Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  Oh May, I thought.

  Then I was shoved aside, and Clarke was sinking to his knees next to her.

  ‘May.’ And he was clutching her arms, urgent. ‘May. It’s me. I’m here.’

  Her lifted her shoulders and her head sagged back and I knew it was true, she was gone. Like a vision I was remembering the feel of her hands on my shoulders, her fingers and all their desperate strength, gripping me, angry and afraid and wanting . . . wanting something. I’d never known what. Would never know, now.

  ‘Wake up,’ the man was saying. ‘C’mon, May. Wake up.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Stanley. ‘She’s dead.’

  And later I would ask Stanley if she’d said anything at all, given any message, any last clue. But there was nothing. She’d drifted away, while Stanley had heard me down at the house calling her name. And while we’d argued about who loved her most, Clarke and I, she’d died.

  Clarke was on his feet again, wheeling, the gun pointing madly from Stanley to me.

  ‘You did this. Get back to the house. Call an ambulance.’

  ‘There’s no phone out here,’ said Stanley. ‘There’s nothing.’

  He stared at us, not understanding. He staggered in circles about her body, his hands to his head. I could see him now in the moonlight—an aging, confused, inebriated man. Like a thousand I’d seen before. In pubs, in gutters, in boardrooms. Alcohol didn’t discriminate, and out here, with the night to strip him of identity and wealth and influence, he moved in the same drunken dance we all did, and towards the same end.

  He fired his gun.

  He wasn’t even aiming at us. It was just one shot, flying off somewhere into the night, and then Stanley and I watched as he pulled the trigger again and again and the gun clicked emptily. He stared at it, threw it away.

  ‘I’m taking her home,’ he said.

  And still we only watched, as if that was our sole purpose there, to witness. He bent to May, got his arms beneath her and tried to lift. Whether it was her weight or his drunkenness, he toppled sideways with her body. May’s head cracked against rock, the sound of it hideous, and then she rolled face down into the earth.

  ‘May, oh Jesus, May, I’m sorry.’

  He bent over her again, weeping, rolling her back and brushing the dirt from her face, from her hair, from her eyes.

  I realised Stanley was looking at me. I stared back, not understanding. He reached over and took the gun from my hand. His fingers moved over it and something clicked, then he put it back in my hand and threaded my finger onto the trigger. His hand still on mine, he pointed the gun at the back of Clarke’s head. Then Stanley took his hand away. And waited.

  I stared down my arm. The gun felt different now. It was alive, potent with power, as if blood pulsed within it. Loathsome . . . and yet, all it needed was the squeezing of my finger. It would leap at the faintest touch, and all that power and potency would blaze and pass and a man would be dead. This man. The one who had killed Charlie and Marvin and May, and who ruined our lives even before he ended them. He would be dead and it would be over. After ten years and more than ten years. All the past, the drunken lost years, the hurt and the sadness, the Inquiry and the whole wretched business that was my life, that was Queensland itself . . . no, Queensland wouldn’t change, Queensland would go on, but my part in it would be done.

  He had May in his arms again, had struggled to his feet. He was talking to her, but I couldn’t understand the words, only what was behind them, the despair. Tears blurred my eyes. I couldn’t kill him. What point was there now? I’d known it all along, I was no avenging angel. Nothing could be brought back. Not even May. Let him live. There was nothing left for him now anyway, without her. Only the descent into alcohol, and inquisition, and arrest. What purpose would it serve, what was there to take from him? All three of us, May, him and me, alone in the end.

  I lowered the gun.

  Stanley stared at me a moment longer, then in one motion he lifted his rifle, only inches from Clarke’s skull, and fired. I didn’t flinch at the explosion, or at the brief bloody flash, and I stood motionless as his knees buckled and his body slumped and settled, almost gently, over May.

  The wind seemed to have died, the whole world gone quiet.

  Stanley lowered his gun. I could sense the fury in him.

  ‘That’s the problem with people like you,’ he said to me. ‘It’s always someone else who has to finish it.’

  And he turned and walked away.

  FORTY-NINE

  We buried May on the hill.

  It wasn’t what she would have wanted. The hill, the mountains themselves, they meant nothing to her, she’d never even seen them until the night she died, and then they had only frightened her. I didn’t know where her heart would have wanted to rest, Brisbane or somewhere else again. That was the problem with burials. There was no way to ask, no way to be sure. And either way, there was nothing else we could do.

  We buried the two men deep under Stanley’s marijuana plantation, and tipped their vehicle into the gully. It left a path of broken, tangled trees, but the gully itself was impenetrable, and Stanley said that within a few weeks there would be no sign that anything had ever been there. As for the men, Stanley was certain that even if the police raided his place one day and actually found the crop, the last thing they would ever do was dig beneath it. And as for May . . . we left it to fate. Surely the curse that had haunted her all her life would finally let her be. There was no reason anyone would want to look up there anyway. The world was full of hills.

  The following night Stanley drove me back into town, to the offices of the Highwood Herald, and dropped me off next to May’s car.

