Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  He dug laboriously in a pocket, pulled forth a set of rosary beads. They might have been white once but were yellow now. Jeremy held them out to me like they were an explanation. His hands shook, and Christ trembled on the cross.

  He said, ‘It’s because the priest can never tell anyone. You could have killed his own mother, but if you tell him about it in the confessional, not only will he not tell anyone else, he will deny to himself that even he knows. Because when you confess you’re not really talking to a person at all, you’re talking directly to God. The priest is only a conduit, a human face on the divine.’

  His hands sank to the table, and his fingers slid over the beads.

  ‘They have a marvellous mental agility, priests. That’s what I mean by discretion. Not just a promise to withhold private information, but a spiritual imperative that makes it impossible to do otherwise. It’s a liberating thing, when you know you have that at your disposal. You can say anything. You can do anything. You can confront the truth. That’s what St Amand’s offers.’

  He was lost in the beads. Louise drained another glass. I noticed her fingernails were painted, just the lightest shade of red, barely above skin tone. Her lips as well. Her eyes met mine again. I was almost intoxicated by the atmosphere of the room, with the memory of drinking, like phantom pain. I picked up my own glass of water and drank, tasting nothing.

  Jeremy looked up from the beads. Sweat had broken out on his face. ‘Have you ever been through alcohol withdrawal?’

  I thought of night and rain and water dripping from trees.

  ‘Not in a detox ward,’ I answered.

  Jeremy reached out and pulled the bottle of red wine to him. He peered at the label, or beyond it, into the depths of the wine itself.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing. Your body is collapsing without the drug. Your mind is collapsing as well. And sometimes, if it’s especially bad, everything comes out. It can be like a religious conversion, a revelation, a Road to Damascus. Every weakness, every crime, every shame, big or small—they’re all laid in front of you, and they get more unbearable with every passing hour. All the cruel and vicious things you’ve done in your drunkenness, it’s a version of hell. It’s either go back to the drink, or go mad, or deal with it somehow. The doctors have drugs, they can sedate you, they can stop the physical convulsions, the hallucinations, and later they’ll start the counselling, but for those first few days, sometimes it’s just you, all alone . . .’

  A tremor passed through Louise, and her throat worked momentarily. Her eyes were still wide and shining, but they were focused on nothing. Jeremy tilted the bottle and refilled her glass. The shaking in his hands sent wine spilling onto the white cloth.

  Jeremy looked at me. ‘When all that is happening, if you have secrets worth the telling—and believe me, the patients in St Amand’s have those sorts of secrets—then you want people around you who hear but do not hear, who see but do not see, who will act but who will never remember or repeat. You want a confessional, George. You want a priest. That’s what you get at St Amand’s. And that’s what you pay for.’

  My head was full of wine. I could feel it pulsing in my veins as Louise raised her glass yet again and drank.

  I said, ‘And what sort of secrets were you keeping when you went there?’

  But Jeremy shook his head, sank back into the chair. ‘You’re a friend, George, but you’re not my confessor, or my doctor. It’s none of your business.’

  I needed to move, to breathe a lighter air. I rose, headed for the bathroom. Once there I dashed cold water on my skin, stared at myself in the mirror. It was an old face, tired, flushed with heat. But the eyes were clear. I was not drunk, had not touched alcohol in ten years. I never would again.

  I went back out. Louise was standing at Jeremy’s side, her hands on his shoulders, as if massaging them. His head was sunk again, old and shivering. She moved back to her seat as I resumed mine, and as she lowered herself she swayed for a second, reached out a steadying hand. So smooth it was hardly noticeable at all. She had drunk almost three bottles, and it hadn’t even been three hours. Jeremy leered at me sidelong, bent over, an evil dwarf.

  ‘Better?’ he asked.

  ‘What sort of people might Charlie have met while he was in St Amand’s?’

  ‘So that’s what you’re thinking . . . it was someone he met in there.’

