I waited, my hand tight around the receiver.
The phone rang and rang.
And clicked up.
‘Hello?’
It was a female voice. I explained that I was after someone who had once lived at this number, long ago, his name was Jeremy . . .
‘Oh,’ she answered, ‘this is still the right number. I’m Jeremy’s personal assistant. Whom shall I say is calling?’
I was speechless for a moment. I was fifteen years in the past. As if time had stood still, and Maybellene was living with him again.
‘George,’ I said faintly. ‘Tell him it’s George Verney. I’m a friend from years ago.’
‘Just a moment.’
I waited. I looked at the little black book. May’s phone number was written in there. Would her number still be the right one too? But no, that had been the number for the house Charlie and she owned together. That was gone. Eventually she’d moved into a flat on her own somewhere. I flicked to the page. There didn’t seem to be a number for it, not even an address, and I couldn’t remember why.
The new Maybellene was back.
‘Jeremy can’t come to the phone, but he says come on over tonight and he’ll open a bottle of wine.’
‘Um . . . I’ll come, but I don’t drink any more.’
‘That’s okay. Neither does he. You know where we live?’
‘I know.’ And then I asked, just to be sure, ‘And your name is?’
‘Louise.’
And time moved on again.
NINETEEN
Jeremy lived near West End. In my time the area had been something of a ghetto for a mixture of communities. Aboriginal, for one. Then European migrants, Greek and Italian for the most part, and later Asian, and finally also a cheap quarter for university students. However, there had always been a wealthier section, on the high ground that overlooked the river—a line of grander homes that had never housed migrants or students. Not quite mansions, perhaps, but they were still impressive, with deeply shaded verandahs and leafy gardens. If they had a certain air of decay about them, all the more appropriate, for most of their residents were in decay as well. Old widows, old families, old money from the very founding of the state. True influence might have passed them by, but the memories lingered.
It had never been my part of town, West End, but I could still note how it had changed. The main street had once been a crowded strip of delicatessens and tailors and fruit stalls, busy with people from a variety of races. It was a place apart, the one section of the city that had seemed to be genuinely alive, even in the old days. Indeed, if there was a centre of resistance to the government and its policies back then, West End was it. There had been collectives and legal centres, radical bookshops and protest groups. And in small rooms above the shopfronts, the Italians had run their own casinos—card games for the most part, but they were strictly small scale and no part of the system. The Inquiry had safely passed them by, if it knew about them at all. And yet now, ten years later, it didn’t look as if any of them would still be there. As in New Farm, a middle-class revolution had swept through the suburb, scattering cafes and bars and a bland sense of space. The new Brisbane marched on. And West End, without the old enemy to fight, perhaps, seemed to have dwindled.
I drove through, up along the ridge towards Highgate Hill, to Jeremy’s house. It was positioned high on the southern slope, hidden behind a tall fence that was choked by an overgrown hedge, exactly as I remembered. It was early evening when I pulled up outside, heat still hanging in the air. I sat for a moment in my car experiencing, once again, a shift in time. Charlie and I had arrived there at similar times on evenings such as this, bottles of wine under our arms, for dinner with Jeremy and Maybellene. With May, really. We were both courting her—at least, I thought we both were, but Charlie was already the winner, if I’d had the eyes to see it.
I got out, pushed open the gate and went in.
Nothing had changed at all. The yard was shaded by the same ancient Moreton Bay figs, the ground was still thick with rotting leaves that muffled sound. The house was there, too, over a century old, and wrapped in creepers. Beyond it the ground dropped away into a gully, all wild with weeds and vines, and though there was a view to be had southwards, Jeremy’s back verandah was enclosed, and I’d never known him to look out the windows. Still, this was the house, unaltered, where, at the age of thirty, I’d finally fallen in love. And the memory of May was everywhere.
I rang the bell.
