Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  In truth, not even that. The service was to take place at a crematorium. I wasn’t going to bury Charlie, I was going to burn him. I couldn’t see him in a cemetery, with a small flat gravestone in the grass that no one would ever visit. Let him become ashes. His life had gone up in flames anyway. I would scatter him somewhere, disperse all the ruin. I didn’t know where. I couldn’t think of any favourite place of Charlie’s—no tree or hill or river that seemed fitting. Brisbane in general had been his favourite place, his only place. He’d loved the town, or at least he’d loved the old town. In the new Brisbane I had no idea what had become of him, or how he’d survived.

  I closed the paper, looked around my room. It was plain. A bed, some chairs, a small kitchen, sliding glass doors that opened onto a balcony. Through a gap in the curtains I could see that the morning was glaring and blue. The city still waited out there, and the funeral was at nine. Not a fashionable hour but appropriate, so the crematorium staff seemed to think, for what was expected to be a small and brief ceremony.

  In half an hour I was packed and in the car.

  The crematorium was back across the river in the southern suburbs. Driving there I barely looked out the windows. I had steeled myself, I was no longer searching for the Brisbane I once knew. It was an anonymous city, a Monday morning with people driving to work, impatient and angry. Horns blasted and it was hot. It was any city. And there were other fears on my mind now, ones that I’d been suppressing ever since Graham had laid this cup before me. Charlie’s funeral. It was one thing to organise it, and to attend. But the question I’d dreaded from the start loomed again now—who else would be there?

  I had no way of knowing. In all the time since Charlie’s death I had not heard from a single interested person, none of his old acquaintances, none of his old patrons. Were they all like me? Had they all long since abandoned him? The papers had marked him as a criminal, as someone the world would not miss, so would anyone come to bury such a man? Only his closest friends, maybe, those who had worked with him and risen with him and shared his fall. But I remembered what the detectives had told me. Marvin—they were still looking for Marvin. Jeremy was in a wheelchair. Lindsay—they hadn’t said where Lindsay was, but of all of us, Lindsay would be the last one I’d expect.

  Which only left Maybellene . . .

  Would any of them have seen the funeral notice? Would any of them act upon it?

  I arrived. The crematorium sat high on the side of a leafy hill, surrounded by remembrance gardens. I had attended funerals there before. There were only two other cars visible in the parking lot, and they were both empty. There was no one standing in the gardens or waiting in front of the chapel. For all I knew, the cars belonged to staff. For all I knew, I wanted them to belong to staff.

  I got out and stood in the sun. The heat and humidity were rising with the morning, and the air, even up on the hill, was perfectly still. Out over the city a thin layer of smog hung in the sky. Brisbane, my Brisbane . . . all gone. I scratched at sweat in my armpits. I was wearing an old black suit that smelled of age. It hung loose on me. It was from my earlier days, when I drank all the time, and ate all the time, and never thought of walking if I could take a taxi and charge it to the newspaper.

  No other cars arrived.

  At five minutes to nine I walked across to the chapel and up the stairs. I peered inside, a twinge of nervousness in my stomach. Would there be anyone? But the chapel was empty. There was only Charlie. His simple coffin sat on its rollers in front of a cream curtain, and around him everything was silent. I retreated into the sunlight again, not knowing what I was feeling. Funerals had their place in the world. There was something about the dignity of death, with its respectful mourners and the hushed whispers of their conversations— grim, and yet still a due part of life. But I knew Charlie had died without any dignity, and it seemed there would be me and only me to witness it. No whispers, no respect. And yet privately I was glad it was only me. It would be easier that way. For me, always for me.

  A man came round the side of the chapel studying his watch, then saw me and introduced himself. He worked for the crematorium and would perform the service, as per our arrangement. His suit was a more subtle black than mine, and modern, and to his credit he pretended no grief. We discussed the details of the service itself and the collection of the urn afterwards, then he went inside and stood by the coffin. I waited on the steps. The sun shone and the heat built moment by moment. Then it was nine o’clock. So no one else was coming, she wasn’t coming, and all this would be over in moments.

  I turned to walk inside.

  A small bus came labouring up the drive and turned into the car park, its windows full of faces. I paused and stared at it. It was the last thing I was expecting and could have nothing, surely, to do with Charlie. But it stopped at the bottom of the steps, and doors slid open. People were climbing out. At their head was the driver. He was young, with square glasses, and a black sports coat covering otherwise casual clothes. He was too young. He was no one that Charlie could ever have known.

  But his hand was out to mine.

  ‘We’re not too late, are we?’

  ‘For what?’ I said.

  He stared at me a moment, through his glasses.

  ‘This is Charlie’s funeral, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then we’re in the right place. Are you the funeral director?’

  ‘No. I’m a friend of Charlie’s.’

  ‘Ah. Well, so are we.’

  His passengers were filing past me, about a dozen of them, men and women. They were mostly older. In fact, very old. Thin faces and cheap clothes and shuffling steps. But there was something familiar about them, about their movements, their eyes.

