‘This is the answer to the big mystery,’ said Lewis, tapping a pile of paper that sat next to the computer and the printer. ‘What he’s been doing all this time.’
‘Marvin, it seems,’ said Kelly, ‘is writing a book.’
I looked at the pile of paper. It was maybe a hundred pages thick, the paper covered with single-spaced typing.
Marvin? A book?
‘What is it? I asked.
‘His memoirs. His whole story. The life and times of Marvin McNulty.’
‘Sort of, anyway,’ added Lewis, flicking through the pages.
Kelly pulled out the chair and offered it to me. ‘We had a good read of it last night. His version of events is, to say the least, pretty subjective. And he’s not telling everything, not by a long shot.’
I sat in the chair. There was a small selection of books on the desk, propped up between two book ends. A dictionary, a Windows 95 manual. I examined the little bookshelf, four shelves high. There were novels and texts and histories, mostly Australian. Books of which I’d heard, but never read. Maybe it was what you needed to get an arts degree.
This was what Marvin had been doing?
Lewis was sorting through the typed pages. ‘It’s all over the place, really. But you’re all in here. You, Jeremy, Lindsay—even May.’
Kelly said, ‘Find one of the bits about George.’
Lewis sorted through some more pages, then handed one to me. ‘It’s not long after the Inquiry has started, and Marvin’s just been sacked from cabinet.’
They both watched, smiling, while I read.
It was like we’d lost a war or something. People were running. I went out to survey the city one last time, and I came across George hiding out in a bar. He was white as a sheet and terrified and didn’t want to be seen with me, not any more. Poor old George, he was worried about his job at the paper, and looking for courage in a bottle.
‘Kiss the job goodbye,’ I told him. ‘What did you think this all was? A tea party?’
‘What if I get charged with something?’ he wanted to know.
Fat fucking chance of that. Not fat boy George. Fucked almost as many of our girls as I did, had a ball with them all, free of charge, but he never had a clue really. George was always strictly gloss.
‘How’s May?’ I asked, and that sent him trembling all over again, for he was fucking her too, of course, on the sly, and to hell with Charlie. I dug it in a little. ‘Hey, if Charlie goes down he’ll be out of the way for you two.’
That made him squirm. George and Charlie were supposed to be best buddies.
‘Charlie won’t go to jail, will he?’
‘Course he will. So will I.’
‘Just for running a few clubs?’
Honestly, he was a simpleton.
‘The walls are down,’ I told him, ‘and this town is gonna burn.’ Then I left him to it.
Later I heard he’d run off into the hills, but that was no surprise.
I put the page back on the desk. The detectives were still smiling.
‘He can actually write okay,’ Lewis suggested, ‘don’t you think?’
My face was burning. I mustered a reply. ‘Like you said, his version is pretty subjective.’
Except it wasn’t. I remembered that meeting with Marvin. It was the last time I saw him in private. And he was right, I was scared, I didn’t know what was happening, and drinking seemed to offer the only escape from it all. That and Maybellene. For the two years between the start of the Inquiry and the final collapse, they were the only two things I had.
Lewis was still flicking through the pages. ‘There’s more like that, but he doesn’t really talk about you much. The really interesting stuff for us is in the last chapter. The last chapter he’s written so far, anyway. It doesn’t look like he means it to be the end.’
‘Interesting stuff about what?’
‘About Charlie, of course.’
And he handed me another page. The last page.
Prison was fucking terrible for a man like me. All that time, and there’s nothing you can do with it, you can never act. That was the worst. I was a man of action, I never looked back, never regretted. But in prison you can’t look forward, it’s a dead-end road, the future. You can only look back. It’s a test you’ve got to pass. Deal with the past somehow. Otherwise you’ll go mad.
That was Charlie’s problem. I only met him once in prison. He was a mess to look at, his face was all scarred and he couldn’t speak properly. They were just transferring him through our section. They usually had him in special sections, ’cause his brain was gone after the gunshot. But he was having other troubles, too, someone told me. Getting violent, picking fights, screaming about stuff, like he didn’t deserve to be there. As if any of us did.
