Jon Cleary - Back of Sunset

“I come south mainly to tidy up the family’s estate. Me two sisters are dead, and I’m all that’s left. There ain’t much, but I can take a few quid back north with me – I know some people up there could use it. No, I come to see you, Charlie, partly because of this pain I’ve had, but I dunno—” He looked about the room again, at Stephen, and then back at Goodyear: the crackling voice was slow now: “I come to see you because of old times, Charlie. When I left here back in 1921, when they said I had T.B. and gimme twelve months to live, I said good-bye then, remember? I come back for your wedding, when was that, ‘28, and then again in ‘38, it was the sesquicentenary celebrations that year. I was still alive, and I bought meself a new suit, can’t remember what I was celebrating, being still alive or a hundred and fifty years of Sydney. This is it, the same one. Cost me twenty quid, I remember saying to the bloke price was no object.” He looked at Stephen. “That was when I met you, Steve. And the last time I saw your dad. I said good-bye to him then, and that was the end of that. He was dead two years before I knew about it. Read it in an old Herald I picked up one day in a pub in Derby. It was lining one of the drawers in the wardrobe in me room.” He was silent for a moment, contemplating the devious ways news went round the world: bad news could never be hidden, not even in a drawer in a fly-blown room in a ramshackle hotel in Derby, two thousand miles from where the story had been written. He blinked, all at once old, and looked back at Goodyear. “I come to say good-bye, Charlie. For the last time.”

“I never say good-bye to my patients,” said Goodyear. “Or my friends. It’s bad psychology for a doctor.”

Tristram grinned, shaking his head. “Well, we’ll think of another word for it, Charlie. But I’m catching that plane Monday night. Me mate is waiting for me.”

“Write him a letter.”

“He can’t read,” said Tristram, grinning. “No, Charlie, I’m grateful for your diagnosis, but hospital’s out. When I hand in me chips, I don’t want it to be down here.” He looked out of the windows, at one of the most beautiful views in the world. “I know a better place.”

Goodyear attempted to argue, but to no avail: Tristram was a man you would have to knock unconscious before he would concede defeat. At last Goodyear rose, straightening his tie and pulling on his jacket. “I’ve got to go. Look, the family is going down to our place at Palm Beach for the week-end. Stephen is coming. You come, too.” He held up a hand. “No, don’t start another argument. You’re coming. Tell Stephen where you’re staying and he’ll pick you up.” He began to usher Tristram towards the door. “You’ll be interested in our house at Palm Beach. More glass than brick. The possums sit on the outside and we sit on the inside and stare at each other with equal curiosity. It’s called outdoor-indoor living or something. Peggy found the architect. Didn’t look the type that could ever look a possum in the face, but that’s what he prescribed for us. Do you ever regret having to give up architecture?”

“Never a regret, Charlie.”

“I’ve often wondered about you. Where you were, what you were doing—”

“Been all over the north and north-west. Never stopped any particular place, never designed even an outhouse, never built even a humpy. Anywhere back of sunset was good enough, anywhere where there weren’t too many people.”

“You’ve got something against people?” Goodyear said, smiling.

“Some of ‘em. City people, mostly. No offence.”

“And you don’t feel you’ve wasted your life?” Goodyear said, still smiling. “You had talent, Jack. You don’t feel you wasted it?”

Tristram looked about him. “I could ask you the same question, Charlie. I dunno you could give any better answer than I could.” He turned to Stephen and put out his hand. “I’m at the Metropole, Steve. Pick me up any time you like. It’s been nice seeing you again, son.”

“It’s been nice seeing you,” said Stephen, and looked at Goodyear standing in the open doorway, the web of the past, of dreams gone for ever, thick on his unsmiling face.

Stephen picked up Tristram just after six on that Friday evening and joined the streams of traffic fighting to get into the channels that would take them across the Harbour Bridge. “Lotta bad-tempered bastards,” said Tristram. “Where they all rushing to?”

“Some going home, some going away from the week-end,” Stephen said, keeping the Jaguar steady, out-bluffing a Holden trying to crash in from the left. “Friday night’s always a bit of a mad panic. Everyone likes to get home for a restful week-end.”

“Stone the bloody crows,” said Tristram, and stared out at the city as it battled furiously to get home for a restful weekend.

They were going down the Wakehurst Parkway, through the cool grey dusk of the forest, away from the city and the bad tempers, before Stephen said, “I went home and dug out an old trunk I haven’t looked at in years. I found this.”

Tristram took the small aboriginal charm. It was a rough carving of a bird, hung on a thin strip of kangaroo hide which passed through the closed beak of the bird. The charm had once been painted, but the red and yellow ochre now remained only in cracks in the wooden bird. It looked shabby and useless, a relic of childhood belonging with the broken top and the bent and rusted Meccano part. It’s magic had washed off with its paint.

“I remember it,” Tristram said. “Did it ever bring you any luck?”

“I don’t know,” said Stephen, surprised that another man could believe in portents: did Tristram mark the trail of his day by the first small happenings as soon as he woke? “Do you believe in that sort of thing?”

“I dunno that I got any beliefs at all. I just accept what comes. When it comes to things like these,” he bounced the charm in his hand, “the blacks are no sillier than a lotta whites.”

“Did you give it to me, hoping it would bring me luck?”

“I can’t remember, Steve. But I reckon I must have. Your old man never had much luck. Maybe I was wishing better things for you.” He looked out of the car, at the trees retreating into the dusk, closing ranks against the night. “It shook me when I read he was dead. I went out and got drunk, stayed that way for a week. Your dad was a great man, Steve, and nobody ever knew it. Only me, and maybe Charlie Goodyear.”

Stephen himself had never known it; no man could ever truly judge his father. “He was meant to be more than just a suburban G.P., if that’s what you mean. Though I don’t think he would ever have been as good a surgeon as Charles.”

“There’s more to being a doc than cutting people open. And I don’t mean being a physician, you know what I mean? Hippocrates could have had your old man in mind when he wrote his Precepts .” Education and learning still rode smoothly on the roughened tongue; the voice was the careless one of years in the Outback, but the mind remembered the books of its youth. “Me and Charlie and your old man, we were all idealists once. Your old man used to take pride in the fact that he was born in the same year as the Commonwealth. We were all gunna help build it, we used to say. Him and Charlie building its health, me building its buildings. Stone the crows, we dreamed, Steve. Talked and dreamed and hoped. And then I got T.B., and something happened to the other two. I remember thinking back in ‘38, the last time I saw Tom, he was the only one who still had his ideals. Charlie had forgotten his, and I didn’t need mine any more.” He looked at Stephen, his face chipped and worn as a rock in the pale light from the dashboard. “Your old man should never have given up that Flying Doctor job, Steve.”