  ‘We’re from the centre,’ the driver was telling me. ‘We had Charlie with us a lot over the last few years, and we always try to attend, when one of us goes.’

  I understood. The centre. They were from the Uniting Church hostel, the hostel for alcohol abusers that Charlie had apparently been frequenting. That was what I was recognising in the faces, and of course they weren’t that old at all, not much older than me and Charlie. They were just old before their time. It was in their stares, the cast of their shoulders, all the signs of a life’s battle with alcohol, mostly lost. These were hard-core cases by the look of them, hollow and pained, with the air of the long-term homeless. For all that they were sober and erect and clean right now, it was something that could never be simply washed away. It went deeper than that.

  The old ache flared. So the centre was that sort of place. A home for lost causes. That was where Charlie had ended up. And these were his friends.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re not too late.’

  He followed his passengers inside and for a moment longer I waited in the sun.

  No one else came.

  So we burnt Charlie. It was small and it was quick. The man from the crematorium waited until we were all sitting down, and between us we only took up the front two rows. If he thought there was anything strange about the mourners that had gathered, either their number or their form, he did not let it show.

  ‘We are gathered here to mark the passing of Charles Monohan . . .’

  He didn’t speak for long. I’d told him nothing personal about Charlie, and I hadn’t asked for any special readings or music. I’d thought of songs we’d all once liked, or books we’d read, from which there might have a been a relevant passage, but there was nothing that seemed to mean anything now. It was a different world and we’d been different people, and none of us had ever been poetic. If it meant the ceremony would be stark and voiceless, then so be it. There was nothing to say, so let silence reign before the flames.

  But the crematorium man asked anyway, after he’d finished his speech. ‘If there’s anyone who has anything to add?’

  He looked at me and waited.

  The old men and women looked to me as well. I looked back at them. They would have no idea who I w
as, but they might have guessed that alone of all the mourners, I at least had known Charlie before his fall. I didn’t answer. I searched in their eyes for any sign of judgement, for the command, ‘It is you who should speak’, as if they somehow knew everything after all. Or the question, ‘Where are the others? His real friends? Why are you the only one?’ But there was nothing in their eyes apart from a mute and distant pain, and that didn’t have anything to do with me.

  I shook my head.

  The crematorium man cast a glance over the chapel, then nodded to himself and lowered his eyes. For a time we all sat there in silence, giving witness to the coffin and a man’s life. From outside came the sound of birds, and distant traffic. Then the crematorium man pressed a button and the curtains parted. The coffin began its slow roll through to the darkness, and I thought from somewhere behind me I heard a sob, or a groan, but it may have been no more than a cough. Then the curtains were sliding shut.

  Goodbye, Charlie, I thought—but it was mechanical and it wasn’t what I felt.

  We all stood up. The crematorium man came over and we shook hands. I turned my head and blinked into the glare from the open doorway. Beyond the doors, out across the white gravel of the car park, I could see a woman walking away. She was framed like that in the light for a moment, just a dark shape, and then she passed from view, but my heart seem to catch.

  It was Maybellene.

  It wasn’t Maybellene.

  My hand was still in the crematorium man’s grasp. He was saying something to me I didn’t hear. I nodded, I said, ‘Yes, yes. . .’ and tore my hand away. I strode down the aisle towards the door, but before I reached it I stopped again.

  Even if it was her, what was the point? What could we say? Would we be able to even look at each other?

  Then my feet were moving again, and I was outside on the steps. I could hear voices behind me but there was no one in the car park. A car was disappearing down the drive, its brake lights flashing briefly. I couldn’t see the driver.

  A hand was on my shoulder.

  It was the driver of the bus, the young man. His eyes were calm and sympathetic, watching me through those big glasses. For a second he reminded me of Marvin. It was only the glasses.

  ‘It’s George, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘How . . .?’

  ‘I’ve been reading the papers. I’m sorry about your friend.’

  It stung suddenly. Something like tears. It was sympathy I didn’t deserve. ‘I hadn’t even seen him in years.’

  The old men and women were filing by, as quietly as they’d filed in.

  ‘Are you going to be in town long?’ the driver was asking.

  ‘Why?’

  I was still watching the old men and women. I wondered how many times they’d done this before, and if they’d really been Charlie’s friends, or known him at all beyond sharing a ward or a room. And did it matter? When it was their own turn to be in the coffin, at least they knew that someone would be there. The dying rounded up to mourn the dead. Any dead.

  The young man was watching the old people as well.

  ‘Charlie left some things,’ he said. ‘Nothing much, nothing important, but there’s no one else to give them to except you. I thought maybe you’d like to come over and collect them. And maybe there are some questions you’d like to ask me. About Charlie.’

  Questions about what? About the life he’d led after May and I had inflicted all the pain that was possible upon the man, and then deserted him? Why would I ask? I didn’t want the answers. I never had.

  I looked away westwards. From high on the crematorium hill I could see right over the south-west suburbs of Brisbane to Ipswich and beyond. Out on the horizon a low blue line marked the mountains. It was only a two-hour drive. The clouds were all gone up there now, it would be bright and clear and cool. I wanted to be there, not here in this heat and haze. Charlie was buried. My duty to him was done.

