Matthew Flinders' Cat

by Bryce Courtenay

  In the reception area of St Vincent’s Casualty he bumped into Dr Goldstein. Somewhat to Billy’s astonishment, the doctor greeted him by name.

  ‘Mr O’Shannessy, how’s the wrist coming along?’ Goldstein immediately asked and without waiting for a reply said, ‘Here, let me see.’

  Billy held out his arm and, observing Sally Blue’s signature on the plaster, Nathan Goldstein grinned, ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘I should be so fortunate,’ Billy smiled. ‘Good evening, Doctor Goldstein.’ He was strangely pleased that the doctor had remembered him by name. ‘Please call me Billy, doctor.’

  ‘Move your fingers for me, will you, Billy.’ Billy did as Goldstein instructed. ‘That’s good, plenty of movement. As long as it doesn’t give you pain, you must try to exercise the hand as much as you can. What brings you here, anything I can do?’

  ‘Thank you, doctor, I’m here to visit a friend, Trevor Williams.’

  Goldstein laughed. ‘We’ll be sorry to see him go, his concerts the last couple of nights have been such a buzz for the ward that we’re thinking of putting him on broadcast throughout the hospital. We had an old bloke in last night, heart attack, fortunately we brought him round successfully, although he was pretty groggy when we wheeled him out of the theatre on his way to the intensive-care ward. As we passed the public ward, Trevor Williams was giving a recital, at that very moment singing “Summertime”. The old bloke suddenly sat upright, nearly bringing on another heart attack. “Is this heaven?” he asked.’ Goldstein smiled. ‘He’s got a pleasant voice, though, hasn’t he?’

  Trevor Williams was delighted to see Billy. ‘Gidday, mate, how’s yer bin, orright?’

  Billy realised that he was going to miss Williams, the little blackfella had a nice way about him, a gentleness which Billy had almost forgotten could exist in a man. Billy placed the bag containing the chocolate and tobacco on the locker beside the bed, then reached for the key around his neck and unlocked his handcuff, putting the briefcase on the floor. ‘How are you feeling, Trevor? The doctor tells me you’re the current singing sensation, that broadcast rights and a contract are being negotiated as we speak.’

  ‘Ah, it’s nothin’, a bit o’ amusement for the folks, that’s all,’ Williams said in a self-deprecating way. ‘Wish me little daughter were here, then you’d hear summin’ else, mate. Yiz’ll see for yerself when we finds her,’ he added modestly. ‘But they like me here, dunno why, bit of a singsong ter keep them happy when they’s feelin’ crook, I suppose.’

  ‘The doctor says it’s by popular demand, ward’s never run better. You’re giving them another concert tonight he tells me.’ Billy said, ‘Well done, Trevor.’

  ‘Yeah, some the older folks back yonder,’ he indicated the end of the ward with a thrust of his chin, ‘say they can’t hear me too good. So, there’s these two real nice poofter security men, good blokes, muscle men, built like a brick shithouse, they look identical, same haircut, same colour, they’s bringing in the microphone from reception.’ Williams laughed. ‘They both crazy about country music, so ternight I’m gunna mix a bit more country into me repertoire. Bin thinking all day, tryin’ ter remember some o’ them lyrics Slim Dusty sings. Them old ones, y’know, “A Pub with No Beer” or “When the Rain Tumbles Down in July”. Bin a while since I sang any of them numbers.’

  Billy’s admiration for Williams had been growing steadily since they’d first met in the Flag. Now his heart skipped a beat at Williams mentioning his daughter, indicating that, when they found her, he would see her talent for himself. He realised, going right back to the abortive meeting with Casper Friendly, in the black man’s mind there had always been a tacit understanding that he’d help in some way. Billy was silent, trying to think of how he might break the news of his departure to Trevor Williams.

  ‘What’ve you brought me?’ Trevor asked, reaching for the bag. He opened it. ‘That’s real nice of yiz, Billy, fair dinkum. Them biscuits yiz left last time, real good, mate.’

  ‘Florentines, traditional Italian delicacy,’ Billy replied, realising he’d told Williams this, that he was simply stalling for time.

