Matthew Flinders' Cat (8 page)

Casper seemed unabashed by the insult, ‘Wait on, Billy! Have another drink, mate, bloody near full bottle t’go. Jesus, did you see that fuckin’ stash? Why’d yer spoil things by tellin’ him yiz was no fuckin’ good no more? We could’ve took some of that loot offa him, no fuckin’ risk.’

Billy shook his head, ‘Even pissed, which he wasn’t by local standards, the black bloke would have beaten the living crap out of both of us.’ He rose, knowing he was already getting the taste for the scotch. He must leave, it was now or never.

‘C’mon, siddown, yer haven’t finished yer fuckin’ drink!’ Casper persisted. In the parlance of a drunk, this was the worst possible indictment.

Billy was sorely tempted, but knew if he finished the glass in front of him he’d follow with another and yet another. Casper may have been unsuccessful with his scam but the scotch bottle was still two-thirds full, a reward in itself. He winced inwardly, desperately reminding himself that an urgent part of his daily routine was still to be kept. He needed to remain relatively sober for Operation Mynah Bird and he knew if he allowed the day to get any further out of hand he’d find himself in the drunk tank tonight. He reminded himself of the terrible humiliation he always felt when he woke up in the company of twenty-six drunks sleeping it off in a windowless dormitory. The drunk tank always meant that once again he’d failed and was one step closer to disaster.

‘Casper, I don’t want your booze and I don’t want your business, you’re an embarrassment.’

Casper spread his arms wide and pointed to the bottle of scotch, ‘Hey, brother, it ain’t my grog, the blackfella paid for it! I’m a fuckin’ drunk, you’re a fuckin’ drunk. You’re talking shit, we’re already all the embarrassment there is, man!’

Billy had to admit Casper might have a point. He watched as the albino swallowed his scotch in one gulp. Banging the empty glass down on the table in front of him, he smacked his lips and reached out for the scotch bottle, filled Billy’s glass and held it out to him. ‘Garn, win some, lose some, no offence, mate.’

Billy didn’t bother to reply. Holding firmly onto his briefcase, he crossed the beer garden and, to avoid meeting Sam Snatch, took the exit that led directly onto the street through a one-way revolving iron mechanism known locally as the ‘Grate Escape’. This was because it was traditionally used by waterside workers to make a hasty exit when news arrived that a cranky wife armed with a rolling pin was on her way before her husband’s entire weekly wage packet disappeared into the publican’s pocket.

‘Ah, fuck off, yer barrister bastard!’ Casper yelled out, ‘Yer think yer too good for us, that yer shit smells of eudie colognie, but yer not, yer just another fuckin’ drunk, mate.’

Billy felt strangely happy that his part of the scam hadn’t succeeded. He reminded himself, though, that Marion still lurked in the darkness beyond the door leading from the beer garden. If Williams had escaped without calling in at Marion’s Bar, Sam Snatch would conclude that Casper had somehow screwed up the deal, forcing Billy to leave and the bushie to walk out on him. He wondered how long it would take into the bottle of scotch Casper now had to himself before a thoroughly pissed-off Sam Snatch proceeded to adjust his attitude.

Billy dodged the traffic, crossed the road to the waterfront and then made his way up the Art Gallery steps towards the Botanic Gardens. He was halfway up when he realised that, in all the agitation, he hadn’t stopped off at the bottle shop. Briefly he considered retracing his steps, but the possibility of running into an angry Sam Snatch made him decide against doing so. He’d had enough aggro for one day. He told himself he’d pick up a bottle elsewhere a little later on in the day.

As Billy entered the gates of the Botanic Gardens, almost immediately his demeanour changed. Even though he crossed the Gardens to the pub of a morning, his return was an entirely different kind of excursion. It was now his custom to walk every path every day, rain or shine, checking on the trees and the plants, making sure that the gardeners were aware of a shrub or tree or flowering hedge or ground cover that might be in need of care. He noted that the azalea hedge along the Macquarie Wall continued to look sick, he’d have to take that up with the head gardener again.

Whilst he usually had a bottle tucked away in his briefcase, he wouldn’t touch a drop until his inspection was completed. It was his habit to sit quietly on the various benches, his eyes closed, listening to the birds and the insects to determine if there had been any changes in the immediate environment. Billy knew what time of the year it was from most of the tiny flying insects that would feed or collect pollen around plants. He deeply missed the cries of the smaller birds that had once been so much a part of the Gardens but which the rapacious mynah birds had systematically eliminated.

Billy had come to regard the Botanic Gardens as his own and assumed a proprietary attitude to all he surveyed. His inspection usually ended around twelve-thirty, when he arrived back at the entrance gates opposite the State Library. It was not until he passed through the gates and crossed the road to the steps of the library on the opposite side that he felt free to take another drink.

Billy was now back where his day had begun but this time he sat himself in the sun on one of the library steps and waited among the early lunchtime crowd for the Indian mynah birds, which would only begin to gather in real numbers around the library steps around a quarter to one. Intelligent birds, they seemed to know the various feeding times and sites. Billy made a habit of sitting in a different spot every day so that the cunning shit-spreaders wouldn’t associate one part of the steps with danger. He watched as they started to fly in and waited until they presented themselves in sufficient numbers before he opened his briefcase.

Quietly he slipped a single surgical glove over his right hand, withdrew the coffee container and placed it beside him. Selecting a single pellet of bread, he rolled it down the steps in front of him and watched as a flurry of mynahs made for the prize which was quickly snapped up by one of the bigger birds. Past experience showed that the bigger ones got more than their fair share, which Billy regarded as a waste of precious ammunition. So, observing the whereabouts of the bird who’d won the first morsel, he threw the next pellet as far from it as possible, thus bagging a second victim. Billy patiently repeated the procedure for an hour, until virtually every bread pellet had been nabbed by a different mynah bird. There only remained the denunciation.

