And yet it could turn black. As if this life was not the life she wanted at all, and even drunk it would come to her suddenly, turn her cold and furious. She would round on us all, rage against Jeremy and Marvin and the way they had sunk their claws into her. And in those moments, to my dismay, it was Charlie who would take her home, or take her out for walks through the empty streets, to sit in parks or bus stops and wait with her until the mood passed. It was Charlie she held, Charlie to whom she cried, to whom she apologised—for what, I didn’t even know. But later I would understand it was the decency in him that she was clinging to. The innate thing that made Charlie, despite everything he did, a good man. He understood something about her I didn’t, or maybe he saw the life she could have been living instead. In loving him she was choosing a man who did not applaud her failings, a man who saw more than the darkness in her, a man who, if she had ever sought to change, to rebuild herself, would have done his best to help.
I was none of those things. I didn’t want her to change. I was excited by May just as she was, excited by the conflicts within her. And there were times, I knew, when she was excited by me. I wasn’t like Charlie, she knew there was no moral base in me to hold her back. She knew I was self-centred and dissolute, that I cared nothing about the problems of Queensland or the world at large. She liked that. With me, she was the most free of her doubts, the most free to sink as deep as she wanted to go. So I was always the one to whom she turned for support when it came to action, to demanding more drinks, to choosing yet another place to go when the one we were in had shut down. I was the one with whom she laughed and mocked and hated and abandoned everything else. Marvin and Jeremy too, but mostly me.
It was another battle within her, forever being fought out between the two men in her life. At the time I couldn’t believe she would choose Charlie. I was the one always at her side while Charlie was off sweating in his kitchen, or entertaining his customers. Charlie was always the one wondering if we really needed to stay out another hour, if we really needed to find another bar. And yet I was missing the things that really mattered. The things that were said when she and Charlie were out in those parks and bus stops. Charlie did have a moral base. He offered her a foundation, not one that would hold her back, but one that would hold her together. He offered her the hope that maybe she hadn’t betrayed everything of her past, that maybe she hadn’t lost everything the old self had been. He could still see those things in her, and so when she was with him, they still existed.
I had no hope to give. I knew I was spiralling downwards. I prayed that May was too. I wanted us both to go down together.
That was what I called love.
She chose Charlie, and I was best man at their wedding.
It was May who broke the news to me, and her tone was almost questioning, as if there was something perhaps that I should say. It wasn’t that she wanted me to stop her but, as with her drinking, as with everything about her life, she was debating with herself about which way to go. And for once I broke my own rules and pushed her. I told her to get married, congratulated her, drank to them both, despite the empty wind blowing in my heart. Because Charlie was good for her, even I could see that, as much as it gave me no joy. Whether she was good for Charlie was a question I didn’t even ask. I was thinking only of how it could be borne from my point of view. And I decided it was bearable. Nothing need change. It would still be the three of us, and even if there were levels of her that only Charlie could reach, well, there were levels that were purely mine, a link between us that alcohol inflamed and not even Charlie could join. I would settle for that.
But by then we were drinking all the time, and as Charlie’s business kept growing and he got busier, more and more it was just Maybellene and me. Of course, not just May and me. It was a whirl of people. Jeremy and Marvin and Lindsay, and dozens of others as well. Journalists, politicians, political workers, pundits, socialites, gamblers, police and prostitutes. It was never just Maybellene and me. And yet we were always there, the two of us, at whatever party or function it was. Charlie would be late, if he came at all, and May would go home with him or home to him, and I would go home alone or with someone else. But we were the one constant for each other every night. Only friends, but with a tinge that was more than friendship, an unspoken acknowledgement that something possible had been refused. And the cruellest thing was that when a distance began to grow between Charlie and May, when the restlessness fermented inside her and the suspicions grew inside him, it was to me that Charlie came with the questions.
After all, Charlie said, I saw more of May in some ways than he did himself—had I noticed anything? Had she said anything? Done anything? She seemed so unhappy. He wasn’t angry or jealous, only pained. It hadn’t even occurred to him that it might have something to do with me. And there was nothing I could tell him. There was nothing to tell, not then.
But something was working at May, the dissatisfaction that lay curled in the core of her. Maybe it was inevitable, a delusion to think that Charlie’s love was really enough to solve anything. Or maybe, once again, it was the alcohol that was to blame, for though she still fought the battle every night, she also lost it every night. She was drowning. There was still the lifeline to Charlie, but it was stretching thin and meanwhile there was me, down in the depths by her side. She knew, had always known, that I would only be bad for her, but somehow it was ceasing to matter. Her tears and apologies to Charlie were happening more and more and I knew I was one of the causes now. Seamlessly, night by night, things began to change. Our hands touched in ways they hadn’t before, or our sides met, leaning against bars, goodnight kisses lingered seconds longer than they should have. And that look in the eye, that unspoken acknowledgement between us, became more of a challenge, a question of what choice might be made after all. Even so, I would have found that final step impossible to take, it could never have been me that reached out for her. As if, as always, I had to leave May out there alone on the brink and let her, her alone, make the choice. To walk away from me, or to drink from my poisoned cup.