  ‘He was alone and penniless and yet he spent three days in that ward, at whose expense we don’t even know. On the third day he suddenly checked out before his treatment was complete, immediately stole a car and drove to Highwood, where he was killed that night. What am I supposed to think?’

  ‘And why do you want to know?’

  ‘He was my friend.’

  ‘Oh? I heard that bullet gave him brain damage. I heard he was a derelict, George. Did you take him in? Did you and May say you were sorry for everything?’

  ‘He wouldn’t talk to me.’

  ‘A guilty conscience is a bad motivation. The worst.’

  ‘It was your place, Jeremy. You knew everyone else who was in there. All the regulars. Was there anyone who knew Charlie? Anyone from the old days? Anyone who might . . . I don’t know . . . not have wanted to see Charlie again?’

  He shook his head, stubborn.

  ‘Who else went there, Jeremy?’

  His voice was distant. ‘Kindred spirits.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘I can’t say. One of the things you sign upon entering the ward is a contract that you will never discuss anything that you see or hear. That’s the deal, George. That’s why it works.’

  ‘But you weren’t like that. You told everyone you were an alcoholic. You didn’t even keep your visits secret. So what would it matter?’

  ‘It was different then. I told everyone because I was ashamed.’

  ‘Of being an alcoholic?’

  ‘No,’ and it was a whisper. ‘Ashamed of wanting a cure.’

  He was gazing longingly at Louise. She had finished the third bottle now, and was gazing back. I might not have been in the room. Something flamed in their eyes.

  ‘Kiss me,’ said Jeremy.

  She rose and, swaying ever so slightly, leaned over him and gently touched her mouth to his. Jeremy sighed and closed his eyes while she hovered there, watching him, a fiery angel. I thought of the three bottles of wine swirling in her blood. I thought of Emily, the taste of alcohol faint on her lips. I thought of Maybellene, of drinking whole mouthfuls from her, her hair lightly touching my face. Then Louise turned her face away, took one aimless step, and vomited onto the floor.

  We watched. It was a simple cough at first, a mouthful of wine, then her knees gave way and she was hunched on the floor, retching repeatedly. The smell of it flooded the room, but still, she was quiet about it, almost refined. When it was finished she stood for a moment, considering us both. Sweat sheened her face and her eyes shone as if with great joy or relief. Then she was gone.

  ‘All right,’ Jeremy breathed. ‘If you have to know . . .’

  I hardly remembered. ‘What?’

  ‘I know who paid for Charlie.’

  ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘Think, George. It could only be one person. He came here. Before you. Only a few months ago. He’s not well. He’s sick, George. And deluded. He thinks he suffered the most, but he doesn’t know what the word means. He came and saw me and we talked about everything. You never knew it, no one did, but St Amand’s was his escape as well. It still is, and he still keeps it secret. He wasn’t like me. He never told anyone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It was sad. He was always ashamed of the wrong things. And he was ashamed, too, about Charlie. He wanted to find him. That’s why he came here. He thought I might know where Charlie was. He thought he could help. He was like you, George. He was leaving it far, far too late.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’

  From the bathroom came the sounds of more vomiting. It didn’t sound dignif
ied now. It sounded painful and hard, broken by gasps for breath.

  Jeremy tilted his head to the sound. He smiled. ‘It was good to see you again, George. Thank you for coming. But I think you should go now.’

  ‘Who?’ I demanded.

  The smile was serene, a death mask. ‘Marvin, of course. Who else?’

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Marvellous Marvin McNulty.

  He haunted my dreams that night, back in the New Farm motel room.

  What did you call such a man? A confidence trickster? A political operator? A visionary? A fraud? Not even Marvin himself could decide, even in his own book.

