The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  He didn’t even look at me. He was staring, bemused I supposed, at the old woman howling in the dinghy anchored in the shallows. ‘EEEE-GORRRR,’ she wailed to the gathering storm clouds, her arms raised in the air.

  ~ * ~

  Three days after I was admitted to hospital, a gentleman matching the description of that young man, my saviour of Peel Island, visited my bedside. Turns out this kid had as much patience as the dead Dapper, and for more than two decades — or from a specific day when he was just twelve years old — he had been hunting a very special person, namely his mother’s murderer. And all that research and observation and playing private detective had come to its explosive conclusion on Peel Island. I just happened to be a piece of collateral damage.

  He gently placed a small piece of rolled parchment, tied with a red piece of ribbon, on my food table. The ribbon looked familiar. I had received a gift from this stranger before — a polished bullet.

  He stood until I unwrapped the roll of mildewed canvas. It was a soiled painting. A head. The mouth wide and forming an ‘O’. The skin scabrous. The eyes dull and dead. It was signed ‘Fairweather, 1959’.

  ‘A memento,’ the man said. ‘Of our adventure.’

  ‘How very kind of you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘So I meet my doppelganger, at last. The man who has been my shadow for the past few weeks. The man who ruined my retirement.’

  ‘I needed you,’ he said. ‘To bring me in. You completed the puzzle. You led me to…’

  ‘The Boltcutter.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘The retired gangster and art lover.’

  ‘The one and only.’

  ‘And why would that piece of human ebola virus interest a young man such as you?’

  ‘He killed my mother.’

  ‘He did, did he? And who was your mother?’

  ‘They called her Legs. But to me, she was just Mum.’

  Later in the week I read in The Courier-Mail that the Queensland Art Gallery had been left an anonymous bequest ot several previously unknown masterpieces by the late, great painter Ian Fairweather. There was a photograph of my friend Dexter Dupont smiling beside one of the pictures. He had teeth after all, did Dexter.

  ~ * ~

  I stayed in hospital for a month. In that time Peg arrived on the Gold Coast, found us a house, moved the furniture in and redecorated the place. She even took a few tips from Nurse Reginald, apparently an interior decorator in his spare time.

  That first night in my new home, having pushed myself around the house (and almost into the canal out the back) in my wheelchair and inspected the walls heavy with effigies of plaster seahorses and starfish and paintings of pelicans sleeping on wharf pylons and schools of dolphins passing through sun-dappled water, I asked, ‘And my retirement painting? From the hospital?’

  ‘That ratty old thing?’ she said. ‘Turfed it, my love. It was so not the Gold Coast.’

  After dinner I sat alone on the back balcony looking down at Pig Pen, lashed to a jetty big enough to accommodate a cruise ship.

  Peg put a VB in my hand. ‘Why don’t you take the boat out tomorrow? Throw in a line? You’re retired, for goodness sake. How’s the weather looking?’

  ‘The weather?’ I said, after a long time. ‘Fair.’

  ~ * ~

  TWO

  THE MURDER TREE

  ~ * ~

  1

  It has often been said that prior to the moment of death, your life flashes before your eyes.

  By flash, do they mean a condensed nanosecond of all you’ve experienced from the crib? Or a spool of film, projected at incredible speed, all blurred and making no sense? I prefer a good old-fashioned slide show, with motes of dust tumbling in the heat and light from the clunky projector, and the screen askew on a rust-pitted stand. But a flash? I’ve staged slide nights that made Lawrence of Arabia look like an advertisement for ChapStick.

  And when it comes to this final look back, who would know if it happens or not? The person experiencing it, the only punter in the house, is dead anyway. Aren’t they? I’m as sceptical of this as the tunnel-of-white-light loonies. If death is like driving through the sooty tube under Sydney Harbour, I’ll be buggered if I’m paying a toll for the privilege. As my Uncle Felix said on his own deathbed — fiddlesticks.

  It was precisely this time last year that my brick-like, stoic mug made it into the newspapers because of all that hullabaloo about Ian Fairweather and Bribie Island, the gangster known as the Boltcutter and the mad race across Moreton Bay to Peel Island where all the fun and games turned fatal.

  After that little adventure, for six months, when I should have been taking out the tinny on the Broadwater and giving the Alvey a workout, I convalesced at home on a plastic banana lounge overlooking the canal. I read cheap detective novels and monitored the curious life of man-made canals with a pair of horse-racing binoculars. It’s more interesting than you think. I kept a little logbook by my side, and if I leaf through it now I could tell you that from my sagging fold-out bed I saw several shark fins scissor past, the usual charter boats groaning with tourists, a gondola featuring a genuine gondolier complete with straw hat, tight trousers and striped shirt (I’m uncertain, to this day, whether he was real, or the colourful by-product of my extensive medications) and a naked young lady who zipped by on a jetski, though even she could have been a blurred dream from my youth.

