Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  There was no escape. I faltered and gazed about at all the new people and lights and noise, the hopelessness growing inside me. The building that had housed my newspaper was square across the road. Apartments now, but there was no mistaking it. There was the top floor corner window, where the editor’s office had been. Where I’d been called, finally, knowing what would happen and dreading it.

  ‘Pack your bags,’ was all he’d said to me, and I’d stood, waiting, as if there might be something else. He’d looked up at me, amazed I was still there, and anger had flared. ‘What did you expect? Christ, George, what the fuck were you thinking?’

  And I’d left then.

  He’d had more worries on his hands than one wayward journalist. His hands were hardly clean themselves. Too many friendships with too many suspect people. And the paper was losing money, the day of the afternoon tabloid was passing, and they’d lost the whole jump on the Inquiry business to their morning competitor. Within a year they were gone. Another victim, in their own way, of the whole disaster.

  It was enough, it was too much. I needed somewhere to hide. The old hotels were still there, but the public bars and tiled walls were gone, and I couldn’t trust myself in any of them anyway. The cafes all seemed too small, too open, too full of people. I reeled through the traffic and moved into a mall where a guitarist played on a stage and where transplanted trees dropped leaves onto paving stones that had just been a naked street in my time. I saw a restaurant that had a long room running back from the front doors. I knew it, possibly, from my own day, though it was hard to tell when everything else was so different. But more importantly, the back of the room was empty. I took a table in the far corner. I ordered iced water and drank it thirstily, glass after glass, until my stomach started to cramp. It satisfied nothing. I ordered a bowl of pasta I didn’t want, just so I could remain there. Across the mall I could see a bar full of people sitting with their drinks, talking, smoking. There was no need for them to order food. A drink in front of you was an allowance to sit forever, undisturbed. Everything in this world was better when you drank.

  Tension ticked in me, minute by minute. People came and went in the restaurant, always in groups. I was the only person seated alone. I stared at the table, at the floor. My pasta arrived and I picked at it, but there was a nervous pit in my stomach, I had no appetite. The cold water went straight through me and came out in my armpits and on my back as sweat. Every time I looked up someone seemed to be looking back at me. I moved seats, to face the wall, but a mirror hung there. I saw a sunburned face, flushed with moisture, a tight, clenched mouth. I moved back again. I was going mad. What was I waiting for, why was I here?

  George and Charlie were supposed to be best buddies.

  It was too late, too late.

  A man approached my table, not a waiter. I looked up at him, confused. I recognised him from somewhere. Then I had it—he was the Christian, from the park.

  ‘Still alone?’ he said.

  What was this? Was he following me?

  I lurched up. ‘Get away from me.’

  I dropped money on the table and almost ran out into the street.

  It was dark now, and more oppressive. People were everywhere. The sky above was lurid and starless. I didn’t know which way to go, didn’t think I could face the walk back to the motel, not down that street, not like this, and what would I do when I got there anyway? Then there was a giant flash of blue from high above. I stared up, baffled. Thunder rumbled, and a curl of air whispered along the mall. The diners at the cafes paused momentarily, glancing at the sky, and the blue light flickered again. In that moment all I saw were their upturned faces illuminated in the corpse glow of the lightning, hundreds of them, pale and open mouthed and staring, and there swept over me a sick loathing for everything Brisbane had become.

  Then fat drops of water were smacking onto the paving stones, thunder rolled and, startled, the crowd began to move.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The downpour cleared the streets.

  I sheltered under an awning and watched it. Thunder muttered and sheets of lightning flickered between the buildings, but there was no real violence in it. It was no more than a passing spring shower. Still, the drops on my face were icy cool and something uncurled in me. I sucked in breaths of wet air, and remembered other Brisbane storms. Dark lines of them marching down from the hills, dropping hail and fire, winds sweeping at their feet. This was not one of those storms, perhaps, but I felt as if the old city itself had come to my rescue. If only now it would rain all night.

  Spring storms did not work that way. After half an hour the first rush eased to a light rain, then to a drizzle and then was gone altogether. The thunder and lightning faded into the northern sky. I emerged from my shelter to a mall that was shining and wet and mostly empty. Down one end people still gathered in the windows of the cafes, but I walked to the far end where there were only trees dripping and the pavement steaming from the day’s stored heat. Cars swished by, and brick walls glistened. I went on beyond the mall and back into the Valley streets, up towards the train station. There was almost no one on the footpaths here, and the cafes had not reached beyond the mall. Instead there were clearance houses and souvenir shops, video arcades and stairways leading to nightclubs. Empty and wet like this, it was almost like the Valley of old. Robbed of crowds the discount stores seemed cheap and vagrant, and the nightclubs as seedy as the ones I remembered from ten years before. Maybe inside they were still the same, maybe only the owners and the names had changed.

