The Big Whatever

by Peter Doyle

  I stayed by the river for the two days as arranged, went into Brewarrina at nine o’clock the next morning. I pulled up outside the Café Deluxe, got some change, went to the phone booth at the post office and dialled Richard in Melbourne. He answered after four rings, said he’d spoken to Tom Uren. Uren was interested. On the face of it. Yes, it all fitted with federal Labor policy regarding public housing and inner city conservation. But he couldn’t act unilaterally. He’d need to take it up with the state mob. They might have their own ideas. “But that’s a good result. So far,” said Richard.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “I might’ve tipped our hand there, because I spoke to Neville Wran a few days ago.” I told Richard exactly how the conversation had gone.

  “Hmm,” he said. “You should’ve left that alone. Oh well, it’s done now. But from here on, it has to be hands-off. If the politicians get the sense we’re pushing them, that the thing isn’t under their control or could blow up, or that someone they don’t know about might have an interest, anything like that, they’ll dump the whole idea.”

  “I understand. So how long will that take?”

  “I don’t know. Three, six months. Maybe a year.”

  “Oh shit, that’s way too long. Listen, Richard, how about we try to speed the process up a bit?”

  “How?” he asked cagily.

  “With some do-it-yourself-type public relations.” I told him what I meant.

  He wasn’t too jazzed by my idea. “That could blow the whole thing.”

  “If it doesn’t happen soon, it’s useless to me anyway,” I said.

  I killed some time having tea and toast at the Café Deluxe, then just after ten went back to the phone booth and called the Third World Bookshop in Sydney. Bob Gould picked up. The combined vice and drug squad raid had gone splendidly, he said. He was sufficiently happy that he gave me the phone number I needed. That got me to the editor of the Nation Review. Who heard me out, though he sounded less than impressed. Still, I had a hunch he was interested, despite his show of indifference.

  At eleven I rang Denise’s number in Melbourne. No answer.

  Another cup of tea. I watched truckies come and go.

  At midday I rang again and she picked up. After we got the mutual hello dear, how’re you going, I miss you, wish you were here stuff out of the way, I said, “Hey, I might have a bit of an ace investigative reporter–type magazine story for you. If you want to write it. Or know someone who does.”

  “Yes?” she said slowly, with doubt in her voice.

  “About a women’s refuge holding out against secret real estate deals. Speculators. All against a backdrop of freeways destroying old inner city communities. Very Sydney.”

  “The fuck, Billy?”

  “The Nation Review is kind of interested, but not quite a hundred percent sold. Not yet.”

  “The fuck, Billy?” Laughing this time.

  I gave her the Review editor’s number, then Terry and Anna’s. “The second number, that’s my friends in Balmain. They’ll show you the ropes, introduce you to the women’s refuge crowd. If you want.”

  “Well, I suppose it can’t hurt to at least ring them.” Her words sounded detached, but I could tell she was fired up. “Thanks Billy. Seriously. So what are you going to do now?”

  “I’ve come this far,” I said. “I’ll see it through.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I’ll track down the last name on Max’s list,” I said.

  “Oh, forget that. It’s a wild goose chase. Come to Melbourne and stay with me.”

  It was tempting.

  “And wouldn’t that be names, plural, to track down?” Denise asked. “The Cat, Brylcreem and Mr Bones. Right? Not to mention the Croaker.”

  “Brylcreem and Bones are in the UK, shoplifting. The Croaker died of a morphine overdose early this year. I’m down to just one name: the Cat.”

  “Maybe he’s gone too?”

  “He was at the races in Sydney two months ago. And if the book is to be believed, the Cat was the last person to have dealings with Max before he blew his mind. He’s around somewhere.”

  “According to Professor Perkal, that would be—” I heard her riffling through the book, “That would be, ah, this: A rundown tropical town . . . a dump. There was no surf, just shitty farm land round about. No natural features to speak of. There were no hippies, no trendies. Just white trash and blackfellas. That would include an awful lot of New South Wales, would it not?”

