Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  It was him.

  I backed away from the window, the fear sinking in like paralysis. I was right, Clarke had been waiting nearby while his tame policeman did the groundwork. And now that his watchdog had been called away, he’d taken up the job himself. And tinted glass wouldn’t fool him, nor would any message. He wanted to see me, and he would wait forever until he did.

  From the street I heard a car door open, then softly clump shut.

  I stood there, blank. I turned my head from the window to the door. The chain hung from its catch, but that wouldn’t stop him. Marvin had been hiding in a fortress, and still this man had got inside. Nerveless I took four steps to the door. I set my eye to the lens.

  Sweat prickled on my forehead. I blinked. I couldn’t see anything. The lens was cracked, its view distorted. I could see the short hallway and then the stairs descending, but everything was askew. A square of glaring sunlight made it a tableau of shadows, black and white. And in the middle of it all, something moved.

  A man was ascending the stairs.

  He was a silhouette, only a refracted, tilted figure, rising slowly. The face was a blur. He was right in front of the door now. He seemed to swell, shudder, and shrink again. Then an arm stretched out, angular and thin in the lens, and I felt strangely delicate knocks come through the wood, grazing my cheek like the touch of a spider.

  I waited, eyeball straining, mere inches from a man I knew had come to kill me.

  Then he leaned close. Through the fractured glass I caught a glimpse of pale skin, and one eye, black as a stone, a swath of dark hair.

  He spoke. A low, soft voice that echoed faintly in the corridor, hollow and pitched only for me to hear. ‘George?’ it said. ‘George, are in you in there?’

  Something blazed in my chest, and once again my body reacted faster than my mind, my fingers were fumbling at the chain, sliding it free, and I was tugging open the door, because that voice, I knew that voice, and then the door was open and I was clutching the startled figure and it wasn’t a man at all, it was a woman, and I knew exactly who she was, I’d been waiting for her since the whole mess began.

  It was Maybellene.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Maybellene and Charlie and me . . . maybe it was as predictable as these things always were, affairs and betrayals and the eternal triangle. At least May and I, we did try. We stopped cheating on Charlie from the day he received his first summons to appear before the Inquiry.

  Everything else had stopped anyway. The parties, the invitations, all the frenzied acquaintances, they were gone in the space of the first few weeks. Our clubs were shut down, everyone’s clubs were shut down, there was nowhere to go, no night left to explore. The Inquiry kept expanding. I lost my job. Marvin was stood down, so May lost her job as well. Jeremy was already in Sydney. Lindsay had vanished. It was just the three of us. May and Charlie and me.

  But Charlie kept the restaurants open. On restricted hours, admittedly, within the law, but he still needed to be out there. He needed to be seen in public, to show he was the same old Charlie, working the tables and laughing with the guests. He’d always fought his body in that sense, his looks, and he’d won. For a time he seemed to be holding it together. His smiling face still appeared in the social columns, and only May and I could see the strain behind the smile.

  But as more evidence emerged and all of it pointed straight at Charlie, something started to crack. The restaurants emptied. The Inquiry was getting too big, too serious, there was nothing enticing about Charlie’s criminal connections any more. People wouldn’t speak to him. His face started appearing in the political pages, and they didn’t even call him a restaurateur now, he was only a purveyor of prostitution and illegal gambling. And people didn’t see his smile any more, they saw only a beefy, small-time thug with narrow, scheming eyes. Charlie stopped going to the restaurants. He managed them over the phone for a while, but then gave up on them altogether. Later still they’d be sold off, with everything else. But for the time being, Charlie withdrew into his house, with May at his side.

  The Inquiry rolled on. I was called only once myself to testify. For a juggernaut that was transforming the entire state, it didn’t look much. A single courtroom, a little overcrowded, with no power to try or convict, only to ask questions, and to compel answers. But through it passed an endless trail of penitents—government ministers, public servants, nightclub owners, police, madams, bookies, informers, petty criminals— and the sheer scale of the story we told was an avalanche. The newspapers could barely handle the weight of it, headlines could only scream so loud, outrage last only so long. And waiting behind was an echelon of criminal prosecutors . . . and they could try, they could convict.

  So I stood in the dock. I was asked to admit that I had financial interests in Charlie’s businesses, which I admitted. I was asked to explain what those businesses were, which I did, as far as I knew. I was asked to confirm that Marvin and Lindsay were also involved, which I confirmed. I was asked if I’d ever been directed about what to write in my columns, which I denied. Then I was let go. It hardly seemed like five minutes. Another witness was called. No one mentioned Jeremy. Let alone anyone called George Clarke.

  The newspapers put me on page five, and they had surprisingly little to say. Maybe they were embarrassed about it being one of their own, maybe some of them had secrets not so different from mine. More likely I was just too small to be worth the bother. I was already unemployed and my old paper was folding and, besides, new scandals were breaking every few days. So my name was added to the long list of the exiled and condemned, and I was tossed aside for bigger fish. I had no idea what to do or where to go. I hid in my flat and drank, or wandered through bars where I would know nobody, see nobody. For a few months I sweated on the talk of criminal charges, but in the end all that I received were some angry demands from the tax department and a cursory visit from the police. Not the police I knew, of course, new police. Or at least, police who acted as if they were new. But even they didn’t want me. I was already forgotten.