  And it was all so small. Just four or five city blocks had contained most of the sin and corruption that would eventually bring a government down. As I walked I listed off the buildings I still recognised, the doorways that had led to the gaming dens and the parlours where women waited and menus offered sexual services. There’d been no big signs or bright lights or semi-naked girls loitering outside, no touts calling at passers-by. It was never a Kings Cross or a St Kilda, but it had been blatant enough. A government minister had once bizarrely asserted in public that there were no brothels or illegal casinos in Brisbane. Amused journalists had pointed out that over twenty advertised almost openly in the daily papers, and insisted on taking the minister on a short tour of the Valley that showed up a dozen. The minister publicly expressed amazement. Privately some of the casino operators observed that the same minister was one of their most regular customers, and in higher circles he was told to keep his fat mouth shut. The journalists were told the same thing by their editors. All those ads were worth money to the newspapers. What were they trying to do—fuck up the whole system?

  Marvin was in hysterics.

  But it was nothing to laugh at. In its small way, it was the beginning of the end.

  The thoughts did not seem so bitter now. I sat on a bus stop seat and stared around and strove to remember what it was like, and who’d owned what. There had been the two major syndicates which together had controlled most of the prostitution and gambling in Brisbane, and there had been the smaller, individual operators. Situated between them, the smallest of the syndicates, or the largest of the private operations, there had been us. Either way, almost everyone had used the Valley as their headquarters. From where I sat now, the nearest police station had been just out of sight around the corner, and its proximity had been a benefit rather than a disadvantage. Each syndicate paid into the police funds for protection, and the money filtered all the way up to the police commissioner. That he was corrupt was widely enough known, even to people outside the system, but he had the ear of the premier, and had always proved invulnerable to investigation or removal. He would not fall until the premier himself began to totter.

  That was the history, it was what you could read in the papers, but it wasn’t what I remembered. Instead I remembered how Charlie and May and Marvin and I, and sometimes Jeremy, would roll out of one of Charlie’s restaurants at one or two in the morning, and walk the Valley streets, drunk and knowing that the city was ours.
How we’d walk up some narrow flight of stairs or through some closed doors and find another world, crowded and hot, full of cigarette smoke and beer fumes and men, and a bar that never closed. Police cars could be parked right outside and it wouldn’t matter because the car would be empty and the police would be inside, enjoying the drinks and women that were their due. Or if it was a casino, then the police might be at the tables, and if their losses were too big, the proprietor would stroll over and have a quiet word to the dealer, and chips would magically reappear.

  I remembered another time, when the five of us had wandered further afield and come across a newly opened club in Woolloongabba, we noticed that there were no police around and that the women were nervous and the owner was worried and then, to everyone’s amazement, the police suddenly appeared on an official raid. They bundled off the owner and the girls, along with all the towels and sheets, but left us and the other customers alone. What the hell was all this, Marvin wanted to know. The police officer apologised for all the trouble, but informed us that the establishment was in direct competition with a major syndicate brothel around the corner, and that it had refused the takeover bids and the veiled threats, so the police had been asked by the syndicate to shut the rival down. Of course there was no need for our night to be ruined, the officer went on. As he’d said, the approved club was just around the corner.

  It never happened to one of our own, of course. Marvin had the right connections, and Lindsay, in charge of the actual clubs, kept in touch with the bigger syndicates and trod on no toes. There was, after all, more than enough to go around.

  I remembered how good it felt, being on the inside of it all, knowing that there were some laws for the little people, but that they didn’t apply to me or my friends. I remembered the excitement of stepping through those secret doors off Brisbane’s quiet country-town streets into a life that was fast and drunken and heavy with sex. It was an excitement all the richer for its veneer of illegality. In Sydney anyone could visit a far wider range of clubs of far more sophistication, but that was Sydney. Brisbane was the moral town, the town of law and order and decency. The spice of sin in Brisbane was so much the greater, the seedier, the dirtier. Primal, in a backwoods sort of way. I found it intoxicating.

  I remembered the rooms, gold with the haze of alcohol, couches and dim light, bad music playing from somewhere hidden. The lazy pace, the drugged stares, the hypnosis. And the women, in all states of dress and undress, slumped in chairs, lounging in doorways, waiting for you to catch their eye. I remembered May, in a room somewhere some night, swaying drunken on Charlie’s lap. Around them were other women, most of them topless or naked, and it was dark and a beat was thumping and bodies were entwined in the shadows. I remembered May’s eyes, locked onto Charlie’s, her hands unbuttoning her blouse, shrugging it from her shoulders, all the while whispering as the women watched and I watched. I remembered taking one of the other women in desperation, staring up at her face and seeing only May, wanting only May.

  I remembered how year by year the clubs got bigger and brighter, full of more people and more money and more police. I remembered wondering just how big and far and wild it could all go. And I remembered one night seeing a strange man stalking about in the shadows of one of our places. Narrow faced, with square glasses that had eggshell-thin lenses, a man not drinking, not using the women, not gambling—just watching, seeming to observe everything and everyone. I knew him from somewhere, some earlier time, and distant alarm bells sounded. Had he worked at my paper once? He certainly didn’t any more. But, as always, I was too drunk to really bother about who he was, or what the alarms might mean.