  ‘Italian, eh? Italian is good tucker.’

  ‘Trevor, I’ve come to say something. It’s . . . well, it’s not necessarily good news.’

  Trevor Williams looked up at Billy. ‘What’s the problem, mate?’

  ‘I’ve decided to leave Sydney, go up north, to Queensland.’

  ‘Whaffor? This your home, Billy!’

  ‘It’s a long story, some complications have arisen.’

  ‘The police? You got trouble?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. It’s just that I have to get away for a while.’

  Trevor Williams was silent, looking down at the white sheet covering his lap, then he slowly attempted a smile. ‘I thought it was only blackfellas needed to go walkabout, eh?’

  Billy tried to smile but was becoming increasingly upset. He could feel the disappointment in Williams, though the black man was trying hard not to show it. ‘Trevor, I know you feel I might be able to help with your daughter, but I can’t. What legal knowledge I once had . . .’ Billy searched for the right words, then finally gave up. ‘Well, anyway, I’d hate to be represented by someone like me in a court of law.’

  ‘Yeah, you said that before, when we was with that mongrel albino. It was bullshit that time, I reckon it’s still the same.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid it’s true.’ Billy sighed. ‘It’s been seven years since I defended anyone in court and I lost my last three cases. I should have been disbarred for incompetence.’

  ‘Yeah, you said that also,’ Williams replied.

  Billy could think of nothing more to say, short of telling Williams the true reason for his departure. ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ he said lamely.

  ‘There’s no need, Billy. Yiz the best whitefella I ever met. Yer had me stash ter yerself and yiz returned it ter me. Yer come ter see me in the hospital. Yer listened to me story of why I come here. White bloke like that don’t need t’explain hisself.’ Williams smiled. ‘When I’m an old bloke, no teeth, I’ll be sitting around the fire with my people. “There’s this whitefella,” I’m gunna say, “done something you wouldn’t believe a white bloke would do for a blackfella in all your born days.” Then I’m gunna tell them the story of Billy O’Shannessy. Maybe make a song, hey? “The Ballad of Billy O’Shannessy”, do it country, sing it round the fire, I can play the guitar a little bit.’

  Billy, despite himself, began to cry. ‘Trevor, that’s the second time you’ve made me bawl,’ he said.

  ‘She’s right, mate, no worries, man can have a blub, don’t do no harm to no one else. Me mum, she’d say, crying’s been given us for washing out the sorrows.’

  Slowly Billy found himself telling Trevor Williams the story of Ryan and Trim the cat, and the friendship that had quickly developed between himself and the boy, then of the accusation that had followed. When he reached the point where Marion had refused to help deliver his letter to Ryan, Williams interjected for the first time.

  ‘That one, she’s got a great arse, but butter wouldn’t melt . . . Don’t never trust her, Billy,’ he warned.

  ‘Ryan’s just a scrap of a boy, a nice little kid, bright as a button, just the thought of harming him in such a vile way is utterly repugnant.’

  Williams was silent for a while. ‘It’s a shit of a world, mate. Youngster like that needs a daddy who can tell him things. What’s gorn wrong when a man can’t do that? Can’t help a little bloke avoid finding trouble.’

  Billy reached down and dried his eyes on the edge of the sheet. ‘I’m truly sorry, Trevor. I’ve no right burdening you with all this, you have your own problems, and they’re a lot more serious than mine.’

  Trevor Williams didn’t reply at first, his eyes downcast, then he raised them to look directly at Billy, ‘Yeah, that’s true, we all
got troubles of our own, mate. But we saw our little daughter grow up decent. Her mum don’t touch the grog and me, only sometimes, not at home, sometimes when I’m away. Only once me little girlie seen me drunk, she was eight years old and she cried for three days. I told meself that ain’t never gunna happen again. She had a good home and she done good winning that scholarship to the conservatorium in Adelaide. Never gave her mum and me no trouble, always singin’ round the place like a canary bird. I know if I can find her, the love we’s always had will come through. Heroin, that’s bitter fruit, man. A bloke’s just gotta hope that what she knows in her heart, that’s gunna come through for her.’