  Charlie wasn’t so lucky. His testimony at the Inquiry was front page stuff, and afterwards formal charges were laid and he was arrested. I went with May to his bail hearing, and when he was released I drove them home, the three of us silent. Charlie was losing weight, and drinking all the time now. He wasn’t someone who knew how to spend time alone. His life was society. Without it he was crippled. I’d tried talking to him, but he was removed from me somehow, the connection was gone. Maybe it was because of May and me—in some way he must have known—and even the bond of alcohol couldn’t break the distance. In the old days drinking had been a shared joy, a celebration together. There was no joy in it now. We were both drinking purely for oblivion, and that sort of drinking never required company. I dropped them off at their house but didn’t stay, despite the entreating look from May. It wasn’t for herself, it was for Charlie. But I couldn’t see any way to save him.

  I drove home and sat in my dark flat and opened bottle after bottle of wine. Later that night there was a knock on my door and it was May, the same old beaten tears in her eyes, and we started up again. Desperately this time, clinging to each other, cruelly aware of Charlie sitting alone in his house, abandoned by the both of us.

  When the trial came I was called as a witness. I asked the defence lawyer if I would have any chance to speak on Charlie’s behalf—to explain his character, the sort of person he was, how he’d probably known no more about the way things had really worked than I had.

  The lawyer laughed in my face. ‘A character reference from you?’ he said. ‘You want Charlie put away for life?’

  So I stood in the dock again and blankly stated that I was an investor in Charlie’s various establishments and that, yes, those included casinos and to some degree brothels, and that, yes, Charlie had spent time in these premises and knew what they were all about, and that, yes, bribes were paid to police and other officials, and on and on. Charlie sat quietly in the dock, look
ing pale and ill, and in the jury’s eyes, I could tell, undoubtedly guilty.

  It didn’t help when he was called up himself to testify. Maybe the old Charlie could have charmed a jury, talked his way clear, but not the way he was now. His barrister at least got him to say that Lindsay had really run the darker side of things, that Marvin had masterminded it all, but the documents didn’t bear his evidence out. Lindsay was gone. Marvin was on trial for other things, and everyone still loved him anyway. Charlie just sounded desperate and vindictive. From the gallery May watched with sad, drawn eyes. No one called on her to speak. One of the working girls had already mentioned May’s habit of using the brothel rooms for sex with Charlie, and to the world at large she was little better than a prostitute herself.

  The night before closing arguments we gathered, the three of us, at Charlie and May’s house. We knew what the result would be and that this was our last dinner together. It was a surreal occasion. One of us was going to prison, but we were still the same people, the same three harmless people we’d always been. In all those long, drunken, wonderful nights, what had been so criminal? Who had been hurt? Everyone, according to the courts, and to the new spirit that was marshalling in the streets of Queensland. We’d hurt everyone, the fabric of society itself. Maybe it was true, but to the three of us that night, nothing made any sense. And Charlie wasn’t saying anything. He was staring fixedly at the three or four years ahead of him. May and I faltered along with the conversation, but it was hard to find anything to talk about. All our memories, all our times together, led us straight back to the trial and to Charlie sitting voiceless, waiting for the sentence to fall. And if there was a wealth of things to say between May and me, it was impossible in front of Charlie. So we sat there, the three of us, the oldest and most familiar of friends and lovers, and chatted inanely about nothing. It was unbearable.

  I escaped, finally, to their back deck, looked out over the Brisbane night. I drank steadily, feeling the welcome numbness grow, the world shrink in, the stars above fading to smudges in the sky. After half an hour or so May came out and said that Charlie had gone to bed and that I should leave. She looked exhausted. Like me, she was facing no criminal charges, but she was going to be a key witness at Marvin’s trial, and she’d lost as much as I had. Meanwhile she’d been locked in a house with a husband growing ever more withdrawn, refusing her support, blaming her silently for something to which she couldn’t even confess. We held each other there on the deck and May cried quietly and we kissed, the world shrunk finally to just the two of us. Charlie chose that moment to come out, his mouth open, as if finally he had found something he could say, some way to move forward, and he saw us there.

  I watched the distinct expressions pass across his face. Shock. Pain. Anger. All in agonised slow motion. Then he was screaming at us.

  ‘Not here! Not now! Wait until I’m gone!’

  We all stood there. The anger drained out of Charlie as quickly as it had come, and he just shook his head, walked back inside. We followed him. Charlie sat on the couch and May sat with him, enfolded him in her arms, and I sat alone on a chair. And so we remained, not talking about it, not saying anything, just drinking, until one by one each of us fell asleep, and then it was morning, and time to go to court.

  Charlie got his four years, and as we left the court May said, ‘I can’t see you any more.’

  She went home to her empty house. It wasn’t her house much longer. It all went, the house and the restaurants, to cover legal fees and tax debts and fines. May moved into a small rented flat of her own. Charlie went into the prison system and May visited him every time she was allowed. I went once to visit and was told that Charlie had no interest in seeing me.

