I'm Dying Here

by Damien Broderick

  “Share?” I said. I reached for the phone. Grime leaned away from me. Bits of metal in her face clattered against the plastic.

  “Yeah, this is his phone. No, they took ours away two weeks ago, the pricks. Non-payment of rent, have you ever heard such shit? Information wants to be free! Telstra and Optus and the unions are all conspir—Sorry, what? Oh, all right.” She held the phone out, not looking at me.

  “Feng Shui Solutions,” I said. The mouthpiece stayed where it was, for a wonder. “I take it I have the pleasure of addressing Mrs. Sharon Lesser of Balwyn?”

  “G’day, Purdue,” Share’s voice said. “I see your phone’s work­ing again. Stick your daughter on, will you?”

  “And the top of the morning to you, too, Share. Why didn’t you just get Grime Grrl to pass it over directly to Animal? I mean, yes, it’s my phone and my phone number, and I pay the monthly bill which is more than these slack layabouts can manage with their own connection to the world although I see that it hasn’t stopped them hooking their bloody high-end computers up to a premium optical fiber feed—”

  “That’s Cookie’s,” Animal said, eavesdropping. “For her job, obviously.”

  “I thought you said she had trouble leaving the house? What job?”

  “Pay attention you nitwit,” Share said. “I’ll be there in five min­utes. I have a little present for you, by the way, so you might as well stick around. Now let me speak to Animal.”

  “You didn’t even know her last night.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You thought she was a hooker. The very idea offended your prim Balwyn sensibilities.”

  The phone was silent for a moment. I thought I heard a sigh. “She was sulking. Tom, would you stop fart-arsing around and fucking put Annabelle on the fucking line.”

  “There is no line,” I said feebly, and handed it over. Animal tucked it between her shoulder and her jaw and sloped off to Cookie’s room, shutting the door behind her with a bang.

  After a bit more silence I coughed and said to the recumbent if not dead Grime, “You know her, then?”

  “Well, shit, obviously. Me and Cookie.”

  “Uh huh. And is Cookie also a—”

  “A muff diver? A carpet eater? A canyon yodeler? A butch man­hating ball-lopping dyke? None of your beeswax.”

  I wondered if Share hadn’t been entirely frank with me. A few tumblers were tumbling into place.

  “Animal told Share about the sugar? Me and Canned Fish?” Grime Grrl looked at me. Our companionable silence extended itself for a bit.

  “Hmm. You were telling me about Cookie’s source of in­come?”

  “Well, Vinnie, for starters.”

  I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck, and the juices in my guts curdle. That was disgusting. Vinnie? He was a hundred if he was a day. Well, seventy-five. Surely his balls had shriveled up by now. The man was meant to be devoted to commerce and the sa­cred memory of the sea.

  “What?” I said. “Vinnie what?”

  “She runs his investment web site. Ran, maybe.” A slow tear leaked down Grime’s face, taking some pale makeup with it. “She coulda done a real suicide, how can we tell?”

  Animal’s laughter rang through the door. A moment later she opened it and came back, clicking the phone shut. As she did so, the mike part fell off and clattered on the hard flooring. I ignored it.

  “My father-in-law is running an SP shop by phone?” I asked in amazement. “In this day and age where one can find a Tabaret on every corner or place your bets by touch phone from the privacy and comfort of your own home?”

  “Running a what?”

  “Starting price bookie. Strictly illegal. Untaxed. Pursued by the State government and its licensed gambling minions with the full vigor and malice of the law.”

  “All over the world,” Animal told me. “Peer-to-peer.” Grime was back fiddling with the phone, snuffling in her grief but wield­ing her hair pin like a top neurosurgeon. “Lotto syndicates. Track meets. Football games across the planet. Digital two-up. Horse races in eighty-nine nations.”

  “Camel races,” I said.

  “Yeah, that too,” Animal said.