  “Most of Queensland, too. Where I am now, I can cut across to the coast, make my way back south, checking out the likely towns on the way.”

  “On the other hand, if you come to Melbourne, we’ll have fun.”

  “How long is that offer good for?” I said.

  “Not forever.” A pause. “But for a little while yet.”

  “Keep a light in the window,” I said.

  * * *

  I crossed into Queensland and cut east through Roma, then Chinchilla, sleeping by creeks and billabongs. I pushed north east all the way up to Cooktown. It was definitely tropical. Also drab, untrendy, and without surf. So were Port Douglas, Cairns, Gordonvale, Innisfail, Tully, Ingham, and so on. So was most of northern Queensland.

  But there was no Cat.

  I checked in with Eloise again after a week. As I’d expected, Donny had been around again. He was frantic. I needed to front Joe and Phil, pronto. Or else.

  “Or else what?” I said. Eloise said that’s what she’d asked him. At which Donny had just shaken his head and said, This is bloody serious now. Abe’s involved. Billy needed to sort this out as a matter of extreme urgency, or he, Donny, couldn’t be held responsible. “Any message?” said Eloise.

  “Not yet, but stand by.”

  After another week I’d worked my way down to Central Queensland. I became very familiar with the details of chemist shops, and was probably better provisioned with toothpicks, razor blades and underarm deodorant than anyone in the country.

  My money was nearly gone. Canvas was showing through on the tyres, and the starter motor was on the way out. I signed on to do a day’s work on a tomato farm, trimming the laterals off the bushes. That night I was sunburnt and sore, went into a dead sleep at eight thirty.

  Two days later, further south, I took on three days’ work chipping weeds in a sugar cane field. The first day was tough, by the third I felt okay. Then I did a whole week in a sugar mill – scored an easy job checking off the loads of cane that arrived hour after hour, day and night, on the puffing billy rail line. That time of year there was work to be had all over coastal Queensland, all of it low-paid.

  I’d got my dress code worked out and become pretty much invisible: a bloke in his late thirties, maybe early forties, dressed in clean, faded King Gee work togs, driving an old but looked-after ute. I came and went, neither welcomed nor farewelled. Got nearly every job I asked for, though. I looked the part.

  I avoided pubs, killed time off the road in movie theatres and drive-ins. Saw the year’s big ones, Serpico, The Sting. Finally caught American Graffiti, which had one scene I liked, hot rods in the pre-dawn, their lights on, driving slowly towards the camera with ‘Green Onions’ playing on the soundtrack. Saw some other films I liked, The Long Goodbye and The Laughing Policeman. Also a late-night double feature, Badlands and Two-Lane Blacktop. The latter was about a pair of longhaired street racers and a girl hitchhiker getting around the boondocks in an old Chevy. The longhairs enter into a driving duel with Warren Oates. One of the drifters was played by Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boy. Both films were a bit on the slow side, and the longhair actors were kind of wooden. But they were okay for late-night viewing.

  Then it started raining. Monsoonal rain. A thunderstorm would build up all day, drop two or three inches in half an hour, then clear before evening. It was the same every afternoon. I worked a few days at a mill near Bundy, but the rain halted the cane cutting, so I moved on.

  When it got too wet to camp out, I spent a few
nights in a motel outside Brisbane. Watched late-night television. Saw an old movie I’d liked when it first came out years before, Thunder Road. Robert Mitchum driving moonshine out of the mountains in a hotted up car, outrunning the traps, stopping every now and then to drop in on a hillbilly party.

  I crossed back into New South Wales, moved down through the Tweed Valley. There were longhaired, down-at-heel hitchhikers everywhere. I picked up a couple at Murwillumbah. She was pregnant, he was drinking from a beer bottle, at one in the afternoon.

  “Your muffler doesn’t sound too good,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Been that way for a while.”

  “Pull up in the shade, if you like, I’ll have a look.”

  Twenty minutes later, using a few bits of fencing wire and a pair of pliers, he’d managed to jerry-rig the exhaust, reduced the racket by two-thirds. I dropped them at the Burringbar turn-off, slipped them twenty bucks. I drove off with the radio playing for the first time since I’d bought the car.

