I get the sense I’m being used as a human whetstone to sharpen this clown’s social skills.
He reminds me of an article I read about the dreaded fire ant, now surrounding much of Brisbane like a terribly patient Roman army. They grab on to the skin with their pincers, and then sting not once but in a neat, complete circle, pivoting from the central axis of where they’ve taken hold of your flesh. The perfection of nature. Reginald has made me come out in a rash.
But if I did close my eyes against his presence, I’d be back in the bay at night, fighting for breath, and I’d be on that island, staring down the muzzle flash of that gun, and I’d be entangled in a mystery about an artist I’d never even heard of before I came up north to enjoy my twilight years.
Before I passed — by chance — an old acquaintance from the underworld of Sydney’s Kings Cross and I was innocently enjoying the sun and minding my own business down at Main Beach.
So I couldn’t close my eyes. I was stuck with Reginald.
‘Could I possibly have more water?’ I ask.
And he begrudgingly pours it.
‘We’re on level four, you know,’ he says.
I’m confused. I have heard Reginald trying to discuss cryptic crosswords with the constable stationed on guard outside my hospital room. ‘I thought this was the fifth floor,’ I say.
‘No, ninny.’ First ‘swish’, and now ‘ninny’. I begin to contemplate that Nurse Reginald is in fact the reincarnation of my grandmother. ‘Level-four water restrictions.’
Is he serious? Queensland is paradise on earth, isn’t it? Bountiful. An embarrassment of riches.
‘Just make it half a glass, then,’ I say.
He doesn’t find this funny. ‘Level four is not funny.’ He grumpily leaves the room. He’s done this walk-out before, when I quizzed him on what it meant to say that Brisbane is ‘the new black’. I’ve seen these advertisement signs everywhere. What is the new black? What was the old black? He turned his nose up at me, swivelled on his heels and left. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen more black in Brisbane in the last fortnight than at any point in my life.
I shouldn’t be here. There I was, minding my own business on the coast. Enjoying a brief stay in the Main Beach Caravan Park while my wife finalised the sale of our house in Sydney and I hunted for our luxury retirement villa in Paradise.
There I was one fine morning, strolling down Tedder Avenue just after seven to pick up the daily newspaper, when I passed him and caught his eye. Dapper Daniel the Antiques Man, a.k.a. the Boltcutter, a.k.a. the scumbag who, on a cold night a long time ago in the dunes of Wanda Beach, put a pistol to my young, naive, fresh-out-of-the-police-academy head, and threatened to blow me and my brains into infinity.
The very same Boltcutter, padding past me like any other retired southern gent in his leather loafers, yachting shorts and fruity Hawaiian shirt. Just like mine.
Our eyes met for a millisecond. And the hair on my neck bristled.
~ * ~
2
I first met my wife Peg on a TAA flight from Sydney to Brisbane in 1971. Peg was a hostess, as they used to call them, before the word was deemed politically incorrect. Now they’re flight attendants. This doesn’t make sense to me. Waiters aren’t ‘food attendants’. Now that I think of it, is ‘politically incorrect’ a logical or correct term? I have my doubts.
I’m getting off the track. I’ll blame the morphine. (Reginald takes no offence in being called the traditionally female-gendered word ‘nurse’. He does not find it politically incorrect at all. One day, he says, he would love to be called ‘matron’. I’m growing suspicious of Reginald.)
Anyway, that flight in 1971 proved to be some sort of trip. It was my first to the Sunshine State. And en route, I met my wife. Not bad.
I had heard a lot about Queensland, even as a young officer wet behind the ears. And not all of it was good.
I had been seconded, early on, to 21 Division, the notorious vice squad, having spent some uneventful early months at Rose Bay police station in Sydney. I’d had my share of the odd harbour body or two, petty burglars, car crashes, noise complaints and the occasional domestic dispute. You have a domestic dispute in some of those streets jam-packed with blocks of flats and, let me tell you, half the suburb can hear it.
Prior to my graduation from the academy I had toyed with studying the human mind. I was intrigued by psychoanalysis. Peg says it was a ‘cry for help’ — that I was trying to understand myself a little better. Smart woman, Peg.
So I dipped into it by correspondence, and when my superiors heard about this I was suddenly the egghead of my police year. They called me, however briefly, ‘the Professor’. (That nickname was replaced, permanently, not long after with ‘Dusty’, after dustbin, and my propensity to attract dust, flies, and other unspeakable societal detritus. The Boltcutter, however, was one piece of muck I thought I had wiped from my shoes many years before. Such is life.) It didn’t take much to be academically head and shoulders above the crowd in the New South Wales police service in the late sixties.
Anyway, my cursory look into Freud somehow fast-tracked my career, and I was thrown head-first into 21 Division. We were a mobile unit, charged with sniffing out illegal gambling dens and other lowlife hellholes of disreputable behaviour. There were things I saw that I had never previously contemplated could be performed by human beings. I’ll spare you the tasty details. Suffice to say, it made my tenure at lovely Rose Bay look like Nurse Reginald’s elusive nirvana.
I had been chosen, I later heard, by the commissioner himself — Norman ‘the Foreman’ Allan — who had an almost obsessive desire to see educated officers in his ranks. Apparently a few months of dipping into Freud’s Wolf Man theories and his bizarre sexual hypotheses qualified me as a learned gent in Norm’s eyes.
I’d only been in 21 Division a month when I was called into the office — the relatively new Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar — and told I was to be part of a ‘very special mission’ to Queensland. All hush-hush. The press grubs were not to know.
‘You heard of a sheila called Wendy “Legs” Lockett from Atherton?’ my superior asked, scanning the room.
‘I’ve never even heard of Atherton.’
‘All right, smart chops. She’s a prostitute. Was a prostitute. Was causing all sorts of problems for us in Brisbane. Statutory declarations. Corruption. Fingering blokes left, right and centre.’
‘You want me to talk to her?’
‘You could try. But she’s dead.’
‘Oh.’
‘The good old-fashioned drug overdose, just before a little court appearance where her testimony could have proved ... er ... rather difficult for one of our boys in Brisbane. I want you to go up there, keep your ears open, find out what the talk is on her. Rumours. Theories. That sort of stuff Even you could manage that, couldn’t you, Dusty?’
Funny how life works. I was flying up to Queensland to spy on a dead prostitute and I met my future wife, who spilled coffee on my nice white 21 Division shirt and skinny tie. I was smooth in those days. I told her, as I disembarked, that I needed her home address so I could send her the cleaning bill. Not original in the modern history of courting, but it worked — she gave me her phone number.