Dead Point Part 6

'Jack Irish.'

A sigh. 'Tried the boot factory, the furniture place, the mobile. Then I found this other number with Jack written next to it.'

Lyall. The dry, precise voice made the room seem brighter; no, the clouds must have thinned.

'I don't think we've ever conversed at my professional premises,' I said. 'Do you wish to consult me professionally?'

'I'm in Santa Barbara,' she said.

'Santa Barbara. What kind of trouble have they got there?'

'Understanding a sentence that doesn't mention Steven Spielberg or money. The ones I've met, anyway. I'm staying with Bradley.'

Staying with Bradley was fine from my point of view. Bradley was a former housemate of Lyall's, a film director. That wasn't what made him fine from my point of view. What made him fine was that he was gay.

'Extend my regards.'

'Brad's come out of the closet,' she said, voice low, serious.

'How many times can you do that?'

'It turns out,' she said, 'he's not gay.'

'They've done tests?'

She laughed. I'd been taken with her laugh from the outset, but it wasn't that laugh now. It was her laugh with something subtracted.

'He says he's never been gay, he's not even bi. He's been celibate for twelve years. I just a.s.sumed that because he didn't want to screw me or any other woman he was gay.'

'Not an unreasonable a.s.sumption,' I said. I still remembered her exact words on that wintry night when we were still near-strangers.

I was in love with him for years. Never mentioned it. No point. He's gay. Huge loss to womankind.

I felt the weight of realisation, of knowing, on my shoulders, a dead weight, a bag of lead sinkers. A silence ensued.

'Jack.'

'Yes.' I could hear the soundless sound of her gathering courage.

'I'm attached, no, I'm in love with both of you. It's very difficult.'

'Torn between two lovers, acting like a fool,' I said. 'The old song. Or is it feeling like a fool? I've got something on the stove.' There are times when you will say anything.

'Jack.'

'Yes.'

'Don't dump me so quickly. This isn't easy. I've agonised over this.'

I said, without thought, 'Lyall, you're in Santa Barbie Doll or wherever and you're f.u.c.king Bradley, he's first-up from a spell, and you'd like to tell me about that and how difficult it is for you. Consider me told.'

Silence. Not even a hum from the copper wire that lay down there in the deep Pacific blackness consorting with the bottom-crawling sea life.

'Told,' she said. Click.

I sat there for a while, thinking that I needed a drink, needing a drink. Then I talked to myself for a while, recited the mantra about the black tunnel, and went home. There were things to do. It was time to clear the decks, to confront places long avoided. I cleaned the apartment from beginning to end, a ferocious attack on dirt in which I dusted pelmets and picture rails and skirting boards, washed floors, vacuumed carpets, defrosted the freezer, scrubbed the refrigerator, the stovetop, the oven. Then I turned on my grocery cupboard, threw out ancient spices, old flour, rusted cans of food I couldn't remember buying. Next, I laid into my clothes. Frayed s.h.i.+rts, unloved s.h.i.+rts, shapeless underwear, two old sweaters, lonely socks, a dark suit turning green, a jacket I'd never liked they all went into a garbage bag and thence to the boot of the Stud. The Salvos could turn them into usable fibres. Then I stuffed two laundry bags with soiled clothes and sheets and table napkins and towels and delivered them into the cleansing hands of the Brunswick Street laundry. Next stop, King & G.o.dfree in Lygon Street, where I bought exotic food and drink without regard for my penury.

At home, at the top of the stairs, a bag in each hand, the manic energy suddenly left me. I steeled myself for one final effort: pour cider over pork sausages in pot, put in oven. Halve tomatoes, quarter potatoes, put on tray, pour on olive oil, put in oven under sausages. Set oven on low. Open bottle of Carlsberg, lie on sofa, read the Age Age. Later on, I ate, drank a bottle of Cotes du Rhone grenache, watched the Saints get thrashed by West Coast, didn't care, a lot, wanted the phone to ring so much that it felt like a bodily ache.

In bed, I resisted the urge to burrow beneath the pillows and breathe carbon dioxide. I read my book. There should be a set number of endings in each life. No-one should have more. Experts could decide how many and enshrine that in the Charter of Human Rights.

But it would be too late for me.

I woke up thinking about Lyall and determinedly switched thoughts to my daughter, Claire. She was pregnant to Eric, her Scandinavian fis.h.i.+ng boat skipper. Before my recent visit, I hadn't seen her for more than two years and, in full adult, barefoot, tropical bloom, she was shockingly different. She'd looked like my mother. My mother young and happy. I could not remember seeing my mother either young or happy, but I knew from the photographs that this was how she had looked. Claire was now very beautiful and my first sight of her had left me wrong-footed, unabled.

