30 Days in Sydney (9 page)

Sheridan takes my arm and leads me around the tree to show me an ugly scar.

Right here, see, Pete. See.

We stand side by side staring at the tree.

They died?

Should have. This happens two hours before dawn. The road is deserted. It is freezing cold and foggy. But it is worse than that because Paul's mate has broken both his wrists.

Paul is piss-faced drunk but he knows he has given Lurch and the cop what they are waiting for. He has to get his mate to a hospital and when he does that the accident will be reported to the cops.
One day we'll get you, you bastard.
He knows he is going to go to jail.

His friend's name is Skink. He's a fabulous banjo player, but there is not a lot of him, hence the name. He's a skinny little lizard of a fellow and now the poor little bugger is lying on the frosty ground and both his wrists are shattered and he is in agony.

Don't worry, mate, says Paul, I'll walk into town and get an ambulance.

No you bloody won't, mate, says Skink.

Yes I bloody will.

No you bloody won't because if you do they'll put you in the bloody slammer and throw away the key.

Yes, I'm fucked.

Skink is one of them little freckle-faced fellows with sticky-out ears. You wouldn't expect big things of him, but now he tells Paul what he is going to do.

You're going to walk up the bloody road here, he says, and he directs him to that farm up there, you see that red old shed, just past there. That's my uncle's farm, says the kid. You wake him up and tell him you are taking his Fiat tractor and then you bring it back here.

I never drove a tractor.

You ain't got no fucking choice, mate, you're going to tow this bloody car away and I will tell you where you can put it where that fucking cop won't ever find it.

And this little skimpy kid lies there, on this very spot, Pete, in the dark, in the fog. Can you imagine the pain? He lay on this spot while his friend came back with the tractor and then he waited while he towed the car away and hid it and then he waited for him to come back and drive him to hospital. Five hours that took.

That's a friendship, Pete. Do you have friends like that in New York City? I hope you do, mate. His fierce dark eyes were glistening. I have friends like that, he said, and then looked sharply away, as if embarrassed.

In the car again, he gave me back my tape recorder. See, I know what you're going to do with this fucking book. You're going to tell everyone how bent we are. I know this shit of yours. Convict colony, Rum Corps, etc., etc. Well, put in that story about those boys. That's Sydney for you, Peter. It's mates.

What will I say about the cop?

Oh don't you dare, cried Sheridan. Don't you dare make this a story about bent cops. You know I cannot bear it when you pull that shit.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE SUBJECT OF THE New South Wales police force is a long and complicated one, more suited to Royal Commissions than a narrative like this. But the issue of corruption in Sydney is so pervasive that you cannot put your spade into the earth without coming up against it.

Here, a random witness - my friend, Geordie Levinson.

In 1974, said Geordie, who is exactly five foot four, I moved to Paddington with my girlfriend Sasha McPhee - a very tall girl. Sasha was mad about motor-cycles and she had a $700 trail bike which one morning was . . . simply
not
outside the house.

Of course it had been stolen and that was, to say the least, a nuisance. It was not insured and neither of us had much money. We'd just arrived from Melbourne and lots of things were wrong already. We didn't like where we were living. We were sharing the house. And now. . . $700 down the drain.

Sasha emptied her bank account and bought a second bike, and this time she insured it. Not long afterwards, ie a week, this second machine vanishes too.

The ink is not dry on the insurance claim when there is a knock on the door and this fellow introduces himself. Do you want his name? I'll make one up for you - Barry Williams.

So he says, hello, I'm Barry Williams.

I ask him what he wants.

You've lost a bike.

Yes, I said. We have. In fact we've lost two of them.

He seemed very pleasant, charming. He was well dressed too - Gucci loafers, chinos, polo shirt. Well, he said, if you come with me you can have your bike back.

So Sasha went with him and before too long the pair of them have returned and Sasha has the missing bike. Wires have been cut and are hanging off, but otherwise it's all in one piece.

So Sasha makes tea and the three of us sit at the kitchen table and she says to him, thank you very much.

Naturally I'm very curious about this transaction so, when neither of them explain it, I ask.

Well, says Sasha, Barry took me to a car park just up the road and the basement level is just
full
of bikes.

That's correct, says Barry. It's chocka.

And, says Sasha, Barry said here's your bike from the other night. You can have it back.

I did, says Barry. That's exactly what I said.

And I said, said Sasha, why are you giving it back?

And I said, Barry smiles, it seemed bad luck to lose two.

And I said, says Sasha, so you took the other one? And he said yes and so I ask him, why are you giving this one back?

Because, says Barry Williams, who was now sipping tea at my kitchen table, there's a
glut
on the market. More than we can sell. Also, she lost
two.

I turned to Sasha but she only shrugged. Later I discovered that her only annoyance was that she had gotten back the one that was insured.