  I called into Byron Bay, even though it had hippies, trendies, diverting natural features and a surf break. There were head shops in the main street. Garish murals here and there. I bought a hamburger in the milk bar and kept going. Drove inland, through Lismore, the instant hippieville of Nimbin, month by month filling up with longhairs, dope-smokers, girls with long flowing hair in long flowing skirts, drooby strummers on street corners, their guitars always slightly out of tune. One kid was singing “Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless.” A cocky walking past caught my eye and muttered, “Hopeless, more like.”

  The hills were green and lush, with clear streams running down through hidden valleys. I was told you could snap up an abandoned hundred-acre dairy farm with a rambling old timber house on it for a song. The hippies were realising now what Mullet and Katie had wigged years ago: this was prime dope-growing country. Provided you could hack all that hippie cuteness and macrobiotic chow.

  I camped on a beach that night, and the next day drove south again. Just out of town I picked up two girls with backpacks, hitching in the rain, looking to get to the turn-off thirty miles down the way. They were friendly enough, but oddly serious too. In their early twenties, army shirts with the sleeves rolled up, dungarees, work boots. Smoking roll-your-owns. One was on the large side, dark haired, with a faint mo, the other slim, also dark. Both had track marks on their arms, I noticed, fairly recent.

  We chatted a bit, and after I had apparently passed muster, the bigger girl, Marcie, sitting by the window, asked if I’d like a joint. I said no thanks, but they could go ahead if they wanted. They did. They dropped some pills, too.

  We drove in silence for a while, then I asked where they were off to. A place up in the ranges, Margie said, suddenly half out of it. Thirty or forty women lived there, coming and going. No men, except for some children. She looked at me as she said it. They said they bounced back and forth between there and Sydney every few months.

  “That’d be a separatist community, then?” I said.

  They looked at me, surprised. Denise had hipped me to the term only the month before.

  “Some of the women believe that when the San Andreas fault gives way and the west coast of America slips into the sea, it’ll make a wave that’s gonna sweep across the Pacific and hit Australia.”

  Yeah right, I thought. From the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere? I glanced quickly at her. She looked very earnest, no smile, so I said, “Really?”

  “Yes. It’ll be huge, of course. It’ll go way inland. That’s happened in the past, you know, it’s in the archaeological record. And the wave is going to cause . . . well, chaos, obviously. It’ll be the end of nearly everything. The patriarchy and capitalism will be finished.”

  At which the other girl, Jan, burst into stoned laughter.

  “What about you?” Marcie said. “Where are you headed?”

  I had to think for a second. “Nowhere much. I’m on a working holiday.”

  In the end I drove them all the way to the commune. Took the turn-off, threaded through the ranges all the way to their place. The rainforest closed in over the road, wild green hills, steep valleys and swollen streams. It looked okay from the driver’s seat: by day there’d be birds, at night gliders and all the forest marsupials. But I imagined what it’d be like living rough in there, the damp, the ticks, the leeches, the snakes.

  I gave a ride to a couple of teenage blackfellas hitching back down the hill. One had a guitar, no case. He snappily picked out instrumentals, ‘Apache,’ ‘Theme for Young Lovers,’ ‘The Third Man,’ all the way down the mountains, but scarcely said a word. After the kid had finished a version of ‘Maria Elena,’ his mate laughed and said, “Wesley’s a guitar-playing Jesus, eh?” I agreed that he was.

  As I was going to sleep that night, I thought about what I’d told the hitchhiker, about being on a working holiday, and the twinge of guilt I’d felt when I said it.

  I drove on down to Kempsey, just a day’s drive from Sydney. Out of the tropics now. Out of habit I stopped outside the chemist shop in the main street. The Cat was standing behind the counter. Fifty or so, well-fed, with a good head of neatly trimmed ginger hair, looking competent in his starched white coat and horn-rimmed specs, the sort of country town small businessman you wouldn’t glance at twice. But if you did look a second time, you’d see he was a little over-groomed, the hair too neatly cut, nails too neatly trimmed. The eyes a little too wary and calculating. Look closely and you’d see the Darlinghurst spiv.

