Peter Temple: Black Tide

Stan gestured around the walls with the back of a meaty hand. ‘The photos. All this junk.’

‘Bloke,’ said Norm O’Neill, cold voice. ‘What kind of a bloke?’

Stan put down a glass, hitched his pants over his paunch. ‘Very nice bloke. Well-dressed. Blazer and grey flannels.’

‘What kind of a bloke?’ said Norm, voice now icy.

Stan drew the last beer with great concentration, held it up and inspected the head. ‘Brisbane Lions bloke,’ he said. ‘Reckons the photos’d be better off in Brisbane in this Lions clubhouse they got there, big luxury clubhouse. Carpets. Got a Lions Wall of Fame. In the bistro.’

‘In the what?’ said Eric Tanner.

Stan shook his head in sadness. ‘Italian term we in the hospitality industry use, Eric.’

In the silence, you could hear the traffic on Smith Street, hear two women talking as they walked by outside.

I looked around the pub walls. The bits you could see between the photographs were stained the colour of black tea by a hundred years of tobacco smoke. The photographs recorded Fitzroy Football Club sides and players going back to the turn of the century. On my way to the toilet through the door marked GENTS, I often paused to look at my father, big, dark Bill Irish, in the sides of the late 1940s. My grandfather was on the wall too. He had three seasons in the seniors before breaking an arm in two places against Collingwood. His team’s faded photographs were near the dartboard.

‘Lions Wall of Fame,’ said Eric Tanner, head tilted, eyes slits. ‘What Lions would those be?’

‘The way he put it,’ Stan said. ‘Fitzroy Football Club’s in Brisbane now, photos should be there too.’

The silence was absolute.

Norm O’Neill’s nose seemed to grow larger, now much more than a prominent feature on a facial landscape, now it was the landscape, a nose and glasses with a face attached. He cleared his throat.

‘Stanley,’ he said, ‘Stanley, you’re missin somethin.’ He was speaking slowly and clearly, leaning forward, knuckles on the bar. ‘Fitzroy Football Club’s not in Brisbane, Stanley. Fitzroy Football Club can never be in Brisbane. Nobody can take the Lions to Brisbane. Why is that, Stanley? Because Fitzroy Football Club can only be in Fitzroy.’

Norm paused, looked around the room. Then he said, ‘Well, bloody Brisbane can put a lion on their jumpers but that doesn’t mean the Lions are now in that bloody tropical hellhole. The Lions are here, in this bloody pub. And they’re not yours to sell. Grasp that, can you?’

Silence, all eyes on Stan.

Stan picked up a beer glass, held it to the light. ‘Be that as it may,’ he said. ‘Pretty good price offered. Never thought the old photos’d be worth anything.’

‘You talk to Morris about this?’ asked Wilbur.

‘Don’t need to talk to anyone,’ said Stan. ‘I’m the manager. He’s sittin in the sun in Queensland with all the other ancient buggers got any brains. This pub, I decide what happens.’

‘I remember you when you were two bricks and a pisspot high, your mum made a little Roys jumper for you,’ said Wilbur.

‘Given it a lot of thought,’ said Stan. ‘Bloke gets an answer tomorrow.’

Without even glancing at one another, Norm, Wilbur and Eric stood up. Charlie rose from his barstool. Wearily, I got up, put on a menacing look.

‘And what, Stanley,’ asked Norm, ‘and I want you to think hard about this. What is the answer?’

There was a long silence. Stan looked at each of us in turn, little smile on his face, put the glass down, turned and set off back to his paperback. Over his shoulder, he said, ‘Given it a lot of thought.’

He picked up the book and looked down the counter at us.

We waited.

‘Reckon I’ll tell him to piss off,’ said Stan.

We all sat down and went back to drinking beer.

At 6.30, a car hooted outside. Three hoots. I said my goodbyes, went out with Charlie. His granddaughter Augustine’s car was at the door. She leaned over and opened the passenger door.

‘What did trade unions do to deserve this striking woman?’ I asked. Gus was a rising star in the union movement. She looked like Lauren Bacall with brains, a sight to soothe any old worker’s eye.

‘What did Taub’s Cabinetmaking do to deserve the most fetching man ever to mate two pieces of wood?’ said Gus.

‘They are both the undeserving,’ I said. ‘We are the deserving. Can we be brought together?’

‘Listen,’ said Charlie, fighting with the seatbelt. ‘In Kooyong, the library. You remember.’

‘I thought you made that up.’

‘People who look for criminals, they make up. Yesterday, this wife rings up. The man, he’s gone. But she wants it still. Measure up next week.’

‘I’ve got tables to finish. Little tables. Day’s work for a man who actually works. More for someone like me.’

‘Next week.’

‘Take him away, Gus,’ I said. ‘He’s ruined a spiritual moment.’

‘It’s a gift,’ she said. ‘The whole family has it.’

On the way home, sense of achievement gone, I went via a place in St George’s Road for some takeaway Chinese comfort food. They know me there. I don’t have to order. As I come in, Lester barks, ‘How many?’ Until recently, the answer was Two. These days, it’s One.

Opening the front door at home, I surveyed the scene with distaste. The minimally converted stable where I live was cold and untidy and unclean, battered leather furniture buried under newspapers, books and items of clothing put down, temporarily.

Friday night is the second-worst night for being on your own. Saturday night is the big one. By Sunday night, you think you’re getting the hang of it.

The answer lies in action. I switched on lights, checked the answering machine, got the heating going, went outside for firewood, started a blaze.

Looking for red wine in the unpacked boxes, I found the surviving bottle of ’89 Maglieri shiraz. It had been in an unopened carton not two metres from the explosive device that almost removed the top floor of my previous dwelling, an old boot factory in North Fitzroy. Eleven bottles fragmented, glass splinters travelling ten metres, a dark purple spray covering everything. The first people on the scene thought it was blood, enough for at least two. But one bottle was mysteriously spared, a small abrasion on the label. A memento of the end of another bit of my life.

Linda’s absence on the answering machine signalled the closing of yet another piece.

This wasn’t the moment for the Maglieri. That called for something to celebrate. The start of something new, perhaps. Now I was at the fag-end of something old. At the back of a cupboard, I found a bottle of Penfolds 128. About right. I put on a Charlie Parker CD.

Home. It means something when you have to do economy class time in planes, sit for hours in small hired cars, sleep in cardboard-walled hotel rooms sprayed with chemicals to mask the smell of other chemicals.

I cleared an armchair and sat down to eat in front of the fire, just in time to watch a weather report. It was delivered by a person who wanted to be a witty weatherperson, not a wise ambition for someone without wit. Still, he clearly relished what he did: waved a pointer vaguely while reading off placenames and temperatures from an electronic prompter. An idiot could do it and an idiot was doing it, a rare example of intellectual capacity and occupation dovetailing.

I fully intended to ring my sister but she beat me to it.

‘Jack,’ she said. ‘I’m in contact with the living Jack Irish? This is he? Him? Don’t tell me. I’m going to faint.’ She paused. ‘Don’t flesh and blood mean anything to you?’

‘A piece of prime sirloin, well hung, it has meaning to me, yes.’