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The Toe Tag
Quintet:
Five Novellas of Murder and Mayhem
Matthew Condon
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ONE
MURDER MOST
ABSTRACT
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1
‘I loved that shirt, Reginald.’
I was gazing out of the window, beyond the tangle of clear tubes, at the flowerless jacaranda tree outside.
‘And which shirt might that have been?’ asked Reginald, not very enthusiastically — not in an interested way, but as if to say if it pacified me to send out some noise with his exhalation, he’d send out some noise.
Reginald was my nurse, and there was an aura about Reginald that said his job of dressing bullet wounds and other sundry abrasions that came into his care was a temporary step to grander things. It was so complete about Reginald, this aura, that I sensed his entire life was a stepping stone to some nirvana. If Reginald’s flat life had a scent, it would be the human breath contained in a week-old balloon. Somebody else’s breath, at that.
‘The Hawaiian,’ I said, to the tree.
I shouldn’t be here. In a hospital bed. With a bullet in my thigh. And a hole punched clean through my side. It had taken the surgeons hours just to pick out the fibres of my new retirement shirt from the wound. All those threads that used to be pretty coconut trees and hibiscus and a little grass hut. I loved that shirt.
Why shouldn’t I be here? I’m happy-go-lucky. I’m that guy who stands by the piano near the end of a party and belts out ‘My Way’, pate on my breath and a fragment of maraschino cherry caught in my front teeth. At Christmas I like to pop those festive crackers and slip on a little paper hat. And I’ll wear the hat all day — or at least until it tears and ends up in the kitchen tidy all stained with oily fingerprints from the chicken and turkey legs. I have an apron I wear when I barbecue, which shows the torso of a woman in bra and briefs and fishnet stockings. Ha, ha. I could be a grandfather, for crying out loud.
That’s why I shouldn’t be here. Thirty-seven years in the New South Wales police force, a number of those commanding the meanest, toughest, bloodiest precinct in Sydney, and I never took a bullet. Someone once cracked my head with a hammer. I’ve been glassed in a pub. Put in a chokehold. Pinned in a totalled patrol car. Kicked in the guts, accidentally, by a police horse. Had a glass of expensive wine thrown in my face by a woman con artist with expensive taste in wines. And felt the muzzle of a .38 pressed against my temple. But that was all a long time ago.
Yet I retire to Queensland and I get shot — not once, but twice. You can understand why I’m not happy.
If you’d said to me two weeks ago that instead of taking out my new silver dinghy, Pig Pen, on the Broadwater at the Gold Coast and throwing in a lazy line, or sitting on the balcony of the Main Beach Surf Club with a cold one at hand and watching the setting sun stain the whitewashed waves a fluorescent pink, I’d be banged up in this little white room, I may have laughed.
Get me laughing now and the bags, tubes and wires that hang off me will gurgle and sway, and make their own music, and become a tune that will forever haunt me, much like ‘A Horse with No Name’, or ‘Knights in White Satin’.
I can hardly move. All day I look at a little square of sky and a tree they tell me was heavy with purple flowers just a couple of months ago. Purple as a fresh bruise. Maybe it’s the morphine, but I feel connected, somehow, to that tree.
Reginald tells me I’m lucky to have a room at all and that I should be grateful. Look out the window to the carriageway at the front of the hospital, he says. Bumper to bumper with ambulances, and in the back of them people that can’t get a swish hospital bed like me. (Reginald says ‘swish’ a lot. I have not heard the word ‘swish’ since I was a boy visiting my feisty old Irish grandmother in her flat in Five Dock. Fancy English crockery, for example, was very ‘swish’.)
‘Did you just say “swish”?’ I ask him, but he ignores me.
He says my picture has been in the newspapers and I look a lot older in real life. Thank you, Reginald. I want to tell him, facetiously, that I don’t like the view and that now I’m a celebrity I should be afforded something more splendid. But in the orbit of old balloon breath I too have become flat and tired. Dullness can be infectious.
‘Is it grape season, Reginald?’ I ask him.
It is another thing — as an observant former detective — I know about Reginald. He carries the ever-so-slight wince on one side of his face of the mercilessly teased. It is a flinch in advance of the insult.
So I ask him inane questions about grapes and watch the wrinkles deepen around his left eye.
On occasion I feel like giving him one of my famous verbal blasts. But I don’t. I’m not in a position to savage the man who removes my bedpan.
‘Don’t listen to me,’ I say diplomatically. It is a saying I have always used a lot. It means, you must listen to me very attentively. The officers under me knew that. So did not-an-inconsiderable few of the junkies, carjackers, dope dealers, hustlers and street grubs I used to come up against. I used to talk with my fists, as they say. Or used to say. Who uses fists now, in the bang-bang age?
I feel sorry for modern coppers, facing multi-million-dollar lawsuits for bruising with handcuffs the delicate wrists of their prissy offenders, or twelve months of counselling and possibly suspended pay if they don’t refer to the drunken, writhing deadbeats they have apprehended as sir or madam. Don’t get me started.
What exactly does Reginald think when he’s polishing my silver kidney-shaped ablution bowl?
‘Don’t listen to me, Reginald,’ I say, meaning, this time, go away.
Over time I suspect my nurse has developed a little touché strategy of his own.
I will say, ‘Is there a furnace in the hospital basement, Reginald, for getting rid of unwanted human bits?’
And he will reply, ‘You can see forever from the helicopter pad on the roof. On a clear day, all the way to Moreton Bay.’
But Moreton Bay is the last place on earth I want to see, let alone entertain at length in my weary, gnarled, nicked and scarred fifty-nine-year-old melon. I would be happy never to see again the glittering diamante surface of the bay. The islands. The islets.
Me and Moreton Bay? It’s a complicated relationship.
At night I want to close my eyes, just to remove myself from Reginald and his increasingly prolific bons mots. He has moved on to ward grotesqueries, just to pee me off. Guess what I saw on the seventh floor? I’ve had it up to the gills with his florid descriptions of wounded, hacked, sliced, bruised, distended, fried and vanished human body parts. At his ceaseless monologue of the things that can happen, out there in the big world, to the human body.
‘It’s tough as nuts, the body,’ says Nurse Reginald, ‘but at the same time, well, it’s as weak as water. It’s truly amazing how we get through the day, how we survive, don’t you think?’