I don’t think he recognised me at first. ‘Charlie,’ I said.
He stared at me, and it wasn’t the old Charlie. He started yelling. ‘Get away from me!’ He spat in my face. It was hatred, pure hatred. He even went for me, but I had a few friends there, and they held him off, got some guards to drag him away.
Like I said, his mind was gone. He was looking for someone to blame. As if it was all my fault, everything that happened. Everyone always thought it was my damn fault.
Christ, it wasn’t my fault. Charlie wouldn’t have got anywhere without me. I was doing him a favour. It was his own life. I didn’t force him into anything, I didn’t steal his wife, I didn’t pull the trigger. And what did I get out of it all?
So hey, fuck you too, Charlie.
And that was all there was.
‘It doesn’t sound like they were friendly to me,’ said Kelly.
‘Sound likes Charlie was an angry man,’ his partner added. ‘We thought he might have just been angry at you, over the Maybellene thing. That’s why we had you pegged for a while, if Charlie was heading up to Highwood to sort you out. But we don’t think that any more.’
‘Not now that we know Marvin and Charlie met up in St Amand’s. And that they felt this way about each other.’
I needed air. I wanted out of this house, away from this book, away from these men.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘What we’re telling you is, if you do see your friend Marvin, you tell us straight away. For your own sake. He’s dangerous.’
‘Marvin? Dangerous?’
Kelly sounded almost sad. ‘Don’t you get it? We think Marvin killed Charlie.’
TWENTY-FOUR
The police drove me back to the motel.
It was only much later, when everything was finished, that I tracked down and read the rest of Marvin’s unfinished memoirs, only much later that I understood the way it had all become warped in his mind. It was a wandering, disjointed account, jumping between styles and arguments and excuses, and made almost no sense in the end. I suppose most of it was written while he was drunk. But for the time being, all I had were those two stark pages, and they had seared themselves, ugly, into my brain.
‘Marvin wouldn’t hurt anyone,’ I said to the detectives.
‘Why not?’ they replied. ‘He was obviously pissed off at Charlie, and God knows, Charlie loathed Marvin. Stuck in a detox ward together, who knows how bad things might have got between them?’
I thought of Charlie’s body, tied against a wall. ‘Not that bad. Never that bad.’
‘We’ve seen worse, George. People do unbelievable things.’
‘And why up there? Why in Highwood? Why was Charlie looking for me?’
‘Maybe we’ll never know. Maybe Marvin had him fired up about old times, so Charlie was looking to settle things with you too, like we first thought. Maybe they went up there together to see you for some reason, and things got out of hand . . . anything’s possible.’
‘I don’t believe it. It’s crazy.’
‘It’s the best we’ve got so far.’
They dropped me on the street outside my motel, the sun blazing in the sky.
‘What are your p
lans now?’ Kelly asked me.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Go home, George. If anyone finds Marvin, it’ll be us. Then we’ll know, one way or the other. But you got nothing more to do here.’
Lewis was digging in his wallet. ‘Tell you what, if you’re looking for something to do on your last night, why not check this out?’
He handed me a card. Above the address was a stylised picture of a cocktail glass balancing on a crouching woman’s back.
‘What’s this?’
Kelly was frowning, but Lewis only grinned, boyish and cruel. ‘It’s your sort of place, George.’
And they drove away, leaving me alone on the footpath, in the middle of New Farm, my old home and a foreign land.
He was white as a sheet and terrified . . .
I studied the card again. It meant nothing. I looked up at the mirrored windows of my motel room. There would be no relief in there. Only more stifling air and Charlie’s ashes on the coffee table.
His face was all scarred and he couldn’t speak properly . . .