  I got to my feet and went to the cupboard looking for something to drink. I found a fifth of Scotch, two-thirds empty. One seven and a halfth of Scotch. You get quite nimble at mental arithmetic, being a runner for an SP bookie like Vin when you’re a teenager. I whipped the top off and glugged down a good quarter of it. A thirtieth of Scotch down the hatch. It burned satisfactorily. I heard my Cobra pulling in to the parking space below, there’s some­thing distinctive about those American sports models, something that sounds like all the money you’ve shoveled into the endlessly open cash register of the one authorized maintenance garage in the Southern Hemisphere and certainly you wouldn’t wish to risk going anywhere else and violating your warranty. Sharon Lesser’s boot heels clipped their way up the steps, so I went to the door and opened it. Light cruelly penetrated the darkness, and I saw what Vinnie had meant about not being able to see who it was.

  “Don’t stand there gawking, man, the game’s afoot and we have urgent business elsewhere.” She kicked the door shut, walked past me as one does the doorman in the Ruritanian outfit standing at the entrance to the Regent. Sharon embraced Animal with a de­gree of warmth, obviously they did know each other. Grime Grrl at least looked at her without scowling, and showed her cheek for a peck. “The sheikh was well satisfied with his purchase,” she told my daughter. “Here’s a little something for you good grrls.” An envelope went from her handbag to Animal’s sleeve like a needle passing through the eye of a camel. Before I had time to protest, she found its twin and handed it to me. The paper that the envelope was hand-crafted from smelled of the attar of roses or something in that neighborhood, and contained ten hundred dollar bills.

  “And this is for feng shui services rendered?”

  “Your aid this morning netted you five thousand dollars,” she said. Even as I opened my mouth in outrage, she said, “Of which I have naturally retained four thousand to cover the damage to my Audi. You can appeal to your thuggish mate Mauricio for a rebate.”

  “He went for it,” Animal was explaining to Grime. “Bought the consignment.”

  “Racing camels,” I said, to show everyone I could read between the lines. “From the western desert. Even now being prepared and pampered for their flight into Egypt.”

  “Not exactly. And into Saudi, actually,” Share said.

  “Or would be, if the bloody creatures existed outside of your fevered imagination.”

  “There are cynics among us,” Share said to Animal. She gave her a kiss which looked surprisingly motherly and went to the door, tossing me my keys. “It’s a little more complicated than that, Mr. Purdue. You can drive,” she said.

  “Hang on,” Grime Grrl called from the couch. Her tone was plaintive. “He’s solving a case. He’s finding Cookie for us.”

  “Cookie’s not here?” Share spun on her heel. In the dimness, her face seemed to grow paler but it was hard to be sure. I was finding almost everything hard to be sure about, however.

  “She left a note,” I said. “‘bY the TimE U read this I shalL B GONe’.”

  “Oh shit,” Share said. She shook her head. “Poor Jonquil. She’s such an unhappy child. But we don’t have time for her tantrums right now. Toot sweet, Purdue.”

  PART 3

  I generally try to stay one klick under the speed limit in town, which is not hard to manage in Sydney Road. The Cobra hums along country roads like a dream of fluid dynamics, more cat than snake, but grinds and gargles and groans in the stop-start nightmare that the Coburg end of Sydney Road has become. What with clearways alternating with parking for shoppers, and the great green and yellow or madly Leunig-daubed behemoths of trams scratching along their tracks in the middle of the road like Victorian aunties out for a stroll, a man was lucky to get bet­ter than jogging speed. You’d see insouciant bike riders
skim by, zip through the lights, leave you stuck behind the tram as one little old lady made her painful descent to the street. Don’t get me wrong, I love Melbourne’s trams. In the holiday break between school and uni I worked for six weeks as a conductor, wearing their daggy, baggy government issue brown uniform and cap, and a happier time I can’t recall. Dinging the bell for stops, stuffing the cardboard backing of a block of sold tickets behind the cardboard advertisements placed at eye level for the many poor buggers who stood swaying, crammed together, hoping for a seat. That was before the State government got all twenty-first century and threw out the conductors, replacing the friendly and helpful connies with clunky machines everyone hated and nobody bought tickets from. It was a people’s passive resistance strike, Gandhi would have been proud of us.

  The tram line terminated at Baker’s Road, and the pace picked up.

  “Where now?”

  “Just keep going,” Share told me.

