Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘Rising star of kitchen drinks to success’ read the caption.

  Fresh young restaurateur Charlie Monohan has recently opened the doors to his third establishment, and is now officially one of Brisbane’s most successful chefs. In glamorous surroundings on the Brisbane Rive Charlie has increasingly become host to a range of the town’s social and political elite, including new government heavyweight and man of the moment . . .

  Marvin was there, sitting next to me, his grin idiotic and his eyes huge behind his glasses, arms spread happily to the lens, his tie wide and hideous, sweat stains on his shirt. Lindsay too, across the table from Marvin, his back to the camera, shoulders stiff and uncomfortable. And Jeremy as well, fading off into the background, his head turned away from the rest of the group, aloof as ever. It would have been still early in the days of the syndicate, before Jeremy was really one of us. Was it 1981? Or 1982? I couldn’t remember.

  And wine, wine everywhere. It must have been late in the meal. A lunch, it looked like. Amongst all the plates and dishes there seemed to be six or seven bottles of wine, glasses of all shapes. A glow in all our eyes.

  And at the edge of the photo, furthest from Charlie and me, the very end of the table was cut out of frame. The only thing visible there was an arm, slender and pale. It lay across the tablecloth and the hand was curled lightly around a wine glass. A woman’s hand.

  Was it our first meeting then? Our first real meeting with Jeremy, and trailing along behind him, sullen and reluctant, Maybellene herself? Had a photographer been there that day?

  I couldn’t remember.

  I flicked to the next page. And the next. Dozens of newspaper clippings. Yellowed and crinkled, but intact. All about Charlie and his restaurants. The reviews, the awards, the expansions, the new openings, the celebrities, the socialites, the politicians. Sometimes Charlie was in the photos, sometimes not, but the captions all mentioned his name. It was his entire history.

  Or most of it. I cut to the last page. It was dated early 1987. Only a month from the beginning of the end. And from there on in, Charlie’s appearances in the media had nothing to do with food or wine or parties. All the coverage in the world perhaps, but nothing to cut out and preserve.

  I let the pile fall back. I found it hard to look at the psychologist.

  ‘Quite a career,’ he said, his tone neutral.

  ‘Do you know how it ended?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Did he . . . did he talk about it?’

  ‘Not really. But some of us knew. It made it all the more sad. I mean, to go from that to what he became . . .’

  I swallowed. ‘What was he like? In the last few years.’

  ‘Well, there were the head injuries, of course. That wasn’t something he was ever going to recover from in terms of full social functioning. There was still a lovely man in there somewhere, but there was frustration, too, and a bitterness driving him.’

  ‘Do you know what he did, after getting out of jail?’

  ‘He drank.’

  ‘He never worked again? In restaurants or anything?’

  ‘Not that I know of. He went on the disability pension and I assume he lived in a few different places. Eventually he ended up here. It’s hard enough at any time to make the transition from jail to the normal world, but for someone in his condition, and with his past, the odds were against him. If he’d had a family for support maybe, somewhere to go . . .’

  He left it unspoken. Friends. If he’d had any friends. I felt my face reddening.

  ‘Did he ever say anything about me?’

  The psychologist thought. ‘Not that I remember.’

  ‘It’s just that he was coming to see me, when it happened.’

  ‘So I read in the papers.’

  ‘I don’t know what he wanted.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything to me. The police asked the same question. They asked everyone else, too, clients and staff, everyone that knew him. No one heard him say a thing.’

  ‘But he stole the car from here.’

  ‘Yes. We weren’t sure at first that it was him. He was supposed to be away at St Amand’s, but one of the other clients said Charlie was nosing around in the front office that afternoon. That’s where we keep the keys. So we reported it, and then next day the police called with the news.’

  ‘St Amand’s? What’s that?’

  His eyebrows lifted. ‘I thought you knew. There’s another detox ward over there.’

  ‘He went to another ward?’

  ‘That’s right. As I said, he came in sick one night, after a two- or three-day binge, but next day he transferred out. An ambulance came and picked him up. It was a few days later still that he came back for the car.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘We told the police. I just assumed you’d know as well.’

  ‘Why was he transferred?’

  ‘It was his idea. We were surprised, though. St Amand’s only takes paying customers—and we all knew Charlie didn’t have any money. But it’s a good ward. Far better facilities than we have here. So we thought good luck to him.’

  ‘And where is this ward?’

  ‘It’s a part of St Amand’s hospital, over in Hamilton. First class. On the other hand, the hospital doesn’t really advertise the ward’s existence. It’s generally for private clientele, and not everyone wants the world to know they’ve got a drinking problem.’

  I hadn’t heard a word of any of this before.

  ‘Do clients of yours often get transferred over there?’

  He laughed. ‘We’re two different worlds. They’re the top and we’re the bottom. No, our clients never end up at St Amand’s.’

  ‘Except Charlie.’

  ‘Except Charlie. But then he was a rarity in more ways than one. After all, he actually had been wealthy once. That’s true of very few of our other clients. It’s a myth, the ex-millionaire reduced to rags, ‘‘Once I built a railroad’’ and all that. Most of our clients started out at the bottom and they’ve stayed there.’