  Nor could the public. They loved him, they hated him, laughed at him, stood in awe of him. They voted him in with derision, voted him out with regret. They sent him to jail, then they couldn’t wait till he got out again. It was like schizophrenia, but they wanted him around, one way or the other. All that mattered was that Marvin entertained. The people of Queensland were his audience, and they were fascinated by the show he put on. His only problem was that he really arrived on the scene too late. If he’d started five years earlier, he might have climbed all the way up to premier, and with Marvin at the helm, who knew what might have happened to us all?

  But could he have made it anywhere else other than Queensland? Would he even have tried it anywhere other than Queensland? After all, a state with sound and sensible government would hardly have attracted men like Marvin. Not if decision making was reasoned, policy cautious, and accountability a prime concern. A state in collapse, however, a political party with no fear of ever losing power, a browbeaten media, a compliant police force, an entrenched air of secret deals and unexplained cash flows . . . that was when the Marvins of the world took notice. That was when the small-time con men and shady entrepreneurs suddenly saw that the main chance for a fast operator was in so-called legitimate government. That was when the circus really began.

  Such was the government of Queensland of my day, and such a man was Marvin McNulty. Of all things, a used-car salesman.

  That was literally where he started. A small used-car lot in the suburbs that he ran with a friend. It was the late sixties. Marvin was only eighteen. He showed me a photo once, him and his partner in front of their car yard. They were laughable. His friend was a dour, grim-looking boy from the bush, and Marvin . . . Marvin was a bony, pimply youth with his slicked-back hair and monstrous glasses that swallowed half his face. They never changed, those glasses, and the lenses seemed half an inch thick. His green eyes bulged through them like baby watermelons. But there was the brain behind them, and meanwhile those eyes and those glasses were his winning edge. The sheer size of them entranced you, they never seemed to blink and you couldn’t look away. So you hardly noticed his bad teeth or thinning hair, you hardly noticed the ludicrous body his head sat on—all legs and arms when he was younger, all belly and legs and arms when he was older. All you saw were the eyes.

  And all you heard was his voice. It was deep and earnest and almost seemed to be crying out against his appearance. You had to take what that voice said seriously, because no one with those eyes and that body could possibly be anything but trustworthy, desperately and hopelessly so. A kid like that, trying to sell used cars (the customer would think), it’s too sad—and so they would buy a car off the sorry boy, just to give him a break. Later they would invest in his idiot projects, just to give the sorry boy a break. Later still they would vote for him in elections, maybe for the same reason. And like everything about Marvin, it was pure connivance. He took the public’s instinctive pity and worked it like a seam of gold. Not that it was an original strategy. Half the Queensland government was running on the same ticket, even the premier, for Queenslanders were always wary of the more sophisticated types—they liked their representatives to be awkward and stumbling. They mistook it for honesty. So much so that the Queensland parliament sometimes bordered on a sideshow collection of the ugly, the misshapen and the incoherent.

  Meanwhile the cars Marvin sold were lemons, one and all, and his business went bust. Undeterred, he and his partner formed an enterprise named McNulty and Co, indulging in property speculation. They got caught up in one of the bayside property scandals that plagued Brisbane at the time, and promptly went bust again. Next they went into insurance brokerage. They grew bored with that, veered into swimming pool construction, grew bored with that as well, then started dreaming of theme parks for tourists. It was the mid-seventies by then, and Queensland tourism was booming. Brisbane may have been the most bland city in the country, but there was still the weather and that long coastline of beaches, and the glory of the reefs. Tourists were flocking up from the south. The only problem was, you couldn’t charge money for the weather or the beach. So everyone was dreaming about theme parks, and everyone was building them, and Marvin joined the throng. Marvin always joined in everything. Whatever other crimes he may have been accused of later, originality was never one of them.

  Then again . . .

  McNulty and Co’s theme park was to be called The Big Hill, and its aim was to be the hilliest golf course, hopefully, in the world. They’d got hold of a worthless and incredibly knotted piece of country behind the beaches north of Brisbane, all ridges and steep gullies, and on it they wanted to build eighteen holes of madness. Near-vertical fairways, greens perched on ledges or hidden in hollows, par fives that were five hundred yards long, three hundred of which was straight down and which you needed a cable car to descend. Marvin could already see the T-shirts, the novelty pens, the celebrity tournaments. He’d never played a game of golf in his life.