  ‘What will you do, Trevor?’ Billy asked. ‘I mean, when you get out of here?’

  ‘I’m goin’ back home to Wilcannia, get meself well again, then I’m comin’ back. I ain’t givin’ up on her, she’s somewhere and I’ll find her, I give me word to her mum.’

  They were silent for a while. ‘Trevor, I really should be going, mate.’

  ‘Yeah, me too, I got to give these folks a concert.’ Williams held out both arms, one still heavily bandaged. ‘Take me hands, Billy, both o’ them.’ Billy gripped the little Aborigine’s arms. ‘You’re my brother, I won’t forget you, mate.’ Billy saw that Williams’ eyes were bright with tears.

  ‘You’ve made me cry twice,’ Billy sniffed. ‘Fair go, mate, not again. Is there anything further I can do for you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Still holding Billy’s hands, Williams indicated his hands with his chin. ‘They’s crook, can you write to me missus, tell her the old bloke is okay, that I’m comin’ home real soon?’

  ‘Of course!’ Billy cried, happy that he could do something for his friend. He released Williams’ arms and reached into his briefcase for a pad and biro and wrote down the address Williams gave him. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow, post it from Queensland.’

  Trevor Williams pulled open the drawer to his locker, took out his stash and peeled four fifty-dollar notes from it, ‘For the journey, mate, take care.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ Billy protested, throwing up his hands. ‘No, really it’s lovely of . . .’

  Williams’ expression grew suddenly stern. ‘You don’t take money from a blackfella, that it, eh?’

  Billy accepted the money. ‘Thank you, Trevor.’ It was all he could think to say.

  ‘Ha, gotcha!’ Williams barked, wiping his eyes on his bandaged arm and attempting a grin. ‘That’s called reverse psychology!’

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  With each perfect day rolling in with the surf, Billy became increasingly depressed in Paradise.

  He had spent almost five months in Surfers, where the sky was more or less perpetually blue and the generous daily quota of sunshine persisted in ratifying the local slogan that each day was better than the one that had preceded it.

  Billy had confronted his demons a hundred times and each time declared himself guilty of being weak and, worse than this, of avoiding any sort of responsibility. But he’d always concluded that he’d paid the price for the right to abdicate from a conscience-driven life.

  What he was having difficulty facing was that this time his running away wasn’t simply an abdication of responsibility, it was cowardice. There was no other way of looking at it. He’d run before he’d been threatened. He’d fled like a timid creature at the sound of a breaking twig. He’d made no attempt to mount a defence against his accusers nor demanded they show him proof of his guilt. He’d made no denial or even lodged a protest. Instead, he’d run from the enemy at the first wisp of smoke on the horizon.

  Billy didn’t wish to see himself as a coward. He didn’t want to accept and live with a coward whimpering pathetically within him, his alter ego beaten and quivering.

  He’d told himself again and again that he’d done the honourable thing and in the process of his life he’d always settled things properly. The proof was there for anyone to see. As a result of his departure, his wife had lost forty-five kilos and discovered that behind the layers of lard lurked a very handsome woman. She’d cut and styled her hair, grown and painted her nails, gone to the gym to tighten the loose parts, adopted the very best of haute couture for the forty-plus woman, wore achingly high heels and jammed her toes into shoes that cost five hundred dollars a pop.

  As a good Catholic girl, she’d denied Billy a divorce but demanded and got a hugely generous settlement, which included the heritage-listed family mansion on three-quarters of an acre in Bellevue Hill. With her life beginning again at forty-nine, she’d found a man five years younger than herself and, so she couldn’t be seen by the bishop to be openly living in sin, she’d installed him in the renovated servant’s cottage at the bottom of the garden.

  What was left of his worldly goods, still a considerable amount in shares and property, Billy had given to his lawyer daughter. She had accepted his remaining assets without feeling the slightest obligation to keep in touch or the need to introduce him to his two grandchildren. As far as she was concerned, it was payment in return for the embarrassment his drinking had so often caused her as a junior in his own chambers.