  He was a crook from way back. When he’d had his shop at the Cross, the Cat was the person you saw to arrange an abortion, fill a dodgy script, sell you a syringe – even patch up a bullet wound, no questions asked, then slip you some pethidine to help with the pain. He had good relations with the racing fraternity, could get hold of the exotic substances they needed from time to time. The entertainment industry had occasion to call on him too, for instance when visiting celebrities found themselves without certain things they needed. All that had come undone when he was charged with indecent behaviour after putting the acid on an undercover cop in a public toilet in Hyde Park. His friends fixed it the first time. The second time he had to pay big to get out of it. The third time he went bush.

  The Cat gave the merest flicker of the eyes when I came in, then extended his hand and said, “William. So wonderful to see you.” He was smiling, but rattled.

  I shook his hand. The shop was empty except for us.

  “I was hoping I might run into you,” I said.

  “How did you know I was here?” he said.

  “Plain old dumb luck, I guess.”

  “Really? Anyway, you want something, no doubt. People always do.”

  “I’m looking for Max Perkal”

  He relaxed a little.

  “Seen him recently?”

  “I have. Twice, in fact. He came in and bought a glass syringe and black hair dye a couple of years ago. He was working as an entertainer at the time.” His voice dropped. “Then I saw him again, about a year and a half ago.”

  “He’d run out of hair dye?”

  He shook his head. “I filled a script for him.”

  “For?”

  “Physeptone. That’s methadone to you.” His voice dropped further. “And some other things in that line.”

  “Know where he is now?”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “Any idea where he was headed?”

  A long look, then a quick shake of the head. “He was rather a mess.”

  I thought it best to not push too hard, so I left. Told the Cat I might pop back later before I moved on. Do, he said.

  Passing through Crescent Head that night, I saw a public phone with a queue outside it. I waited my turn for a free call, rang Terry in Sydney.

  “Mullet’s back home. With bad news, and good news,” he said.

  “Bad news first, please.”

  “Dennis Wilson and that American Graffiti guy, George? Looks like they’re maybe not going
to pick up Crystal Dreams. They think it’s a bit too Aussie, or too strange, or maybe not strange enough for Yank audiences,” Terry said.

  “So it’s all down the brasco?”

  “The good news is that they’re still interested. But they want something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “Another film. Something a bit like Crystal Dreams, but with more of a proper story. With surf, dope, cars. And maybe a bit of fantasy, too. Thing is, I’ve been thinking about it, talking with Mullet. We could reuse some of the footage from Crystal Dreams – the big surf stuff, the sunrises over the Pacific Ocean, all that. We’d have to film some other bits to string it all together, though. Add some motor bikes and car crashes. And more drugs.”

  “Cars, bikes and dope?”

  “Yeah. And Australian settings. Outback, abos, koalas, that sort of thing. With tits.”

  “Mullet’s all right at surfing and smoking joints, and filming other people surfing, but is he any sort of real director?”

  “I dunno. Are you?”

  Next morning I went back to the Cat’s pharmacy.

  “You’re still here?” he said.

  “When Max was in town did he see anyone else?”

  “Not to my knowledge. But then, what do we know of others,” he said, “and the things they get up to?”

  “Food for thought,” I said. “You’re not in the phone book. The Pharmacy Guild didn’t have you on their books.”

  “My, you’ve been busy. I suppose I should be flattered you’ve taken such an interest. No, I’m not in the book. And this place isn’t mine, technically. It’s a friend’s. But now I’m intrigued. Why did you so want to find me?”

  “Max wrote a book about his exploits in Melbourne. The book never really got around, but a few copies were circulated. He mentions you.”

  “By name?” Now he was alarmed.

  “Just your nickname. Said you were hiding out in a drab coastal town in the tropics, with no trendies, no surfies.”

  “I was for a while. But can you see me living for long in a town with no surfie lads?”