Peter Temple - White Dog

I showered until the hot water ran out, dressed, stood in the kitchen. It was past 10 am. I wasn’t hungry, I was still more than a quarter drunk.

A drink would take away the pains. Medicinal drink. Vodka. Linda liked vodka and orange juice sometimes. Vodka and vitamin C. The old VC, did more good than harm, a health drink.

I touched the tabletop, steadied myself, closed my eyes and said the mantra, not said even after the hospital. Then I drank a glass of milk, put on the heating, lay on the couch, arms folded across my chest. Hugging myself. Weak sunlight crossed the floor and lay upon me. We had often shared our couch, Isabel and I, lying as if in a bath, facing each other, feet in socks, legs enclosing legs, legs passing between legs, reading the papers, reading books, tweaking toes, tickling insteps, one thing leading to another, hands invading pants.

I drifted off and when I woke it was afternoon, the light thin, the day sliding away, most of a day gone, a day subtracted from the total, the wounded creature’s cave would soon be darkening again.

No.

I got up, unsteady, almost fell over, went to the bathroom. Now I looked in the mirror. There were welts on the bridge of my nose, on my cheekbones, down my face, dried blood in places.

He didn’t mind that I saw his face. He didn’t care or he wanted me to see his face.

Next time I’ll bring someone round, and, when I’m finished, he’ll fuck you, okay?

No.

No. No next time.

I took the toilet disinfectant, the chlorine, drove to the office, took the carpet by a corner, his piss was in it, my tears of humiliation. I dragged it across the street and threw it into McCoy’s skip, came back, sprayed the floor with chlorine, threw buckets of water over it, brushed it, brushed the water out of the front door. I was standing with the broom in my hand, feeling weak, eyes down, the door open.

‘I pay for that fucking skip,’ said McCoy. ‘Not a public facility for anybody to dump their junk.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Send me the bill.’ I turned my back on him but I wasn’t quick enough.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Accident,’ I said.

McCoy blocked the door, the light. ‘Bullshit,’ he said, offended. ‘I know fucking fighting. You’re supposed to be a lawyer, what are you doing fighting?’

‘It wasn’t exactly a fight,’ I said. ‘I got king hit and the rest followed.’

‘Client?’

‘No. A bloke who knocked on the door. Never seen him before. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.’

McCoy gave me a good staring. ‘For Christ’s sake, check who’s outside before you open the door,’ he said. ‘Give me a buzz, I’ll give them a fucking checking over.’

He left. From the window, I saw him remove my rug from the skip and take it inside. No doubt he would be wearing it when next I saw him.

Action. No more moping. I took Sophie’s photographs and the negatives to Vizionbanc in South Melbourne, parked the Stud outside in the loading zone. The woman looked at my face in a clinical way, not disguising her interest.

‘I’m hoping your magic will help with these,’ I said.

She looked at them. ‘Fucking awful.

In a hurry?’ ‘I cannot begin to tell you,’ I said.

Her plastic surgeon’s gaze played over my face. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Have a seat, Jack.’

She went into the back. They didn’t keep office hours, these picture people.

I flipped a few photography magazines, including a big one full of nudes, women and men, some bound, some oiled, many cut off at the head. There was a picture of a man in a suit with what looked like a sea creature hanging out of his fly, the sort of blind pointed thing I imagined to be found at great depths, living off sulphur bubbles in the eternal dark.

I was at the window, hangover not abating, watching well-dressed people go into the pub across the street. It had been a bloodhouse in recent memory, scene of a famous fight between factions of the Painters amp; Dockers Union. I’d appeared for one of the accused, a near-homicidal man called Tully with fists the size of small cauliflowers. Thinking about his hands brought other hands into my mind, the rings on his fingers, seen through blood as he backhanded me, the…

No.

I thought about photographs, the number of photographs I’d peered at since I started taking assignments from Wootton, pictures of missing people, their wives, lovers, friends and relatives, their dogs, their cars, photographs taken outside courts, in clubs, on the beach, barbecuing meat, in pools, at weddings and twenty-first birthday parties, kissing people, even a homemade porn video featuring a man and two women, one dressed as an Ansett air hostess, complete with little hat and name tag. It occurred to me for the first time that she might have been a real Ansett hostess.

‘He says it’s the best he can do,’ said the woman.

I turned. She was holding up an A3 envelope.

‘The neg’s a bit better than the print,’ she said. ‘Want a look?’

I shook my head, gave her my business credit card, said my thanks for the service.

It was the wrong time to be on the streets, drizzle, evening peak hour, drive time. The woman with the Italian name was on the radio. She had a way with her, clever, bursting with cheek, a naughty laugh that could blow away the rain. I went up Lygon Street to King amp; Godfree. Thirsty, I needed two bottles of beer. Carlsberg, no other beer would do. I bought six bottles.

Behind the stripped oaks lay a warm dwelling. I’d forgotten to switch off the heating and I was glad of the oversight. I drew curtains, put on lights, put on music, didn’t agonise over the choice, put on Elvis, the greatest hits, he always made me feel better. In the kitchen, I removed the cap from a Carlsberg and drank three-quarters of the bottle straight off, flooded myself with Danish hangover medication, tears coming to my eyes.

To the sitting room with the bottle and another one.

I sat in my chair and took the four big laser prints out of the envelope. In the top two, the woman’s face was much clearer, a snub nose, but the angle was bad. I turned to the third picture.

The woman standing at the car. The car’s number plate was readable now.

You could also see the lower half of the face of the woman in the passenger seat. You could see the crucifix in the hollow of her throat.

I knew that crucifix.

And you could see the driver’s hands on the steering wheel.

You could see the rings on his fingers, big rings on big fingers.

I touched my face.

I knew the rings. I felt a joy.

Eric the Cybergoth rang back when I was halfway through the second bottle of beer. He coughed for a while, the man who put the hack into hacker.

‘Redmile Solutions, four vehicles, want them?’ he said, nasal and throaty and apparently speaking from beneath an eider-down.

‘Might as well.’ I wrote down details of four vehicles, the address in Abbotsford. It was just off Johnston Street, in the dip, not a great distance from where I sat. I said goodbye, reached for my book, found a number.

‘No, we never sleep,’ said Simone Bendsten. ‘We can’t afford to now that we are in fact we and not lonesome me calling myself we like Queen Victoria.’

I went to the kitchen and rinsed an arbitrary quantity of rice, put it in the rice pot, covered it with a certain amount of water, threw in two cubes of frozen chicken stock, put the container into the microwave and punched in an arbitrary cooking time.

It would turn out soggy, it would turn out as a hard rice cake. Or each grain would be perfect, moist, independent of its neighbours. There was no knowing.

And I didn’t care. I opened a can of tuna and went to the cupboard for the plum sauce from the Adelaide Hills. There could not possibly be enough tuna swimming around Thailand to supply every supermarket in the world with as much tuna as they needed. What was this stuff? Patagonian toothfish?