So in the end it was May who looked up at the end of one long night without Charlie, drunk and swaying and deeply unhappy, defeat like tears in her eyes, and said, ‘I give up, George. I don’t want to go home.’
And thus the addiction started, rooted in sadness. Pleasure wasn’t the word to describe it, neither was sex. Sex, amidst all the drunkenness and exhaustion, hardly seemed to matter. It was more the surrendering to self-destruction, the two of us tortured by our own flaws, and yet standing naked before each other, not physically, but spiritually, all the pretences and hope gone, one and the same. We were like a confessional, there in bed together. The face of God for each other, impossible to hide anything, and better, far better, to merge our failings together.
Everyone knew. Jeremy. Marvin. Lindsay. They read it instantly in our faces. Only Charlie couldn’t see it—or couldn’t let himself see it. Would we ever have told him, confronted him with it? I didn’t know. We never talked of plans, May and I, never talked of any future. Perhaps we couldn’t even imagine one. May always went home to Charlie in the end, racked with guilt and tears, and he forgave her without admitting the truth, and she always came back to me again. Still, maybe we would have said something one day. Or perhaps Charlie would have. It couldn’t have gone on like that forever.
But around us, beyond the golden glow of the drinking and each other, the real world went on, and it was a world of cheating and lies and crime. It couldn’t go on forever either. And when, inevitably, the Inquiry rolled over us all, everything changed. The glow evaporated and suddenly it was serious and stone sober, and Charlie was in deep, deep trouble. And for the first time in their relationship, rather than May needing Charlie, it was Charlie who needed May.
Even more than he needed me, his best friend.
TWENTY-NINE
It was all there in the night.
Crowded rooms and white limbs and sucking mouths, handshakes and laug
hter, breasts I couldn’t touch, drinks that, whenever I reached for them, faded away, insubstantial, and Lindsay, leaning over a bar, handing me a phone. It was Marvin on the line, but when I picked it up it wasn’t Marvin, it was Charlie, and his voice hurt, it was like a slow electric shock, and I dropped the phone, moaning, and a woman with no pubic hair lowered herself over me, warm and wet and not May, and then a real phone was ringing and I woke to the light and heat of a Brisbane morning.
I stared. The lights and the television were all switched on and I didn’t know why. I was still miles away and ten years younger, suffering after another night spent sodden and fucked and forgotten. Pain danced through my bones, as familiar as a hangover. If there’d been a dishevelled female body snoring next to me, her name lost somewhere seven drinks ago, then the memory would have been complete. But I was alone and I had not spent the night taking discount sex from prostitutes. Or from May. Or from anyone. That was all years ago. The phone rang on.
Marvin, I thought, reaching for it.
‘George?’ said a woman’s voice, and it took me a moment to recognise it.
‘Emily?’ I rubbed sweat from my face, blinking at the television.
‘Are you okay? You sound dreadful.’
‘I’m fine. I was asleep.’
‘Asleep? It’s ten o’clock.’
‘I was up late.’
There was a pause from the other end. I could picture Emily, sitting in her neat office at the school, already long out of bed and at work on a crisp Highwood morning. I felt obscurely guilty, as if she somehow knew my dreams of the night, could see the erection that was dying as we spoke, or had finally heard all about the life I’d kept so hidden from her.
Maybe she even thought I’d been drinking.
‘I’m fine, really,’ I repeated, forcing energy into my voice. ‘I was just up late, watching TV.’
And why was I lying?
‘Good,’ she said, sounding relaxed again. ‘How’s it all been going down there?’
‘I got the funeral out of the way.’
‘Was it as bad as you thought it might be?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Did anyone else come?’
‘No. Not from the old days.’
‘That’s sad.’ But there was relief in her voice too. ‘How have you found Brisbane after all this time?’
‘Different.’
‘You haven’t seen anyone?’
‘No.’ I still didn’t know why I couldn’t tell her. ‘I’ll probably stay a few more days yet, though. Now that I’m down here.’
‘Oh.’
‘But not too long. Don’t worry.’
‘Good. I think Gerry would like you back. The novelty of running the paper on his own is wearing a bit thin. And anyway, I miss you.’
‘I miss you too. I miss Highwood.’
She laughed. And then she stopped. ‘Um . . . there was another thing.’
‘What?’
‘Joan got a phone call at the boarding house. It was for you.’
And the last of the sleep was gone. I sat up. ‘Who from?’
‘She didn’t say. The caller, I mean. It was a she. Joan knew you were in Brisbane, so she gave the woman my number, and she called me.’
‘You never got a name?’
‘No. She asked for you and I said you were in Brisbane. She wanted to know where, but I said I wouldn’t tell her that unless she said who she was. When I asked again, she just hung up.’
I didn’t speak. A hope had flared and died in my chest, left me without air.
‘Was that all right?’ Emily wanted to know. She sounded upset. ‘I thought I shouldn’t give your address to just anyone, not after what happened to Charlie.’
It might not have been Maybellene. There was no reason it would have been her. No reason at all. I kept my voice calm. It wasn’t Emily’s fault. The woman hadn’t left a name.
‘It’s fine, Emily,’ I said. ‘It was probably nothing.’