  In short, I inched towards my normal self, albeit with a couple of plugged holes in my leg and midriff, and the nightmares of the Priest and the Boltcutter stopped. That’s when I declared to my Peg that it was time I returned to bona fide retirement.

  ‘No more hijinks?’ she repeatedly asked. Peg had never really grasped the dangers of my previous employment as a police officer. Nor the accidental adventures of last year. She seemed to think that cleaning the streets of criminal vermin, putting life and limb at risk, and getting shot were things men did to let off a little steam and satisfy something in their primitive natures.

  ‘No more hijinks,’ I said.

  For several weeks, early in my recovery, Peg had returned to Sydney to stay with friends and I had been assigned police protection. I told them it was a waste of time — that if one of the Boltcutter’s associates really wanted to exact revenge on his expired, bullet-riddled behalf, it wouldn’t be difficult to steal up on a prostrate ex-copper about to turn sixty dozing off on a banana lounge. When you live on a canal, all manner of murk can inch in with the tide.

  So it was I spent interminable hours playing poker on the back deck with my young constable protector, Rory — a wet, fresh-faced kid with an uncertain grasp of his chosen profession. Having said that, he was a whiz on the barbecue and cooked a mean New York cut steak.

  ‘Rory,’ I said to him one evening, feeling either heavily philosophical or a tad light-headed from antibiotics washed down with VB. ‘Do you really want to end up like me?’

  ‘Waddya mean?’ he said.

  ‘Waddya mean waddya mean? Look at me, Rory. I should be supping at the table of life’s rewards. Visited by loving grandchildren and as full as a Catholic girl’s sock with pride at a career spent serving my fellow citizens. Instead, here I lie, fat and foul, sniffing not the roses, Rory, not the roses, but catching a whiff of human sewage off my canal of dreams ...’

  I’d lost Rory at that point. I’d lost myself. Write this down as a life lesson from an old warrior — never mix booze with lorazepam.

  ‘Whatever,’ Rory said, bored in the way that the youth of today get bored when life fails to seize them by the throat. He put his head in his hands.

  ‘Rory. RORY,’ I continued. ‘What do you want to DO with your life, son. Inspector? Commissioner?’

  ‘I wanna do schoolies next year,’ said Rory.

  At my request, Rory went back to his usual roster and I was left alone on the canal, albeit with a little snub-nosed companion tucked inside the small blue esky that sat permanently beside the saggi
ng banana.

  Then Peg returned, and steadily I recovered, making little excursions to the monstrous shopping precinct, Pacific Fair, where I nearly got skittled and killed by the kiddies’ train that tootles about the complex (the driver alleged he sounded his choo choo whistle, but I’ll be damned if I heard it), and back to The Spit, where Peg wheeled my chair beneath a casuarina and I nibbled on crab sandwiches, wondering if I’d ever rejoin society in quite the same way again.

  But the human spirit is an amazing thing, and just a few months ago I was walking awkwardly with a cane, and the month after that I was back in my faithful Peugeot 504 running errands and generally introducing myself to the world once more.

  It was during this ebullient period that I struck upon a nice, quiet and safe hobby to, as Peg so eloquently put it, keep me out of the hijinks game. I had decided one evening, staring at the wind-ravaged palm tree at the rear of our house, that I would study genealogy and flesh out the leaves on my hitherto bare and undiscovered family tree.

  ‘It’s time I traced my roots,’ I announced to Peg.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said with the same degree of interest she had expressed in prior obsessions of mine, such as tracking every movie appearance of the Peugeot 504 (personal highlight? The Day of the Jackal) and my interest in time travel.

  ‘As my first senior-sergeant once told me, you shake a tree hard enough, you never know what nuts might fall out.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said.

  ‘Who knows what I might find, right? Murderers, poets, potters? I’ll be facing the ultimate question, Peg. Who am I? What is it that made me who I am today? Where am I from? And, in turn, what is my purpose? I have stared down death, Peg. It’s natural to be asking these things.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, leafing through a magazine.

  ‘And how much trouble can you get into, tracing your family tree?’

  That is the question that has come back to haunt me, as I sit here, chained by both wrists and ankles, with an eyeless hood over my head, in a pitch-black room deep inside Queensland’s oldest building — the convict windmill on Wickham Terrace.

  Who could have known that a few insignificant trips to the refurbished State Library on the banks of the Brisbane River, during which I often daydreamed through the library windows, would lead me up the river’s winding course to the great Wivenhoe and Somerset dams, and to a corpse fatefully uncovered by our endless drought, and — thus — to the heart of a mystery that had waited almost two centuries to surface? That just a year after the last fiasco I would be in hijinks up to my cauliflower ears, again?

  These, and other things in that so-called film of my life, unspooled before me as I waited, in agony, for my fate inside that old windmill, a citadel to Brisbane’s brutal founding.

  Then I heard a padlock spring open, a chain rattle and footsteps echo towards me.

