The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  The goons were nowhere to be seen.

  I studied him for several uncomfortable moments. It was one of my old tricks of the trade. I had patience. I was, more often than not, impervious to embarrassment. I could stare and stare with impunity. This talent had elicited many confessions in my career with 21 Division.

  I barely blinked at the pretty, gift-wrapped boxer standing a foot from me in the Fairweather room.

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ I finally said. ‘Is it Suit Day in Brisbane? I didn’t think anyone wore them up here.’

  ‘What did you think we wore? Pith helmets and linen?’

  ‘It takes a lot of guts to wear a pith helmet, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I know.’

  ‘Good, just as long as you know.’ I smiled.

  ‘You’re positive there’s nothing I can help you with.’

  ‘A gin and tonic would be nice, actually.’

  His mouth, as small and neat and lipless and clean as if it had been quickly made by the slash of a Stanley knife, did not move.

  ‘I am Dexter Dupont. The gallery director. And you’re looking for the tradesman’s entrance?’

  ‘Now, Dexter, don’t be rude. I want nothing to do with your tradesmen’s entrance. And remember, I too have a capacity for cruelty, particularly with words.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘Give me an example.’

  ‘I would, if only you could get to Dupont. Do you get it?’

  ‘Congratulations. I have a small gift for you. You are the one millionth person to make that joke.’

  I tucked my notes into my shirt pocket. ‘Why don’t you give me an early birthday present and get out of my personal space? I am a private citizen. A Fairweather fan, you might say. And I’d like to be left to contemplate his works, in particular his religious period, in peace. Thank you, Dexter.’

  He didn’t move.

  ‘We have a mutual friend who is very distressed.’

  ‘I am a retiree soaking up some culture. I am submerged in art, Dexter. Go away.’

  ‘A gentleman friend of yours on the Gold Coast. You have made him most agitated. Most aggrieved.’

  ‘Big country town up here, isn’t it? Can’t break wind without it turning up in the newspaper. Our mutual friend should know to keep his trap shut. Loose lips and all that. Words sometimes have a way of biting their owners, turning up in court, magically transforming into evidence. Your worship.’

  ‘I am aware of that. It is why I was waiting for you.’

  ‘Popular, ain’t I?’

  ‘And it is why I’d like you to come up to my office.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘What for? You want me to explain Fairweather’s mystic symbolism to you?’

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘With regard to?’

  ‘With regard to murder.’

  ~ * ~

  7

  The Peugeot started to smoke by the time I got over the bridge to Bribie Island. As I puttered above Pumicestone Passage I was half-hanging out of the driver’s side window, it was so bad in the cabin. It did not smell like French tobacco. It smelled like burning human hair and dust.

  I was tired and emotional and so was the car. We repaired to a patch of shade just off the bridge. Looking out at the grey water and gun-metal clouds, I had an existential moment. What was I doing here? I asked myself. I imagine the car asked it also.

  It had been a long, restless night in Brisbane. I had stayed at a cheap motel not far from the Gallery of Modern Art, near the spritely little spans of the William Jolly Bridge. In my head I went over and over my meeting with Dexter Dupont, the gallery director. I awoke at six in the morning. I had been haunted, some time in the night, by an image of the departed art appraiser James Fenton Browne lying on his back, crucifix-style, with spears of mangrove growing through his corpse. Small crabs ferried in and out of his eye sockets, and bluebottles were tangled in his hair.

  I had always thought this part of the country a happy-go-lucky place. Bridges were called Jolly. There were suburbs called Sunshine. Yet the brighter the light, the darker the shadow, and I had somehow fallen into south-east Queensland’s malevolent alter ego. And this wasn’t the drug world. This was the art world, for crying out loud.

  A friend of a friend at the Homicide Squad had agreed to see me at the Roma Street headquarters and share a few scant facts about Fenton Browne’s demise. He was one of those slick young coppers, highly educated, with an ironed crease down the sleeves of his shirt. I was shambolic, weary, and wearing stained leather scuffs. He gave me a cursory five minutes.

  ‘And your interest in this case?’ he said, leading me out, almost by the arm.

  ‘Curiosity,’ I said.

  ‘And we all know what curiosity did, don’t we?’ he said, smiling patronisingly. I had become, in his eyes, some ex-cop who could not let go of his police pedigree, and now bumbled about bothering working officers with this hobby, much as older men may take up orchid-growing or whittling. It mattered nought that I had taken down some of the most notorious men in Australian criminal history. Smelled their breaths, quite literally, in a couple of situations.

  This perfumed, crew-cut desk jockey steered me through the foyer and on to the street.

  ‘Well,’ he said, in the sing-song voice of a kindergarten teacher. ‘Good luck with it.’

  ‘Up yours,’ I mumbled to myself.

