I'm Dying Here

by Damien Broderick

  “You are mad.” She peered this way and that. “Where the hell did I leave my car?”

  “Probably on the far side of the Mack.” The huge truck’s arse stuck out into the street. She stalked away. I called, “Look, calm down, okay? Stick with us, we’ll go for a drink to steady your nerves, then I’ll bring you back to your car, okay?”

  Mauricio had abandoned his conversation with the cop and was now staring straight into the bright lights of a television crew. “The vicious animal that done this has to be hunted down and prosecuted to the full vigor of the law and they’d better throw away the key before the dog ruins any more priceless Australian icons like my property here. It is typical of the gutless wonders of today’s modern criminal class that he runs away from the scene of the crime and doesn’t face the music like a man.”

  “Was there anyone inside, Mr. Cimino?”

  “Only my tenant, and he’s a harmless Fang Suet Master who doesn’t have an enemy in the world he’s a man of peace and tran­quility it’s part of his philosophy.”

  I took Share by the elbow. “Come on, we’ll leave Mauricio to it. There’s nothing for us to do here. We can come back for your car.”

  For a second it looked as if Share was going to march straight up to the cop with a view to helping him with his enquiries. With bad grace, she allowed herself to be escorted back under the two strands of tape. Silently she opened the Cobra’s passenger door and slumped into the seat.

  I had just bumped the car over the gutter and completed a three point turn when Mauricio slammed into the back compartment of the Cobra. “They won’t wait for daylight, they’ve got some heavy haulage tow truck coming,” he said, face theatrically black with rage in case any of the cops were watching, tone creamy with satisfaction. “You won’t be sleeping there tonight, Purdue. I hope you’ve made arrangements.”

  I turned my head, muttered directly into his ear, “Shut up, for fuck’s sake.” He ferreted under the back of my seat, fished out his gun from under my leather jacket and casually disappeared it under his suit coat. “Christ,” I said with a certain bitterness, “that was thoughtful of you.”

  “Well, I couldn’t very well cart the thing around in front of the cops, could I? C’mon, what are you hanging around for? I could eat a horse.”

  “He could probably arrange that for you,” Share said wither­ingly. I thought, If only she knew.

  The cop let me through, and I drove back into Royal Parade, headed north. “No, they still don’t serve horsemeat to humans in Melbourne,” I said. “Raw fish, yes. Anyone fancy sushi? Sashimi? With a bowl or two of hot saki? Just what you need to soothe the nerves after your house has been demolished by a raving lunatic.”

  “You’re going the wrong way,” Share said. “The best Japanese is in East Melbourne, Albert Street, opposite the Fitzroy Gardens.”

  “That’s wall to wall surgeons’ consulting rooms,” Mauricio said.

  “They have to eat too,” she said. “The Nippon Tuck got four stars in the Age Guide.”

  “I have a better idea,” I told her. The Cobra hummed up Syd­ney Road between a lumbering green tram and more four wheel drives than you could shake a yuppie at. People still buying SUVs, amazing. Something had happened to Brunswick lately. I shook my head sadly, and took a left into a bumpy alleyway between a closed-down book store and a classy new fish shop that looked like they’d style your hair while they grilled your batter-free piece of fish. “Have you ever eaten at the Alasya?” I asked Share.

  “What, is that place still open? When I was a student nurse.”

  “Noisy, but the food is good and Mauricio won’t be tempted to shoot anyone in such a public place.”

  He punched me sharply in the back of the head for that, so it was a good thing I’d found the rear of the shop I was looking for and parked the Cobra next to a huge and moderately smelly indus­trial-grade Dumpster bin.

  “We can walk from here,” I said.

  §

  I pulled my jacket on for form’s sake and nipped in to buy several reasonable bottles from a pub that had improved its game mark­edly since Share was a student. At the eatery, the guy carving hot spitting gyros nodded me upstairs to the private room. They serve you fast at the Alasya. Mauricio undid the top button of his pants and tucked in, shoveling flat bread into plates of pastel dips and chewing it up with black oily olives, lamb chops, sliced lamb, lamb kidney, minced lamb and some other foodstuffs derived from the sheep family. Even Share got into the spirit of the thing after a couple of glasses of rather attractive Delatite 1998 unoaked char­donnay. I stuck to red, and it stuck to me, taking away the stiffness in my neck and shoulders and with it my desire to beat Mauricio into a pulp. Most of it.