  ‘That’s it for you and me, George,’ he said.

  I didn’t bother answering. I drove May’s car down to Brisbane and to the house she’d rented. I wiped the steering wheel and the doors and the dash—every place I could think—for fingerprints. Nothing was in her name, she’d said, but someone would track it down eventually, and it was important that I left no trace of myself. I opened the house and did the same in there. Then I left the keys inside, closed the door and walked away, down through the streets, until enough distance and time had passed, and the dawn was coming. Then I hailed a cab over to New Farm, to the motel.

  I hammered on the door until the manager woke. I apologised for disappearing without warning, I paid the outstanding bill on the room, and retrieved my car from the garage. Then I drove back to Highwood, unlocked my own house, and finally slept.

  Gerry came by later that day, surprised at seeing my car in my driveway.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he wanted to know.

  I said, ‘May decided she’d rather go back to Brisbane. So she went.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘What about Clarke, and this detective of his, what about them?’

  I was tired. I couldn’t even muster a lie. ‘I don’t know, Gerry. It’s out of my hands.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Are you going to talk to the police?’

  ‘They already know all they need to know. And, Gerry, it would be better if you never mentioned to anyone that May was up here. Not even to Graham. Just let it be, for my sake.’

  ‘What about Stanley?’

  ‘He’ll tell you the same thing.’

  Gerry studied me, his eyes going cold. ‘What happened out there, George?’

  ‘It’s over. It sorted itself out. That’s all that matters.’

  But there was something new in the way he looked at me, as if after all that he’d tolerated in me, my past and my weaknesses, he had at last seen something too distasteful to live with.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I never saw her.’ He started to go, paused. ‘But I don’t think I want you working for me any more, George. I think we’ll just . . . call it quits.’

  And I could understand that.

  A day later, Detective Kelly called.

  ‘Is she with you,
George?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘May.’

  ‘I told you, Detective. I haven’t seen her.’

  ‘That won’t do, George. We worked out she’s married to Clarke. And now it turns out he’s missing too. So what’s going on here?’

  ‘Have you talked to Detective Jeffreys yet?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No one knows where he is either.’

  ‘Ask him, when you find him. Ask him about the rest of it too. I’ve already told you everything I know.’

  He was silent for a time. ‘You said you were going to disappear for a while, George. What happened to that?’

  ‘All I really needed was to get out of Brisbane.’

  ‘And do you still think Clarke was with Marvin when he died?’

  ‘I can’t prove anyone was there. Can you?’

  ‘You know we can’t.’

  ‘Then I might as well forget about it.’

  ‘I think we’d better come up there and talk to you in person, George.’

  ‘So come on up’

  But no one came.

  I would never know what they decided themselves, the police, but officially they and the papers stuck with the wrong story and Marvin went to his grave a suicide and a murderer. The public tone was one of bafflement—how could their old hero end up so disgraced? Corruption was one thing, but this . . . people felt disappointed and cheated, which perhaps was how they should have felt all along when it came to Marvin. Clarke and his wife made the papers as well. They were listed as missing, presumed to have fled the country to escape the investigation into his business affairs. No one mentioned his old connections with Marvin and the rest of us, nor anything about May’s history. Perhaps the police were happy just to bury it all, to farewell the long decline that was the Inquiry. It was the end of it, that was for certain, and there weren’t really any survivors.

  Which only left Emily.

  And I couldn’t face Emily.

  It wasn’t her fault that May was dead. How was Emily to know what would happen, just by answering her door to a detective? It was my fault, if anyone’s. My fault that May was even in Highwood, and that Emily was left there alone, not knowing. My fault, too, that Marvin was dead, I’d led them straight to him. Even Charlie had only suffered and died because he was unlucky enough to be looking for me. The blame stretched back through the years, back to all of us, Marvin and Lindsay and Jeremy as well, and the disaster we’d all created . . . all the alcohol and long nights and the money . . . in the end, all the way back to that first drink Charlie and I had shared over dinner in his parents’ little restaurant, when Brisbane was a different place and the only thing we wanted was somewhere to drink after closing time.

  But Emily . . . she had nothing to do with it.

  Even so, I couldn’t go around to her house. Every time I thought of her I saw May’s face staring up into the night. I couldn’t conceive of what I would say to her, what I could explain, how I could tell her that whatever had been there for me and her, there was nowhere it could go now. Not with May’s body between us, not with May’s eyes as dark and empty as if the sorrow of her whole life was welling up into them. I couldn’t even tell her May was dead. It was another secret, on top of too many others. I knew it was even worse to just leave things so unspoken, so incomplete, but I still couldn’t bring myself to do it. Go and see her, I told myself. I screamed it inside my head. At least do that one thing, for her sake, finish it properly!

  But Stanley was right.

  I didn’t go and see her. Instead I rang my landlord and told him I was leaving the house, and I started packing up my belongings. There wasn’t much and I didn’t know where I would go, but there was no need for Highwood now. There was nothing left from which to hide, no exile, no wanderers waiting to return. On the day before I was due to move out I read in the paper that Sir Jeremy Phelan, distinguished public servant, had died in hospital after a long illness. So it was only me left. Lindsay was still out there admittedly, but really, it was only me.

