New Australian Stories 2 (38 page)

Next morning Derek was watching the bushfire coverage again, a satellite image showing a cloud of smoke so vast it was visible from space.

‘Can't we watch something else? This is depressing,' said Penny.

‘There's a cool change coming through,' he said. ‘I wanna see what happens.'

In the kitchen she snapped open a fortune cookie:
Something you lost will soon turn up
. She was thinking this over, trying to recall all the stuff she'd misplaced over the years, when the TV noise cut off abruptly and she heard Derek speaking on the phone. Something in his voice, an anxious note, brought her back into the lounge room.

‘So they got out?' Derek was asking. ‘They're safe, they're going to be okay?' He let out a long breath, nodding. On the silent screen a journalist was standing by a charred letterbox, its metal face partly melted.

Penny waited until he'd hung up. ‘Everything all right?'

‘Cousins. My mum's sister. Probably lose the house, but everyone got out in time.'

She wasn't sure what to say. He'd never told her he had family up in the hills; but then again, she'd never asked. She felt a faint sense of shame. How would it feel, sitting there watching the fire devour whole towns, knowing someone you cared about was in its path? She got two icy poles from the freezer and offered one to Derek. ‘Thanks,' he said.

It was mid morning when Penny left the house. The sun leaked across the sky like something bleeding, and in the amber light her shadow on the footpath took on a strange terracotta hue. She walked out to the bridge over the aqueduct. For a while she stood there in the heat, watching the planes take off and rise up into the hazy air, get smaller and eventually vanish.

She took the gun from her bag. Down below, in the centre of the aqueduct, ran the thin channel with its dark streak of water. She opened the cylinder and positioned herself carefully. One by one, she took all six bullets from their chambers and dropped them into the water, which swallowed them with barely a sound. Then she placed the gun on the ledge of the aqueduct and walked away: not slow, not fast, just heading home.

Leaving the Fountainhead

ZANE LOVITT

The rain has kept people away. I'm planted on a stool at the end of the bar and I'm halfway drunk on bourbon that burns in my lungs and in my throat, but it's cheap and this place is across the street from my office, so checkmate. For all the days and nights I've worked out of that office, I must have come here to the Fountainhead Hotel on only a halfdozen occasions. It's always so peopled. I'm usually peopled enough.

But tonight the rain has kept them away. The stools stand empty, and the bartender has nothing to do but polish glasses, slowly, taking pride. Most nights there'd be seven or eight men seated here, lungs burning, flushing the day away. Tonight it's just me.

Way off in the lounge there's a couple of kids, barely old enough to drink, talking in hushed voices, ignoring their beers. Breaking up maybe. Or getting back together.

But that's it. I've been easing into the quiet for about half an hour, keeping my weight on the points of my elbows, looking up only to watch the water cascade down the front windows like there's an actual fountain on the roof of this place, true to its name.

I'm doing this, watching the water, when the barman speaks.

I say, ‘What?'

Tiny pineapples and bananas decorate his shirt, which is easily the happiest thing in the room. The pores on his big friendly nose look like they've been drawn on, and his big friendly face smiles at me with an openness that must earn him a nice tip from anyone who comes in here alone and lonely. He's got the kind of moustache you don't see much anymore, and beneath it there's a smugness, like he's immune to what affects his moping clients and what's more he knows it. Or just thinks it. Or maybe I just think it. I can't read people the way I used to.

He says again, louder, ‘Why the long face?'

And I force a grin. Bartender humour.

He snorts pleasantly, puts the glass he's been wiping on the shelf behind him, draws another from the dishwasher.

‘You okay, bloke?' he asks, polishing again.

‘I'm fine.'

‘You don't look fine.' With an elegant swoop of his arm he pours a shot of bourbon into that same tumbler and puts it on the mat in front of me.

‘This one's on the house.'

It's a throaty voice, comforting, like a lawnmower when it finally starts. I don't say, ‘Thanks.' I say, ‘Thank you.'

His shoulders push back against my gratitude. ‘I can tell when someone's having a bad day.'

I neck the bourbon I've already started and clutch at the new drink, feel the glass still warm from the dishwasher, just as friendly as the man who poured it. It makes me turn back to the window, the rain outside.

He follows my gaze. ‘It's a wet one, hey.'

‘Yeah.'

‘My word,' he says. ‘What do you do, bloke?'

I look back at my glass. ‘I'm a delivery boy.'

‘What do you deliver?'

‘Legal papers, mostly. Financial records.'

‘You enjoy it?'

Maybe the answer is inside my drink somewhere. I peer in. ‘I don't think so.'

‘Yeah …' He pulls another glass from the dishwasher and says, ‘What are you going to do?' Only it's rhetorical, so it comes out: ‘Waddayagunnadoo.' And I'm hoping this is his way of ending the conversation.

But then he shelves that glass and says, ‘Where you from?'

‘You're used to a lot of people sitting here, talking to you … right?'

‘My word.'

The way he keeps saying that, it's like his catchphrase. He delivers it with stern conviction.

I say, ‘Well, I guess I don't really feel like talking.'

The bartender nods, arches his mouth like a Chinese businessman agreeing on a price, turns his big round body away to the stack of ashtrays behind him and puts one on top with just enough delicacy to give me a rush of guilt.

I say, ‘But thanks for the drink …'

He goes back to the dishwasher, pulls out another glass without looking at me, and I sigh at the awkwardness. There's a distant rumble of thunder. Beyond the window, headlights and neon signs flash at each other, and I don't want to go out there, so I figure it's good when a silhouette crosses the window and comes into the bar, ringing the bell above the door, splashing water from his umbrella onto the linoleum and giving the bartender something to think about apart from how I'm a jerk.