  ~ * ~

  2

  When I was a child, growing up in the greasy back lanes of South Sydney, the highlight of my week was quite literally the call of the rabbit-oh, and I experienced both a perverse attraction and a stomach-turning revulsion at the rows of skinned rabbits swinging with the gait of the horse and carriage as it passed the front of our crumbling terrace house. I didn’t know it then, but I would later earn my living in a profession in which blood and guts were a common part of the landscape.

  Another highlight of my childhood was learning that in the nineteenth century, a member of our family had been a bushranger. I became obsessed with bushrangers, and of course Ned Kelly. I was punished for cutting a rectangle out of our only bucket. I ambushed innocent passers-by on our street, ordering them to stand and deliver. They rarely stood, and more often than not delivered a cuff across the back of my square head. There was a kid in my class at school whose name was Glen Rowan. I thought he was the luckiest boy in Australia.

  Memory is a strange thing. I had never seen a genuine South Sydney rabbit-oh because they petered out around the end of the Great Depression. But my grandfather had told me of them and must have described them so powerfully that they became a part of the family’s collective memory, and in turn evolved into an actual experience for me. If I close my eyes I can still see them, yet in fact I never witnessed them. How can this happen?

  As a grown man, I saw it time and again while taking the confessions of assorted felons. If you ever want to meet the most imaginative and creative people in society, forget the novelists and painters, the poets and filmmakers. A seasoned hit man or con artist can out-create them hands down; can invent the most convoluted, plausible and believable narratives time and again without missing a beat. To be a great criminal is to be a great artist.

  I have listened to murderers who can describe a room or restaurant or train carriage in which they swear they were during a killing — the architecture of their alibi — down to such fine detail that I’ve later had to verify it, or not, with my own eyes. The minutiae of their imaginings can be so great, you can smell the coq au vin drifting out from a restaurant kitchen, or hear a specific bus rumbling past a specific house on a specific street at an exact time. They’re so convincing they end up convincing themselves, and all that comes of this are muddied waters and a lot of wasted legal fees at trial.

  As for the bushranger, I have never been able to prove or disprove the existence of one in my antecedents, and it has been a question that has haunted my life. Peg says, get over it. But I’m a curious fellow, and I hate things left unfinished.

  That’s how I found myself hitting the highway to Brisbane in my coughing, trembling Peugeot, to once again begin a peaceful and measured retirement. I had had a most violent, unexpected retirement interruptus, and I was keen to get it back on track.

  This time Peg had organised my first mobile telephone.

  ‘Now, if you get into any more mischief,’ she said in her sing-along voice, reserved, or so I’d thought, for our son, ‘you can ring home.’

  She had of course seen me staring at it on the kitchen bench as if it was foreign matter dropped from outer space, and nudged me towards it.

  ‘Even you can work out how to use it,’ she said. ‘Green is for go. Red for stop.’

  ‘Get ready for the yellow light. Thanks, Big Ted.’

  ‘You can do it.’

  How wrong she was. And how totally incorrect she was to think that some flimsy piece of plastic and computer chip could possibly keep me safe in the advent of ‘mischief. I couldn’t see it stopping a speeding bullet.

  Yet there it remained, in the glove compartment of the car, and it was still there, chirping merrily, in the cool of the library car park during the hours I spent upstairs, chafing my feet merrily against the floral carpets during those tentative investigations into my family history.

  I have a Queensland connection, you see. It was in this fair state that my relatives settled, a long way from the Irish peat bogs of our ancestral home, and scratched out a new life. It was Queensland that proved the perfect Petri dish for the family bushranger. If he had existed, I’d find him here in the State Library records.

  What I had not anticipated was the popularity of genealogy. Arriving at the library mid-morning, I was immediately lured by the smell of roasted coffee beans at Tognini’s Café, and sat out on the comfortable cream chairs leafing through my newspaper. I thought I had all the time in the world.

  When I finally ambled up to the research room I noticed a queue the likes of which you usually only saw at All You Can Eat food troughs in your local RSL. I stood in the line behind an elderly man with giant ears, and in those ears were lodged a pair of giant hearing aids. Each had several small antennae poking from the device. He looked like Ray Walston in My Favorite Martian. I bet he got great reception on SBS.

  ‘How long, do you reckon?’ I asked him.

  He ignored me. There was a faint whistle about him and his monstrous electronic extrusions. I guessed he couldn’t walk fifty metres without a pack of dogs following him.

  I could see int
o the family-history zone and old men and women were hunched over computers and microfiche machines, so I decided to leave it until lunchtime. I had a hunch most of them would clear out around then.

  It proved to be the right decision. It gave me time to explore the library. Somehow, I found myself in a red cube of a room with a little terrace of seats that seemed to hang out over the river itself.

  I was the only person in this peculiar but deeply satisfying room, and the little slivers of light reflecting off the surface of the river meandered through the room like a school of pilchards. After a while, I forgot about the family bushranger; the dark, leafless limbs of my family tree yet to be explored; the healing bullet wounds in my leg and torso. I was having, as I had read about but never quite understood, a transcendental moment beside the Brisbane River.