  “That was a really fucking stupid thing to pull, Mauricio.”

  “Purdue, you’re a loser, you know that? Can’t tell one bloody day from the next,” he confided to Share. “What kind of business­man is that?”

  “I’m not a businessman, you fucking thug,” I told him with dignity. “I’m a feng shui master. I prefer to be addressed as Sensei Purdue.”

  §

  I stumbled a little as we went back down the alley from light­-smeared Sydney Road, so I put my arm around Share’s shoulders to make certain she was okay. Whistling, Mauricio stopped be­hind us, and I heard a zip unzip and a moment later a cascade of piss against a brick wall. It made my own bladder ache. When we turned into the loading area behind the store where Vinnie lived upstairs, someone was out cold in the driver’s seat of the Cobra.

  Share touched my arm. I leaned over and shook a naked shoul­der poking out of an ancient dinner jacket with its arms torn out.

  “Wha? Mumph?”

  “Time to go beddy-byes, Animal.”

  Share whispered, “I don’t think you should—”

  Animal convulsed, and was out of the seat like a scary jack-in­-the-box doing its surprise. I looked down into a face that hadn’t seen the sun in about three years, eyes black with something so thick you’d expect the lids to stay gummed up after a single blink, and with more metal stuck through skin than you’d see in a fragged lieutenant in an Iraq tent. Sodium light from a pole high over the alley gleamed revoltingly from a mostly shaven scalp. One hand stuck out in my direction, quick as a flash, while the other beckoned demandingly. I shrugged and pulled out my wallet, placed a crisp new fifty in the outstretched hand. Share snorted, probably wondering if I’d succumbed either to a stand over job or a particularly sleazy invitation to a quickie. The banknote stayed where I put it. Before it could blow away I sighed and deposited another hundred.

  “Come to tuck me in, then, daddy?” Animal said in a sulky voice. She gave Share an inscrutable glance.

  Feet clattered: crazy Mauricio approached. Animal gave me a big kiss, then turned away and climbed the steps to the back of the shop.

  “Hey, sweetheart darling,” Mauricio shouted. “I wish we’d known you were home, you could have eaten with us, Anna­belle.”

  My daughter had the door open to Vinnie’s cave by then, and was through it, banging it shut. “Not hungry. Come on, I’ll drive you back to your car.”

  §

  The heavy haulage tow truck arrived. The hapless Mack had been dragged into the street and half the front of the heritage protected mansion had come with it. The roof on the top floor had caved in. I pulled up a safe distance away, and Share was off like a filly. You could have heard the shriek in Flemington.

  “Motherfucker!”

  Mauricio had caught a cab home to Fitzroy, so he was well out of it. Wearily, I bolted the driving wheel again and followed her past the behemoth. Reversing it out of the front of the house, they’d managed to run the back wheels up the hood of the Audi and through the windscreen.

  Share was shaking, white faced, clutching herself with clenched fists. I suppose she was cold, too, without her fur. Autumn in Mel­bourne is delightful, but even with El Nino and greenhouse it can cool down shockingly fast at night. I thought of lending
her my jacket, but that would have involved getting nearer than I planned just at the moment. Gingerly, I held out my cellphone.

  “You could call your husband, have him pick you up?”

  “He’s in K.L. this week, don’t you listen to anything?”

  Oh yeah, that had been somewhere after the second bottle of red.

  “Well, a cab. I’ll call you a cab, Share.” I poked around in my jacket pocket, looking from her crushed car to my dismantled home. “I haven’t even got anywhere to sleep, you should think yourself lucky, Share.”

  This time the shriek woke the elephants, or maybe one just hap­pened to trumpet in sympathy. It was unearthly. She came at me with nails extended, and I had to hold her forearms or I’d have looked worse in the morning than Animal. Enraged words were pouring from her mouth. I suspected that her inner harmonies were not all they might be, not at that moment.