  But I nodded, all the same.

  FOURTEEN

  The Uniting Church Dependency Hostel was situated in Bardon, a green and wealthy suburb miles from where any homeless alcoholic might be wandering the streets. This was quite intentional. The hostel wasn’t like some of the centres that existed in the Valley or in West End—it wasn’t a drop-in facility for the homeless to find a meal or a bed. The Uniting Church staff did indeed liaise with those sorts of places, and took referrals from them, but the idea at their own hostel was to detoxify their clients, get them sober or straight, educate them on survival strategies, and then either send them home or, if there was no home, set them up in one of the Uniting Church’s halfway houses. The accompanying brief was to focus on clients that other detox units wouldn’t take, or couldn’t take—the long-term abusers with no money of their own, no family or friends to help, and not much chance of recovery.

  All this was told to me by the resident psychologist, the driver of the bus, and his name was Mark. We were sitting in his office at the hostel. From down the hall came the rattle of the kitchen gearing up for lunch. The hostel consisted of an old wooden house, at the back of which a brick annex had been attached . . . all of it small, all of it simple. Most of the labour was volunteer and they had no aid from any government, federal or state.

  ‘The original idea,’ he was saying, ‘was to deal both with alcoholism and with drug dependency. In the end, though, we tend to deal mainly with alcoholics. Heroin users do end up here sometimes, but we seem to have developed a reputation just for alcohol. It does make things simpler. The two groups don’t get along. It might just be an age thing. The heroin users are generally younger, while the alcoholics are older. The heroin users think the alcoholics are pathetic and useless and that they’ll never end up like that, while the alcoholics think the heroin users are punks and thieves, and that they were never that bad.’

  He was smiling faintly, staring at a battered briefcase on his desk.

  ‘Of course, we don’t get many older heroin addicts because they all die so young, and we don’t get many younger alcoholics because it takes a lifetime of drinking to get bad enough to be sent here.’

  I, too, was staring at the briefcase. It was made of leather and would have been expensive when it was new, but it was no longer new. The handle had been stretched until it sagged, and the bottom corners were patched with masking tape. As if it had been carried, and set down, and carried, and set down, over and over and over again.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Maybe you already know all this?’

  I looked at him. ‘No. Not really.’

  It was a lie. I knew plenty about it. But in a way it was the truth. In all my life, this was the very first time I’d stepped inside a detox ward.

  ‘Is that Charlie’s stuff?’ I asked.

  He nodded and pushed the case over towards me. I took it on my lap and looked inside.

  ‘This is it?’

  ‘That’s all he had here. Our clients don’t generally have much, and there isn’t room for many personal belongings anyway. Some of them do have their own places, but if Charlie had one in recent years, we didn’t know about it. He was either here, or at one of our halfway houses, or just somewhere else. He had clothes, of course, but they were really ours, donated from our second-hand stores, so after he died we put the useable items back in stock. That’s all that was left.’

  The suitcase was full of papers. Documents, it seemed, on the top at least. I shuffled through some of them. I saw bank statements and utility bills, mostly several years old. Terminated rental agreements for what looked like boarding houses. Social security forms. Medical prescriptions for drugs I didn’t know. A tattered birth certificate. But there was nothing that looked personal, nothing in Charlie’s own handwriting. I studied two of the uppermost sheets—recent bank statements. The balance was never more than a few hundred dollars, and on the last page it was a flat zero.

  The psychologist was watching me. ‘That last statement came after we’d heard about his death. We informed the bank and the governm
ent agencies, and everything has been closed.’

  I said, ‘He spent every cent he had the week before he died. Two hundred dollars.’

  ‘He fell off the wagon. It was fairly typical, unfortunately. He disappeared for a few days and only showed up here at the end of it, broke again, and very ill.’

  ‘You didn’t try to stop him?’

  ‘We can’t stop anyone. We can advise, but they can leave whenever they want, and do whatever they want. Of course, if while they’re gone we fill up with other clients and there aren’t any beds left when they come back, then it’s their tough luck.’

  I nodded and dug deeper into the case. At the bottom there was a thick sheaf of yellowing newspaper. The top page bore a large photograph. A pang as sharp and palpable as a heart tremor ran through me.

  It was me and Charlie. The page was from the society section, and the photo was of a gathering at one of Charlie’s restaurants . . . his third, by the look, the one down by the river. Charlie was in the foreground, a glass of wine raised in a toast. He was in chef ’s whites and smiling, and it was only the smile that saved him, as usual, from the brute force of his own body. But he looked so young, so solid, so real—no scars on his face, no vague and empty eyes. They were bright, full of energy. There was nothing to connect him with the thing I had seen tied to the wall in the substation. And no matter how I stared, there was no hint of a future so terrible, so friendless.

  In the photo he was surrounded by friends. Right behind him, at a long table, we were all there. I was at the nearest end, my glass also raised, smiling at the camera. A well-fed, cheerful man, young, with a whole life of success ahead of him. Charlie’s best friend of all.