I had no guilt to carry in regard to Claire. Well, less guilt perhaps. It is all a matter of degree.

Her mother, my first wife, Frances, had left Claire's place in Queensland only hours before I'd arrived. She was still married to the man she'd left me for long ago, a surgeon, thin and pinstriped Richard, and Claire had two half-siblings, boys I'd encountered three or four times a year while Claire was growing up. Richard was your normal medical specialist: straight As for maths and science, no personality that would show up on any test. Nevertheless, he'd clearly touched something in Frances when he'd operated to fix an old tennis injury. Soon after, she departed without warning from the conjugal dwelling, taking with her one-year-old Claire. The next day, Richard arrived at my old law office in Carlton.

'Mr Wiggins to see you, Mr Irish,' said the secretary.

He was as pink and clean as a newly bathed baby and wearing a suit worth more than I was making in a fortnight, gross. Primed to the eyebrows, hardly inside the door, he said, spitting it out, 'I'm here to tell you I'm in love with Frances and plan to marry her when she's free.'

I was late for court, looking for things. 'Steady on,' I said. 'Now what Frances is that?'

He coughed. 'Your, ah, wife. Frances.'

I said, 'Right, that Frances. You plan to do what with her?'

'Jack,' he said, 'I know this is a painful...'

'Wiggins,' I said. 'Aren't you her surgeon?'

Richard touched his razor-abrased chin. 'I did first meet Frances as a patient, yes, but...'

'Professional misconduct,' I said. 'I think your future lies in medical missionary work. Leper colonies, that kind of thing.'

His lips twitched. 'Jack, I a.s.sure you that I have not in any way contravened-'

'What's your first name?' I interrupted.

'Richard.' He saw hope, shot a cuff, put out a slim white-marble hand.

I ignored it. 'Save the a.s.surances for the disciplinary hearing, suns.h.i.+ne. Now, I'm busy, so see yourself out will you?'

He gathered his dignity, head to one side. 'Unless the patient is the complainant, Jack, there really isn't...'

I was putting papers into my briefcase. 'Wiggy,' I said, 'you cut the flesh, I'll do the legal argument. In case she turns out not worth sacrificing a career for, try the sister. Some of the blokes prefer her.'

Cruel. Cruel and unnecessary, but the wounded animal is without compunction.

On this chilly Melbourne morning, many years later, time having healed some wounds, put fragile scabs over others, inflicted new ones, I drove down Carrigan's Lane, its sole streetlight making gleams on the bluestone gutter. It was still dark as I unlocked the side door to Taub's Cabinetmaking, clicked on the lights, noted the bulbs gone: three. Charlie wouldn't have fluorescent lighting and no day pa.s.sed there without me risking my life up a ladder replacing incandescent bulbs.

The workshop was as Charlie had left it on the day he flew to Perth to attend the marriage of his youngest granddaughter to someone in the quarry business. His idea had been to be back inside twenty-four hours but he had been prevailed upon to spend ten days with another grandchild and his family.

Before he left, Charlie said to the workshop, not to me, 'For what do I need a holiday?'

I was under a three-metre-long table, made of red cedar cut in northern New South Wales before World War One. Charlie bought the timber in 1962, wrote the date on it in pencil. I was examining the perfect fit of the wooden b.u.t.tons that fixed the tabletop to the frame and would allow the timber to move seasonally for a few centuries until it stabilised.

'You'll probably never want to come back,' I said. 'It's still warm. Hot. More than hot.'

He banged a huge fist on the tabletop directly above my head, causing me to feel that I was fainting.

'Hot? You tell me what's hot good for. One thing, you tell me.'

I crawled out, tympana still vibrating, got to my feet, braced myself against the table. 'People go outside and do things, go to the beach, swim.'

Charlie made his pitying noise, a sort of snort enhanced with nasal sounds. 'Exactly,' he said. 'They waste time. You think Mozart went to the beach? You hear that Liszt was a lot of the time swimming? What use is swimming, anyway?'

'It keeps you from drowning,' I said. 'In deep water.'

He rolled his cheroot between thumb and two fingers, puffed at it, shook his head in a worried way. 'Jack, Jack,' he said, 'don't go in the deep water, how can you drown? What use is swimming then?'

'I need some time on that,' I said. 'What do I do while you're away?'

He turned away, walked off towards his machines to touch them goodbye, said over his shoulder, 'Pack up and deliver the library, the lady's waiting.'

I followed him. 'Me? Are you mad? Mrs Purbrick's paying a fortune for Charlie Taub.'