  Fool. I was so far beyond genuine newspaper work that I couldn’t even spot an investigative journalist when he was jotting down notes right next to me at the bar.

  That’s all it took, in the end. The serious elements in the media shook off their thirty-year lethargy and almost casually, certainly with no belief that anything serious would happen, they began to report what everyone already knew. They listed some of the venues, some of the names of the owners, noted that the police appeared to be involved. Just a few feature articles, but a ripple ran through the state. Then came an hour-long piece on a national current affairs television show. ‘The Moonlight State’ it was called. Another ripple, perhaps a small wave. But that was all. In the end they’d barely scratched the surface, and besides, it had happened before. None of us was worried. All that was needed were a few official denials, a few suppression orders, and it would all die down again. But inexplicably, the government panicked. To this day no one knew why. The premier was aging, some said, losing his grip. Others said the police minister was running wild and had no idea what was really happening under his authority any more. There were all sorts of stories. But the result in the end was that an Inquiry was announced.

  An independent Inquiry.

  Even then it might not have mattered. There had been inquiries before, and they’d been safely managed, the terms limited. But something was in the air this time. The Queen’s Counsel appointed to run the Inquiry was, to everyone’s surprise, apparently in deadly earnest. The long-suffering elements of law and order saw a sliver of a chance. Lawyers rolled in, whistle-blowers rolled in, all the long-silenced enemies of the system burst into song and the initial panic of the government disintegrated into angry confusion. The terms of the Inquiry ballooned out from a simple question of brothels and casinos to involve corruption within the whole police force. From there it sprang to their political masters, and finally to the entire Queensland political structure. It was wildfire, no one could stop it, only stand back horrified. Desertions began, papers were burnt, ministers were suspended. Harried witnesses saw themselves being abandoned, started buying immunity by informing, and suddenly the whole invulnerable edifice was shuddering, and then collapsing, awfully, into chaos.

  It amazed me even now.

  I looked up and down the street. It had all happened here. A different world and a different time. A different culture even. Prohibition was gone. Gambling was legal now. There were big casinos in every major Queensland city. Poker machines in every bar and club. Liquor licences were handed out almost for the asking. Pubs and bars could open virtually any hours they liked. Even the cafes had beer and wine. It was all out in the open and anyone could have it, no elites, no secret societies, everything properly taxed, properly monitored. What need, then, for an underworld? What need for men like Marvin or Lindsay? Or for the rest of us, the hangers-on, the drunkards, the dupes and the fools.

  Prostitution remained the only riddle. Ten years of new governments and new laws, and they still hadn’t worked out what to do. To legalise brothels or not to legalise them. To arrest the streetwalkers or not, or the women working from their homes, or their pimps or their customers—the laws seemed to change every year. As if it was really any different from drinking or gambling, as if there was really even a choice about whether it should exist or not. Of all the old Inquiry sins, only prostitution was still in the shadows, and as always, I assumed, it would be thriving there. Someone would be running it, paying the money, making the money. The only difference now was it would be someone I didn’t know.

  I saw a cab rank a short way up the road. There was one taxi there, its driver sitting smoking behind the wheel. I seemed to remember that smoking in cabs had been outlawed since I’d left. Even for drivers free of any passengers. Some vices went out, others came in.

  I got up and walked to his window.

  ‘Going somewhere?’ he asked.

  I didn’t even bother with euphemisms. ‘I’ve been away for ten years,’ I said. ‘I was wondering where the brothels are these days?’

  He looked at me, considering. ‘Who says there are any brothels any more?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Brothels are illegal,’ he told me, indifferent.

  I sighed. In the old days the cab drivers didn’t hesitate, they’d take you right to the front door of the nearest club and g
ratefully take the kickback.

  ‘I’m not a cop or anything,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘I can see that.’

  He looked at least fifty. Old enough to have it seen it all happen, the rise and fall.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, entreating.

  He tossed away his cigarette. ‘Of course, I could drive you round for a while along certain streets, and if you see a place that you think looks like that sort of place, then I could drop you off.’

  Ah. So that’s the way it was now.

  Different ways, but still the same.

  ‘So you getting in?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Just curious.’

  I started walking again. I felt better somehow, reassured. The world still rolled along after all. Maybe it was all I’d needed to realise, after hours of pointless wandering and brooding. We weren’t the only ones, we weren’t unique or anything terrible. It all still went on. Legally or illegally, what did it really matter? We weren’t demons. Not me, not May, not Charlie. Not even Marvin, wherever he was. Other things had gone wrong, yes, but they were personal things, personal betrayals, and they could happen in any walk of life. It had nothing to do with the evils of crime, nothing to do with the Inquiry.

  Except Charlie was dead. And Marvin was missing. And May would be forty years old by now.

  I walked, turning corners, the streets to myself.

  Go home, George.

  And it was good advice. To some things there were no answers.

  I stopped in front of a flashing sign. It showed, in neon, a cocktail glass balancing on the back of a crouching woman. Below it, the front of the building was jet-black glass. Ultraviolet light leaked out of the doorway.