But I was upset, said Geordie, and I said to Barry Williams, what makes you think I wouldn't report this to the police?

He seemed astonished I would ask such a question. Why would you do that? You've got your bike back. Here we are, having a cup of tea. Anyway, it wouldn't do you any good.

But this is outrageous.

Well go to the cops if you like, mate. I'm just telling you, it won't do you any good.

Anyway, he was very calm. He took his time to finish his tea and when he left he shook my hand and wished me good luck. Meaning, I assumed, good luck with the police.

The instant he was gone I phoned Paddington police. They said they were the uniformed police, I better talk to the detectives, and so they gave me another number.

It took a long time for the detectives' phone to be picked up but finally a man answered. He didn't seem very interested. He said that someone would get back to me.

When? Tonight? Tomorrow?

Oh no, someone will get back to you.

But I was the only one who ever did any getting back. Not that it did me any good. Whenever I got hold of a detective, it always turned out to be the wrong person.

I forgot about it after a while and it would have been six months later that I called them again. But still I couldn't get them to pay attention.

Anyway, sometime later I'm walking down the street in Paddington and I run into Barry Williams and I say, hi, what are you doing around here?

And he says, oh we're dismantling this fence. And it was a bluestone
wall.
And it looked terrific, it was a beautiful wall.

Are you taking it away?

Yes.

What for?

A commission.

A commission?

Yes, the owners are on holiday and we're taking the wall on commission for some people who want it.

Sometime later, said Geordie, there's a drinks party in the Eastern Suburbs. Beautiful house. Chandeliers. The people's name is Williams, and I say to my friend Victoria, these couldn't be any relation to Barry Williams?

That's the family. This is his parents' house.

No sooner has she said it, said Geordie, than I see Barry himself coming through the crowd.

That Barry Williams? But he's a crook in Paddington.

Yes, she said. He went to school at Cranbrook. He was there with so and so and so and so. And she reels off all these names of very wealthy people.

So why is he a thief?

Shush.

Barry catches sight of us, said Geordie, and he comes over, kisses Victoria on the cheek, shakes my hand as if we're old friends now. And in a strange way we are. That's Sydney, we're all so very intimately connected.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

IF YOU MAKE THIS book about yuppies like Geordie Levinson, said Sheridan, how can you expect to be taken seriously - he's not even from Sydney.

He's lived here twenty-five years.

Oh come on, Peter. He drives a Ferrari.

It was a Dino. Do you know how long ago that was?

Don't talk like a car dealer, said Sheridan who was now steering his great Queen Mother of a Merc down into the Megalong Valley. I don't give a fuck what he drives.

He was my lawyer. He still is my lawyer. You get to know a person very well that way. He is one of the most decent, fair-minded men I ever met.

He's a snob.

Sheridan, you've never spoken more than twenty words to him. Did he offend you in some way?

To be honest, Pete . . . he's five foot four.

Jesus, Sheridan.

As we left the heights of the mountain escarpment and descended through the coachwood forest, the chopped sunlight fell in bright slices across the chalky hood of the Merc. We had fleeting glimpses of the sandstone walls of the Blue Mountains rising above us, but we were no longer 'in the mountains'. As we came into the wider flatter land of the valley we left the bitumen and entered a dirt road and then a number of successively rougher dirt tracks until, after one particularly rocky passage, we stopped in front of a high and excessively complicated gate which bore all the marks of Sheridan's ingenious mind.

Once we were through this obstacle I asked him if we were now on his property but he was preoccupied with preserving the Merc's muffler. He swung on and off the track, unsuccessfully trying to avoid the rocks. When, after one violent thud, he cursed and stopped, it did not occur to me that we had arrived.

You should get a four-wheel drive, I said.

Sheridan turned those dark hurt eyes upon me. The thing is, Pete, how does Geordie pull those chicks? What is he? Fifty? Fifty-five?

There was no point in telling him that Geordie now drove a Volvo station wagon, or that he was the father of three little boys. Geordie's current happiness would not have comforted my friend today.

Sheridan, I asked, are you OK?

He turned off the engine and, in the silence, bestowed upon me a sweet strained smile. Home sweet home, he said.

But there was no sign of any home and what sweetness there was in the over-grazed paddock was not immediately obvious.

Stuff to carry, he said.

I was soon loaded up with wine bottles and books and a very bloody leg of lamb around which the flies immediately clustered.

Where's the cave?

It's here.

