That observation didn’t advance things much. I repacked the suitcase, feeling the outside of pockets as I went. The dinner suit was last. I ran my hand over the jacket’s outside pockets, felt something at the left hip. I lifted the flap, tried to insert cautious fingers, couldn’t. It was a dummy pocket. Of course. What tailor would allow the line of a dinner jacket to be spoiled by something stuffed into a hip pocket?
Through the cloth, I felt the object again. Something the length of a pen cap, flat, no thicker than a stick of chewing gum. I opened the jacket and found the small inside pocket, a sturdy pocket designed to hold a single key, extracted the object. It was a plastic stick, dark-blue, a recessed button on one side, a hole in the front. I pressed the button. A red light glowed in the hole for a second or two. I did it again. The light went off even when the button remained depressed.
Today’s mystery object. Nothing to identify it, say what it was for.
I put the device in my wallet, zipped the suitcase, put it in the small back room, sat at my table and eyed the unopened mail. Once letters held promise. Now I couldn’t think of anyone who’d write an undemanding letter to me, pen your actual personal letter, fingers holding a writing instrument, hand touching paper. I thought about letters I’d read by fast-dying light, sniffed, imagined I’d caught a scent, held up, looked for a touch of sweat or the smear of a tear. Even, hoping against hope, the ghostly imprint of a kiss, just a touch of lips, leaving a mark.
Just a touch of lips. Lips left their mark, they all did, like branding irons, you felt them forever.
There was nothing left that I had to do or wanted to do. Midday Saturday. Once it had been the peak of the week. I went to the window and looked at the street. Rain on the tarmac, oilslick-shiny pools in the bluestone gutters. Across the way, outside the clothing factory, a man in a four-wheel drive had tried to shoot me one night.
The phone rang.
‘Jack Irish.’
A sigh. ‘Tried the boot factory, the furniture place, the mobile. Then I found this other number with Jack written next to it.’
Lyall. The dry, precise voice made the room seem brighter; no, the clouds must have thinned.
‘I don’t think we’ve ever conversed at my professional premises,’ I said. ‘Do you wish to consult me professionally?’
‘I’m in Santa Barbara,’ she said.
‘Santa Barbara. What kind of trouble have they got there?’
‘Understanding a sentence that doesn’t mention Steven Spielberg or money. The ones I’ve met, anyway. I’m staying with Bradley.’
Staying with Bradley was fine from my point of view. Bradley was a former housemate of Lyall’s, a film director. That wasn’t what made him fine from my point of view. What made him fine was that he was gay.
‘Extend my regards.’
‘Brad’s come out of the closet,’ she said, voice low, serious.
‘How many times can you do that?’
‘It turns out,’ she said, ‘he’s not gay.’
‘They’ve done tests?’
She laughed. I’d been taken with her laugh from the outset, but it wasn’t that laugh now. It was her laugh with something subtracted.
‘He says he’s never been gay, he’s not even bi. He’s been celibate for twelve years. I just assumed that because he didn’t want to screw me or any other woman he was gay.’
‘Not an unreasonable assumption,’ I said. I still remembered her exact words on that wintry night when we were still near-strangers.
I was in love with him for years. Never mentioned it. No point. He’s gay. Huge loss to womankind.
I felt the weight of realisation, of knowing, on my shoulders, a dead weight, a bag of lead sinkers. A silence ensued.
‘Jack.’
‘Yes.’ I could hear the soundless sound of her gathering courage.
‘I’m attached, no, I’m in love with both of you. It’s very difficult.’
‘Torn between two lovers, acting like a fool,’ I said. ‘The old song. Or is it feeling like a fool? I’ve got something on the stove.’ There are times when you will say anything.
‘Jack.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t dump me so quickly. This isn’t easy. I’ve agonised over this.’
I said, without thought, ‘Lyall, you’re in Santa Barbie Doll or wherever and you’re fucking Bradley, he’s first-up from a spell, and you’d like to tell me about that and how difficult it is for you. Consider me told.’
Silence. Not even a hum from the copper wire that lay down there in the deep Pacific blackness consorting with the bottom-crawling sea life.
‘Told,’ she said. Click.
I sat there for a while, thinking that I needed a drink, needing a drink. Then I talked to myself for a while, recited the mantra about the black tunnel, and went home. There were things to do. It was time to clear the decks, to confront places long avoided. I cleaned the apartment from beginning to end, a ferocious attack on dirt in which I dusted pelmets and picture rails and skirting boards, washed floors, vacuumed carpets, defrosted the freezer, scrubbed the refrigerator, the stovetop, the oven. Then I turned on my grocery cupboard, threw out ancient spices, old flour, rusted cans of food I couldn’t remember buying. Next, I laid into my clothes. Frayed shirts, unloved shirts, shapeless underwear, two old sweaters, lonely socks, a dark suit turning green, a jacket I’d never liked — they all went into a garbage bag and thence to the boot of the Stud. The Salvos could turn them into usable fibres. Then I stuffed two laundry bags with soiled clothes and sheets and table napkins and towels and delivered them into the cleansing hands of the Brunswick Street laundry. Next stop, King amp; Godfree in Lygon Street, where I bought exotic food and drink without regard for my penury.
At home, at the top of the stairs, a bag in each hand, the manic energy suddenly left me. I steeled myself for one final effort: pour cider over pork sausages in pot, put in oven. Halve tomatoes, quarter potatoes, put on tray, pour on olive oil, put in oven under sausages. Set oven on low. Open bottle of Carlsberg, lie on sofa, read the Age. Later on, I ate, drank a bottle of Cotes du Rhone grenache, watched the Saints get thrashed by West Coast, didn’t care, a lot, wanted the phone to ring so much that it felt like a bodily ache.
In bed, I resisted the urge to burrow beneath the pillows and breathe carbon dioxide. I read my book. There should be a set number of endings in each life. No-one should have more. Experts could decide how many and enshrine that in the Charter of Human Rights.
But it would be too late for me.
11
I woke up thinking about Lyall and determinedly switched thoughts to my daughter, Claire. She was pregnant to Eric, her Scandinavian fishing boat skipper. Before my recent visit, I hadn’t seen her for more than two years and, in full adult, barefoot, tropical bloom, she was shockingly different. She’d looked like my mother. My mother young and happy. I could not remember seeing my mother either young or happy, but I knew from the photographs that this was how she had looked. Claire was now very beautiful and my first sight of her had left me wrong-footed, unabled.
I had no guilt to carry in regard to Claire. Well, less guilt perhaps. It is all a matter of degree.
Her mother, my first wife, Frances, had left Claire’s place in Queensland only hours before I’d arrived. She was still married to the man she’d left me for long ago, a surgeon, thin and pinstriped Richard, and Claire had two half-siblings, boys I’d encountered three or four times a year while Claire was growing up. Richard was your normal medical specialist: straight As for maths and science, no personality that would show up on any test. Nevertheless, he’d clearly touched something in Frances when he’d operated to fix an old tennis injury. Soon after, she departed without warning from the conjugal dwelling, taking with her one-year-old Claire. The next day, Richard arrived at my old law office in Carlton.
‘Mr Wiggins to see you, Mr Irish,’ said the secretary.