Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  And I couldn’t answer.

  ‘Anyway, eventually we started up, him and me. It wasn’t like anything I’d been through before. It felt like we were both sober all the time, really there all the time, even though he always drank. There were none of those nights like we used to have. It was quiet. But in lots of ways it was better. It was real. It wasn’t always . . . blurred . . . the way it used to be. And for once I wasn’t always trying to choose. Between one or the other. Between you and Charlie. There was just him, and that was enough.’

  I was still disbelieving. ‘And you got married?’

  ‘We got married. It was a long time ago, George. It’s hard to remember. It’s true, there was always something removed about him, but it was good when we were together. He seemed so certain. So secure. After everything . . . it was what I needed.’

  ‘Marvin said he was violent, May. That he’d hurt people.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’ She caught herself. ‘I mean, not until now. I never saw him do anything like that, or talk about anything like that. He was strong, though, he could make people back down. Maybe he even did that to me a little, I don’t know. All I know is that he seemed better for me than anyone else ever had been.’

  ‘Even Charlie?’

  ‘Charlie thought I was someone else. That’s why it went so bad. I wasn’t good enough for Charlie. Charlie was . . . Charlie was . . .’

  She took her hands off the table, stared at them in frustration. I remembered what it was like, when you wondered if your hands were bent on betraying you, always reaching for a drink that would never be there. It was hard, May, it would always be hard. And suddenly I was remembering May on my couch in that big empty apartment, one hand reaching out for a glass, while the fingers of the other lightly touched my face . . .

  She forced her hands down again.

  ‘This time around, with George, I thought we at least saw each other for what we were.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  ‘It went fine for a while. The business was going well, the sub-contracting and the other things he and Marvin set up years ago. It wasn’t strictly legitimate the way he worked, but God, whatever is? It was me, really. I was the problem.’

  ‘How?’

  She shook her head, wondering at herself. ‘It was the nights. I missed those nights of ours. Those endless sessions. They weren’t real, but real . . . real gets dull. The days were okay, I was always working in the day. But something was still wrong with me. I still wasn’t happy.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What I always used to. I got drunk.’

  ‘You got drunk?’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me. It wasn’t funny.’

  It was the old May, defiant and yet so unsure, and it washed over me again, how long it had been, how it had all gone so terribly wrong.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘We were out one night, at a party. We didn’t do that very often. He was a very private person. And sometimes I thought he was worried about being seen with me in public. In case someone remembered me, made the old connections, despite the fact my name was different now. He helped me with that. Got friends of his in the registry office to mix up the records, so there was no link. So I was someone new. But I wasn’t someone new.’

  ‘You were at a party . . .’

  ‘Yes. It was with some of his business contacts. Overseas suppliers. His lawyers. It was so dull and I was thinking, is this all it’s come to, my life? So I just started drinking. I didn’t even think. And oh . . . it was glorious. It all came alive again. The party, the night, everything. I wanted to go out, to see what was left out there in Brisbane, despite it all. I can’t explain it. It’s something that’s in me. I could never just be one or the other, that was always the problem. I wanted George to come with me. I knew he wouldn’t like me drinking, but I thought, for one night at least, we could be out there, together. Let it all go for once.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He refused. Completely. He was furious, demanded I go straight home with him. At first I thought he was just disappointed, but it wasn’t only that. I could see something else in the way he was looking at me. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to come out with me, he couldn’t. He couldn’t do it. It wasn’t in him, the idea of cutting loose. He didn’t know how.’

  ‘Did you keep drinking?’

  ‘No. It was just that once. He was so mad for so long.’

  ‘So what happened next?’

  ‘So I didn’t drink again. But I watched him, watched everything he did. And I started to understand. It was all about control. I finally realised how hard he fought for control, all the time, every second of his life. Even when he was drunk he didn’t let it slip. I think that’s the real reason he wasn’t involved with the syndicate. Not just because it was small time, but because he didn’t understand it. The bright lights, the fast life, the indulgence of it all—all the fun we had. He couldn’t do it. He was too cold. Too ordered. In the end I think he got so furious with me because I scared him. That side of me . . . just scared him.’