Now I followed Sheridan's broad back through a landscape quite unlike the one I had expected. Mind you, it suited him. It was a perfect habitat for an old hippie -plenty of sedge, thriving blackberry patch with wattles growing through its centre, rusted-out water tank, fenced dam with four-year-old blue-gum saplings growing around its edge, and beside the cattle pad we walked along, signs of Sheridan's considerable energy - fenced plantings of hakeas, grevilleas, eucalypts. It was not what I had pictured when I imagined a cave in 'the mountains'. I had thought of something deep into the escarpment, a place where you could see the marks where Australia tore itself away from New Zealand.

The cattle pad swung to the left along the contour of a hill but we continued upwards, and there it was - the cave.

It did not look like a cave but a garden shed buried in a hillside. There were plastic buckets everywhere around, and spades and hoes leaning against its windows. It was a cave, of course, with sandstone walls and a great slab of sandstone across its roof. Sheridan with his typical industry had framed out the mouth, building a wall, windows and a door. The result was a big rock-walled room that you could only call cosy. It was a little musty, true, but he quickly laid a fire in his stove. He lit the gas lamp and the refrigerator. He set a kettle on the primus stove. There were two over-stuffed armchairs but I chose to sit on the straight-backed wooden chair behind the desk and looked out through the dusty glass. Far in the distance the light caught the escarpment at Katoomba.

This is where you write?

This book has been a disaster, said Sheridan quietly. It is a total fucking disaster.

I thought you had a publisher.

I do, I do have a publisher.

Congratulations.

No, he said vehemently, I swapped my marriage for a publisher. I came up here for three years and now it is done I haven't got a fucking marriage and all I have is a book. Do you know what she said to me - you burned up all my goodwill. What the fuck does that mean?

But I thought Clara was the one who wanted you to get out of soaps. She thought you were wasting yourself.

Well, she did give that impression, Pete. But while I came up here to write the book she was working eighteen-hour days. She did not complain until she hated me.

That seems unfair.

It's not to do with fair, mate, it's all about her father. I'd kill the fuck if he was not dead already.

I'm sorry, I said.

The truth is, I hate this place now, Pete. I used to be so happy when I was here, but now it feels like a tomb.

But you've always loved the mountains.

Yes, he said, I have always loved the mountains. I sort of had the idea that I belonged here.

My brother still farms up towards Lithgow. My grandfather had his first selection in this district. When he was a young fellow he went dancing in a cave not far from here. That was not a cave like this, it was a huge, deep cavern with a proper sprung floor that the cattlemen built. When you see it, you'll marvel at it, the things that men will do for sex. Yes, this is my place, but I should never have written the book. Even if it turns out I have written
Ulysses,
I regret it. I'd rather be writing soaps again. I wouldn't argue with the cunts this time around.

He held out his hand but I did not understand what he wanted.

Give me your tape bloody recorder.

Why?

Why do you think? I'm going to give you your fucking Earth story. He snatched the tape recorder from my hand and, having turned it on, sat beside me at the table.

You know, he said, on the day after she said her goodwill had been burned, I came up to abseil down Danae Canyon.

Let me explain some shit to you. Well, first you know Sydney sandstone is very soft. It's a soft bastard so the creeks cut through it like a knife through butter. You'll have a little creek that started out its life running along at the bottom of a V but over the years it cuts down and it cuts down until the V has become a Y and the shaft of the Y may be only six foot across but it can be hundreds of feet deep and the walls are all eroded in the most beautiful sculpted shapes, and on the sides you'll get hanging gardens of ferns, and spiders and lizards that don't live anywhere else in the world, that have perhaps lived here for a hundred thousand years. It was my mate Skink who got me into this.

The boy who broke his wrists.

They're good fellows, Paul and Skink, and they don't mind a little danger. You look at Skink you wouldn't think he was much, but I've climbed with him and I've fought fires with him and I'd as soon trust my life to him as any man alive. And these canyons can be dangerous, mate. You get caught down one of these holes in a storm you're in deep shit. They're so narrow it doesn't take a lot of water to make them rise. I mean, one minute you could be lying on your back on an airbed, floating down the stream in this gorgeous filtered light and these sculpted golden walls, and the next you could be in a torrent filled with logs and you could die. This is the astonishing thing about Sydney. You drive an hour or two and can go down canyons where no human being has ever been before. Now sometimes these climbs are more in the nature of a picnic, but sometimes we get very serious about it and the time I am speaking about, the day after Clara said, 'My goodwill is all burned up,' four of us had planned to abseil down this amazing waterfall. Danae is a slot down the face of a cliff and the cliff is around two thousand feet.

Two hundred, you mean.

I mean two thousand. I was going to cancel out, I was kind of depressed, but finally I decided that I needed something as big as Danae Canyon to take my mind off my problems. Anyway, the way you do this is go down in a series of what are called 'pitches', steps of fifty metres. You have two ropes tied together, paired. You have these belaying points. No, not bloody pins. Some cowboys will drill holes into the rock and epoxy glue bolts into the rock but I never trusted those. You belay off any solid object - a log, a rock, anything you can put a sling around. You loop your rope through the sling. The point about pairing the ropes is so that you can pull the rope after you when you're at the bottom of each pitch. The sling stays on the belay point. Having done that, however, there's no returning.