  The day remained gloomy and overcast, much like my internal demeanour. I struck out for Bribie Island. It was further from Brisbane than I expected. Like most men, I like a good drive. Indeed, I’d solved many problems on the highway. I find, when I’m in motion, the rushing Australian bush — its endless mundane walls of gum and wattle, its sheer excruciating drabness — is extremely conducive to concentrated thought. I imagine our early explorers experienced the same thing atop horses and camels. The bush, in its monotony, throws the consciousness back on itself. Makes an external journey an internal one. This can be illuminating, or dangerous. Ask Burke and Wills.

  On my expedition to Bribie I tried to hover above the information I had, as an early mapmaker might have done. I have been fascinated by maps since I was a boy, and remain in awe of the first cartographers’ art — how they layered gossamer lines, coordinates, geology one on the other and eventually came up with a picture of the whole.

  It was a practice applicable to Fairweather’s paintings. What Dexter Dupont did not know the day he conversed with me in the gallery, and then spun me a cock and bull story about the departed James Fenton Browne, was that I had seen something in Fairweather’s Epiphany, and again in his Glasshouse Mountains, that had given my slowly emerging picture of this case a defining contour.

  Fairweather had shown me the heart of darkness here, in this geography. And that warning had, I felt, given me some sort of advantage.

  But my reading of the Fairweather story did not prepare me for Bribie Island. I had expected a little fishing village with a clutch of casuarinas tickling the shoreline, but it was a hive of big development, like most of the Queensland coast.

  Fairweather had complained of urban encroachment way back in the sixties, when he used to wander about the island in soiled pyjama trousers. He even painted about the invasion of his Shangri-la. The building of the bridge over Pumicestone Passage had rightly caused him alarm. In the outside world his prodigious talents were finally being recognised. Now the world had access to him. And come they did, from local journalists to art critic Robert Hughes to Nobel Laureate Patrick White.

  Fairweather had become the very cliché of the artist who lives for only his art. The poet in the garret was in his case the master painter in a Balinese-style hut of his own making. No running water. No refrigeration. No stove.

  But the Fairweather story was more than that. In that dim hut on Bribie he wrestled with the great questions, and created a record of his metaphysical struggles with house paint on cheap canvas, car
dboard and even sheets of newspaper. In a rat-infested hovel he laid out map after map of his consciousness. He ate kippers, drank rotgut and painted and painted, as the world crept closer.

  When the Peugeot had cooled down, I secured a map from the visitors’ centre and drove the short distance to the park that had been consecrated in Fairweather’s honour. It was here his huts had once stood, where he did his major works that now hang in temperature-controlled galleries around the world.

  I drove past rows and rows of muffler repair shops and takeaway joints and newish housing estates. It didn’t feel right. I had read reports of Fairweather’s hideaway being almost impossible to find, deep in the bush. But where was the bush?

  I was not thinking of the fifties and sixties. It had been more than thirty years since his death. And as I came upon the little straggly pine grove that was Fairweather Park, I felt a pang of sadness for the artist. It was surrounded by bitumen roads, a bus stop, and a regulation Australian suburb.

  The huts were gone. The solitude was gone. His cairn of kipper tins — all gone.

  I eventually parked off the main road and wandered through the pine grove. The sandy floor of the park shifted underfoot. There was rubbish littered over the pine needles and leaves. In the centre of an amphitheatre of sunken earth, sporadically decorated with flaking timber bench seats, were a huge, misshaped boulder and a plaque to Fairweather. On the concrete apron at the base of the memorial some kids had scrawled graffiti.

  I sat for a long time in Fairweather’s grove. I strained to hear the birds he so loved, but only heard the distant gear change of trucks and the staccato thud of heavy machinery. Somewhere, in a nearby house, Willie Nelson was singing about being on the road again.

  Tom Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again.

  It was dark inside that sorrowful glade. It was late afternoon but the park seemed to have its own light, irrespective of time, and it was as gloomy as twilight. I could just make out the spectral shape of my white Peugeot through the trees. It seemed to me as blurry-edged and mysterious as the weird, haunting blotches of white in Fairweather’s The Bathers.

  I connected a couple of dots that afternoon in the glade. In my thoughts I travelled all the way back to the death of Legs, the madam from Atherton, and to a young Boltcutter in his antique store at the Cross. Then there was a newspaper brief from a long time ago about a murdered Brisbane art dealer. It nibbled at me like a Bribie sandfly. I’d have to hit the archives.

  When I headed for my car it was almost pitch black in the forest. I stumbled through the sand and undergrowth.

  I saw the figure of the man at the last moment. A silhouette, blacker than black.

  I even remember the crack across the back of my head.

  Then nothing.

  ~ * ~

  8

  When I finally opened my eyes again I understood two things.

  Firstly, gentlemen of a certain age shouldn’t put themselves too often in a position of being bludgeoned on the back of the head with a blunt object. There are less painful ways to see stars, and more pleasurable paths to a massive headache.