  “I’ll see you in court, Purdue,” she sobbed, pulling herself free, stumbling away from me. “Every penny you own, and then some. I’ll have you in jail for this, you and your thuggish friend Cimino. You’ll hear from my solicitor on Monday morning. I could have you arrested for carrying weapons and, and felonious intent to scam your insurers. No, keep away from me.”

  “Share, I was just going to offer you my jacket. You must be freezing.”

  “Stay away.” People were peering from behind curtains. What an entertaining night this must have been for these burghers. “Let me drive you home, Share.”

  “You’re drunk, you lunatic. Just piss off.”

  I sighed heavily. We looked at each in silence for a while. Finally, I said, “So I suppose a fuck’s completely out of the question?”

  It took a couple of moments. I suspected the top of her head was about to blow off, but then, thank god, she started to laugh. She leaned against a lamp post, and I smiled back at her as the makeup ran down her cheeks.

  “Oh Jesus,” she said, then. “Okay. Drive me to Balwyn, Purdue, then we’ll see.”

  §

  And that was it for me. I slept like a bloated pig.

  Breakfast at Share’s was basic: black coffee and some sort of rusk. The rusk was only a marginal improvement on the prover­bial branding iron, and the coffee did little to soothe the hang-over—I’m a hair-of-the-dog man, myself. I said so to Share, who looked terrible. She seemed unreasonably upset, but then Sharon Lesser was evidently a woman living on the far edge of the edge.

  “We drank the dog last night, Purdue. Hair and all.”

  The empty vodka bottle abandoned on the kitchen floor seemed

  to bear this out. I took a pull of the coffee. It tasted like tin. “Okay, Purdue,” she said from the other side of the kitchen table, visibly pulling herself together, “about the consultation.” “The consultation.” I wanted to lay my head down on the table. “You seem a bit slow,” Share said. “The words are a bit slow coming.”

  “My reactions are always a trifle torpid in the morning,” I said. “I’m not a morning person.” My dreams had been black and curdled. I’d half woken needing a piss, convinced I’d heard

  Mauricio’s Mack truck slamming through a wall. No, that had been earlier. My house was gone, as planned, but sooner than planned. Oh Christ, the stupid fuck could have killed me. And I didn’t know where Share’s bathroom was, so I’d rolled over and gone again into the murky dark.

  “Be that as it may, there’s still the matter of the consultation. I’m your client. I came to see you last night, remember? You know, you were running this feng shui Consulting outfit. You had a really nice office suite in the downstairs part of this really nice heritage listed gaff in really really nice Parkville. Is it all coming back to you? Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  “Now?” I said in dull amazement. “You want a feng shui con­sultation at this hour in the morning?”

  “Stop fart-arsing around, Mr. Purdue. Do your stuff.”

  “If you insist, Share.” I squared my shoulders despite the pain. “What needs to be understood about feng shui is that the words mean ‘wind’ and ‘water’. These two primal elements represent the space between heaven and Earth. In this space, which is our dwelling place, the mighty force known as ‘chi’ eddies and swirls with all the wild grace of wind and water. But for all its grace and power, water can grow stagnant, it can become trapped....”

  “It can become putrid, can’t it, Purdue? Fouled with pollutants, dead rats, old condoms, plastic bottles, oil slicks, cryptospiridium, e. coli by the bucket load....”

  “You seem to have grasped the concept admirably,” I said. The tinny coffee was all gone, and the chi with it, leaving something foul and brackish in the bottom of the cup. I reached for the pot and poured some more, shuddering slightly. “It is the feng shui consultant’s job to identify those malformed spaces where the mighty force of chi is trapped like the stagnant water to which we have alluded....” I trailed off. I was too old for this sort of thing, I decided. This time yesterday I’d thought of myself as a young fel­low in the prime of life. Bang. Bang. And the house came tumbling down.

  “What about Yin and Yang, Purdue?”

  “I was coming to that, Share. The concepts Yin and Yang are very important to the practice of feng shui. They are the light and the dark in constant opposition. You don’t have any orange juice, do you? I hesitate to say so, but your coffee is appalling. Mineral water would do at a pinch. I’m a bit dehydrated.”

  “Plenty of water in the tap. You’ve got to balance the buggers, haven’t you?”

