‘No. Can you tell me why you pretended that he was still here?’
‘He asked me to. He asked me to tell anyone who came looking for him that he was still here, and to keep them waiting as long as I could.’
‘Why? Why would he do that?’
‘Do you know William very well, Mr Hardy?’
‘Not very.’
‘Does he strike you as a sane, balanced man?’
‘Is anyone?’
‘Don’t try to be funny. William… people say I haven’t got a sense of humour and perhaps they’re right, but I do know when people are trying to be funny.’
‘He’s an artistic man, talented,’ I said. ‘People make allowances for that.’
‘They shouldn’t; it doesn’t change things. Mother was said to be talented and look at what happened to her.’
‘Did you know that William was seeing a psychiatrist in Sydney? ‘
‘No.’
‘He was… is. A Dr Holmes. He told me.’ ‘Do you know where he was going when he left here?’
She shook her head; the loose-cut grey hair hardly moved.
‘No.’
I’d had enough of her and her house and her piety. I moved awkwardly past the dresser with its photographs and china cups, and headed towards the front door. She followed me, still gripping herself as if she was wearing a strait-jacket. The cream doily gleamed in the dim light of the hallway. I turned back to face her. She’d revealed so much that was painful, that I felt I owed her something.
‘Don’t you want to know what this is all about?’
‘No. I’m sure it’s dreadful. I don’t want to hear about it.’
I put my hand on the door knob. ‘I still don’t see why he asked you to go through this charade.’
Her hands flopped down from her shoulders and her features tightened into a grimace that was like putting a face on mental agony. ‘He said that it would be a fitting punishment for anyone who was after him to have to spend an hour with a dried-up, boring, frustrated old bag like me.’
11
I stopped at the first pub I came to, which was two suburbs away, and had two double scotches. I stood at the bar, looked at the racecourse picture mounted on the wall opposite, and tried to get the desperate look in her eyes and the stiff set of her body out of my mind. It was hard work. I tried to think about racehorses, and Phar Lap and Peter Pan were the only names I could recall. The barman looked closely at me when I bought the second drink. The bar was almost empty and gave the impression of not having been full since the days of six o’clock closing.
‘Are you all right, mate?’
I looked at him and had trouble remembering who he was. There were seven stools lined up beside me, all empty. I sat down on one which shook with the trembling of my legs. I felt drained of energy as if I was in a low blood sugar slump, the way my diabetic mother got when she’d been on the booze for days and hadn’t eaten.
‘Yeah, I’m all right. Is there anywhere around here I can get something to eat?’
He told me there was a Chinese cafe across the street. I drank the scotch too fast and went out into a cool night that smelled of cut lawns, watered gardens and petrol. The pub stood at an intersection with a newsagent diagonally opposite and the cafe on the other side of the road from that. The other corner was occupied by a TAB agency. These were the first buildings I’d noticed since I’d left Miss Mountain’s house with the church on the rise at the end of the road; I didn’t know what suburb I was in, but it was a big improvement on Bentleigh.
Collisions with damaged lives were part and parcel of my business, but the encounter with Mountain’s wounded sister had left me more affected than usual. In some terrible way she seemed to be living in her future as well as her present, and the whole thing was as sterile and comfortless as her concrete driveway. Worst of all, I felt an odd community with her, as if I was a fringe dweller on the edge of functioning humanity too. I opened the door of the cafe and confronted the sight of people in gangs and couples, drinking and eating and having a good time. I couldn’t join them; I bought a couple of dishes to take away, got some cans of beer from the pub and ate and drank in the car.
When I’d eaten the hot food and put away two cans of Fosters, I felt ready to review the day’s findings. It didn’t amount to much: Bill Mountain had achieved some kind of an alcoholic dry-out. He had a car, maybe Terry Reeves’ Audi, and he was still dropping hints and clues to his pursuers. He planned to do some travelling.
The psychiatric angle was new and disturbing. Bill Mountain was shaping as a very complex subject. I wondered what would force him to resort to professional psychiatric help if he thought he could handle as big an emotional disorder as alcoholism on his own. His treatment of his sister was another worry. For someone as fragile as she seemed to be, what he’d done was the equivalent of squashing a butterfly with an army boot. I saw her face and heard the words falling like stones from her mouth. I’d never cared much for Bill Mountain, but I liked him even less now.
I used a public phone to ring Grant Evans. Jo, his wife, sounded pleased to hear from me after all these years, which made a nice change from the receptions I’d been getting in the last few days. Years dropped away when Grant came on the line. It’s a fact of modern life, local line telephone communication means more than long distance, it’s half way to being in the same room. Grant’s voice sounded close, comforting and familiar.
‘Cliff, where are you?’
‘Near a place called Bentleigh.’
‘Jesus, why?’
‘It’s a dirty story.’
‘I bet. Well, we’re in Brunswick and we’re expecting you right now. Have you got a Melways?’
‘Yeah, I’ve got one.’
‘You all right? Sound a bit strange.’
‘I’m all right. I’ll be glad to see you. Give me the address.’
I drove back to the city and through a Brunswick, steadily and surely, feeling the effects of the alcohol and not entirely sure that the Chinese food had found a permanent home. Grant’s street was a shade wider, had a few more trees and contained slightly grander houses than the average for the area. Grant’s house was one of the better ones, a wide freestanding terrace with all its ironwork intact, a deep front garden and a new-looking corner window. Nothing wrong with that; Grant was a senior policeman these days with a healthy salary and appearances to keep up.
I ran my hands through my hair and blew my nose, performing a traveller’s toilet before I approached the house. My skin felt dry under the stubble and my face felt asymmetrical, which it is because of the broken nose. My eyes were tired from concentrating on the unfamiliar roads, and my breath smelled of whisky and beer. It was a fine way to go calling on a friend I hadn’t seen for five years, but Grant had seen me in much worse shape. He’d probably have been more worried if I’d turned up shaved and in a clean suit. And the breath wouldn’t be a problem long if I knew Grant-he’d have the perfect red in stock to deal with it.
Grant, opened the door and we shook hands and slapped shoulders and I went into a house that bore no resemblance to the last one I’d been in. The big terrace was warm and scruffy-the banister was hung with clothes, and books and boots littered the bottom stairs. I could hear rock music playing upstairs and a dog of indeterminate breed wandered out of a room off the hall to see what was going on.
Jo Evans is a shy woman who says a lot to Grant in private, all good sense, but not much in public. She smiled hello, and one of Grant’s teenage daughters appeared at the top of the stairs to check me out. She’d left the door open behind her and the rock decibels mounted. She waved and ducked back.
‘Studying,’ Grant said. He shook his head in mock despair.