  But the money rolled in. It was such a fool of an idea from such a strange man, investors could smell a hit. Then, to everyone’s surprise, just before construction was due to begin, McNulty and Co sold out to a wealthy southerner, recently arrived in Queensland and bedazzled, perhaps, by the sheer craziness of the place. Several months later, torrential rain caused most of the landscaping to collapse in a landslide, and the government surveyors announced the site was unstable and unfit for any public use. The whole deal folded, and even after the dust of legal action had settled, McNulty and Co came out holding the cash. No one ever found out about Marvin’s relationship with certain figures in the state surveyor’s office. Or the amount of money he paid them to doctor the initial reports.

  All in all a minor enough incident, but it must have been that first brush with the elasticity of official procedures that gave Marvin his inspiration. Government! The real money obviously wasn’t to be made in bribing official bodies, it was to be made in controlling those official bodies. Within another two years he was a member of the ruling political party, had secured pre-selection for a safe seat, and was duly elected into parliament at the tender age of twenty-nine. It was all so unlikely that the voters had no choice but to believe he was some sort of boy wonder—anything else and they would have felt like fools themselves. Where he got the money for it all, no one really knew. Even his Big Hill windfall would barely have covered the money he was rumoured to have thrown around the party structure. But no matter how deep his debts might have been, it wasn’t a problem now. He had a steady MP’s salary to rely on and, more importantly, he was in government, it was the late seventies, and the Queensland cash-cow was just getting into full swing. As he would later admit, the first thing he did after being sworn in was to send his secretary out to buy him a new wallet.

  The second thing was to move into his electorate, a technicality he hadn’t bothered with until then. And his new electoral office was, of course, right around the corner from Charlie’s little restaurant.

  And so it went. A few years later came the meteoric leap to Minister for Mines and Energy, during the power dispute. No one knew what he’d said to convince the premier he could handle it, what strings he had to pull, but even his own party was shocked by him. And it was too good to last. Mines and Energy was a rich portfolio, ripe with kickbacks and incentives from big business and mining, and for all that
Marvin had outclassed the striking electrical workers, it was deemed too high a reward. The more senior ministers, alarmed and protective of their own rackets, made sure he was demoted in the next reshuffle. For the rest of his career, Marvin was forced to wander the minor ministries. Minister for Education, which was baffling given that he didn’t have one; Minister for Small Business, for a man who’d failed at every commercial enterprise he’d tried; and finally, Minister for Local Government, when his only interest in local councils was the circumvention of their zoning laws.

  In all they were a disappointment, even though he turned a personal profit out of each of them, and even though he remained a star to the public, out of all proportion to his actual power. Still, maybe that disappointment explained why he threw so much of his time into the syndicate. True, towards the end there was talk of handing him the police ministry, which showed how crazy things were getting by that stage. If he’d got there, maybe he could have gone the rest of the way as well. Marvin certainly had no doubts he was destined to be premier. But then the Inquiry came along and kicked the whole business out from under him.

  So the syndicate remained his true love.

  I never knew exactly how big it was in the end. That was Lindsay’s business. Apart from the restaurants, we owned two clubs outright, with their attached casinos, of that much I was certain. But we also had investments in others clubs and bars, and even connections with several dedicated brothels. Meanwhile we all had roles to play. Marvin was unquestionably in charge, for all that Charlie was the figurehead. Lindsay, of course, was the financial manager. Jeremy was the elder statesman, our patron, so to speak. And Maybellene, to everyone’s surprise, left Jeremy’s employ after a year or so and took up a position working for Marvin as his political advisor and general assistant—despite the fact that he’d been the very man responsible for her ending up in jail. Jeremy was philosophical about losing her, however. May had learnt his lessons too well, that was all.