Anyway, the first pitch is the most dangerous, because you don't know exactly what conditions you are going to face, and on this occasion I am the first one over. I am halfway down the pitch when I realise the volume of water in this fall is far greater than we had thought. I am wearing a wetsuit but the problem is not getting wet. The thing is, Pete, I cannot fucking breathe. There is a ton of water thundering over me. It is like putting your head out the window of a speeding car.

But it is worse than that. Because there is a fallen tree wedged vertically in the waterfall and when I am halfway down I realise that the rope is caught in the top of the tree, so I am halfway down the pitch and I am out of rope.

Now my mates are waiting on the ledge above me and they can't see me and I push myself out as far as I can and I SCREAM but they can't hear me. And I know that they're going to die on that ledge if I'm stuck, because there is only one rope and I've got it.

So I've got two options. The first, get off the rope and drop, although God knows how far that will be, but to do this I have to disconnect and my weight is holding the release locked tight.

So I climbed the fucking tree. I don't think you can know what it is like to climb a slippery pole against a ton of water. But I manage to do it, and I get the rope free. I am pretty tired and knocked up but I can continue down.

But the fifty-metre rope is insufficient, and I come to the end with only air beneath me. I am really exhausted by now. I am really sorry I ever started it. No way can I climb that rope against the weight of water. It is not even an option. My only choice is to drop, and hope I don't break my neck. But the damn rope has jammed in the harness, and as long as my weight is on it I cannot release it to drop. I am so weak by now I cannot pull myself up the rope enough to take the weight off the clip in order that it will let go.

And I hung there, and you know I really did not care if I died. In fact, to tell you the truth, death did seem like a pretty good solution, but I could not leave my mates up there. Skink had a one-year-old baby.

So, I gave it one more go. What I had to do, in the middle of this fucking waterfall, was a one-armed chin-up and while I lifted myself in the air with my right hand I fiddled with the harness with the left.

And finally, the sucker opened, and I did not even think: I dropped. I thought, thank Christ it's over. I fell eight feet into a pool five foot deep.

My conversation with Sheridan was in April 2000 and it was a little over six weeks later I received this clipping from the June 15
Sydney Morning Herald.
There was no accompanying letter, only a yellow Post-it reading FYI.

Their fatal leap from the edge of the world
By John Huxley

Late-rising kangaroos lingered along the dirt track. Honeyeaters fluttered through the trees. Bushwalkers, some carrying babies on their backs, strode off in search of local attractions such as Mount Cloudmaker, Big Misty and Dance Floor Cave.

And, ever so slowly, the sun climbed over the ridge, burning off the mist and the morning frost.

There is a reassuring familiarity about the Kanangra Falls car park with its discreet toilets, picnic tables and information shelter, all tidily atop Boyd Plateau, high in the Blue Mountains.

But a short walk away - a 'leap off the edge of the world away', as one member of the police rescue squad put it - is an altogether more alien, more hostile environment.

An untamed world. In the words of the National Park guide, 'a labyrinth of creeks, rivers, spiny ridges and deep gorges'.

It was in one of these more remote gorges, near the 400-metre-high Corra Beanga Falls, just five kilometres north-east of the car park, that two members of the Newcastle University Mountaineering Club died last weekend after a three-day expedition went horribly wrong.

It appears the two men were trapped after their ropes became tangled while leading a fifty-metre abseil down the eighth of the thirteen falls that comprise Corra Beanga.

'We believe two ropes were involved,' said Mr Alan Sheehan, of Oberon SES rescue unit. 'The first man made it down and freed his rope. But the second man became tangled in his rope. When the first climbed back up to help him, he too got into trouble.

'It's very rare for ropes to jam. Why did it happen? Maybe we'll never know. Maybe the only two people who know are dead.'

Desperate, torch-lit attempts by their seven colleagues - looking down in horror from forty metres above - to rescue the pair had to be abandoned as night fell and the weather deteriorated.

Forced to spend the night trapped, dangling on the exposed cliff face, lashed by rain, wind and waterfall, Mr Steve Rogers, 26, and Mr Mark Charles, 24, are thought to have died of hypothermia.

'We just don't know, but it could have taken a matter of minutes. Or a matter of hours,' Mr Sheehan said.

The survivors spent the night on a narrow ledge, barely half a metre wide, shivering, huddled under a flysheet, unable to respond to the cries of help from their friends below.

A senior Chifley police officer, Inspector Peter Thurtell, said it appeared that they did not initially know of the fate of their companions.