  “Christ, we’ll be on the Hume Highway in a minute.”

  “Not for long. Take a left at the first lights after Boundary Road.” She was dabbing at her eyes. An emotional woman. “Jonquil Lesser,” I said, “is your daughter.”

  She gave an angry bark of laughter. “Break it down, Purdue. How the hell old do you think I am?”

  “A gentleman never says.”

  “Well not that fucking old. Cookie is my husband’s child.”

  “I very much doubt that she’s dead,” I said.

  “Of course she isn’t, you idiot. Girls fall out. She probably felt cooped up there in that place.”

  Maybe so, but how had she got out, in her condition? And why leave her computer and other tools of her dubious trade? I watched her and the road.“You don’t get on.”

  Share shot me a glance, shrugged. “She’s difficult. How did you know?”

  “Well, you didn’t put your head into her room with a cheery hello from the visiting stepmother.”

  “She’s taken a set against me, doesn’t like me in there. Ruby’s nearly as bad. God knows why. The trophy wife syndrome I sup­pose. I’ve asked Annabelle but she just clams up.”

  “Animal and clams are as one.” I thought I should leave it at that for the moment. Really, what the hell did I know? Somehow I didn’t like the husband doing his mysterious business in K.L. and I’d never even met the man. Hard to track the logic of it all, although some connections were becoming clear. Part of me was very angry indeed at Annabelle. But I couldn’t say that I was dis­pleased to have made the acquaintance of her friend’s stepmother. Crazy bitch though she was.

  §

  For a wonder the lights were green. I turned smartly through the great wide gates of Fawkner Crematorium & Memorial Park and round the fountain, patiently following Share’s instructions. The road was candy striped with parallel paint lines in many merry hues, like a hospital floor, the better to guide the dead to their destinations, some peeling off to the right, some to the left, some forging straight on.

  “Not only is the end nigh,” I said, “it’s conveniently color coded.”

  A stifled snort implied that I was forgiven.

  “Seventh Avenue,” she told me.

  We had to wait as a funereal cavalcade passed, headlights burn­ing sullenly in afternoon daylight. In the long dark gray limo be­hind the hearse, a wife or mistress wailed behind smoky glass. Several vehicles back, four hearty real estate agents or used car salesmen howled as the driver, beefy red face creased with hilarity, reached the punch line of his joke. We crossed Merlynston Creek.

  Never flush with water at the best of times in these greenhouse El Nino days, it looked parched and cracked. I parked on asphalt outside a blandly tasteful interfaith chapel. Share put on a broad brimmed hat with a handy obscuring veil.

  “Who’s being buried? Or is it roasted?”

  “Walk with me,” Share said, taking my arm. “Let us reason together.”

  §

  A cemetery is perhaps the finest place to meet when skulldug­gery is on your mind. You wander respectfully among the head­stones, speaking softly, heads close, consoling one another. Fam­ily members might meet by accident, bearing floral tributes or simply dropping in to commune with the spirit of the deceased. We passed a few clumps of strangers standing tranquilly beside plots, or perhaps hatching them. Sharon Lesser knew her way around the place. We stopped under a tall Australian native tree, and waited there for the man meditating with his back to us at a nearby grave.

  “Who’s the mourner?”

  “Surely you know him.”

  I shrugged, although there was something familiar about the man.

  “Everyone should know Culpepper,” Share said.

  Christ, so it was. “Really,” I said in a flat voice. The under­worlds and overworlds of Melbourne are variegated and many, despite the regular outbreaks of internecine murder in the streets. I’d only known Mutton and Wozza by chance, really, and never met Culpepper, which was not remotely surprising. Not that he was the chairman of the Stock Exchange, but he moved in those circles, although you never saw his picture in the social pages or heard his name on TV.

  “He expedites things,” Share explained, as if to a moron.

  I gave her a cryptic look. I was getting a bit jack of Share’s wom­an-of-mystery act. Two can play at that game. “What things?”

  “For heaven’s sake, man,” she said, impatient with me in her turn. “He expedites whatever you want expedited.”