  And I thought of May, a burning trail through the evening.

  I said, ‘Maybe that’s what he liked about you as well.’

  ‘Maybe. But whatever he saw in me, he wanted it kept quiet. He wanted me kept quiet. He was like that about everything. All those things from the old days, the clubs and the casinos. They were too visible, too chaotic. He thought his way of doing things, the quiet way, the steady way, was better.’

  ‘He was right. He’s the one that survived the Inquiry.’

  She tilted her head. ‘I don’t know. He thought he had. But you could see it sometimes, eating away at him. Had he really? Could anyone just walk away from something like that?’

  ‘And now questions are finally being asked about him. That’s what Marvin said.’

  She nodded. ‘He’s cut too many corners. Been too clever with the money. Not even clever really. Only half clever.’ She pondered something. ‘You know what used to infuriate me about Queensland the most? It wasn’t just the corruption. Everywhere has corruption. But usually it’s a little more discreet, a little more professional, it takes some brains. In Queensland, any fat idiot could do it. Queensland corruption was run by a pack of loud-mouthed amateurs. Like Marvin, like all of them. That’s what made it the worst. And I thought that at least my George wasn’t like that. I thought he was different.’

  ‘He wasn’t?’

  ‘Not in the end. He didn’t survive the Inquiry because he was smart. He survived because the Inquiry was never after him in the first place.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now he’s under pressure. They’re talking about an official investigation. Another inquiry. And this time he’s the target. That’s when the drinking started getting bad. He’s older, for one thing, and no one, no matter who they are, can stand the sort of drinking he’s done all his life. Not without something giving. He’d get drunk—and I mean drunk like anyone else— and I could see how that terrified him. And that only made him drink more.’

  ‘He couldn’t stop? Like you did?’

  ‘Don’t you see? The drinking was his control, it was the thing that kept him together. Even when it started to turn on him, he couldn’t let it go.’

  And I thought of a different kind of alcoholism, where drinking wasn’t an escape from reality, but an anchor that kept you in reality.

  May was staring inwards. ‘He’d start raving. About everything going wrong. About everyone being against him. He hated what he thought was going to happen to him. He was frightened he’d end up just like Marvin. Or even Charlie. And in his mind, they were about the most pathetic people there were.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Me? I didn’t know what he wanted from me any more. Most of the time it seemed he hated me too. I reminded him of too much, maybe. He’d catch me watching him and scream about how he wasn’t like the other men in my past, how he was better than them. And okay . .
. maybe then, maybe when he was like that, for the first time, I was even scared of him.’

  ‘But he never hit you?’

  ‘No. But it was still there. I didn’t know what to do. It was like the old days again, with Charlie or Marvin, during the Inquiry. Worse even, because I’d been so sure he was different, and it turned out he wasn’t any different. He was the same as the rest of us. As weak as the rest of us. I couldn’t take it, George. Not all over again. I couldn’t stay.’

  Weakness. I thought of Marvin and Lindsay and Jeremy, Charlie, and even myself. And May was right; I could only see weakness. It was a simple fact about corruption, about Queensland corruption in particular. Would any of us have chosen the life we had if we’d possessed anything like strength?

  May had turned away from me, was gazing out through the eastward windows.

  ‘And I started thinking,’ she said. ‘This was the man who’d ruined my life. It was all because of him in a way. That power strike, the union, Marvin and Jeremy and Charlie and you . . . everything that happened. It all started and finished with him. My entire life, George, all the people and things I’ve deserted, one after the other, he was at the end of them all. And I married him.’ She shuddered. ‘It was like I was waking up for the first time since that damn fire we started, and I couldn’t stand anything I saw.’

  ‘So you left.’

  ‘So I left. I walked out on him. Just like I have everyone else.’