  Secondly, I was convinced I was dead. I was in a room with a single light glowing feebly in the distance, and crouched over me were an old man and woman.

  They pulled me up to a sitting position. I was on an old imitation leather couch. ‘You’re okay,’ the woman said, pressing a cold, damp flannel to my forehead. The flannel had little African violets stitched around its perimeter.

  The room started coming into focus. A recliner rocker with a flip-out footstool. A nest of coffee tables. Cream carpet so old it bore grey tracks of human traffic. A huge, old-fashioned imitation mahogany cabinet television set with a curly copper antenna on the top at one end, and a small white bust of Lenin at the other. There were nondescript pictures on the wall, the type of Hawaiian beach scenes that you could, once upon a time, buy by the metre from somewhere.

  ‘You want drink?’ the old man said. ‘Here, drink.’

  He pressed a big glass tumbler into my hand. It was warm orange-crush cordial. It smelled like a neglected fish pond.

  ‘You’ll stay for tea,’ the woman said, wiping her hands on her apron and shuffling over to the open kitchen behind the recliner rocker. I could see through the window a sole street light and the scissor shadows of palm trees.

  The old man hobbled over to the rocker, rested his cane against one of the arms, and eased into the chair. It squeaked loudly under his weight.

  I had no idea where I was or who these people were. If this was heaven, it could’ve done with a good scrub, some new furniture and a squirt of room deodoriser.

  ‘Am sorry,’ the old man said.

  ‘He’s SORRY,’ the old woman shouted from behind the kitchen bench. I had witnessed this dynamic with older people. The deaf husband. The wife, in compensation, turning up her own volume, then forgetting lots of other people in the world weren’t deaf. Her voice went into my tender eardrum like someone knocking a knitting needle into my brain with a rubber mallet.

  ‘Was mistaken identity,’ he said.

  ‘MISTAKEN IDENTITY,’ said his wife. I winced.

  ‘Where am I?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m Igor. This my wife, Manya. You at Bribie.’

  Bribie. The Fairweather forest. Yes. Heading for my car. Lights out.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I told you. Igor.’

  ‘He’s IGOR.’

  ‘Igor, why did you knock me unconscious?’

  ‘Was mistake. I thought you were the man coming with the shovel.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘For a month, a man come with the shovel. Always at night he come. We keep a watch over the park. He was our good friend, EE-arn Farr-weather. We keep a watch for the last thirty years, you know, make sure is nice for him, his last resting place and things like that.’

  ‘His last resting place?’

  ‘His ashes spread there.’

  ‘HIS ASHES.’

  ‘So in the past few weeks, the neighbours and other peoples, they see the man come at night with the shovel. I never seen him, until tonight. And bop, I hit you on head, thinking is you. Is it you?’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘That’s what my friend Bruce say. He here before, take a good look at you, and says — no, Igor, is not the man with the shovel.’

  With the shouting from Manya and a lump the size of half a cricket ball on the back of my head and Igor’s lurching Russo-English, I was completely disoriented.

  ‘You’re telling me that for the last month a man has been coming to Fairweather’s park late at night with a shovel, digging around for something, and he’s been observed by neighbours and passers-by. You thought I was that man. So you tried to kill me with your walking stick.’

  ‘It was small spade actually.’

  ‘SMALL SPADE,’ Manya shouted to the imitation walnut kitchen cabinets as she chopped vegetables. She chopped loudly as well. Every blade-strike into the bread board tapped at my bruised cranium.

  ‘He was my good friend, EE-arn. I had only taxi on the island for a long time and he have no car, so I drove him everywhere he want to go. Not many places to go on Bribie, you understand. But I run him around and do errands for him, and he was very good to me. I take some of Manya’s cooking to his huts sometime, just so he have a hot meal in him. Sometimes he ate and sometimes no. He was strange man, but good man, EE-arn.’

  From my seat on the crinkly vinyl couch I could not see the old man’s face across the room, just the occasional reflection of the overhead light in his enormous, black-rimmed spectacles.

  ‘This man, the one with the shovel, what would he be looking for?’

  The old man retrieved his cane and toyed with what looked like a cast-iron wolfs head handle. He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘What all the others been looking for.’

  ‘And what’s that.’

  ‘Money. Paintings. Ever since he die — 1974 �
� the strangers coming to pick over poor EE-arn. They think he rich, you see. That he bury the treasure. They think, how can such a great man, famous man, live like pauper? You know pauper?’

  ‘PAUPER.’

  ‘Paw-paw?’

  ‘PAUPER!’

  ‘They think, his name in paper and his pictures so they get a lot of money, so where the money? Is the way they think in capitalist society. They always seek the money. If is not visible to the eye, is buried. Money, money, money. But EE-arn, he don’t care about the money. He a rich man inside, not on outside, you understand?’