In the old days that was enough. Jeremy would yell from somewhere deep inside to come on through, and usually the door was off the latch. But there was no yell this time, and the door appeared to be locked. I noticed that the windows were barred, something else which was new. And when the door finally did open, the woman standing there wasn’t Maybellene, and for all that I’d half expected she might, this woman looked nothing like her.
‘You must be George,’ she said. ‘I’m Louise. Come in.’
But then again, there was something about her voice. And though physically so different, her hair red rather than May’s black, and a sharp freckled face compared to May’s softer features, there was still something in her that took me back. An air of reserve. Or of sternness.
I followed her inside, and we threaded our way through the artefacts.
For Jeremy, as befitted his class, was a collector, and it was in collecting that he most expressed his missed vocation for the priesthood. In his older years he had haunted church demolitions and renovations and auctions, salvaging religious pieces. Altar pieces, crucifixes, statues—the rooms of his house were crammed with them. There were also antique copies of the Bible, folios, Latin manuscripts, spread out in display cases. And on the walls were Madonnas and icons and stations of the cross. All objects of worship, and all long rejected by a more practical Church in its contemporary age. The iconography of a more devout time. The direct representation in pagan stone, here on earth, of the godhead.
He also had another collection, not generally on display. It was nineteenth-century pornography, sheet after sheet of faded sepia images, obscenities from a century ago. Explicit perhaps, but somehow made chaste by the years, by the lack of colour, by the absence of movement. Jeremy considered that the one collection reflected the other. That if you looked at the faces of the men and women arranged in their poses, they had expressions every bit as detached and otherworldly as the faces of the painted saints and Madonnas. Or the marble figures of Christ, racked upon the cross . . . every bit as sacrificial and cold as the naked bodies wracked upon each other. And the eyes of all—men and women fucking, or saints and saviours praying—always raised in a distant ecstasy to Heaven. The sense of the divine was the key, it seemed. It was the reason Jeremy dismissed both modern pornography and the modern Church. One dwelt inanely on the details of the genitalia, the other dwelt pointlessly on the details of the day-to-day physical world. They both lacked abstraction, and transcendence.
Transcendence . . . this from a man who haunted casinos and brothels, and who wallowed in the fleshiest of pursuits. I’d never understood it, or him. And now the rooms looked unused, like a museum. Dim lamps shone in the corners, and the blinds on the windows were down. And though it might have been a warm evening outside, inside the air seemed to hold no temperature at all.
We reached the dining room.
‘George.’
And it was with Jeremy himself that time had most visibly moved on. Hunched in his wheelchair, he was a distilled version of his old self—leaner, bonier, more shrunken. And when he reached forward, his hand outstretched, I saw there were bruises on his arms, and the shape of what appeared to be bandages on his shoulder, under the shirt. And on the shirt itself, leaking through, a spot of blood the size of a ten-cent piece.
‘Jeremy,’ I said, and shook his hand, the weight of it no more than a sheet of paper.
He smiled the old half smile at me, ghostly on a face so thin. ‘You look younger, George. You even look health
ier.’
‘You look like you’re dying.’
‘I am.’
We let go each other’s hand. His voice had dwindled from its old clear smoothness; now it had a tone of effort about it, breathless.
He gestured. ‘You’ve met Louise.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well sit down then. Dinner won’t be long.’
The table was spread with lace and decorated with silver, and there were three places set—Jeremy’s at the head, and one on either side of him. A bottle of white wine, already open, sat there between us. There was also a carafe of water.
‘Wine?’ Jeremy inquired.
‘I don’t drink any more.’
His head dipped. ‘So I heard. Oh well, there’s water for us. Louise?’
Louise nodded and took up the carafe. There was only one wine glass on the table, and just the two water tumblers. Louise poured our water, then lifted the wine and filled the wine glass. Without a word she raised it briefly in toast to Jeremy and myself, then put it to her lips.
Jeremy was staring at her, fondly, an old expression, the way he’d looked at another personal assistant once, when she was learning to drink.
