Peter Temple: Bad Debts

‘I know where to find ten grand,’ I said. ‘Everybody keeps ten grand in the dishwasher. And everybody keeps seventy grand in the airconditioner. Wootton reckons you’re short twenty. I’m pushing a receipt for eighty grand and a pen under the door. I want you to sign it.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘Mate,’ Eddie said, ‘every cent. Tell him every cent.’

‘You tell him. Just sign,’ I said.

The receipt came back, signed.

‘The pen, please.’

The pen appeared. ‘Thank you. Goodbye, Mr Dollery.’

Eddie was shouting something when I closed the front door, but he’d stopped by the time I reached the car. Across the road, the white cat was watching. I drove out of Mabberley Court. Two hours later, I was at Pakenham racecourse watching a horse called New Ninevah run seventh in a maiden.

The next day, I went to Sydney to talk to a possible witness to a near-fatal dispute in the carpark of the Melton shopping centre. It was supposed to be a six-hour quickie. It took two days, and a man hit me on the upper left arm with a full swing of a baseball bat. It was an aluminium baseball bat made in Japan. This would never have happened in the old days. He would have hit me with a Stewart Surridge cricket bat with black insulation tape around the middle. Except in the old days I didn’t do this kind of work.

It was 5.30 p.m. on Saturday before I got back. I listened to a summary of the football on the radio on the way from the airport. ‘Fitzroy started in a blaze of glory…’ said the announcer. I felt like switching off. The only question left was: By how much? By 114 to 78 was the answer.

I turned off at Royal Park and drove around the university and through Carlton to the Prince of Prussia. It was one of the few pubs left in Fitzroy that still made a living out of selling beer. Most of the proud names had been turned into Thai-Italian bistros with art prints in their lavatories.

I parked a block away, two wheels on the kerb in a one-way street, and made a run for the Prince. I could have found it by smell: a hundred-odd years of spilt beer. My grandfather used to drink there. So did my father. His dark, intense face is in the faded photographs of the Fitzroy Football Club sides of the late 1940s on the wall near the door marked GENTS.

There are only a few dozen Fitzroy supporters left who remember my father; to them I represent a genetic melt-down. Three of these veterans were sitting at the bar nursing glasses of beer and old grievances. As I stood brushing rain off my sleeves, they looked at me as if I were personally responsible for Fitzroy’s 36-point loss to despised Carlton on Saturday.

‘Three in a row, Jack,’ said Eric Tanner, the one nearest the door. ‘Played like girls. Where the hell were you?’

‘Sorry, men,’ I said. ‘Business.’

Three sets of eyes with a combined age of around 220 examined me. They all held the same look. It was the one the boy in the gang gets when he is the first to put talking to a girl ahead of kicking the football in the street.

‘I had to go to Sydney,’ I said. ‘Work.’ I might as well have said I had to go to Perigord for truffles for all the exculpatory power this statement carried.

‘Should’ve taken the team with you,’ said Wilbur Ong.

‘What kind of work does a man have in Sydney on Satdee arvo?’ said Norm O’Neill in a tone of amazement. These men would no more consider being away from Melbourne on a Saturday in the football season than they would consider enrolling in personal development courses.

I caught the eye of Stan the publican. He was talking in undertones to his wife, Liz, at the serving hatch to the kitchen. Only half of her face was visible, her mouth a perfect Ctesiphon curve of disgust. Stan said a last word and floated over, a big man, thinning head of pubic hair, small nose like an afterthought pinched out by the divine sculptor. His eighty-six-year-old father, Morris, owned the pub and wouldn’t sell it. To Liz’s disgust, he also wouldn’t die.

‘The boys missed you today,’ he said.

‘They told me how much,’ I said. ‘Cleaned these pipes yet?’ The beer had been tasting funny for weeks.

Stan looked at me pityingly. ‘Jack, you could give a baby milk through these pipes. I had the bloke in. Nothing come out ’cept clean steam. Clean steam in, clean steam out. Chucking my dough away, he reckons.’

He put the first full glass on the counter. ‘Your Mr Pommy Wootton’s been ringing. The old bat said to give him a tinkle when you came in, quick smart.’

‘He’s about as pommy as you are,’ I said. ‘His old man taught welding at Preston Tech.’

‘Wish my old man’d taught welding at Preston Tech,’ Stan said with controlled venom. ‘Then I wouldn’t be standin here till all hours listenin to old buggers fartin on about footie games sixty years ago.’

I rang Wootton from what Stan called his office, a midden of old bills, junk mail, newspapers, telephone directories. Under the telephone was a Carlton & United Breweries page-a-day diary. The year was 1954.

‘Mr Wootton has made a number of attempts to contact you,’ said Mrs Davenport. ‘Please wait while I see whether he’s free.’

‘Free, free, like a bird in a tree,’ I said. I don’t know why.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mrs Davenport, not startled.

‘It’s a line from an American poet, E. A. Presley.’

There was a silence of precise duration. It told me my flippancy had been noted. Then Wootton came on the line, querulous.

‘What’s the point of having an answering machine if you don’t plan to respond to messages? I even resorted to ringing that filthy hole you drink in.’

‘Even as we speak I am in that hole.’

‘Well, see if you can get out of it by Monday to do a small task for me.’

‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘do I detect a hint of the master-servant relationship creeping in here? Let’s start with a nice thank you for the parcel I dropped off on Thursday. And then we can talk about the possibility of future dealings.’

‘Thank you,’ he said ungratefully. ‘I notice that you remunerated yourself rather lavishly in excess of the agreed fee.’

‘The agreed fee didn’t cover uniform fetishists armed with dodgy guns. I explained that on the phone.’

‘Perfectly harmless little turd.’

‘There’s no such thing as an armed harmless little turd.’

We went on like this for a while. Then I went back to the bar, drank a beer with the lads, ate a toasted cheese sandwich crafted out of recycled sawdust and polyvinyl by the reluctant hands of Liz. I was at the door when Stan said, ‘Another bloke looking for you. Thursday, I think it was. Said he’d been round your office.’

‘Name?’

‘Didn’t say. Didn’t ask. Said he’d come back.’

‘What’d he look like?’

Stan thought for a while, squinting slightly. ‘Short,’ he said. ‘Dangerous.’

‘That’s half the people I know.’

I went home. The flat smelled of musty books. It took me back to the start of my legal career, searching through document boxes stacked like tin coffins in a crypt. I put my bag in the bedroom and opened the sitting room windows. The cold came in like a presence. At the end of the lane cars flicked by. The rain held in the streetlight’s cone seemed to rise from the sharkskin pavement.

I made a drink of whisky, ice and tap water and slumped on the sofa beside the telephone. In the gloom, the little red light on the answering machine blinked nervously. I went to push the button and thought, bugger it. Tomorrow.

I finished the whisky, made some Milo and took it to bed, feeling tired and lonely. It took six pages of a Bolivian novelist to put me away.