  I drank. I still had money and I was on unemployment benefits and nothing mattered.

  I didn’t expect to see May again, but one last time she arrived at my door, lost and alone and poised, quivering, as she would always be, on the horn between light and dark.

  And as I always would, I took her in.

  Later we lay on the couch in my big empty living room, the sky outside orange and night air flowing through the windows, and we talked about Charlie.

  ‘It’s terrible,’ she whispered, the sadness splintering her voice. ‘He won’t talk to me, he thinks I’m with you. I’ve told him I’m not, I’ve told him I haven’t seen you, that I won’t see you . . . but he doesn’t believe me. And it’s killing him in there. It’s like he’s dead already.’

  And in the depth of my being, to my lasting shame, I wished that he was.

  ‘Never again,’ she hissed, clutching my shoulders, her hair tangled about her face as she stared down at me, fierce and afraid. ‘I had to tell you this, but never again.’

  By dawn she was gone.

  That was it, I thought, as church bells rang in the morning and the choir lifted their voices in song, praising a wise and merciful God. That’s all there is.

  But by then it was two years since the Inquiry had begun.

  And the Queensland elections of December 1989 were drawing near.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Within minutes I was packed and we were in May’s car, speeding away from the motel through the back streets of New Farm. From the passenger seat I craned around and watched out the rear window. There was no one following us.

  ‘George?’ May asked. ‘Where are we going?’

  For the first time I turned and really looked at her.

  Maybellene, a decade older. Her hair was longer, and the curls were gone, leaving it straight and severe, and darker than I remembered, as if it had been dyed. Her face, though, had softened and grown more rounded. Her whole body had. It didn’t suggest that tight, coiled energy that it had of old. She was a middle-aged woman. But it was May all the same. It was finally sinking through all the tension and panic of the last hour. She was really here.

  ‘Just drive around for a while,’ I said. ‘Get us out of New Farm.’

  She nodded. She didn’t seemed surprised by anything I was doing. I’d barely noticed it in all the rush, but from me flinging open the motel door to bundling my stuff together and dashing back over to her car, she’d hardly said a word. As if she’d shown up almost for this very purpose. And now that there was time to talk, I didn’t know where to begin.

  ‘Jesus, May,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about that . . .’

  ‘It’s okay, George.’ She glanced from the road to the rear view mirror and then to me. ‘I was coming to see you, but I saw that police car outside, and then that man, so . . . so I waited. When he left I thought you mustn’t have been inside, but I had to check.’

  I was staring at her, listening to the way her voice had deepened.

  ‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ I said. ‘I’d given up. I thought you must be out of the state, or out of the country.’

  She smiled, the old May smile, with its interior sadness. ‘It’s a long story, George.’

  ‘And . . . you’ve heard about Charlie?’

  The smile faded away. ‘I’ve heard. About Marvin too.’

  ‘Marvin?’

  ‘It was on the midday news. That’s why . . . that’s why I thought it was time I came and saw you.’

  ‘How did you know where I was?’

  ‘Lindsay told me. Yesterday. I asked him not to say anything to you. I mean, I didn’t know if there was any point in us meeting.’

  And it all rushed up on me. ‘But what have you been doing? Christ, May, have you been in Brisbane all this time?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘The police couldn’t trace you. They said your name wasn’t listed anywhere.’

  Her eyes were cool, measuring me. ‘Can you blame me for not wanting to be found, George?’

  ‘They only wanted you because you were Charlie’s next of kin.’

  ‘We were divorced.’

  Her tone was cold, but even after ten years, I knew her better than that.

  ‘That was you, wasn’t it. At the funeral.’r />
  She looked away. ‘I didn’t realise anyone saw me.’

  ‘I didn’t. Not really.’

  ‘I couldn’t face it, George. I’m sorry.’ And it seemed that was all she had to say.

  I stared out at the streets gliding by. May was following the river as it curved around into New Farm’s industrial fringe, only it wasn’t industrial any more. All the old warehouses had been transformed into studio apartments, the factories into restaurants and shops.

  She’d been here all along. And she hadn’t known if she’d even wanted to see me.

  She said, ‘I’ve been reading the papers. About Charlie, about Highwood. They even mentioned you. Have you been up in that town ever since those days?’

  I nodded, still staring out. It was easier than looking at her. ‘I couldn’t face Brisbane again. Until now.’

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Working on a little paper up there.’

  ‘I wondered, but I could never call. I only had that old number anyway.’

  ‘The boarding house. Did you call it a couple of days ago?’

  She nodded. ‘That was before I thought of Lindsay. I knew you would have seen him. And the old woman wouldn’t tell me where you were. Neither would the other one. Emily.’

  I looked at her and she was looking back, her eyes unreadable.

  ‘Are you married or anything, George?’

  ‘No, but Emily and me, well, you know . . . What about you?’

  The smile again. ‘No.’

  ‘But what have you been doing, how have you lived?’

  ‘I’ve been okay.’ She laughed, unsteady. ‘This is so strange, George.’