But seeing who it is gives me something to think about too.

Our contact was so brief and so long ago that he won't recognise me, which I'm thankful for. I almost didn't recognise him in that well-cut suit and those polished black shoes, his grey beard and hair trimmed to imply someone corporate. The last time I saw him he didn't imply someone
bathed
. As he approaches the bar, glancing at me with those fat black eyes and looking around the place to see how empty it is, I'm thinking this is like his face has been cut-and-pasted onto the body of an effeminate city executive, complete with a strawberry red umbrella. Also, I'm thinking he could reinvent himself as an air hostess and anyone in Melbourne who isn't brain-damaged would still recognise Kevin Tomlinson.

But then the bartender says, ‘What can I do you for?' with that same good-natured smile and there's no hesitation in his voice or eyes. So what do I know.

‘I'm looking for the Boatswain's Club,' says Tomlinson. ‘Isn't it around here?'

The bartender scratches his nose. ‘The what, sorry?'

‘The Boatswain's Club. Do you know where it is?' It's a voice like he was raised by foghorns.

‘My word,' says the bartender. ‘You're on foot, are you?'

‘Yes.'

‘No problem.' He points emphatically, stretching his hand as far back and away from his body as it will go and waving a finger out there. ‘You go six blocks along Russell Street until you hit Victoria Road. You go two streets west along that until you come to Locust Street, where you take a right. It's a laneway, really. Go all the way to the end. The Boatswain's Club is on the corner there, next to the Parkway-Spruce Hotel.'

Tomlinson squints. His eyes twitch, one at a time.

‘So … six blocks along Russell, left onto Victoria, right onto Locust.'

‘It's a popular place. You can't miss it.'

‘All right. Thank you.'

‘No probs, bloke.'

The exchange is over in all of thirty seconds, then the bell above the door rings again and Tomlinson is gone. Back into the rain. I watch his umbrella open and float away past the window.

Then I look to the bartender, waiting for him to look back.

When he does, he misinterprets my face. ‘You want another?'

‘Why did …' I'm about to ask the obvious question, but then I don't. Instead, I say, ‘Sure.'

He pours me another. There's silence while he does it. Then he goes back to drying the glasses from the dishwasher.

In that rain, walking that distance, it'll take Tomlinson about twenty-one, twenty-two minutes to get where he's going. The bartender, he's not doing these calculations. Even as I watch him, serenely shelving mugs, he might already have forgotten about the stranger who just came and went, carrying a red umbrella.

I ask, ‘Do you know who that was?'

‘Who? That bloke?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Is he famous?'

‘Kevin Tomlinson?'

He doesn't recognise the name either.

‘Spac Attack Tomlinson?' I offer.

This time he scowls and his gaze drifts past my ears. ‘Sounds familiar,' he says. ‘What's he famous for?'

‘He's a psychopath.'

‘You mean, like, he's a footy player?'

‘No, he's a real-life psychopath. And a thief.' I take a sip, glance back to the door. ‘And it looks as though he's doing well for himself.'

The bartender slows the polishing of the glass, comes almost to a stop. His eyes search the floor. After two seconds of thinking, he snaps out of it, looks back at me.

I say, ‘He stabbed his home-economics teacher in high school, spent five years in a youth prison, got out and made a career robbing houses, and somewhere along the way he blowtorched his own nipples off. He's got a tattoo on his left arm that says
Rebecca
. He's also got Hepatitis C, mild narcolepsy and once he won twenty-seven thousand dollars on a horse named Rent Arrears …'

I drink. The bartender doesn't move.

‘… which is what it says on his right arm.' The bourbon roars in my throat.

‘How come you know so much about him?'

‘I used to know this kind of stuff for a living.'

‘Were you a cop?'

‘Not really. I worked privately. The first client I ever had was someone Tomlinson robbed. At least, the police said it was Tomlinson. We never found out for sure. This was a long time ago.' I laugh to myself, feel the passage of time right in my stomach the way a boat feels rust.

The bartender keeps polishing, pretending he isn't worried about what's just happened. I'll let him pretend for a while.

‘They invited me along to a raid on Tomlinson's flat. I was supposed to identify a stereo and TV belonging to my client. But I never got to do that.'

I expect stealth, but they just walk up to the door and knock. It's about as
not
like the movies as it can be. Seven uniforms plod along the second-storey catwalk, one of them's even whistling, and when they get to his door they knock politely and wait, in the midday sun, for it to open.

I'm at the back of the group, hanging so far behind you'd think I lived in this block of flats and I was just curious. The raiding party eye me with indifference. Some of them smirk at the distance I'm keeping, some of them don't try to hide that they're smirking. Some of them, I can tell by the way they chew their gum, are freaking out just the same as me.

We all know whose home this is.

The door opens, and it's a woman, her hair pulled back tight, and there's lots of green shadow around her eyes. It's obvious she hadn't bothered looking through the peephole because she makes a face when she sees who's out here.

‘Oh,
fuck off
.'

The senior constable at the head of the group, the name on his pin reads
Gant
. He offers her a folded sheet of paper and says, ‘Becky, we've got a warrant to search this flat. Is Spacca at home?'

‘No, he's not here,' she says back, louder than she needs to.

‘You're going to have to let us in.'

Already other officers have their hands on the door, ready to push it open.