by Gilling, Tom
‘Just two, yes.’
The elderly proprietor stared at him, and Nick thought he was going to ask whether they were married, he and his mythical companion. Then he reached under the counter for the register. ‘Double rooms are sixty-five. Breakfast extra.’ He opened the register and turned it around for Nick to sign. ‘Do you want breakfast?’
‘No thanks. We’ll be pushing off early.’
‘Suit yourself.’ He watched Nick write his details and then turned the register round. Even with his reading glasses on, he had to press his face almost against the page to read the words. ‘Chambers,’ he said, as if the name confirmed his worst suspicions.
‘That’s right.’
‘Had a Chambers here some time back. Left a tap running. I had to have the carpet up.’ The proprietor squinted over the top of his glasses. ‘Wasn’t you, was it?’
Nick held his gaze for a few seconds but the unfocused stare told Nick that the old man was almost blind. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘My first time down here.’
‘Must have been someone else then.’
‘Must have been.’
‘Cost me nearly eight hundred dollars.’
‘The carpet?’
‘Smell wouldn’t come out. Had to buy a new one.’
‘That’s too bad.’
‘Chambers. I’m pretty sure that was his name. Polypropylene.’
Nick looked puzzled.
‘The carpet. Polypropylene. Navy blue. You wouldn’t want it in the house. No one cares, do they? What’s on the floor. Could have sawdust and they wouldn’t notice. Just come here to sleep. Someone walked off with a television set once.’ He pointed across the forecourt. ‘Number seventeen. Upstairs. Now they’re all bolted to the wall.’
He waited for Nick to speak.
‘It’s a motel,’ said Nick. ‘I suppose—’
‘Wife said I ought to have told the police. Malicious damage. Told her they wouldn’t be interested. File a report and forget about it. Same with the television set. Asked me if it was insured. Next minute they’re getting back in the car.’ He paused, and started flicking through the register. ‘I’m sure it was Chambers… Chalmers. Maybe that was it. Only eighteen months old.’
‘The carpet?’
‘We had them all done. Twenty-four units. Wife chose the colour.’ He frowned and snatched a key from the board on the wall. ‘Number seven,’ he said. ‘There’s extra bedding in the cupboard if you want it.’
‘Thank you.’
The old man handed him the key. ‘There’s no dogs, by the way.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Dogs.’
Leaning over the counter, the proprietor pointed to a small sign: NO DOGS, NO VISITORS, NO SMOKING.
‘I can always smell a dog,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose. ‘The wife says it’s a gift.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Nick. ‘It sleeps in the car.’
The unit looked as if it hadn’t been slept in for months. There were cobwebs in the corners. Four tea bags and a bowl of petrified white sugar sat on a plastic tray beside the kettle. Nick tried to open one of the windows but it was bolted shut and he couldn’t find a key.
After locking the door he sat down to read the instructions on the box of hair dye. It all looked simple enough but the plastic gloves split and Nick was forced to improvise with a pair of supermarket bags. With the bags on his hands he couldn’t avoid smudging dye on his temples. He studied the result in the bathroom mirror. He’d missed some of the roots but the overall effect was good enough. As he stood there he heard a knock on the door. He froze. Then he called out, as if to his nonexistent companion, ‘I’ll get it.’
Nick watched the doorknob turning silently in its socket. ‘The TV in there is stuffed,’ said a familiar voice. ‘I could get another if you want.’
‘Thanks for the offer,’ said Nick. ‘We don’t watch much TV.’
‘It wouldn’t be any trouble. There’s one in the office.’
‘We’ll be fine.’
‘Fair enough. It’s there if you want it.’
Nick slept with his clothes on, just in case. In case of what? Who exactly did he fear—the police? Michael Flynn? Or Kevin Chambers? Nick realised how much he didn’t know about the man whose name he’d taken. Why had Chambers left his wallet and keys in an unlocked car next to a deserted beach? If the boxes of groceries were supplies for a journey, where was he going—and why? If he was going to report his car stolen, he would have done it by now. And if not, then what did he have to hide?