  ‘So you think Charlie still had some cash stashed away from the old days?’

  ‘It’s possible, but unlikely. I was thinking more that maybe someone was paying for him. An old friend or something.’

  ‘Did he ever mention anyone like that?’

  ‘No.’ He shrugged, lowered his eyes. ‘But then you’d be more familiar with his old circles than I am.’

  I was . . . and that was the whole problem.

  Coughing erupted in the hall outside. An old woman staggered by, choking up volumes of phlegm in her throat.

  I looked back to the psychologist. ‘Does St Amand’s actually cure people then?’

  ‘There’s no cure. Some people survive it, some people don’t. In fact the latest research questions the very idea that any particular treatment is much better than any other. The truth is, none of them is very successful in absolute terms. So it comes down to what sort of quality of life you can maintain in the meantime. And that comes down to money again. Go over to St Amand’s. The people you see there won’t look anything like the people you see here, and they’ll have nice furniture, and bigger TVs, and good coffee to drink. But money is the only real difference.’

  We sat in his plain little office for a moment, silent.

  I studied the briefcase.

  ‘I can keep this stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘You paid for his funeral, and that’s as close to next of kin as I think we’ll ever get. The police have already been through it, and there’s nothing they wanted, so . . .’

  I thought a moment about the next question. ‘There was his wife. Did she ever come here?’

  He shook his head. ‘I knew he’d been married, but he never talked about her, and she never came to see him.’ He regarded me steadily. ‘No one did.’

  It stung again, and I was standing up. The briefcase hung from my right hand, the handle worn soft under my fingers. I thought of Charlie’s fingers in the same position, lugging t
he case with him wherever he went, wherever that had been, in all those years. It felt heavy.

  I said, ‘If St Amand’s is so good, why do you think Charlie left after only three days?’

  The psychologist sighed. ‘Don’t ask me, George. Like I said, go and see for yourself how the other half live.’

  I nodded, and carried the briefcase out to my car.

  FIFTEEN

  But memory played tricks.

  There was no photographer present when I first met Jeremy. It wasn’t a lunch, it was a dinner, a late one. Nor was the venue the riverside restaurant, it was at one of the others. And May wasn’t there either . . . although there was a discussion about her. Not that I realised it at the time.

  I was drunk, for one thing.

  We were celebrating. Things were going well. It was three years since the foundation of our little syndicate, and we were a success. Both as a group, and as individuals.

  Personally, I had my own daily column at the paper. I was known all about town, invited to social events, to launches, to everything. I was not a man who lowered himself to daily news events. Instead I cast impressions, told amusing stories, passed on anecdotes about the rich and powerful, stripped away pretensions. People fought to get my attention, to be mentioned by me, or to not be mentioned by me. Occasionally, to my editor’s delight, there was even the threat of a libel suit.

  I was a gossip columnist. Years later, I wouldn’t remember a single word of what I wrote.

  But meanwhile I was also an investor in three fully licensed restaurants, and that’s what I would remember more. Charlie’s restaurants. The original site, greatly expanded, in Paddington. Another in the city centre. And the third on the river. They were the places where I spent my nights, roaming between them like a nomad. All of us were the same, dragging our friends and our contacts and our colleagues along with us. There were no problems with the time, no problems with bookings, no problems with drinks. Not as a part owner, and not with Lindsay working away behind the scenes, soothing everything with the official bodies, even though we broke every single law concerning food and alcohol and opening hours. And not with Marvin bringing half the government through our doors, night after night. We were safe inside the system.

  Nor was it a secret. Charlie’s places were known for it, at least by those whose business it was to know, and the rest of the population, what did they matter? Charlie’s prices weren’t cheap, and they were paid by people who had no particular concern about money, or trifles like the law. Charlie himself was everywhere. He still oversaw the menus and the cooking, but his triumph was playing host. His ugly face was what greeted the patrons, everyone knew him, and he knew everyone in return. And an air surrounded him now. A hint of political connections and intriguingly shady dealings. It only added to the glamour, and Charlie was smart enough to play along, to act the benign gangster. He certainly looked the part. Maybe no one exactly knew that Marvin was involved, or Lindsay, or even me. But they all knew something was going on, and that was all that really mattered at four in the morning, when the bar was almost the only one still open in town.

  On the other hand, when it came to actual cash flow, we were still small time. The real money lay elsewhere. So one night Marvin called a meeting to discuss some possible diversification. And by those days, when Marvin called, we all came. He was famous now. A cabinet minister. And the strange thing was, it was electricity that had put him there.

  As Marvin had warned us three years before, the government was determined about breaking the Electrical Workers Union. So two years after their initial move, they once again tried to open the field to independent sub-contracting companies and non-union labour. Once again the union responded with strike action. Nine hundred workers walked away from their jobs. Linesmen, maintenance men, station staff. Everyone. Picket lines were manned, the offices of the sub-contracting companies were besieged. And once again, Queensland was wracked by power blackouts.

