Peter Temple - Bad Debts

‘That must be Paul Gilbert,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I haven’t thought of him in years. Dr Paul Gilbert, he was. He went to school with Ronnie. Lovely boy, very clever. He had a surgery in St Georges Road.’

‘The address is in Daylesford,’ I said.

‘Well, he’s not a doctor anymore,’ Mrs Bishop said. ‘There was some trouble over drugs. It was in the papers. He started uni at the same time as Ronnie. I used to see Paul’s mum sometimes. She was so proud of her boy before it happened.’

I rang the number twice before I went to bed. No answer. I fell asleep thinking about Linda Hillier. She probably had a good laugh at being come on to by the likes of me. Why had Gavin Legge called her a starfucker and a groupie? What star? What group? I hoped she wasn’t avoiding me.

The bare limbs of Wombat Hill’s English trees still smoked mist as I drove into Daylesford just after 9 a.m. The commuters were all gone and the small town’s locals were easing themselves into the day. I parked in the main street and asked at the butcher’s for directions to Long Gully Road. Butchers are the most friendly shopkeepers. It must have something to do with working with dead animals.

‘Jeez,’ said the butcher, ‘Long Gully Road. Be out there in the forest, I reckon.’ He shouted, ‘Les! Where’s Long Gully Road?’

A tall youth with red hair came in wiping his hands on butcher’s paper. ‘G’day,’ he said. ‘Where’s a pen? Have to draw youse a map. It’s out to buggery in the badlands.’

I’d tried P. Gilbert’s number twice more that morning. No answer. I was eating my microwaved porridge when I decided to take a drive out to Daylesford. I didn’t give much thought then to the pointlessness of driving for an hour to a house where no-one was answering the telephone. On the way I did, and almost turned back.

Twenty minutes after leaving the butcher’s I was lost. The bush around Daylesford was veined with twisting, rutted roads going nowhere. Les’s map wasn’t much use after the first wrong turn. I was about to do a U-turn and try to retrace my route when I saw a man in overalls putting in a fence strainer post. Back in the trees a timber shack leant against a woodpile. He must have heard my approach but he didn’t look up until I was out of the Celica.

‘G’day,’ I said. ‘Looking for Long Gully Road.’

He looked at me for a while, big beard, eyes slit, jaws chewing cud. ‘Back to the T-junction. Left. Third road on the left.’

I found the turnoff. The sign said NO THROUGH ROAD. Just off the ground, a square wooden board with an arrow had Koolanja Healing Centre, Spa, Massage in peeling white paint on a green background. There were old bullet holes in it. I drove about a kilometre through the scrubby regrowth forest before a duplicate of the first sign pointed down a narrow track.

The buildings were behind a fence in a big clearing at the end of the road: a long, low weatherboard with a verandah along the front, a square cinderblock building with narrow windows and, behind them and to the left, a steel-frame shed without walls. The gate was closed and on it a sign saying CLOSED hung at an angle.

A car was parked in front of the cinderblock building: a BMW, not new. I suddenly realised that I’d never asked what sort of car Ronnie was driving. In the shed, I could see two other vehicles, a four-wheel-drive and an old Holden.

I parked outside the gate and let myself in. No dogs. Dogs appear quickly or not at all. Ahead of me a driveway ran for about thirty metres, ending in a gravelled area in front of the buildings. On either side of the drive, a formal garden had been attempted and long ago given up on. Only the winter rain was keeping the surviving plants going.

I walked down the drive. It had been planted with poplars but they’d never got beyond infancy. Near the house, I could hear the sound of piano music, something classical. The front door was open. The music was coming from inside. I knocked loudly and said, ‘Anybody home?’ Nothing happened. I tried again. Only the music. Then it stopped and a voice said, ‘One of Chopin’s loveliest. And now for a complete contrast in composing style…’

The front door led into a long sitting room, furnished with stripped pine country-look pieces. The room was cold and unkempt, as if people had been dossing in it. In a stone fireplace, ashes were a foot deep. There were newspapers everywhere and all the surfaces held empty beer and soft drink cans and dirty plates.

I said my ‘Anybody home?’ again and went through into a big kitchen. The radio was on a shelf above the workbench, which was covered with the remains of meals long past.

I didn’t look at the rest of the house. I went out the way I had come and walked over to the cinderblock building. Nothing happened when I knocked and called out.

I opened the door. A wave of warmth hit me. The air was moist and smelled of chlorine. Chlorine and something else. It was dark inside, the venetian blinds at the slit windows closed. I found a light switch. Two fluorescent tubes flickered, then lit up a sort of reception area, with canvas director’s chairs and a glass coffee table holding stacked magazines.

I called out again. Nothing. I crossed the room to a half-open door. Beyond was darkness. I groped around and found another light switch just inside the door. I was looking down a corridor with two doors on either side and one at the end, all closed. The smell was stronger here. The air was also steamier.

My shoes made no sound on the grey felt-like carpet as I walked down the passage. I opened the first door on my left.

It was empty except for a pine upright chair and a large, deep coffin-like object against the end wall. There were pegs on the wall to hold clothes. The smell in here was salty. I guessed the giant coffin was a flotation tank, a bath filled with salt water for experiencing weightlessness.

The hatch on top was closed. Without thinking, I walked across and slid it back. It was empty. I felt foolish.

The room on the right held another tank. I didn’t look inside. The next door down on the right opened to reveal a room set up for massage: table, shelves with small bottles. There were posters of Nordic scenes on the walls. Pine forests, snow, frozen lakes.

I didn’t enter the room. As I turned to the door across the way, my eye caught a ghost of steam coming out from under the door at the end of the passage.

I went down the passage and put my hand on the door handle. Then something made me knock. No reply. I waited, knocked again.

Then I turned the handle and pushed the door open.

The smell came out on a great cloud of steam, the smell of stock made with chlorinated water, a pungent, medicinal smell that filled my sinuses and made my eyes water.

I retreated down the passage to the entrance and watched the steam billow out of the room. Just turn around and go home, my inner voice said. Just walk out of this building, down the drive and find your way back to the man putting in the pole. Stop and tell him thanks for giving you shitty directions, you couldn’t find Long Gully Road, so bugger it you were giving up. Go back to Daylesford and buy some bullboar sausages from the butcher. Tell Les you couldn’t follow his map and it wasn’t important. Drive home and have a shower. Forget about Danny and Ronnie and anybody else whose name ended in a diminutive.

But I didn’t listen to my inner voice. When the steam thinned, I went back down the corridor.

I’d left the door only half-open.

I pushed it fully open.

The room was still dense with steam but I could see that it was like a large bathroom, tiled floor to ceiling. In the corner to my right, I could dimly make out a large spa bath, above the ground.