Nick began to regret having stopped for the night. Wouldn’t it have been safer to have kept going? He could always have pulled over and slept in the car. Someone might have recognised the Valiant on its way through. If Kevin Chambers was a local, he would know who to ask. Nick was tempted to leave now, in the middle of the night, only he knew it would arouse suspicion— and he’d already given the motel proprietor ample reason to remember him. But Kevin Chambers wasn’t local. According to his driver’s licence Chambers lived in the western suburbs of Sydney. So what was he doing leaving his car unlocked in a deserted carpark at Seven Mile Beach?
Eventually he fell asleep—only to be woken by the sound of a car in the parking area, and by the slow arc of headlights, like the revolving beam of a lighthouse, shining through the windows. The car drove past, then came back. Nick looked at his watch. It was just after three in the morning. He rolled out of bed and pulled on his shoes and crawled to the window. The car was a white saloon—a Commodore, he thought. The last time he’d spoken to Danny Grogan was in a white Commodore.
The car stopped outside a block of units on the far side of the parking area but the engine was still running. Through a gap in the vertical blinds Nick thought he could see two people. He slipped the door latch. A figure—it looked like a woman but in the darkness Nick couldn’t be sure—got out of the passenger seat and shut the door. Now he could see her high-heeled shoes. She walked around to the back of the car and took something from the boot, then opened the rear door on the driver’s side and got in. Nick couldn’t see the driver. The Commodore sat there with its engine running, not moving. Nick felt in his pocket for the keys to the panel van. Had the old man turned him in? He remembered the ruined carpet. Had Kevin Chambers really stayed here before?
Nick thought of Laura-May the skydiver from Sauk City, Wisconsin, who’d survived a fall of ten thousand feet without a parachute. The miraculously lucky happened every day. Why not the miraculously unlucky? He remembered the honeymooning plane crash victims who’d been destined for the front page until they turned out not to exist. The splash that replaced them was about a Kempsey woman who’d run over a masked armed robber in the carpark of the local RSL, only to find that the robber was her own son.
As a junior reporter he’d suspected stories like that of being made up but they never were. Nick scoffed at the idea that age nurtured scepticism. Age nurtured belief, even in the unbelievable. Especially in the unbelievable. Who could have predicted a physical resemblance between Nick Carmody and Kevin Chambers—and yet the resemblance was a fact. Coincidence wasn’t an unnatural contrivance but its opposite. It was what kept the world moving.
Finally the Commodore drove away, and Nick realised he’d been spooked by nothing more sinister than a furtive coupling in the back seat.
It was still dark when he crept out to the panel van with two supermarket bags full of dye-soaked newspaper. The dog stared at him wanly as he opened the car door: the sort of disappointed, reproachful morning-after look that reminded Nick of unhappy nights with Carolyn. He sat behind the steering wheel while the dog sloped off towards the waste ground, then clambered in beside him.
He’d told the old man he was on his way to Sydney, so he set off in that direction, then turned round and drove back, dipping his lights as he passed.
The sun was coming up. Before he came to Batemans Bay a road sign pointed to the Kings Highway. Beyond lay Braidwood; beyond that Queanbeyan and Canberra.
Nick pulled a copy of the Daily Star from a rack outside a service station. The splash said, OVERDOSE KILLS TYCOON’S SON. Beneath the headline was a picture of a body being removed from the back of an ambulance. Someone had tipped off the press: a switchboard operator, probably, or somebody at the hospital. An almost identical photograph was on the front page of the Herald. Nothing in the picture identified the corpse as that of Danny Grogan except, perhaps, the two bruised feet protruding from the blanket. Nick remembered the scene in the toilet cubicle at Central Court, which seemed now like a grim rehearsal for the final act of Danny’s life.