  Both sides, government and union, knew that this time there would be no backing down. But this time, the government was ready. They declared a State of Emergency, sacked the nine hundred workers, and offered their jobs to all comers.

  Mayhem broke out. The Minister for Mines and Energy, backed by the premier, declared that as the strikers had been formally dismissed, they no longer constituted a legitimate union, hence they were just a rabble illegally blocking the streets. An army of police was sent in, arrests began, and terrific violence ensued, a set of running brawls and pitched battles that headlined news all around the country.

  At first it seemed the government had miscalculated. The state was crippled. The power would fail four or five hours every day, and the picket lines still prevented the new contractors from getting the system working again. Complaints mounted, even from government supporters like mining and tourism. The media woke momentarily from their long slumber and began to question the government’s strategy. Other unions were threatening strikes of their own. The Maritime Union. The Federated Builders. Bus drivers and train drivers. After two weeks of chaos, with no sign of the union surrendering, and with the contractors wavering, the Minister for Mines and Energy was sacked. The union was on the verge of claiming victory.

  And then, to everyone’s amazement, Marvin, an untried backbencher and political lightweight, was appointed to the job.

  Up until that point, my own interest in it all had been minimal. I suffered the blackouts with everyone else, watched the picket line violence on TV, and left the reporting of it to the more mundane journalists. I had no particular opinions about who should control the power supply. All I wanted was my beer kept cold. It was only much later that I realised how directly those few weeks would affect my life. And that if only I’d watched the TV screens a little more closely, I might have seen, caught up amongst the police and unionists, the woman with whom I would later fall in love.

  Maybellene.

  She was younger then, of course, and moved in a world utterly opposed to mine.

  She was a university graduate, working on a masters thesis in sociology, and she had gone straight from her Catholic girls’ school into political activism. Queensland infuriated her sense of justice. It wasn’t just the government, but also the voting population that allowed it to stay there. The electricity dispute was the final straw. She’d been following it for the last two years, and originally she’d been talking with the union only for her thesis research, but by the time the final eruption came, she was in deeper than that. She was on the picket lines with them. After the State of Emergency was declared, she was arrested in the first round of police assaults, and spent her first night in custody. She was back on the lines the next day, and arrested again. She was prepared to fight until the end. But when the minister was dismissed she thought, like everyone else, that maybe the battle had already been won. After all, who was this Marvin McNulty?

  Marvin, it turned out, was the man for the job.

  I heard only rumours about how he secured the position. That he had friends in the right places, and money from somewhere undeclared. That he had direct links with the private contractors concerned, or some hold over the premier. That the old minister had been too squeamish, had been scared off by all the sound and fury, but that Marvin was going to be different.

  He was. The assault on the picket lines burst out afresh. The contracting companies, who before had been vacillating, suddenly produced strike-breaking forces of their own, and hit back at the unions. The police rigorously stood by, or came in only on the contractors’ side. Marvin flooded the media with his own propaganda about union rorts and corruption, cast visions of what a de-unionised power industry would be like—cheaper electricity, faster service, better maintenance. The union suddenly couldn’t seem to get their side into the news. Public opinion, never very favourable to the strikers, began to slide. People wanted the lights back on, and they didn’t care how. Another two weeks went by. The sacked workers were running out of money, and there was still no end in s
ight. Doubt set in. Where was it all leading to?

  Then Marvin played his trump card. He initiated legal action directly against individual strikers, each of the nine hundred, suing them for financial damages to the state. The amounts threatened were huge. At the same time he offered an alternative. The suits would be dropped and they could all have their jobs back—as long as they signed new contracts which shut out the union, lowered working conditions, and which contained a cast-iron ‘no strike’ clause. Everything, more or less, that the government had wanted from the start.

  And then he just waited.

  The union understood the danger. They called for solidarity. The opposition in parliament called for solidarity. May, somewhere in amongst it all, called for solidarity. But it all began collapsing. Some of the workers started signing the contracts. The opposition fell to in-fighting over who was to blame for letting it go so far. Numbers fell on the picket lines.

  In despair, May and some of her comrades turned to extreme measures. In a midnight raid they invaded the depot of the major contracting company, and set the whole place on fire.

  That was the end. Whatever sympathy the union still commanded went up with the flames. Marvin declared a moral victory, and for all that the union could decry the fire and deny official involvement, they knew as well as Marvin that it was over. Hundreds of the sacked workers surrendered and signed the new contracts. Hundreds more quit the industry forever, and many of them the state as well. The power supply returned to normal and, from then on, although electricity remained a government enterprise, the work itself became increasingly the domain of sub-contractors and private suppliers. Police investigating the fire finally arrested one suspect who confessed to the crime, and named all the others.

  May ended up in jail again. On arson charges.

  All in all, it was one of the government’s greatest triumphs of the era. It cowed all the other unions into silence, and left the opposition party in ruins. They would not even come close to power for yet another seven years. And it was all Marvin’s work. No one laughed at him anymore. He was a political star now, he was the Minister for Mines and Energy. And though his fortunes would never be so high again as they were in those first few months after the dispute, it was no wonder he thought he was invulnerable.