Peter Corris - Deal Me Out

She re-charged the pot. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘I was wondering if Chinese people got red-rimmed eyes from lack of sleep.’

She laughed. ‘I got some sleep. I feel all right. D’you want milk? There doesn’t seem to be any.’

‘Black is fine. The cat drinks all the milk around here. Seen the cat?’

‘Yeah, it looked in and left.’

‘No milk, see? Goes next door.’

We waited while the pot did its job. She poured two cups of coffee and took hers across to the sink. She leaned back against the sink and used it for a big ashtray. The morning was cool, and she was wearing a sloppy joe Hilde had left behind. It was about three sizes too big and the message ‘Dentists are people too’ was down around her waist. She saw me looking and tugged at the sweater.

‘Does this belong to your woman?’

‘No. To my ex-lodger.’

‘No woman?’

‘Not at the moment. She comes and goes.’

‘Does that suit you?’

‘Yep.’

‘Why?’

‘Two lives are more interesting than one.’

‘Sounds like Bill’s philosophy. You’re a bit like him, you know. Why didn’t you two get on well?’

‘He’s more of an extrovert than me; you probably noticed.’

She smiled. ‘Can we go over it all a bit? I’m sorry, I just don’t know what to do.’

‘Suits me.’ I spilled some bread out of its wrapper and inspected it for mould. ‘A talk’d be good. I need to know a hell of a lot more about him. Toast?’

We sat and drank coffee and ate toast and she talked about Mountain at length. A picture formed of a wilful, selfish man, but one capable of great emotional generosity. Erica claimed that he had taught her a lot without ever patronising her or making her feel inadequate. She thought he’d make a good teacher.

‘It sounds like a gift all right, but what he wants to be is a great writer, not a teacher. How about that?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s what he wants, that’s true. He wants it so badly.’

‘Does he want it too much to do it?’

‘How do you tell? I never even write a letter. I don’t know what it’s like to write anything. Do you?’

I shook my head.

‘He reads about writers all the time. Literary biography is probably his favourite reading. He says he does it to find out how a writer should behave. When he’s drunk enough

‘Yes?’

‘He curses television, says real writers don’t have anything to do with television.’

‘Certainly didn’t bother Shakespeare.’

‘Don’t joke; you said you wanted to know about him. Well, this was his obsession. Look.’ She pulled the book I’d brought from Blackheath, and completely forgotten about, out from under the morning newspaper. ‘Why did you take this?’

‘I don’t know. Let’s have a look at it.’

The book was a thick paperback biography of Jack Kerouac. The pages were turned down at irregular intervals indicating that Mountain had read it in dribs and drabs and possibly more than once. I looked at his big sprawling signature-a firm hand that he’d tried to disguise when he wrote ‘Bruce Worthington’. The date was printed boldly in figures half an inch high.

‘I hope he wasn’t trying to learn how Kerouac lived. He drank himself to death.’

She nodded. ‘Bill wanted to stop. He tried to a few times, but he couldn’t.’ She pushed back her fringe and gave me an unimpeded straight look. ‘Are you going to try Mai again today, Cliff? Can I come?’

I liked the ‘Cliff’, but I was trying to think of a way to say no, when the book came open at a page that had been turned down at the corner more than once and the binding had been strained by being bent back flat. A couple of paragraphs on the page were heavily underlined in fresh-looking ink. While Erica waited, I read the paragraphs: they described the period, late in Kerouac’s life, when he went to live with his sister and tried, unsuccessfully, to stop drinking. My mind flicked back to what Erica had said about Mountain’s alcohol problem.

‘You said he wanted to give up the grog?’

‘Yes, but he was worried that he wouldn’t be able to write without it. And you know how it is, all his social contacts were drinkers, they met in pubs… he’d have to give up almost everything he did to stop drinking. It was just too hard.’

‘Does he have any relatives?’

She thought about it, which meant lighting another cigarette. ‘A sister, but they’re not close.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Did he ever talk about her?’

‘Mm, not. much. She lives in Melbourne and she’s pretty straight. Bill called her something strange, something old-fashioned. A wowser.’

‘Wowser is old-fashioned?’

‘Is to me. Why? What’s his sister got to do with it?’

I showed her the passage in the book about Kerouac drying out with the dried-up sister. It seemed too thin and fanciful to even be called a lead, but if I followed it I could at least get off on my own and do some investigating in my own style. My old mate Grant Evans was currently nudging his way up the police preferment ladder in Melbourne, and I could have a quiet word about stolen hire cars with him without alerting Bernsteins and Woodwards. I’d have preferred a trip to Byron Bay but you can’t have everything.

‘What’s the sister’s name, d’you know?’

‘I don’t know, but I know where she lives-place called Bentleigh. I remember Bill said there was no-one bent in Bentleigh.’

‘Witty. She married, this sister?’

She shook her head and blew smoke over my shoulder. ‘Don’t think so, no.’

‘That’s a help. Can’t be too many Mountains in Bentleigh. Is that witty?’

‘Not very.’

‘A terrible thought just occurred to me, Erica. His name really is Mountain, isn’t it? It’s not his nom de plume or anything?’

‘God, that’d screw it up. No, I’m pretty sure it’s Mountain, but I don’t know why I say so.’

‘I’d better go down there and see her.’

‘And what am I supposed to do?’

‘Why did you go to his house the other night?’

‘To work through all his stuff really carefully to see if I could come up with anything. I don’t know what — diary, letters-anything.’

‘That’s still well worth doing.’

‘Meanwhile you go off doing the interesting stuff.’

I looked at my watch. ‘You can come with me when I visit Mai. That’s in about twenty minutes; want first shower?’

We were preoccupied and not cheerful on the drive to Woolloomooloo. The weather didn’t help; the sky was overcast, with only pale, yellow breaks in it, and there was a swirling cold wind. The water had an ugly grey sheen, and the high buildings looked dirty against a dirty sky. I snapped at Erica when she lit her umpteenth cigarette for the morning.

‘Can’t you cut down on those bloody things?’

Her Oriental eyes widened, the frown line in her forehead deepened and the corners of her mouth turned down. I felt like a bully and was sorry I’d spoken, but she looked calmly at me and took a puff.

‘I’ll quit when you find Bill,’ she said.

We walked across the street, with the wind whipping at us, to the entrance to Mai’s block of flats. The building had had a sort of seedy glamour at night, but in the grey light of day it looked faded and tired. We went into the small lobby and I wondered what sort of image Mai would present in the morning. Dressing-gown? He was hardly the track-suit type; that’d be more Geoff’s style.

I knocked, but there was no response. Another knock brought a slapping of slippers on the stairs behind us.

‘What the hell do you want?’ Glad stuck her head around the corner of the stair, looked down on us, and began an imperious descent. Her multi-coloured hair was up in curlers; she wore a violet dressing-gown with a pink sash and huge, fluffy green slippers. Splashes of high colour showed in her cheeks and her second chin quivered.