'I told you already, Charlie Taub the woman got. You put a couple screws in the wall, that's it. When I come back, I check.'

'Charlie, that's not a good idea. I could ruin your reputation.'

He wound the blade of a table saw up, wound it down, an action serving no purpose. 'So ruin,' he said, subject closed. He turned his head in my direction. A new subject. 'The one with the horsetail, you know?'

I knew. The property developer who'd turned the old chutney factory in Carrigan's Lane into four desirable inner-city New York-style loft apartments, lifestyle choice plus once-in-a-lifetime blue-chip investment opportunity not to miss.

'I know,' I said, with an icepick in my heart.

'Six hundred thousand dollars.' Charlie pointed around the s.p.a.ce.

'An offer?'

'From the agent. Clive, Clive somebody.'

'Clive Miller,' I said. The repulsive Clive, gone on from accepting f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o in lieu of rent and from dudding poor tenants out of their rental bonds to sitting on boards and living in the best part of Kew. Clive Miller embodied the recent history of Fitzroy.

'That one. Nine hundred pounds I paid. One hundred and fifty cash down, five quid a week.'

'So?' I said.

Charlie straightened, ran a hand the size of an oven glove over the burnished surface of the cabinet, tested the stability of the fence.

'So?' I repeated, wanting to know, at that moment.

'So?' Charlie said. 'So?'

'Are you selling?'

'Selling?' The large head turned around, eyes under thatch bundles regarded me. 'My workshop? So I can go to Perth and learn to swim? So I don't drown?'

'Just asking,' I said, trying as nonchalantly as possible to get oxygen to my gasping little lung sacs.

Now I walked around the workshop, touched a few machines, just to comfort them, spent five minutes studying Mrs Purbrick's library. It was pure Charlie Taub: cla.s.sical elements pilasters, mouldings, cornices but pared of all showiness. The eye was drawn first to the beauty of the wood, then to the perfect balance of the design, its understatement and severity, and then, perhaps, to the craft of the joiner.

The ensemble, missing only its top and bottom tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, stood a.s.sembled in a corner of the workshop. It had been sanded, grain-sealed, sh.e.l.lacked and polished by Charlie's finis.h.i.+ng man, the voluble Arthur McKinley, retired coffin-maker. That work had taken six weeks. To reach the stage where the finis.h.i.+ng could begin had taken a mere eight months because Charlie had set aside three days a week for the library. Progress might have been even faster had he had someone other than me to a.s.sist him. But speed had never been a concern for Charlie. He didn't hear clients' questions about how long a job would take.

Once, in the early days, entrusted with a small table, anxious about my progress, I asked, 'When does this have to be finished?'

Charlie had been rough-planing an 18-inch walnut board with a block plane, working at an angle to the grain to avoid tear-out. The thick plane steel, sixty years old at least, honed and strapped, could clean shave a Gulf Country feral pig. With each stroke, long translucent shavings whispered through the plane's throat, bending back with the grace of a ballerina's arm.

'When it's finished,' he said, 'that's when.'

I went to the storeroom at the back and got out the packing blankets, World War Two army blankets Charlie had bought in the 1950s. Then I disa.s.sembled the library. There was not a screw in it; secret wooden locking wedges held it together. By 8.30 a.m., I'd finished wrapping and taping the pieces. I was waiting for the water to boil and thinking about my anchovy-paste sandwich when I heard the vehicle outside.

Cam was in his stockbroker gear chalk-striped charcoal suit, blue s.h.i.+rt, silk jacquard tie and carrying a dark-blue cardboard box. He put it on the steel trolley Charlie used as a table.

'Breakfast,' he said and opened the box. 'Scrambled eggs and barbecued pork New Orleans style on Greek bread. Coffee. Blue Mountain.'

Fusion cooking was completely out of control. What chance did an anchovy-paste sandwich and a cup of tea stand? We got going, sitting on the chairs Charlie had rescued from a skip. The pork melted in the mouth, the scrambled eggs had a faint mustard and cream taste.

'Southern barbecued pork? Greek bread?'

'Good?'

'That's not strong enough. Who's the cook?'

'Greek bloke in Brunswick, used to live in New Orleans. He's got a brick oven out the back, looks like a rocket s.h.i.+p. Fat rocket s.h.i.+p. Little pig's in about eight at night, comes from his brother in the bush, the neighbour comes off s.h.i.+ft at 4 a.m., checks it. Bit of bastin. Ready at seven.'

'Write down the address.'

He nodded, looked at me reflectively, tongue running over his upper teeth. 'Talked to Cyn again. She's gettin better, not so vague now.'

'That's good.'

We chewed in silence.