The front page story carried Michael Flynn’s byline under a banner that said STAR EXCLUSIVE, although most of what he’d written had been taken from the files. The police, for once, were keeping their suspicions to themselves and for all Flynn’s efforts his story added nothing to what had been on the radio a full twenty-four hours earlier: Danny had been discovered lying in the stairwell of a block of apartments in Bondi. The ambulance team had been unable to revive him. A used heroin syringe had been found with the body. Danny didn’t appear to have been visiting anyone in the block and no witnesses had come forward to say who Danny might have been with on the night he died. Insofar as the evidence supported a theory, it was that Danny had simply walked in off the street and given himself a fatal shot of heroin.
Turning the page, Nick saw a photograph of himself under the headline: POLICE PROBE MISSING REPORTER LINK. It was the picture on Nick’s staff ID card. Was that Perger’s idea of a joke? If so, he’d done Nick a favour. The picture desk could have chosen from a selection of more or less flattering byline photographs, but Perger had picked a wild-eyed scowling mug shot that made Nick look like a fugitive on a ‘Wanted’ poster. The chances of anyone—even Carolyn—recognising him from that photograph were slight. Strangely, there was no byline. It crossed Nick’s mind that maybe Perger had bullied Sally into writing the story:
Daily Star reporter Nick Carmody, who testified on Danny Grogan’s behalf after Grogan’s Audi TT coupe was caught speeding in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, has gone missing.
Carmody failed to show up for work yesterday and appears to have vanished from the house in Abercrombie Street, Chippendale where he has been living for the past few months.
A friend of Grogan’s from their school days at St Dominic’s College, Carmody is known to have been in contact with the tycoon’s son in the weeks before his fatal overdose.
Colleagues at the Star are surprised at Carmody’s disappearance. The police have been informed, but so far nothing has been found to connect Carmody with Grogan’s death.
Carmody is believed to be driving a red Toyota Camry, registration SVA 709. His dog is also missing.
There was, as Nick had anticipated, nothing in the story to justify the headline POLICE PROBE MISSING REPORTER LINK. If the nameless reporter was Sally then Flynn hadn’t told her about the hit-and-run. Nevertheless, Nick was glad to have got rid of his car.
He skimmed the next few pages. Perger had gone overboard, as Nick knew he would, but most of the material was old hat—a tawdry retelling of Danny’s life under the media spotlight. Had it been anyone but Danny, Nick would have been happy enough to play his part in the ritual cannibalising of a famous corpse, but now he was repelled. It was a pantomime of a human life and it made him cringe.
The Herald was more restrained in its coverage—the tabloids had always owned Danny Grogan—but restraint hadn’t stopped the broadsheet from sending a photographer to corner his grieving mother in the hospital carpark.
Before driving off Nick looked at himself in the rear-view mirror. His face had subtly changed, although Nick had done nothing but dye his hair black. By altering a single feature he seemed to have initiated a deeper kind of metamorphosis—as if his face, the face of Nick Carmody, was adjusting to suit his new identity. Or was it something else: that Nick was looking at himself, for the first time, from the outside? He remembered the shock he had always felt when listening to himself on the radio. What he heard then was not his own voice but the strident, toneless voice of a stranger. In the mirror he saw, for a fraction of a second, a face he didn’t recognise.
The flagpole of Parliament House loomed in the distance. Nick drove across the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge and parked the Valiant in a carpark near the National Convention Centre. He walked back towards the city centre. The black dye looked less convincing in daylight than it had under the dusty fluorescent light in the motel unit. He’d missed most of the roots and some of the ends. He needed a haircut.
The place he chose was a unisex hair salon sandwiched between a travel agent and a souvenir shop in the Jolimont Centre. Four of its five chairs were empty. A girl with black nails and black lipstick pinned an apron around his shoulders. ‘My name’s Jade,’ she announced with a quizzical smile.
Nick asked for a number two cut. Jade opened a little zippered plastic bag with her name on it and picked out the necessary attachment, which she held up for his inspection—like a sommelier offering him wine to taste.
‘So,’ she said, lifting some strands of hair on her comb. ‘Am I allowed to ask who was responsible for this—or is it a secret?’
‘I was born with it,’ said Nick.
‘I mean the colour,’ she said. ‘Not the hair.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That was my girlfriend.’
‘Really?’ she answered, meeting his gaze in the mirror.
