Authors: Peter Temple
I went to my window. Heavier rain now, steady plinks on the pools in the gutter. The lights were on in McCoy’s abode across the street, presumably to assist him in committing some disgusting act on canvas. Or elsewhere.
The phone rang.
‘Here’s a number,’ said D.J. Olivier. ‘It’s good for an hour or so.’
I drove around to the Prince, parked in the loading zone around the corner. Inside, I found no youthful pioneers of the cyberfrontier energising themselves with the fermented juice of radiated Russian potatoes. The nicotine-dark chamber held only a mildly alcoholic accountant called George Mersh, who played seven games for Fitzroy, and Wilbur Ong and Norm O’Neill, both strangers to the cyber and approaching a frontier from which noone returned.
They saw me, mouths opened like demanding chicks spotting the parent bird.
I heard the words unspoken, raised a hand. The mouths closed.
‘Not today,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to hear about it today.’
We would speak of the Saints’ inglorious performance but not while the memory was so fresh. Raw. I rapped on the counter and opened the flap.
Stan appeared.
‘The phone,’ I said.
‘Your professional uses his mobile,’ he said, and smirked.
‘It’s the new asbestos. Don’t you read the papers, Stan? Worse than stuffing bits of asbestos into your ear.’
His eyed opened wide, then a knowing look came over his face. ‘What do you take me for?’
‘An enigma wrapped in a mystery. Three beers. And have something yourself. Have, what is it, a Wally?’
He shook his head. ‘Jesus, Jack. Stolly. Really.’
I went into the pub’s office/archive. The telephone was under one of Stan’s jumpers, which I moved with a rolled-up newspaper. Cautiously. Then I cleaned the handset with a paper napkin I found marking a place in a paperback called
Get a New e-Life: Cybertactics for Small Business
, and dialled.
‘Done the immediate stuff,’ said D.J. Olivier. ‘Queensland, driver’s licence, issued 1992, renewed January 1996, and most recently six weeks ago. Otherwise, he’s not on the books.’
Robert Gregory Colburne had no tax file number and was not registered with Medicare.
‘MasterCard, six weeks old, limit ten grand, it’s 600-odd in credit.’
‘Address?’
‘Brissie. Red Hill. Also for electoral roll. No phone in the name now or ever. There’s just one possible lippy smudge on this collar.’
‘Yes?
‘The name got a passport in 1996. Departed Sydney, April ’96, but there’s no mention of a return arrival.’
‘How can that be?’
‘Well, sometimes they come back in a sailing boat, tramp steamer, fucking hang-glider, land in Broome, Top End, Tassie somewhere, there’s not always a record gets on file. Till they try to leave through Customs again, nothing shows.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No traces at the moment between April ’96 and the licence renewal and credit card issue six weeks ago. Oh and he enrolled at Sydney Uni in ’91. Seems to have dropped out in the first year. He’s not there in ’92.’
‘What school?’
‘Walkley. Up there somewhere to buggery over the mountains. You go through Bathurst. I think.’
I thanked D.J. and joined Wilbur and Norm. The subject of St Kilda could not be postponed. We had a fact-free exchange of views. The new development today was that both students of the game found some positive things to say about the Saints’ appalling performance. Most of them would have escaped less scholarly eyes. It had been that way with Fitzroy through the many dark seasons, the times without comfort or hope, all our enemies grown taller and swifter, their hands bigger and stickier, their boots crafted to kick impossible bananas and their foul blows, trips and gouges apparently invisible to umpires.
Cheered, I left before the IT crowd arrived. If they were ever coming back. As I turned the corner, the rain paused. The air was cold, deceptively clean-smelling. I could hear water running in the gutters, a flow of toxic liquid heading for the river and the bay.
On the way home, Linda Hillier was on the radio, where I’d left her, on 3KB.
Congratulations. You’re listening to Melbourne’s smartest station, and that says something about you
.
Tonight we’re talking about drugs. Heroin users complained on radio this morning that they were treated like second-class citizens. Well, the man I’m about to talk to, the Reverend Allen O’Halloran, says that’s what they are. What’s your view? The number to call is, and bookmark it in what passes for your phone’s mind…
One day, I would phone in. One day when I had the words to speak to Linda.
At home. A fire. No, too much effort. I put on the heating, went to the kitchen, began the defrosting of Sunday’s stew and opened a bottle of the exemplary Mill Hill chardonnay. Then I slumped in the armchair, switched on the television for the news.