  I called Jeremy’s number and Louise answered.

  ‘He left me the house,’ she told me. ‘Everything.’

  ‘I don’t think he had anyone else.’

  She laughed sadly. ‘Even his wine cellar. You wouldn’t believe his wine cellar. He kept collecting, even when he couldn’t drink any more.’

  ‘He had you to do that.’

  ‘George . . . come round. I don’t know what to do with myself. Come round and I’ll open some wine and we’ll drink to Jeremy.’ Her voice fell. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot you don’t drink.’

  ‘I’m not so sure that’s true any more.’

  ‘Really? Well why not then?’

  And it was there, the siren call, faint and tinged in my memory with immense sadness, but still there. Maybe it was only an echo of May . . . even from the first meeting I’d seen something of her in Louise. Something not so shining and fierce as May, something quieter and less bent on its own destruction, but even so, there was that familiar shadow within her, and in her eyes. Maybe something lesser was all I was capable of anyway. The call would never be so strong with someone like Louise, and the addiction never so deep, but nor would it be fatal.

  ‘I might,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving here tomorrow, and really, I might.’

  And then it was my last day and there was only one thing left to do.

  I climbed into my laden car and drove down through the town. The morning was clear and warm. I’d been expecting that somehow, despite the progression of summer, it wouldn’t be that way. When I’d first arrived all those years before, Highwood had seen what I needed and had granted me two blessed weeks of mist and rain and cold. I’d been hoping, maybe, for a similar farewell . . . but whatever had kept the town and me so attuned in those days was gone now. It would be a hot day.

  It was just on eight a.m. I drove up past Emily’s school and two early children were running through the gates, but I didn’t look for her. I drove on to the edge of the town, where the hills rose again to the border of the national park. I parked the car. When I returned to it I would have to decide which way to go. One direction would lead me over the mountains and down into New South Wales, as I’d intended once, long ago. The other would lead me back down into Queensland. Neither choice made any sense or held any promise, but I would choose one or the other. I was a physical body, I was a presence in the world, and I had to exist somewhere.

  But not yet.

  I took a backpack from the car and walked across to the sign which heralded the beginning of the walking trails. The map hadn’t changed. There, at the upper extremity, eleven kilometres away, were Redemption Falls, where they’d always been. I took no note of the name. This time I wasn’t walking to heal myself, or running from anything, and I no longer sought salvation.

  I was going to bury a friend.

  I plunged into the forest. It was cool and green in there, and for all that I remembered of wet rock and rain and aching legs, the walking was pleasant. There was a wind in the tree tops, but it was only the faintest of whispers, and birds sang clearly through the air. I met no one else. The miles rolled by, and the hours. I recognised nothing. It had been too long ago. My legs started to stiffen, but I had water in my bag, and food. And even if I arrived back at my car tired and sore, then wherever it was I stopped that night, I would find a bar and I would order a tall cold beer to soothe the muscles, like any man did. Like any man had the right.

  Then I was walking alongside a small stream. Through the trees ahead the sky appeared blue and cloudless, and I came to the cliff top. The stream tumbled over the last few rocks and disappeared and beyond that . . . beyond that was a gulf of air and the distant peaks and hills of a different country. It was noon and the sun blazed down from above and hawks circled in the sky.

  I sat on a rock and opened my pack and took out the urn.

  I thought about Charlie, but I was still no closer to
an answer. Where would he like to be—Queensland or New South Wales? We stood there on the very border and it was only a matter of choice. The same choice that was before me. To leave or stay. Was it Queensland, after all, that had destroyed Charlie and me? Was there really an essence to the state, a crucial flaw that warped its inhabitants and closed down their minds, made us small and fearful? And even if there was, what was there for either of us in New South Wales? A state so much bigger and stronger, and yet so cold, so superior, so full of scorn for places that were small. Wanting them to be small. What had Stanley said that night? The rest of the country needed Queensland to be the way it was . . .

  And I thought of May, tugged and pulled all her life by men who wanted her to be what they needed. Until between us all, we’d torn her apart.

  Which way would Charlie want to go?

  I watched the sky. I remembered what the psychologist had told me. Burial was for the living, not for the dead. So don’t think about what the dead would want, I told myself, answer the questions of the living.

  I was a physical body, I had to exist somewhere, but that didn’t apply to Charlie.

  I stood up and uncapped the urn. I stood on the very lip of the falls and poured the ashes into the stream, just at the point where the water tumbled over the edge. Up here at the top it was Queensland. A hundred metres down, at the bottom, it was New South Wales. In between I could see that the little funnel of water fanned out into a spray and eventually to a mist, and then to thin air. I watched the ashes go over, watched them diffuse into a grey cloud, drifting.

  I walked away.

  The choice was still mine to make.

  But Charlie—I was hoping he’d never touch the ground.