Peter Corris: Man In The Shadows

‘Mr Hardy? This is Dr Smith. I’m glad to see you got home all right. It occurred to me that you were in no condition to drive.’

‘I’m tough, but I’m touched by your concern. Also I’m lucky.’

‘Yes, you are. We’ve found your keys. You can pick them up the next time you’re here.’

‘You seem pretty sure I will be.’

‘Yes. Any kind of negative publicity is bad for a hospital. If this Greenway is some kind of ratbag journalist… ‘

‘You’ve got a problem. Okay, Dr Smith, I’m sure we’ll be talking again.’

I hung up and sat down to worry. That did no good. I ate a tuna sandwich to tone up my brain cells, took some aspirin for the pain and some more whisky for the humiliation and went to bed.

Aspirin and whisky don’t make for very good sleep. I woke up a couple of times, once because the cat was yowling outside. I got up and played it a tune on the can opener. Later a backfire on Glebe Point Road woke me and left me staring at the ceiling for an hour.

It was the frangipani that got me to thinking about Helen. She’d given it to me in its big tub as a gift, transported it all the way from her Bondi flat balcony, when she’d finally made the decision to go back to her husband and her kid on a full-time basis. Our six-monthly polygamous set-up hadn’t worked. ‘It never does,’ people drunk and sober had told me. They were right.

I got up and made a cup of weak coffee and sat thinking about how I’d dragged Helen down from Kempsey to Sydney. How we’d pledged this and that and fucked until we ached. Then we’d talked until our mouths were dry and all the words were changing their meanings.

I put the coffee down and it went cold. I wanted to smoke but there was nothing available. Helen had smoked one Gitane a day which left no packets, not even any butts, lying around. As a little light seeped into the bedroom I remembered the last scene, played out right here. The tears and goodbyes. And the bloody frangipani. I could still smell it as I finally fell asleep.

I came awake fast and nervous. The hammering sounded as if it was on my bedroom door. Then I realised that it was downstairs. I grabbed a dressing gown, almost tripped on the stairs and reached the door in a foul temper. The knocking kept on. I jerked the door open.

‘What in hell’s…?’

‘Let me in, quick!’

‘Who’re you?’

‘Annie Parker. Quick!’ The person who was supposed to be dead slipped past me into the hall.

‘Have you got a gun? Jesus, they’ll be here any minute.’

‘Who?’ I’d asked three questions in a row and was getting sick of it.

She moved down the hall. ‘Please. You know me. Annie. Just get the gun and stand in the door and let them see it. Please!’

The way she flattened herself against the wall like a back lane fighter convinced me. I got the. 38 from the cupboard under the stairs, checked that the safety was on and stood in the doorway with the gun held low but in view. I felt ridiculous; dressing gown, bare legs and cold feet. A red Mazda stopped outside the house. It edged back a little so that the driver could get a better look at me. All I saw was a pale face and a turned up collar. I couldn’t see his passenger at all. The car engine purred for about half a minute, then the driver revved it and moved off fast.

I closed the door and looked at the woman sitting on the bottom stair. She was medium-sized with light hair; she had on heavy sunglasses and was wrapped in a sort of imitation of an aviator’s jacket with straps and zippers and a hood.

She dug cigarettes out of a pocket in the jacket and lit one. ‘Recognise me?’

I nodded. She bore some resemblance to the skinny, strung-out kid I’d dealt with some years back but, in a way, more to her mother. Or to what her mother might have looked like at about her age which I reckoned to be somewhere around twenty-five. ‘Sure, Annie. I recognise you.’ I was going to say that her name had come up in a recent conversation but something trapped and desperate about her smoking stopped me.

She puffed smoke. ‘Yeah, I haven’t changed much. More’s the fucking pity.’

‘Do you need help?’

‘Don’t we all? No, I was in the area when those bastards heavied me. I tried to hide in the park but they flushed me out with the bloody headlights. I remembered your place. So I’m here. I can piss off in a minute if you like.’

I walked past her and put the gun away in the cupboard. ‘Come through to the kitchen. I want some coffee. You?’

‘Coffee, yeah, okay.’

It was bright and warm in the kitchen. Annie took off her jacket and hung it over a chair. She was wearing a clean white T-shirt with SAFE SEX lettered on it and jeans. I let the cat in and she took the tin from me and fed it. Then she sat and smoked, cat on lap, while I made the coffee. The cat seemed to like the smell of the tobacco which is perhaps why we don’t get along so well.

‘You’re looking a bit better than when I last saw you,’ I said, ‘but I hear you’ve had some trouble.’

‘Trouble. Yeah. You knew Mum died?’

‘No, I didn’t. I hadn’t seen her around for a while. She wasn’t that old, was she?’

She shook her head and gave a short, wheezy laugh. ‘Died of hard work.’

No fear of that for you, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I poured the coffee and carried a mug to her where she sat so the cat wouldn’t be disturbed. That’s a knack cats have-being considered. I’d gone out on a long limb for Annie. Maybe she was one of the people who soak up consideration like cats.

The first sips of coffee cleared my brain. ‘You look all right, Annie. Are you clean?’

She shrugged. ‘Methadone programme. I’m doing all right.’

She grinned and it looked as if she was struggling to pull herself up out of quicksand. ‘Could I have some sugar?’

I got it for her but her hands shook so much she almost dropped her mug; the cat stirred, feeling her agitation. She stroked it, to calm herself. ‘Didn’t you used to have a girlfriend around here? Blonde? Student or something?’

‘She wasn’t a girlfriend, she was a boarder. Friend. Now she’s a married dentist with a kid.

Annie looked around the untidy kitchen and living room. It wasn’t exactly squalid but the signs of minimal maintenance were plain. ‘No chick in residence, eh?’

I shook my head.

‘It figures. You were always a cold bastard. Good at your job though.’

‘Thanks. I have to tell you this, Annie. I met a man named Greenway and he told me you were dead.’

She nodded slowly. ‘That doesn’t surprise me. ’

‘Tell me about him.’

It came out, bit by bit, over the rest, of the coffee and a lot of cigarettes. Annie had spent some time in England, come back to Australia clean but had drifted into the smack world again. She’d struggled though.

‘I was maintaining when I met Gareth,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘Using, but in very small amounts and very disciplined-so many hits a week, so many no-hit days, a clean week once a month. People go on like that for years, decades, it’s not so bad.’

Then she met Greenway at the clinic where she got her syringes and worked part-time as a sort of minder, baby-sitter, coffee maker. She was attracted. They had a hot affair. Then he dropped her.

‘Was he an addict?’ I asked.

‘He acted like one.’

‘What does that mean?’ I spoke more sharply than I intended and she bristled.

‘Fuck, I don’t know. He didn’t shoot it, he said he smoked and popped. I never saw him do anything but grass. But he was edgy, like I feel now when you snap like that. What’s the matter with you? What did I say?’