  Down below the lights of Brisbane were beginning to gleam, and overhead the sky was a hazy golden green. And I was swirling. With everything. With the day, with ten years, it was all too much. And it was May, still May, her eyes as sad as they’d ever been.

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t say goodbye. I just went. I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘You haven’t even spoken to him?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not him, not anyone.’

  ‘You don’t call that hiding?’

  ‘I call it trying to work out what I want for myself, just this once. Not for Jeremy or for Marvin or for him. Not for Charlie or you. Just me. You know what I did when I got here? I bought a carton of wine. Twelve bottles. I put them in the cupboard. And ever since then I’ve been sitting here thinking, it’s up to me now, no one else. Will I or won’t I? Will I or won’t I?’

  ‘Don’t, May. It wouldn’t help.’

  ‘And what would it hurt?’

  We sat in silence.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said finally. ‘Charlie’s still dead. And that’s what I don’t understand.’

  ‘Marvin thinks something happened in that ward, that Clarke said something when it was just Charlie in the room, something he didn’t want anyone to know. Maybe it was about this new inquiry. Can you think of anything like that?’

  She shook her head. ‘And anyway, what could Charlie have done? He was so far down that nothing he said would’ve meant anything to anyone. I heard the way George used to talk about Charlie. He was no threat. Not one worth killing.’

  ‘He said that about Charlie?’

  ‘About Charlie, about Marvin, Jeremy, everyone. He knew that none of them could touch him any more.’

  ‘May,’ I said, ‘did he ever mention me?’

  She turned away from the window and she saw me, sitting forlorn across the table from her. Something changed in her face, something that made her younger, that stripped away the years between us. ‘No. In all those years, he never mentioned your name.’

  ‘Does he even know about us?’

  She touched my hand, shook her head. ‘Oh, George . . .’

  And I didn’t understand whether that was an answer, or a refusal to answer.

  She took her hand away. ‘What’s so strange,’ she said, ‘is that he was even in that ward. The whole mess only happened because he met Charlie and Marvin in that ward. He’s never needed medical help before, no matter how bad he got. Even now, I can’t believe he’s come to that.’

  But I understood one thing at least.

  ‘May, can’t you guess?’

  She stared at me.

  I said, ‘The way Marvin described him, it sounds like he’s almost drunk himself to death. You said it yourself, nobody can take it forever. Maybe it’s just this investigation, the way everything’s falling down around him. But May, if you just walked out on him . . .’

  Her hand was over her mouth.

  And I tried to make it gentle. ‘Maybe that was the last thing. Maybe that’s all he could bear.’

  ‘But . . . but that means I’m the reason he was there. That means I killed them.’

  ‘No, May, I didn’t mean . . .’

  But she was gone. She was up and away from the table. She moved back and forth around the room, her hand still to her mouth as if she might vomit.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, not again. I’ve killed Charlie again.’

  Then she was in the kitchen, throwing open a cupboard. I glimpsed bottles of wine. Red wine. More than one, a shelf full, a dozen. She pulled out a bottle.

  ‘May . . .’

  ‘No, George, no. Enough. I can’t take this.’

  She tugged open drawers, sent knives and forks cascading to the floor. She went down on her knees after it all. And then she had a corkscrew. She reached up and grabbed the bottle of wine, tore at the foil around the cork, positioned the corkscrew. She hunched over it, her entire body centred around that one place, that one moment, the opening of a bottle. And she froze there, kneeling on the kitchen floor. I could see the bottle shaking in her grip, her shoulders shaking. May, my May, caught again, paralysed by choice, by the need and the refusal of the need. The corkscrew wavered in her hand. She looked up at me, pleading.

  I didn’t know what she really meant, what she wanted me to do, if she even knew herself. And with Charlie’s ashes, unburied, unscattered, there on the table—what would he have wanted now, what would he have forgiven? I didn’t know, I didn’t care, I’d fought it too long.