Innocents dying, the guilty walking free, nature mocking the frailty of human habitations, a hijacking, a royal birth, a supermodel on drug charges, a politician caught out in a lie, a cat’s incredible sewer journey, the death of a revered pornographer and the legal battle over his archive of people doing things. Sport. And weather, a map, a man who knew about weather: cold, rain, the possibility of periods without the latter.
Watching this necklace of images strung in some electronic bunker, a part of my mind that bicycled along dull streets and sat on benches overlooking nothing was thinking about Robbie Colburne.
What to make of Robbie? Gets into university. Drops out. Runs up debts. Departs for foreign shores in 1996. Not recorded as coming back. Four years later, back nevertheless, renews his driver’s licence and, notwithstanding his credit history, gets a credit card with a $10,000 limit. Appears in Melbourne with a small but expensive wardrobe, gets a casual job as a barman, dies of a drug overdose.
A short but puzzling life.
Someone had to know more about Robbie. Someone had to be able to put some coherence into this narrative. It was just a question of who. The woman who left the message on the answering machine knew something. But I didn’t know who she was.
I rang Cyril Wootton on his latest mobile number. The numbers changed all the time.
‘You wish to make contact with me?’ he said. ‘How unusual. That’s twice in a few days. The hole in the ozone layer, El Pino, to what do I owe this?’
‘Niño. El Niño. Pina Colada. Expensive, this thing.’
‘How much?’
‘Yes or no. I’m happier with no.’ I didn’t want to go travelling.
‘Yes, if properly accounted for.’
‘Was it not ever thus?’
‘Ever thus my arse,’ said Wootton.
‘Really, Cyril,’ I said, ‘at times your vocabulary is at odds with your appearance. Your carefully cultivated appearance.’
The town of Walkley was a long and narrow blanket thrown over the spine of a ridge running out the back of the Great Dividing Range. To get there, you drove out of Sydney and on through hard country, high, gaunt, dry. Everywhere black rock broke the thin skin of soil, erosion gullies furrowed the slopes. The light was white and offended my city eyes.
I drove around until I found the school, it wasn’t difficult, parked the hired Corolla outside the only brick building. The wind was a shock, buffeting, frozen hands pressing against my face.
A sign took me past murmuring classrooms to the principal’s office. In the anteroom, a stone-faced woman, big, sat on a stool behind a counter. She looked at me and asked, ‘You’re not Telstra, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Bastards. Kin I do for you?’
‘Carly?’
‘Yes.’
‘I spoke to you yesterday. Jack Irish. The lawyer from Melbourne.’
‘Oh.’ She looked less stony. ‘Well. Melbourne. My little sister lives in Doncaster.’
‘I’m told it’s a great place to live. Does she like it?’
Wince, shrug of big shoulders.
‘He’s a paramedic. She met him in Bali. This bloke with them, he was dancing, fell over. Heart. Young, too. Everyone panicked. Denzil just went over, pushed everyone away, sat on the bloke, got the ticker going.’
‘Saved his life.’
‘No. Well, for a bit. Anyway, Carol’s down there with him. In Doncaster. Supposed to get married but it’s bin six years.’
‘It’s a big step. Giving it a lot of thought.’
‘Yeah.’ She passed a hand over her right temple. ‘That or he’s got somethin else goin.’
Time to move on from Doncaster. ‘The principal’s in?’
Carly rose with difficulty and went to the door at the back of the room, knocked, waited, opened it and put her head in.
‘The man from Melbourne’s here,’ she said. ‘Mr Irish. He rang yesterday.’
She waved me in.
The principal was behind a bare desk in a big, light room with school photographs on one wall and a large whiteboard covered with diagrams and lists on another. He stood up and put out a hand.
‘David Pengelly.’
‘Jack Irish.’
We shook hands and sat down. He had wispy hair combed across his scalp and a thin, worried face, the face of a farmer forever anxious about weather and weeds and the bank.
‘Long way to come.’
‘Excuse for a drive. I had business in Sydney.’
‘Carly says you’re asking about a student.’
‘He would have finished about ten years ago. Robert Gregory Colburne.’
‘What’s it in connection with?’
‘He died suddenly. No-one knows anything about his family, next of kin. I was asked to look into it.’ All true.