Nick began to regret not choosing Jade’s taciturn colleague, who was snipping silently at a pensioner in a raincoat.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I did it. I thought I’d surprise her.’
‘I bet you would have.’
‘It was a spur of the moment thing. The instructions made it look easy.’
‘The instructions always make it look easy.’
Nick watched her in the mirror. Jade didn’t look like the sort of girl who spent her spare time reading the newspapers. She looked like the sort of girl who spent her spare time painting herself black.
‘Why do you paint yourself black?’ he asked.
‘Don’t you like it?’ asked Jade. She held her fingernails out for him to admire. Nick admired them. His own fingernails were yellowish brown.
‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ said Jade. ‘It’s not good for you.’
‘I’ve quit,’ he said. It was a short sentence but he never thought he’d hear it. Sometimes, admittedly, a person like him had uttered those words, but only in his dreams. Subconsciously, perhaps, Nick had longed to say them. But consciously, they were anathema— a betrayal of all the hours he’d spent (months in total— years, probably, by the time he retired) loitering on the pavement outside the Daily Star, struggling to keep a cigarette alight in the rain, or lurking like a burglar in the stairwell, keeping an ear out for the approach of the security man. Nick Carmody would never have given up smoking. Nick Carmody was going to die—prematurely, but with a perverse kind of satisfaction—with a cigarette between his fingers. But Kevin Chambers hadn’t smoked a cigarette for nearly eighteen hours. Seventeen hours and forty-six minutes, to be exact.
‘Excuse me for saying it,’ said Jade, ‘but you don’t smell like someone who’s quit smoking.’
‘I quit last night,’ he said. ‘At ten past seven.’
Nick could tell that she didn’t believe him; he only half-believed himself. She held up the mirror so he could see the back of his head. ‘Short enough?’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Just what I was after.’
‘The colour still looks terrible,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to fix it?’
‘I can live with it. But thanks anyway.’
Jade took the nylon apron off his shoulders and shook the loose hair onto the floor. ‘That’s twenty dollars.’
It crossed his mind to give her fifty but a tip like that was the sort of gesture she wouldn’t forget—and forgettability was a quality Kevin Chambers might need.
The dog was hu
ngry. Nick found a supermarket and bought some tinned food and a plastic bowl. He sat and watched her eat. It was years since he’d spent more than three weeks away from his desk at the Daily Star. Somewhere in the personnel computer was a file showing his accumulated annual leave— nearly seven months, at the last count. Carolyn’s idea of a holiday had been a fortnight in a luxury resort in Port Douglas or Fiji or Phuket. Nick thought of all the holidays he hadn’t taken and all the trips he hadn’t made and all the places he hadn’t visited. He’d sacrificed them all to work and ambition. And for what? To find himself subbing stories about escaped alligators stalking the suburbs of Tupelo. He had five thousand dollars in his wallet. Five thousand dollars was a lot of petrol money.
He drove south to Cooma, north-west along the Snowy Mountains Highway, through Adaminaby and Kiandra all the way to the Murray River. It occurred to him that he didn’t know where he was going—that if he made up his mind where he was going he would be able to choose the most direct route. But without a destination he could keep driving indefinitely. Maybe that was what he wanted.
Near the town of Boundary Bend (population 182) he swung off the Murray Valley Highway onto a dry-weather gravel road that took him to the junction with the Murrumbidgee.
He stood on the banks of the Murray, between the gnarled roots of a dead river gum, listening to the insect hum of irrigation pumps. On the far side of the river he could just make out the shape of a lone angler. The flow of the huge river seemed timeless, irreversible. He thought of the dead white explorers— Sturt, Mitchell, the canoeist Francis Cadell—encountering the river for the first time. He, too, was an explorer—an explorer of possibilities, of the possible lives and possible futures of Kevin Chambers.
As he returned to the panel van the raucous cry of a kookaburra burst from the branches above his head. The greyhound sprinted ahead, as though reminded of its evenings on the track, then scampered back, as the sludge-green river lapped at its banks.
