Peter Corris - The Marvellous Boy

The Noble Briton is a survivor; it’s just out of range of the developer’s knife and looks defiant. A few tiles had peeled off the front, exposing the grey pitted cement beneath, but the 1930s beer advertisements were intact.

The public bar was like a thousand others. There were a few stools around the bar, a clear space near the wall-mounted TV set and some benches around the tiled walls. Two pool tables were tucked in near a dartboard. I ordered a beer from a thin, pale barmaid with an enormous, teased-up blonde hairdo. I sipped and looked the few early starting customers over. None looked like Henry Brain.

The barmaid teetered up and down behind the bar like a colt in a stall. She had on a see-through blouse, skin-tight black jeans and enormous heels. With the fairy-floss hair she must have topped six feet. I watched her with interest and she caught me watching.

‘You want something else, mister?’ Her voice was like a noise from a sheet-metal shop. I spun two fifty cent pieces on the bar.

‘Have a drink.’

‘Ta.’ She grabbed one of the coins in mid-spin and dropped it into a glass by the till. I spun the other coin and she plucked that up and dropped it into the Help the Blind tin. Charm having failed I fell back on professionalism. I showed her my licence to investigate.

‘I’m looking for a man. I understand he drinks here, or did.’

Her pencil-line eyebrows shot up. ‘Ooh, it’s like a movie, isn’t it?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘This is just a legal matter, nothing exciting. But I’m on expenses…’

‘What’s that mean?’ She flapped her hand impatiently at a customer at the far end of the bar who was holding up his glass.

‘Serve the man,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you when you get back.’

I put the licence away and drank. The barmaid came back and leaned over me like a crane.

‘You was saying?’

‘I’m going to describe a man to you. See if it fits anyone you know.’

She nodded, dead keen. The hair flopped dangerously forward and I could see light through the top six inches. I put together the descriptions I’d been given and delineated Henry Brain. She let me finish, then bared her small, even teeth in a triumphant smile.

‘Got him, that’s Perry.’

‘Perry?’

‘Perry Mason, you know, the lawyer on TV? That’s what he’s called in here. He reckons he was a lawyer once and he can do the talk — gentlemen of the jury and all that. Course, the only way he’d get in court now would be to get thirty days. Yeah, Perry Mason, you remember.’

I did, on black and white television, played by Raymond Burr who bought an island in Fiji that I coveted. There was irony in it. Here, where there was a dream in every glass, Henry Brain was given high rank.

‘That’s the man,’ I said. ‘He was a lawyer. Will he be in tonight?’

‘I reckon. I’ve been here five years and he’s never missed except when he’s sick. He’ll be in around eight.’

I separated ten dollars from the thin roll and pushed it towards her. She made a pushing-back motion.

‘Keep it. Give it to Perry. He needs it more than me.’

‘I’ll have another beer then. You like him — Perry?’

She pulled the middy. ‘He’s okay. Doesn’t get stroppy and goes when it’s time. He’s okay.’

I sat over the beer and smoked a couple of cigarettes. It was just after eight when Brain came in. It was a warm evening but he was wearing the derelict’s overcoat. With some of them it’s their cupboards, their shelter, their address. The pub was half-full, with darts and one pool game going. Brain cranked himself up onto a stool and thrust an arm into his overcoat pocket. It disappeared to above the elbow. I went around and stood behind him.

‘Good evening Mr Brain. Can I buy you a drink?’

He lurched around and almost fell off the stool. I steadied him. The cloth of the coat was greasy with years of dirt, the arm felt like a broomstick wrapped in rags. I held him until he was firm on the seat.

‘Thank you sir, you are a gentleman.’ His voice was a ruin, a desecration of what had been a fine instrument. I ordered two double scotches from the barmaid. Brain raised a finger to her skinny back.

‘No ice, Eunice.’ He got his tongue around the words with difficulty.

‘Right Perry.’

Brain winced. ‘My nom de bar,’ he croaked. I smiled and we examined each other. I saw a gaunt wraith dressed in other people’s clothes. There was a feeling of incompleteness about him set up by the thinning hair and missing teeth. The hair had gone in patches giving him a piebald look and a few yellow stumps of teeth still sat stubbornly in his mouth. His faded eyes were watery and there were deep wrinkled pouches like walnuts hanging under them. The skin of his face was leathery and it wrinkled and sagged its way down his slack jaw and grizzled neck into the top of a dirty, collarless shirt.

What he saw didn’t seem to interest him and he fidgeted waiting for the liquor. His hands shook violently and attracted my attention. They were long and thin with blue veins showing through translucent skin. Unlike the rest of him they were scrupulously clean; the nails were trimmed and pink as though a scrub with a hard brush was part of his regular toilet. Otherwise he was battling to stay out of the gutter. A struggle was going on. There were signs of attempts at parting the sparse hair and his heavy, broken shoes had been rubbed up to a dull shine. But he was losing the fight, day by day.

Eunice put the drinks on the bar and I paid her. Brain lifted his glass to the light and smacked his lips.

‘Neat quality whisky,’ he rasped. ‘It’s the only way to drink. Cheers.’ He put half down in one swallow and carefully cupped his hands around the rest.

‘I didn’t catch your name dear boy.’

‘I didn’t give it. It’s Hardy, Cliff Hardy.’

‘Why are you hastening me towards the grave, pray?’

He sipped, still not looking at me. He must have known this day was coming. He’d held out a juicy bait to top people. Maybe he didn’t care or perhaps his brain was so eaten out by alcohol that he’d forgotten. Two years is a lot of booze in his league. I spoke quietly and carefully, striving for some intimacy in the noisy bar.

‘I want some information you were once prepared to sell, Mr Brain. I might be buying or I might be just asking.’

He looked at me shrewdly as if judging how much drink I’d be good for; nothing else mattered to him, his whole being seemed focused in on the glass in his shaking hands.

‘You talk in riddles dear boy.’ He took a sip. ‘I can’t claim to be a busy man, the desk is not littered with briefs, but please come to the point.’

‘You were married to Sir Clive Chatterton’s daughter Bettina,’ I said close to his grimy ear. ‘The marriage broke up, childless. Sir Clive’s widow claims you called on her two years ago. You spoke of a grandson and requested money… I don’t hear an objection.’

‘Ah.’ The sound came out slow and easy, oiled by the whisky. ‘So that old piece of carrion has sent you on an errand. You are an operative.’

The old-fashioned word touched me somehow, off-set the impatience I was beginning to feel. I showed the licence.

‘I don’t want to cause you trouble, Mr Brain, but Lady Catherine has developed an obsession about the child. I mean to find him, if he’s real.’

‘He may be dead,’ Brain said quietly and tossed off his drink. The words were my first firm evidence that the story was true. They had a quality, a substance, that convinced me.

‘I want to know, one way or the other.’

‘Is the noble lady prepared to be generous?’

‘To you? No, I shouldn’t think so. She’s not a generous or forgiving woman. For the man the sky’s the limit.’