Sweat dripped out of me. I needed something to drink. It could only be water. What I really needed was a dark, cool bar and droplets of condensation on the rim of a beer glass, golden and foaming, and Lord if only . . . but it could only be water. Tasteless, useless water.
My feet were moving.
Go home, George . . .
And why not? Why stay? Marvin was gone, for whatever reason, and there was nowhere else to look, no one else to ask. My car was there, it was only a couple of hours.
Later I heard he’d run off into the hills . . .
I walked away from the motel, away from the shame and the temptation. I didn’t know where I could go, what I could do, but I walked anyway, if only to hold down something that was swelling in my chest.
Could Marvin have done that to Charlie?
It was inconceivable. After all those years that we’d drunk together, laughed together, wandered the night. Marvin had no standards, no morality, everyone knew that, but something so cold, so merciless? No. I knew the man.
George was strictly gloss . . .
I didn’t know him at all.
I walked. Heat beamed off the ground and down from the buildings on either side. It was only a block across and I was into Brunswick Street. It was busy, traffic jammed back in both directions, and the footpaths were crowded with people. I stood still and looked up and down. Cafes and bars, galleries and bookshops, none of them recognisable. I had a choice of going left or right. Left would lead me up into the Valley, right would lead me down to New Farm Park and the river. I turned right.
I felt increasingly unsure of everything. A sneering, contemptuous Marvin. A bitter, hateful Charlie. Strangers to me. And what was I now? What had happened to me? Was I really that much of a coward? The others had all come back at least, whatever else might have happened to them. At least they’d had the courage to confront Brisbane.
I could barely look it in the face.
Driving through the town had been bad enough. Down on the footpaths, the hatred for it came back like weariness. Change was everywhere, in the buildings, the smells, the noises. Everything felt brand new. The dark little second-hand shops were gone, the grimy takeaways, the corner stores and the pawn merchants, the narrow delicatessens. The prostitutes were gone, the drunken old men shuffling along the pavement or sleeping in corners, the paranoids from the halfway houses. The police station was still there, but the brothel which had once existed across the road from it was not. And of the dozens of boarding houses and cheap hotels that had once lined the street, barely two or three remained, and it didn’t seem that even they could remain much longer. Jackhammers rattled death knells. The only real familiarity was the heat, and that was an old enemy, not an old friend. And without the old refuge of alcohol, the heat was unbearable.
I stomped along, dizzy with it, feeling as if every eye was upon me, full of scorn. It wasn’t just that all the old buildings were gone, and all the old people—it was the new inhabitants that disturbed me most, the new generation. So young, so confident. Late lunchers and afternoon coffee drinkers idled at the tables of the cafes and watched me go by, safe in their shade. Stylish waiters lounged in dim interiors. Mobile phones trilled, and music I didn’t understand thumped from passing cars, and from inside shops. It was vibrant, alive, but for me it was all distorted. It was a world that had replaced my kind. There was no reason to hate people for being young and bright, but I did. I wanted my world back. Where things moved in secrecy and back rooms, where there was no glamour, no grace, only a sweaty drunken rush, and only for the few.
Except even that world had been an illusion. I hadn’t belonged there either.
. . . he never had a clue.
It ached like pain. I walked, as if walking itself would be distraction enough. But this wasn’t the forests of Highwood, walking wouldn’t help me now. I came to New Farm Park. It was not as crowded as when I’d seen it two days earlier. Today people had withdrawn from the sun, into the shade of the trees. There were only a few elderly couples having afternoon tea, a man sleeping with a newspaper over his face, a dog owner watching his animal chew on a stick it was too hot to chase. I walked across the grass, alone in the sunlight. The park felt much smaller than I remembered, its rose gardens somehow thinner and drabber, the grass tinged with brown. In my time the park had been the one fresh and beautiful spot in a suburb half derelict—now the suburb itself was shining and new and it was the park that looked worn out. A police car cruised by on the road that circled the lawns. Its occupants watched me indifferently. I came to the wall of grey rocks and boulders that marked the river bank.