‘I mean, it seemed odd that she tried to get you at the boarding house. You haven’t been there for so long.’
‘Yes.’ And there were only two people it could be, two people who might try a number ten years out of date. Charlie was one of them and he was dead. The other was May. I’d given her that number the very last time we’d talked. She’d never called me back. Oh no, it wasn’t anything important at all. ‘But, Emily, if she calls again, you may as well tell her where I am.’
Emily was silent. She knew who we were talking about.
‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘I’ll tell her.’
‘It’s okay, really, everything is okay.’
‘Have the police found out anything about Charlie yet?’
‘No. Not yet.’
‘Be careful then,’ she said, and I was remembering how good Emily had been to me, for so long.
‘I will,’ I said. ‘And I’ll be home soon. For good.’
‘I’ve got a class, George, I’ll have to go.’
‘Emily . . .’
‘Call me when you get home.’
And she was gone. It felt as if far more had been said than we meant to say, but I didn’t know what exactly. I sat on the bed. Out through the window the sky was bright and clear, the haze of the last few days washed away by the evening’s rain, but the humidity had already returned, and it would build for the next day or days or weeks, pooling over the city until another front came through.
The TV was switched to the mid-morning news. They, too, were talking about the weather. Last night’s storm had been worse than I’d thought. Parts of the city had been blacked out and even twelve hours later the power still hadn’t been restored. People were complaining, and a government minister was holding a press conference asking people to be patient. There was a restructure happening in the industry, and these sorts of delays would soon be a thing of the past.
Some things in Queensland, it seemed, never changed.
The phone rang again.
I picked it up, knowing it would be Emily, to unsay something, whatever it was that we’d said.
‘He wants to see you.’ It was Lindsay, his voice like gravel in my ear.
‘What?’
‘You got lucky. Marvin wants to see you. Today.’
‘Where?’
‘My place over at Redcliffe. It’s on the beach.’ He gave me the address and I fumbled for a pen, wrote it down.
‘He’s waiting for you,’ Lindsay went on. ‘And one more thing. Take this any way you want, but Marvin says to make sure you’re not followed.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘He wasn’t, that’s all I know.’
And Lindsay was gone.
I stared at the coffee table and at Charlie’s ashes, contemplating two different voices on the phone, and what they’d each told me. My head was full of May. I wanted to call the boarding house and get Joan on the line and find out if there was anything she might have missed, anything to tell me who the caller was, where she was. But Marvin was the important thing. Marvin was the key. Not May.
I showered and dressed and started on the long drive out to Redcliffe.
It was the last part of town I would have looked for someone like Marvin. Or Lindsay, for that matter. I doubted the police would think of it either. Which was possibly why Lindsay owned a house out there in the first place. Maybe he hadn’t left the country after all—maybe he’d hidden the whole ten years out on the peninsula. Redcliffe was not even part of Brisbane proper. It occupied, all on its own, a headland at the northern end of Moreton Bay. It was a city in its own right, and historic, for it was at Redcliffe, in 1824, that white settlement was first attempted in what would later become known as Queensland. The idea was to set up a penal colony a safe distance from Sydney, hundreds of trackless miles to the south. Moreton Bay was selected as the general area, and the first boatload of convicts and soldiers opted for the Redcliffe site on the assumption that it had plenty of potable water, fertile land, and a safe anchorage
for ships. They were wrong on all counts and after a year the settlement was abandoned in favour of a new site fifteen miles or so to the south-west, on the banks of a large river. Both the river and the new settlement were named after the current governor back in Sydney, and the city of Brisbane was born.
Redcliffe survived, however, and I drove through the sprawl of Brisbane’s northern suburbs, heading for the bay. For Marvin’s sake I kept looking in the rear view mirror to see if I was being followed. I felt ridiculous doing so, and even if I was being followed I had no way of knowing it. The roads were all major and busy and the streams of cars behind me were completely anonymous. I had an idea that maybe I should be taking a more tortuous route—doubling back and making odd turns to see if anyone stuck to my tail. But I was getting lost enough as it was amidst all the new arterials and bypasses, and if anyone was keeping track of me through it all, then I wasn’t going to shake them anyway. Shake them? Shake who? Deep down I couldn’t really believe in the whole idea. Charlie might be dead and Marvin in hiding, but some things still seemed beyond the possible. This was still only Brisbane.
I found myself in Sandgate and then made my way on to the bridge. It was long and low and narrow, running for kilometres across the bay to the head of the peninsula, for Redcliffe remained an awkward place to reach, eternally cut off by the ocean and rivers and marshlands. The tyres of my car thumped over the cement sections, and I gazed across the water to where distant container ships plied along the channel, and yachts searched vainly for a breeze. Then I was across. The road curved around, following the headland. On my right was the water, on the left was a line of fast-food shops and aging holiday units. Further inland I knew the town was a mix of working-class suburbs and more expensive estates built on reclaimed swampland, but near the water the old beach town of Redcliffe lingered on, ramshackle. A place for families on limited budgets to visit, perhaps, where there was little to do but swim, or fish, or drink.
Last Drinks Page 21