Pengelly scratched his scalp with one finger, taking care not to disturb hair. ‘Ten years,’ he said. ‘That’s a problem.’
I waited.
‘The records used to be in a demountable out the back,’ he said, pointing. ‘Burnt down in ’94, my first year here. Couldn’t save anything. Kids. Year twelves, just after the exams.’
‘Anyone still on the staff from 1990?’
He pulled a face. ‘Ann Pescott. That’d be about it. Been packing it in, all the senior ones.’
‘Could I talk to her? It would only take a minute.’
Silence while he studied me. Then he got up and went to the door. ‘Carly, ask Ann Pescott to step in for a minute, will you?’
He came back. ‘Died suddenly?’
‘Drugs,’ I said. ‘Accidental.’
‘Not much accidental about drugs. I used to teach in Sydney, in the west. Kids shooting up in the toilet block. Got away first chance I could.’ He looked out of the window at a sad stand of eucalypts moving in the wind. ‘Can’t get away from it though. Can’t get away from anything, can you?’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘No.’ He was studying me again. ‘I wanted to be a lawyer. Had the marks. My parents didn’t have the money.’
I didn’t have anything to say to that. There was a knock at the door and a woman in her forties came in, not confidently. I stood up.
‘Ann, this is Mr Irish, a lawyer,’ said Pengelly. ‘It’s about a kid from years ago. What was the name?’
I shook hands with Ann Pescott. She had an intelligent face, lines of disappointment, nervousness in her eyes: cared too much, waited too long.
‘Robert Gregory Colburne. He started at Sydney University in 1991, so 1990 would probably…’
Her face was blank. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Colburne, I don’t remember a Colburne. But I didn’t have the seniors then.’ Her eyes apologised for failing me. ‘Sorry.’
‘He’d have been a bright student.’
‘No. He didn’t come through me.’ She swallowed. ‘Must have arrived in eleven or twelve. There were a few new kids around from Forestry around then.’
‘Forestry?’
‘Conservation and Forestry, whatever it was called then, changes its name every year. They sent a whole lot of people up here from Sydney. Regionalisation I think it was called. Total disaster, city people, they all hated it and then the government changed and they all went back.’
‘So people around here would remember them?’
She shrugged. ‘Well, yes. Some. I suppose.’
‘Where should I start?’
A siren sounded, a harsh noise.
Ann Pescott’s eyes went to Mr Pengelly.
‘They’ll probably find their own way out,’ he said. ‘Animals generally do when the door’s open.’
‘Terry Baine at the newsagents,’ she said. ‘He would have been around in 1990. And they know everything, the Baines.’
I thanked Mr Pengelly and Ann Pescott for their time, together and separately. He seemed sad to see me go. I understood. On my way out, I thanked Carly.
‘Got a card?’ she said. ‘You never know. My sister might need a lawyer in Melbourne.’
‘You never know.’ Relationships made in Bali are not known for their durability. Six years was probably some sort of record.
I parked outside the newsagent in the main street. There wasn’t a great deal going on in Walkley. A bull-barred ute rumbled by. Two men were talking outside the bank, faces and hats shaped by hands and wind and rain and gravity. A shop door opened and a child in a stroller came out, followed by a woman inside many handknitted garments. I could see only the tip of the child’s nose, a tiny pink nipple.
Two customers were in the shop, browsing the rack of magazines. The man behind the counter, fat advancing, hair receding, was staring at a computer monitor, frowning, rapping keys. He saw me in his peripheral vision, didn’t look around.
‘Sometimes I think it’s a blessing the old bloke’s gone,’ he said. ‘Christ knows what he’da made of this crap.’
‘Terry Baine?’
He turned his head. ‘Help you?’
I introduced myself.
‘Melbourne.’ He beamed at me. ‘There the other day. For the Grand Prix. Stayed at the Regency, me and me brother, nothin but the best. Casino, you name it. Treat for the wives.’
‘They like motor racing?’
‘Nah. They went shoppin. Had to take the credit cards off em after the first day, mind. Outta control. So what’s yer business up here?’
‘I’m trying to find the family of someone who died in Melbourne recently. He finished school here.’
‘Yeah? Who’s that?’
‘Robert Colburne.’
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Robbo.’
‘Remember him?’
‘Oh yeah. What happened?’
‘Drugs. Accidental overdose.’
Terry whistled, shook his head. ‘Robbo. Mad, bad and dangerous to know.’