Billy peeled off the glove, stuffed it into the empty coffee container, walked over to a nearby rubbish bin and disposed of it. Then he shackled his briefcase about his wrist, walked to the top step of the library entrance and commenced to recite a piece of doggerel of his own composition, causing the people seated on the steps to look at him in bemusement.

No Mynah Matter

All the birds of the air are

a’crying and a’sobbing.

They’ve heard of the death

of the wren and the robin.

Of the Wagtail triplets

killed asleep in their nest

And poor Jacky Winter,

twice stabbed in the breast.

The birds are all asking

They’re all in a twitter.

Is it someone among us

who’s Jacky the Ripper?

These are our Gardens

where we’ve lived all our lives.

Who’s the terror among us

with beak sharp as knives?

Hey, beady-eyed stranger

with the long yellow legs!

You’ve been seen prowling around

where the robin lays eggs.

Ha! Caught you red-handed!

Now it’s your turn to pay.

Judge Billy O’Shannessy

has been called to the fray.

The long arm of the law

has reached out at last.

Operation Mynah Bird

is now come to pass.

This promise I make you

as a bird-loving man.

Their mob is in trouble,

the shit’s hit the fan!

Small birds will return to

where the kookas laugh.

The wrens seen once more

along the bush-lined path.

The Gardens made safe

for your dear little nests.

There’ll be birdsong again

from small feathered breasts.

I swear this before you

on the currawong’s cry.

These unwelcome strangers

are all going to die.

So ladies and gentlemen

out enjoying your lunch

You’ve just seen the last

of this murdering bunch.

My decision is final

my judgement must rest.

The Indian mynah

has robbed its last nest.

It’s death by rat poison

because one of us cared.

The invasion is over

the small birds are spared.

Billy completed reciting the poem, which he was the first to admit wasn’t very good, and told himself that he had every intention of working it up to scan correctly. Nevertheless, it served his purpose of publicly announcing his personal crusade.

After this, Billy would usually take a sip from his bottle and smile benignly at the sandwich munchers. Then, bowing slightly, he’d wish them all a splendid day and take his leave. One of the very few advantages of being a derelict was that people concluded that you were either drunk or mentally retarded.

He now made his way down the steps and across the road back into the Botanic Gardens. At this time of the day the giant Moreton Bay fig he loved would cast its shadow across a bench beside a small rock pool situated along a little-used path. He’d been coming to this bench all his adult life, first to eat his lunch and later to study for his entrance to the Bar. Later still, he’d come during a recess from a case he was conducting. Now he liked to sit quietly and write while he worked his way through half a bottle of scotch. The day’s writing would be concluded when the words slipped off the paper into his lap and he found himself too inebriated to continue.

Today’s task was to put down the story of Trim just as he’d imagined it in his head. He told himself that without the half-bottle of scotch, the words had a good chance of remaining firmly anchored to the page. If he could manage to accomplish this, it would more than make up for the day’s disruption and give him the perfect excuse to celebrate a little later.

To his dismay, as he reached the small pool and walked around it to his bench, he saw that it was occupied. And not only occupied, but a body lay stretched out on it. In all the years Billy had been coming to the bench, it had never once been occupied. Billy could barely contain his anger. This was
his
bench and nobody was going to take it away from him. He wasn’t a violent man, but things had simply gone too far and he was going to have to do something quite drastic. He cast about for a stone big enough to threaten the intruder and found one at the edge of the pool, a smooth river boulder about the size of a cricket ball. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d use it, but this didn’t seem to matter, the rock in his hand gave him courage. He’d swear and threaten and hold the rock up in a belligerent manner, and hope this would be sufficient to send the bench thief packing.

Approaching closer, Billy recognised the pair of scuffed Cubans, then the moleskins and the tartan shirt, although the black man’s Akubra appeared to be missing. All the steam went out of him. He dropped the rock and stood quite still, waiting for his heartbeat to slow down to normal. He couldn’t possibly threaten Williams. If the Aborigine wasn’t exactly a mate, he owed him some sort of respect. Besides, his hat was missing and Billy guessed that the ancient Akubra was part of the stockman’s very being, that he must have been extremely drunk to have lost it. The least he could do for the poor bastard was find it again. Billy told himself that this might square things up and assuage his guilt for the incident at the Flag.

There was only one way to the bench since the path ended at the pond, so Billy retraced his steps. On a small patch of lawn to the left of the gravel path and some twenty metres down from where Williams was lying, he saw an empty scotch bottle and, half hidden in a patch of pampas grass, the hat.

Williams had obviously selected the lawn as a place to rest but when the sun had moved directly overhead and become too hot, he had decided to move on, falling arse over tit into the tall clump of ornamental grass and losing his hat in the process. Billy could clearly see where the grass had been flattened by his fall. Williams would have regained his feet and staggered along the pathway to the bench, leaving his hat behind.

Billy retrieved the stockman’s precious Akubra and approached the sleeping man. Standing over him, Billy inquired, ‘You all right, mate?’

Williams didn’t move. After a few moments, Billy put the hat down on the gravel pathway and shook him tentatively, then a little more roughly, but still he didn’t respond. Finally he shook Williams vigorously, his free hand gripping his shoulder tightly, ‘Wake up, damn you!’ Billy shouted in frustration, but he knew the black man had slipped into a drunken coma.