  I pushed back my chair and went to her. I knelt down on the kitchen floor and took the wine from her hands, took the corkscrew. In three quick twists I opened the bottle as if it had all been only yesterday. I took two glasses from the cupboard and filled them both. And all the while May watched me, her body shuddering, her eyes shining with the old fears and the old temptations, all the battles we’d already fought and lost together, and would lose time and time again.

  I gave one glass to her, kept the other for myself.

  I lifted the glass to my mouth. I smelt the dust and love of alcohol, the bloom of wine that, despite all I knew, promised everything, warm and dark and obliterating, a world with only the two of us again, me and her.

  And there, on the kitchen floor, we drank.

  FORTY-TWO

  There was a figure somewhere out in the medical world. A percentage. It was ever-changing and disputed. Seventy per cent, eighty per cent, ninety per cent. It related to the number of alcoholics who, once dry, would relapse. There were those who said everyone would relapse at least once, sooner or later. And others again who argued that it was a meaningless question, that the fate of alcoholics couldn’t be discussed in terms of sober or drunk, success or failure, that it was a matter of survival, of quality of life, of what was bearable and what wasn’t. But all agreed that the enemy was not just the physical addiction, it was the spiritual one, the addiction of the soul. It wasn’t merely the alcohol to which the drinker surrendered, it was all that alcohol represented, the joys it once held, the pleasures it heightened, the weaknesses it glossed over, the pain it numbed. All of it false, and proven to be false, and utterly destructive, but yet still perversely alluring, perversely insistent. And that was why the specialists were so keen with advice once you were sober—stay away from your old life, from your old drinking friends, your old bars and restaurants, your old patterns of behaviour, from everything that will remind you of what you’ve lost and given away. After all, you have gained far more than you have l
ost, they say. You are born again. You are shining and new.

  But the siren song remains.

  And I woke to the deadly kiss of her, my first hangover in ten years.

  It was late afternoon, the sky outside the bedroom window hazy with a day already passing. And that was what felt the most familiar, not the hangover itself, not the dry mouth and the headache and the dull throb in the bones of my legs—it was the sense of time lost, of a day having escaped without notice. I’d forgotten it could be that way. One of the first things I’d noticed about sobriety was the way time flowed so smoothly from morning to night to sleep to morning again, without interruption. There was no blurring, no telescoping, no rush of the hours, no blackouts. You never lost track of time when you were sober. And that was also one of the most frightening things. What did you do with all that time, all that clear consciousness? If anything sent drinkers hurrying back to the bottle in the first few weeks it was that, the fear of eternal awareness, because in the end, for drinkers, awareness was the real danger. But now, having drunk again, I stared at the afternoon sky, disoriented, wondering where I was, and where the night and the day had gone.

  And then, like the old friends in the bars who would always welcome you back, the memories came, and I lay my head on the pillow, blotting out the sunlight, knowing what I’d done.

  I opened my eyes again. May lay sleeping next to me, the sheets thrown back, a light sweat on her skin. It was hot in the bedroom and my hair felt damp with it, the sheet below me muddy with sweat of my own. I was thirsty, but all I could see on the bedside table were fluted glasses stained with the remnants of red wine, and empty bottles.

  We’d drunk until dawn, May and I, all of it in darkness, no lights switched on, no lamps or candles, only the glow of the city coming up from below, warm air creeping through the house as an evening breeze stirred the trees outside. Shadows the both of us, without voice for the most part, and then reaching for each other, moving across the rooms, losing our clothes but keeping our glasses and the wine, to the bed. There was sex in there somewhere, but as always the sex wasn’t what mattered. It was the clinging, the force in May’s arms wrapped around me, squeezing with something so violent it was almost hatred. And the drinking, her hand reaching out in the darkness, or mine, to find the bottle and bring it to her lips, to mine, offering ourselves up to it together. We were both so much older now, our bodies softer, but the fierceness in us was the same, and the knowledge that we’d always held about each other, about the crucial flaw that lay at the centre of each other’s being . . . that was as intoxicating and damning as it had ever been. Only exhaustion and the growing light of sunrise had put a stop to it.