodies come from, all this wealth and tanned skin and good clothes?

  So much change, and in so little time.

  I wasn’t prepared, hadn’t expected anything like this. I drove and sweated and felt something like claustrophobia closing in, as if the whole city, all of its life and bustle, was directed against me. It wasn’t just that I’d been away so long, it wasn’t just that things were different, that there was nothing I recognised . . .

  It was that things were so obviously better. Like any exile, I’d imagined, hopefully, that I might have been missed, that somehow the city might have suffered from my absence. But even at a glance it was clear Brisbane had blossomed without me. It had become what a city should be, what Brisbane should always have been. It was what Charlie and I had wanted it to be, back before we joined the system and went rotten with the rest of it. Everything was out in the open. All the things that had been kept unlawful, except for the privileged few, seemed to be anyone’s now. And people had swarmed out of their houses and embraced it all. As if the old Brisbane, my Brisbane, couldn’t be forgotten quickly enough.

  I turned off Brunswick Street, searching. This was all a mistake. Bad enough that I’d come back to an alien city, but New Farm was the worst part of all. It had been my home, but I had no part in what it was now. I felt dated. Dulled. I belonged to the bad old days. A decade or so earlier I’d walked these streets as if I’d owned Brisbane. It might have been ugly and drab on the outside, but it was mine, I was on the inside, and I knew where the true heart of it lay. Now . . . now the only thing ugly and drab was me, and I knew nothing.

  The heat was insufferable. I needed to get off the streets. I gazed around vainly for landmarks, and then at last there was the motel. Two stories of plain brick, somehow
reassuring amidst all the madness. I parked and sat in the car a moment, wiping the sweat from my face.

  One night, I was thinking.

  Just one night and then I could get Charlie buried in the morning and be gone again. Who knew what I’d been expecting or hoping, but even after barely an hour in Brisbane, I knew there was no point in staying. There would be no welcome home. No fond remembrance. The new Brisbane had thrown me off and prospered. It didn’t need me, and nor, I felt, did it want me back.

  I climbed out of the car, dodged a couple gliding by on their roller-blades, and went to see about my room. The sun beat down on my head as I crossed the car park. The grand exile returning.

  A man ten years out of time. Looking for somewhere to hide.

  THIRTEEN

  I slept the sleep of the hunted.

  Cars moaned in the street outside, voices called and doors slammed, and all night an orange light tainted the room. For ten years I’d known nothing but the dark mountain nights of Highwood, the deep silence that could make your ears ring, but Brisbane knew no such quiet. I rolled in the sheets and sweated, starting awake at unknown sounds, and slowly the hours passed. I woke finally to daylight, a headache and an empty pizza box on the pillow beside me.

  It was a sign of defeat, that box. I had certainly seen several Italian cafes along Brunswick Street, but still, I’d dialled for pizza and waited for it to come to my door. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the motel room or to walk down those footpaths or to eat in public. The entire city available for just that one night, and I’d drawn the curtains and huddled in front of the television, preferring to think none of it existed.

  And what did it matter?

  It was the day of Charlie’s funeral, and after that, Brisbane and I would be through with each other.

  I rolled out of bed and fetched the newspaper that had been pushed under the door. I turned to the obituaries and found Charlie’s funeral announcement. I knew what it would say. I’d placed it myself, and it had run for the past four days. Just his name, the time and the place. I hadn’t mentioned anything about his family, or any details about his life, or by whom he was deeply mourned. I didn’t know if he was deeply mourned by anyone—or if he was even really mourned by me. For now it was enough just to pay some of the old debt, and to get him underground.