Peter Temple - Dead Point

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. 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 fishing 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 assure 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 assurances for the disciplinary hearing, sunshine. 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 passed 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 buttons 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 space.

‘An offer?’

‘From the agent. Clive, Clive somebody.’

‘Clive Miller,’ I said. The repulsive Clive, gone on from accepting fellatio 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.