  Maybe that was about as much as she knew about the man. It wasn’t that I knew a whole hell of a lot more, but international gambling figured near the top of the list. Maybe he knew the sheikh. Bound to. I decided to ignore her. A couple of lorikeets in the tree above our heads were carrying on like pork chops, shouting and screeching at each other, hanging upside down by their claws, ripping at the gum nuts like vandals. I studied their behavior for a minute or two. The mourner stood beside us. In­congruously, he held in one hand by its sturdy plastic handle a white polyurethane cooler—an Esky. So he liked to sip a beer dur­ing his meditations on mortality, drawn from the chill embrace of a twenty-first century CFC-free Australian icon.

  “A certain animal vitality,” he said in a plummy English accent, head tilted, regarding the chortling birds.

  “They’re not what you’d call funereal,” I said. “Not your classic birds of ill omen.”

  He was rueful. “The avian kingdom is no respecter of human gravitas.”

  Share introduced us. We shook hands. Felix Culpepper was very well dressed in a hound’s-tooth suit with impeccably pressed shirt and Melbourne club tie. I especially admired the crisp lines of his collar. I can never get that right with my iron.

  “Ever been inside a mausoleum, Thomas?” the Culpepper said. “Nope.”

  He made the slightest motion with his head.

  Share and I followed his back along a twisting path through the gravestones, cutting across the rectilinear roadways and paths. The cemetery mimicked Melbourne’s ethnic map. From an area of headstones each of which carried an enamel image of the deceased and hearty recommendations in Italian to the Almighty, we arrived at a more waspish, moneyed suburb of the dead: from Brunswick to Toorak in one bound, you might say, except that these days the Toorak dead rarely took the long trip north and across the Yarra River. Still, some of these graves were old and expensive and pa­latial. Some more palatial than others. We stopped beside a scaled down version of a Roman villa. A marble Botticelli angel brooded on the roof. Culpepper placed the Esky between his feet, unlocked a gate in the wrought iron fence, strode the three long steps it took him to arrive at the villa’s door and unlocked that as well. The door was steel, equipped with one Yale lock and two padlocks.

  “Should keep the stiffs from going AWOL,” I said. No one laughed, not even me.

  “After you,” Culpepper told us.

  I took a look around at the daylight. Suddenly the open cem­etery seemed a very cheery place: lorikeets, trees, fellow human beings. I followed Sha
re into the mausoleum. Culpepper closed the door. I thought for a moment that he was intent on locking us in. No. In the total darkness, I could hear him fiddling with some­thing; at least he had followed us inside.

  “How about you leave the door open.”

  “Better that I don’t,” Culpepper said in the dark. A flashlight in his hand came on. We stood in a square room of marble. Shoved against one wall was an open casket, extra large, its lid propped beside it. Light gleamed briefly from the rich lining. My pulse ac­celerated. He couldn’t fit both of us into it, surely? A flight of steps led down into the earth. “The dead have little call for electricity,” he added. “In some respects these places are distressingly primi­tive, but they have their unique virtues. Let us proceed to the un­derworld.”

  The flashlight beam pointed down the steps. Culpepper left the Esky in the upper crypt, beside the coffin, descended, turned to direct the beam back in our direction. Share followed, stepping carefully. I did the same, and I wasn’t even wearing high heels. We halted before another steel door. This one might have graced a bank vault. Culpepper turned the knob right and left in a swift series of maneuvers, far too fast for me to memorize the combina­tion. He spun the well-oiled wheel and the door opened sound­lessly. It was ten centimeters thick and padded on the inside.

  “About fucking time,” a voice said from inside.

  “I’ve bought your stepmother to see you, dear,” Culpepper said, entering the crypt. If that’s what it was. It might have been a World War Two bunker, except that we’d never had to fight the Germans and Italians on our own soil. Well, the Italians, once they started immigrating after peace was declared, and then we called them reffoes and beat them up in the school playground. So my father told me, anyway.

  “Share? Is that you?”

  “Christ, Culpepper,” Share exploded. “You didn’t tell me you had Jonquil in here, you bastard. I thought we were here to discuss camel genetics!”

  “One can’t be too careful on the telephone.”