‘Well,’ he said, turning his faded eyes to mine. ‘So another one has found his way home.’
‘I’m not back for good. And this isn’t home.’
He smiled. ‘That’s what they all say.’
‘Who’s they?’
‘Oh . . . others.’ He waved the thought away. ‘How have you been, George?’
‘Do you know Charlie’s dead?’
‘Yes, I know. The police were here.’
‘You weren’t at his funeral.’
He glanced down at his chair. ‘I don’t leave the house these days. Did you see the bars on the windows? People thieve around here now. I may as well have gone to prison like everyone else.’
There was a querulous edge in his voice, self-pity, and that wasn’t like the old Jeremy.
‘Did anyone else attend?’ he asked.
‘No one.’
‘No one at all?’
‘Maybe . . . I thought maybe I saw May. I don’t know.’
‘Ah . . .’ He addressed Louise. ‘Maybellene was one of your predecessors. A long time ago. But then I lost her to a friend of George’s here. To Charlie, in fact. And then others.’ He looked back to me. ‘No. I don’t think it would have been May.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Have you?’
‘No.’
‘But you want to, of course.’ He shook his head. ‘May is a lost soul, George. I couldn’t save her. Neither could Charlie. Or you. She won’t be back.’
‘Where did she go?’
But he sounded forlorn. ‘I don’t want to talk about May . . .’
‘What about Charlie? Did you ever see him after he got out?’
‘No . . . I heard he came back to Brisbane, but he never contacted me.’ He coughed faintly, a wet sound in his throat. ‘But I knew you’d be calling around. Once I saw that funeral notice. I told Louise you would, didn’t I, Louise?’
She nodded, and drank from her glass, a long steady swallow. Something flickered in me at the sight, and was gone.
‘How long did you stay down in Sydney, Jeremy?’
Yellow stubs of teeth gleamed in his smile. ‘Not as long as I meant to. I was back here even before the trials were over. Not even a year.’
‘You didn’t have any trouble?’
‘The police didn’t care. No one did. The new government would hardly want my services, not them, so what danger was I? Who was I going to influence or corrupt? No . . . it was all finished. So they let me come home.’
I looked around at his house, at the art on the walls, still the same pictures in the same places that I remembered from years before. I hadn’t come home, and neither had Jeremy. This house was the past. A refuge in history.
‘Time for the soup,’ he declared.
Louise drained her glass, and rose from the table.
I observed her while we ate. She said nothing, only watched and listened, but by the time the main course arrived she had almost finished the bottle of wine. Wafts of the alcohol, sweet and cloying, drifted over the meal. When she leaned across to slice Jeremy’s meat for him, I could see him drawing in breaths of her. Was that how it was then? Had he taught her, too, as he had taught her predecessor? She didn’t appear at all drunk. A certain languidness had suffused her movements and there was a liquid wideness to her eyes, but that was all. The minutiae of alcohol. Only an ex-drinker would even notice them. A thirst stirred in me, the old thirst, and it wasn’t for water. Or simply for alcohol either. Maybellene lingered in the air like the wine.
We talked meanwhile, Jeremy and I, but about very little. Long sentences seemed to exhaust him. If I’d taken him outside, into the wind and sun, he would have crumbled to dust. He had not touched his glass of water, nor eaten more than a mouthful or two of his finely mashed food. And from time to time his eyes would cloud over and his attention wander, as if he was battling with sleep. Or with pain.
He asked me about Highwood, and about what I’d been doing up there. The idea of the Highwood Herald seemed to amuse him. The old condescension was still there. The implication that he still knew things I didn’t know, and never would. Only his health had betrayed him. Looking at him now it was hard to imagine him in the clubs and at the bars, gliding about, tall and urbane and convinced of his inner dignity, even when surrounded by vulgarity. I remembered him scattering a table of blackjack players once, like a raging Jesus at the temple, as if they were an insult to him. I couldn’t remember what it was about. Only that, from time to time, he would look around and seem to hate what he saw.