  Then, as his final act of contrition, Billy had accepted all the blame for Charlie and politely removed himself from the scene so that he would no longer be an encumbrance.

  So, what more could he possibly do? Nothing, came the reply. Whereupon he’d begin convincing himself all over again ad nauseam – he’d swapped a warm bed for a park bench, status for nonentity, money for poverty, old friends for vicious strangers, a family for a life alone and a life of ease for one of extreme discomfort. Billy argued that what he’d done wasn’t cowardice, but true remorse. Only a real penitent would deliberately fashion for himself a hairshirt of such unlikely and difficult contrasts.

  But every way he argued or whichever angle he looked at it, the guilt persisted. He’d forsaken a ten-yearold child who was trying to come to terms with a dying grandmother and a heroin-addicted mother. Billy was finally forced to admit that he’d done what he’d always done, paid the money to salve his conscience and made a run for it. He was a coward, the argument was over.

  However, an admission of guilt is not necessarily acceptance. Guilt is not always assuaged by confession, the road to self-acceptance is rocky, rutted and long, and its end is as often self-loathing as it is self-forgiveness. Not every road to Damascus ends in an epiphany. And so, as alcoholics so often do, rather than tackle his cowardice head-on, Billy turned to Mr Johnnie Walker. The wee Scotsman with the big stride, in his polished leather boots, smart cutaway coat, top hat and silver-tipped cane, was always there for him. They had walked side by side through triumph and disaster, in good times and bad, Johnnie was no Johnnie-come-lately.

  Billy started to hit the bottle hard. He could no longer pretend he was a problem drinker skirting the peripheries of alcoholism. He was drowning in self-pity for the new guilt he had taken on board. Billy soon lost his habit of doing his ablutions daily and now bathed and shaved every fortnight on pension day. He grew dirty and unkempt and what remained of his hair reached down to his shoulders and became infested.

  In his fourth month in Paradise he was arrested for exposing himself in public. He’d been discovered wandering through a beachside shopping mall with a bottle in his hand, his fly unzipped and his willie peeping out at passing patrons. Fortunately for the late-night shoppers, his appendage was of such small dimensions that it lay buried in the shadows and general camouflage of his dirty apparel. That is, until a small boy of fly-zipper height pointed it out to his mother. In his state of advanced inebriation, Billy had taken a leak and neglected to make himself decent before leaving the toilet block. He’d weaved and stumbled a fair distance along the mall before he was finally apprehended by a very large Maori on the security staff. When Billy had attempted to resist him, the Maori had picked him up, tucked him under his arm and hailed a passing police van.

&n
bsp; Billy spent the night in the watch-house in Southport where he was charged with wilful exposure. He was put into the drunk cell, which contained a cement bench and several cubic feet of stale air. Later the next morning he was arraigned in front of the magistrate, where his obvious remorse and pleas for forgiveness seemed to make less of an impression than his good manners and cultured accent, and he was let off on a good-behaviour bond.

  While the dangling of his willie in public left Billy devastated, it also served to send him back to the bottle in an attempt to obliterate the terrible shame he felt. Drunks often repeat their actions by attempting to forget them.

  In Billy’s sober moments, which were growing increasingly further apart, he was dimly aware that he was slipping inexorably towards the point in his life when he’d wake up one morning clutching an empty bottle of sting (metho) and mumbling gibberish. He slept where the bottle took him, usually in the doorways of shops or sitting with his knees up around his chin on the floor of a phone box. Or, if he was still capable of hearing the sound of the surf, he’d attempt to stagger onto the beach. Through all of this Billy hung onto his briefcase, now handcuffed back where it belonged, to his left wrist.

  The Salvation Army drug and alcohol rehabilitation counsellors in the William Booth Institutes will tell you that an alcoholic will only agree to a detox and rehabilitation program after they’ve hit the wall. That is, after they admit they can’t give up the grog by themselves and need outside help. But they always say that an alcoholic rarely seeks rehabilitation to save himself. It is invariably an external event that triggers his resolve and it is always a thing of the heart.

  At the William Booth Institutes they have a saying, ‘Treat the person and you may win, treat the addiction and you’ll always lose.’