The river was much wider than it had been back at Marvin’s house. Here it was spreading out as the swamps and sandbars of its mouth drew near. Not a breath of wind ruffled its surface, and nothing moved. At low tide I knew the mudflats would be exposed, but the tide was in now, perhaps just turning, and the water was poised, high and sluggish, with nowhere to flow. Twenty yards off the bank three yachts hung limply on their pylons. No one was on board. I waited. Finally, off to one side a lone figure in a kayak appeared, labouring towards the ocean. I watched him, the dips made by his paddles stretching out behind like footprints in mud. I could hear his breathing across the water. Heat pooled in my head. Out across the river, and beyond the roofs of Woolloongabba, there was a haze in the south-western sky, low on the horizon. The suggestion of shadow and cloud. Maybe a storm was building in the mountains, maybe over Highwood itself. But a change was hours away from Brisbane, if it ever came at all.
A man stirred in the shade of a tree behind me, came my way.
‘Do you have the time?’ he asked.
I told him. He was wearing a watch and studied it, as if to check, hovering.
‘My name’s Justin,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’
I told him that as well.
He looked up and down the river, hesitant. ‘Do you have Jesus in your life, George?’
Oh God . . .
I turned and walked back the way I’d come.
The ache was still in my chest. How could memory be physical like this? I left the park, trudged along Brunswick Street again, taking the opposite footpath. A few blocks along I came to an imposing stone mansion set back from the road amidst a large garden. It was the residence of Brisbane’s Catholic Archbishop. It appeared unaltered, as timeless as the church itself. I didn’t know who the Archbishop was now, but I’d met one of his predecessors once, a man long since dead. It was at a dinner with Marvin, in the days when bishops mixed with government ministers and neither bothered much with their respective congregations. All of us Catholic, all of us lapsed. Just beyond the residence I turned into a side street. There was a church there, not a cathedral or anything grand, simply a church. And next to the church was the block of flats in which I had once lived.
It was a dark, brick building, three storeys high, two apartments to each floor. I’d rented the forward fl
at on the top level. It had big rooms and high ceilings and had cost hardly anything—no one with money had wanted to live in this part of New Farm in those days. Even the church next door had been more of a curse for the rental agent than a boon, because of the noise. Sunday mornings I had always woken unwillingly to the endless tolling of bells. Sometimes there would be a choir. I would hear their soaring voices begging the Lord for deliverance, and from the depths of my Sunday morning hangover, I would echo their plea. For silence. For mercy. Suspecting even then that salvation was not something I had earned.
It would be expensive to rent there now. The garden had been remodelled and the small lobby redecorated and a security door installed. I looked up at my old windows and saw the tops of pot plants and white walls behind. The walls had been brown in my time, half panelled in wood, and darkness was the way I remembered it. I’d possessed very little furniture and no plants. And suddenly I remembered myself and Maybellene, together on a couch in the middle of an otherwise empty living room, the hint of dawn coming through the windows, a bottle of wine on the floor. The apartment had felt as vast and cool as an auditorium, and May’s whispers seemed to echo, close to my ear.
He was fucking her too, of course . . .
The ache sharpened around my heart.
I’d left the couch and all my other furniture when I fled Brisbane, abandoned it for the agent to do with as he wished. Perhaps some of it was still there.
And that couldn’t be borne.
I turned and went back to Brunswick Street. The afternoon was lengthening into evening, and the cafes were filling up, but the heat still held the air breathless. I walked blindly for twenty minutes, shouldering my way through pedestrians and around tables on the footpaths, just putting distance behind me. I stared at the ground straight ahead and met no one’s eyes. Laughter seemed to follow me along, careless and innocent and piercing. And when I looked up I was at the other end of Brunswick Street in the very heart of the old Brisbane I’d once known—Fortitude Valley—a heart that seemed to have been removed by surgery and replaced with something pink and new and pulsing to a different beat.
Last Drinks Page 17