‘Why did you bother with us, back then?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t need the money.’
‘Neither did you.’
‘Maybe not . . . but it was all new to me, all those people we met, the things we did, so of course I fell for it. But you already had all that. Why bother with us?’
The question didn’t seem important to him. ‘Why does a king fuck his kitchen maid? Why does a rich man hire a ten-dollar prostitute? It’s human nature, George.’
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t know . . . to wallow. To be lower than you need to be. To choose to be lower. Otherwise, how can you be sure you’re superior? Inferior people, George, don’t have the choice.’
He was smiling again.
‘And that’s all it was?’ I asked.
‘To tell the truth, I don’t remember. I was drunk most of the time.’
The smile faded, a vagueness creeping into his eyes.
None of this was to the point.
I had yet to ask him the thing I’d come to ask.
I said, ‘Just before he died, Charlie spent three days at St Amand’s detox ward.’
He arched an eyebrow. ‘The old alma mater? My my . . .’
‘I know. That’s why I’m here. I thought maybe you were the one who got him in there.’
‘No. Why would I do that?’
‘I don’t know . . . it’s just that you were such a regular patient.’
‘Twice a year, every year. They kept me alive, those people.’
‘Have you been there recently?’
He breathed the barest suggestion of a laugh. ‘I don’t need detox any more. Even one drink would kill me now.’
‘When was the last time you went?’
‘Years ago.’ His eyes lit for a moment. ‘Do you know why I really went to Sydney?’
‘To avoid arrest?’
‘I went there to kill myself.’
I blinked at him. ‘Why to Sydney?’
‘It’s a place to die, that’s why. It’s a toilet of a city. They would have taken my body and thrown it in the gutter and that would have been that. I didn’t want a state funeral, George.’
‘But you didn’t kill yourself.’
‘I almost did.’ He nodded at the glass in Louise’s ha
nd. ‘I was going to drink myself to death. Not over years, I was going to do it in months.’
‘Why? Because of the Inquiry?’
And there had, after all, been suicides.
Jeremy was disgusted. ‘The Inquiry didn’t matter. Or it only mattered because it meant everything was finished with, everything was shut down. No . . . I was sick to death of myself, George, sick to death of me. That’s all.’
He almost sounded drunk, and I wondered if he was taking something. Painkillers, perhaps, for whatever was wrong with him.
‘So what happened?’ I asked.
‘I had a room, in a very nice hotel. I had them install a full bar for me there, and restock it every day. I called in women even though I couldn’t do much with them.’ Another glance at Louise. ‘It was better than drinking alone. And it seemed to be working. I grew ill, then very ill. The hotel was worried. They wanted to call in a doctor. You can understand I hardly wanted one. But of course, they didn’t want a dead public figure on their hands, not with all that wine and so many women around. That sort of thing happens too often as it is.’ He started to laugh, and that descended into a cough which racked his entire body.
Louise paused, glass halfway to her lips, and watched him carefully.
The spasm passed. Was the spot of blood on Jeremy’s shirt larger now? His eyes were shining with tears. ‘It got awkward. I was soiling myself, vomiting blood, the room was an awful mess. Finally they asked me to leave. And the truth was, I was in too much pain to argue. Too much pain to even hold a single drink down. My plan was falling apart. You have to have some strength to kill yourself with alcohol and, as it turned out, I was too weak.’
He was ignoring both Louise and me now, staring straight ahead down the table to where, in a large golden frame, Satan tempted Jesus in the desert. It was his favourite painting. His theme on the whole world, and the role he had always played.
‘Still, I might have made it. But then I had a visitor. An unpleasant visitor. I thought Marvin had sent him at the time, just for cruelty’s sake. But Marvin didn’t send him. Marvin had too many troubles of his own . . .’
Last Drinks Page 13
