Peter Temple: Bad Debts

After that I had a choice between television entertainment on the themes of a) child abuse, b) parent abuse, and c) tree abuse. Failing these, there was a documentary on the drinking problem in Lapland. I failed all of these, killed the telly and fell asleep over chapter three of Eugene Marasco’s In the Absence of War.

Some time in the small hours, startled by something in a dream, I awoke and staggered to the bed proper. But sleep had fled. I lay and thought about Danny, one-time police informer, addict, convicted hit-and-run killer, born-again model employee, husband and father. If his cousin’s mate, dead of smack, had told the truth, a policeman could have given him an alibi. And therefore the star witness was lying. The witness’s name was Ronald Bishop.

I put on the light, got the file from the lounge, and read Ronald Bishop’s statement again. It was a model of its kind: Ronnie Bishop didn’t have any doubts about what he saw. I put off the light and fell asleep with the strange career of Danny McKillop turning in my mind.

In the morning, I rang Barry Tregear at home to catch him before he left for work. A woman said he’d left but she would pass on a message. I gave her my name. About ten minutes later, he rang. From the noise, he was on a mobile phone.

‘Ronald Bishop?’ he said. ‘Morton Street, Clifton Hill. I’ll see what I can do.’

I had breakfast at Meaker’s on Brunswick Street, a street which boasted trams and, at each end, a church spire. Sometimes, when a freak wind lifted the pollution, you could see the one from the other. Brunswick Street had been a grand thoroughfare once and a long passage between rundown buildings and hopeless shops for a long time after that. In the eighties, the street changed again. Youth culture happened to it. The old businesses-clothes-pressing sweatshops, drycleaners, printeries, cheap shoe shops, the gunsmith, dim central European coffee and snooker cafes-closed down. In their place, restaurants, coffee shops, delicatessens, galleries and bookshops opened. Suddenly it was a smart place to be.

Meaker’s had been in Brunswick Street since before it was smart. It had changed hands several times and moved once but nothing had really changed. Well, nothing except the appearance of the customers. And the staff. There was a new waitress today. She was probably in her late twenties, tall and raw-boned with scraped back hair and an amused, intelligent look.

‘I’m Sharon,’ she said when she put down the tray holding the Cholesterol Supercharge: eggs, bacon, sausages, fried tomato. ‘The cook says you’re Jack.’

‘So what do you do?’ I asked her when she brought the coffee. It was assumed in Brunswick Street that waiting on table was not one’s vocation.

‘I’m an actor,’ she said. ‘In the theatre. Don’t you recognise me?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I don’t get to the theatre much these days.’

‘What about you?’ she said, wiping the table.

‘I’m a bishop.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Is that a crook you’ve got in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’

I could see she was going to be an asset to the place. Not as religious as one would have liked, but an asset.

I didn’t have anything in the legal line to do, so I put in five hours at Taub’s. Charlie was making the boardroom furniture for a Perth mining company’s new Melbourne office. It was what the business pages call an ‘emerging miner’. Usually, your emerging miner wants a table shaped like Australia minus Tasmania, chairs like breaking waves. This outfit hired a decorator who convinced them that big business in Melbourne favoured a more traditional look. A Charlie Taub look, in fact. The decorator was married to Charlie’s grandson: the extended family has its uses.

I spent the early part of the day trying to get Charlie to tell me what I was doing. He’d got out of the habit of doing drawings. ‘What for do I need drawings?’ he said. ‘I don’t make anything I haven’t made before.’

‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘I haven’t made this table before. All I’ve got is some measurements on this piece of paper torn off the side of the Age. I’d like to have some idea of how what I’m doing fits into the plan you’ve got in your head. That’s a lot to ask?’

He went off grumbling to the office and came back in ten minutes with several school exercise book pages. On them were detailed working drawings of an armoire designed to contain bottles, glasses and television and video equipment, a boardroom table, very severe, and a chair, equally spare.

‘You want drawings, I give you drawings,’ he said.

I went around the corner to Flash Advanced Telecommunications, prop. G. Bertoli, former telephone-repair person, and made two copies.

Barry Tregear rang at noon while I was reading the Age and eating the corned beef and gherkin on rye sandwich I’d brought from home. He couldn’t find any trace of a Ronald Bishop.

I knocked off at 1.30 p.m. and drove around to the address in Clifton Hill, no more than a few kilometres away. Morton Street was close enough to Collingwood Football Ground to hear the sobbing when Carlton beat them. Fitzroy used to beat them once upon a time but it would take divine intervention these days.

The bourgeoisie had long since occupied most of this once deeply working class area pinched between two main roads and a freeway. Morton Street, however, had the unloved look of a trench fallen to the rentiers.

Ronald Bishop had once lived at number 17. But not even the house still lived at number 17. It had been extracted like a tooth, its earthly remains some blackened broken bricks where a fireplace had stood and a mound of damp ashes that had saved the demolishers the trips to the tip. I knocked at number 19. No-one was home or admitting to it. I trudged off to number 15.

The bell didn’t work. I tried tapping and then gave the door a couple of thumps. The door was wrenched open and a large red-faced man in his sixties glowered at me. He was wearing a dirty blue nylon anorak zipped up to the neck and black tracksuit pants with a stripe, possibly white once, up the side.

‘Don’t fucken hammer my door,’ he said. ‘Whaddafuck d’ya want?’

I apologised and gave him my card.

‘So?’ he said, not noticeably impressed.

‘I’m trying to find out about someone who used to live next door,’ I said. ‘About twelve years ago. Were you living here then?’

‘Depends,’ he said. He ran both hands through his long, greasy grey hair.

‘We have a standard fee of twenty dollars for useful information,’ I said.

‘Who’s the someone?’

‘Ronald Bishop.’

‘Come inside,’ he said.

I followed him down a passage dark as a mineshaft into a kitchen that smelled of sour milk and burnt fat. All surfaces were covered in dirty plates, open tins, takeaway containers, empty cigarette packets. The gas stove had a baked and blistered topping of spilt food.

‘Garn!’ the man shouted at a huge tabby cat walking on tiptoe across the littered table. It floated its flabby body across to an impossibly small perch on the sink.

‘Wanna beer?’ he asked.

‘That’d be good.’ There was no knowing how he would take a refusal.

He took two cans of Melbourne Bitter out of an old fat-bodied fridge. The light inside wasn’t working. We sat down at the table. I couldn’t find anywhere to put my can down so I held it on my lap.

‘So what, he’s inherited some dough?’ he said. He gave the can the suck of a man who measures out his days in tinnies.

‘Not that I know of,’ I said. ‘His family’s trying to get in touch with him. Did you know him when he lived next door?’

‘Fucking poof,’ he said. ‘Bloody lucky he got outta here alive. We was just about to give him a hammerdrill up the arse when he pissed off.’ He wiped spit from his lower lip with his thumb and took a packet of Long Beach Lites out of the anorak. ‘Smoke?’