  “What buggers?”

  “The Yin and Yang, you’re not brain-damaged by any chance?” I stood, made water flow into a tall glass. Chi sparkled in a beam of sunlight, or it might have been a film of detergent.

  “It is indeed necessary to achieve a harmonious accommodation between the forces of Yin and the forces of Yang—”

  “—in order to enhance not only one’s physical surroundings but also one’s life, career and interpersonal relationships...that’s right, isn’t it, Purdue?”

  “You appear to know almost as much as I do, Share. I see you’ve had occasion to consult a feng shui master before.”

  “I’ve read the same bloody website, Purdue.”

  “The role of the internet in spreading the good word about feng shui cannot be overestimated. However, a word of warning: full mastery of the insights of this ancient art can be obtained only by many years of study and contemplation at the feet of an enlight­ened master. The temptation to use a little learning gleaned from the internet—”

  “Without paying huge amounts to a charlatan like you.”

  “—should be avoided at all costs.”

  “Sugar, Purdue. Can you tell me something about its Yin and Yang?”

  I was getting whiplash. Maybe I’d nodded off for a couple of seconds, the way you do when you are majorly jetlagged, but I hadn’t been out of the country for years. “What?”

  “That white stuff, the sort you don’t snort up your nose. You put it in tea.”

  I shook my head sadly. I suspected her tea would be as awful as her coffee. “Feng shui has little to say about sugar, Share. Tea in China is traditionally drunk without the addition of either milk or sugar.”

  “But the average race horse in Australia is no respecter of tradi­tion and takes its sugar neat.”

  Oh. Oh fuck. I felt sicker, all of a sudden. “Just what is this all about, Mrs. Lesser?” Had we or hadn’t we? I honesty couldn’t re­member. Our clothes had been all over the bedroom floor. But I’m notoriously untidy when I’m pissed, it didn’t necessarily signify a night of wild passionate screwing.

  “I think you are a man of parts, Purdue. I think it is possible to consult you about a lot more things than this feng shui crap. Or do I mean horseshit?”

  “I think it might be a good idea if you said what was on your mind, Share.”

  “The stewards were very interested in Canned Fish.”

  Yes, correct weight. For about half a minute I just
looked at Share and she returned my gaze. She was a good looking woman, all things considered, although she looked terribly strained. Just how far had I managed to get with her? Were we known unto each other? We’d certainly woken up in the same bed. I couldn’t remember a fucking thing, literally. Dreams of my house falling about my ears, that was all.

  “Canned Fish,” Share said, just in case I’d missed it.

  “It’s a bit early in the morning for canned fish, darling. Kippers, perhaps.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Well you tell me,” I said. “Just what do you know about Canned Fish?”

  “That the nag suddenly developed a massive turn of speed in the 3.30 at Flemo a couple of years back. A few very select punters did rather well out of it. Your good self included.”

  “Jesus, this is history, Share. We’re talking about a bygone era.”

  “We’re talking about pet food. About three quarters of a tonne of pet food.”

  “Poor old Canned,” I said. “He broke a leg a year later. He was a little battler, but there was nothing we could do. The bullet was a kindness.”

  “Cut the crap. About the 3.30 at Flemo. Before the nag got turned into Cat-O-Meat.”

  “Just who are you, Share?”

  “I’m someone who wants to know about tanking a horse up with sugar. That’s what you used, isn’t it? Just sugar. Nothing detectable by sophisticated methodology. No fancy drugs, no ste­roids, no growth hormones. Just the old CSR table sugar.” CSR was Colonial Sugar Refinery, the Australian byword for white sugar since my parents’ childhoods, and their parents. I wondered for a moment if the company had changed its name to Postcolo­nial. “The poor animal went hyperactive, it had to run like stink to burn up the sugar.”

  I looked out the large window at the large grassy back garden. Tall native trees blocked out the neighbors. “All horses like sugar lumps,” I said. “You want to hold your hand very flat, though. Just let the lump sit on the palm of your hand. Don’t curl your fingers or you’ll get nipped.”

  She regarded me with scorn. “My understanding is that the horse had half a sack of sugar in it. I don’t think it ate that off some guy’s hand.”