He was. You know he was.
And then you, my nervy little mate, do you remember? You were auditioning for Drivetime Radio. Someone was on holiday. Matt Cocker? No, not him. They gave you three weeks to try out Drivetime Radio with Felix Moore. It went to your head, no? Just a teensy bit? Somehow you thought you could call a general strike from the fucking ABC. You were worried, as I recall, how you would fit eighteen left-wing union leaders into a little studio on William Street. Eighteen. That was optimistic.
You weren’t against it, mate. As I recall, you sort of egged me on.
Let’s just say, I was very interested in everything you had to say. You were born in a country that never had a war. You were blessed, but you thought we should suffer like the Bosnians, the Rwandans, the Palestinians, everyone. I never heard anything so fucking stupid. You really wanted civil war.
Whatever. You were on my side.
Oh, mate, he said and he cocked his head and the expression on his face was almost fond.
What?
What do you think?
You weren’t playing on the other side?
Other side of what? Other side of bloodshed? You bet. Fortunately you didn’t have the balls for it. You were shitting yourself, I remember that, looking for any chance not to follow through.
You told Celine this?
You were frightened of where your imagination was leading you. Remember we sat up half the night before? You got so pissed you couldn’t walk. You slept at my place in Neutral Bay. Do you remember the morning?
We drank all your tequila.
No, not that, mate. Your car caught fire.
Of course I remember. You were with me. You’re the one who dragged me out the passenger side. It was not my fault the car caught fire.
No, it was my fault.
Bullshit.
Yes, me. I fucking saved you from yourself. You should be grateful I gave you your excuse. Although you could have still got to the studio if you’d really wanted to.
We had to wait for the police.
Ah, look at you, said Woody Townes, delighted. The boy who cried pig. You’ve spent a lifetime screaming at everyone for being so gutless in ’75. To the barricades, and all that shit. If there was any credible opposition you had them, every available pinko and ratbag, waiting to go on Drivetime Radio. What will your little girls think of their daddy when they hear all this?
The wine was dripping, but only very slowly. The hermit turned his attention to the visitor’s flask from which he slowly refilled two large glasses, one of which he drank.
Why? he asked his biggest fan.
Woody leaned back, as if to give the writer a sporting chance to grab the gun. Mate, you know me.
He slid the second glass across the table. Felix Moore did not reject the gift.
So you’ve got nothing to give me, Feels? Not a single page?
Sorry mate. Wish I did.
Woody stood. He kicked irritably at the tangled typewriter ribbon as he slid the gun back inside what was, clearly, a highly specialised garment.
You’re not up to this game, he said. You’d like to play at this level, but you never could. Here, take my phone. When you realise what shit you’re in, call me on my landline. It might not be too late.
It was an iPhone, the latest model, but Woody left it without regret.
The hermit remained in his doorway as the visitor continued down the path. When he heard the gunfire he felt no particular alarm. Woody, he understood, wished to use his weapon, and firing the last fifteen rounds at an aluminium dinghy was the best he was going to do today.
27
THE QUEEN HAD locked the saint in a tower room filled with straw and ordered him to spin the straw into gold, on pain of death. And how he worked. He slammed at the spinning wheel, night and day until, one morning, it was necessary to shove the gold into a plastic bag and hurl it from the tower.
Cleverly done. Well saved. But when peace returned it was no simple matter to retrieve the treasure. The saint lay down on his stomach and stretched himself full-length on the edge of the outcrop, peering down through the undergrowth and scrub where he could see, in nets of light produced by slapping wavelets, the aerial roots of mangroves poking up like nails from yellow sand.
The so-called “outcrop” was host to a jungle of wattles, wild lantana and various bits of prickly stuff. Here, just a hand’s span below his fleshy nose, grew a knotted little eucalypt with a trunk no thicker than an axe handle.
Further down, a man’s length he calculated, there was a convenient ridge in the rock where he might gain purchase with his toes. Below that, he could not really see.
As a schoolboy he had achieved serious status as a hundred-kph spin bowler, in spite of which he had been, sporadically, unpredictably followed by boys swinging their arms and making “chee-chee” monkey cries. That is, duh, his arms were long. But, as his mother once said when answering a query re his testicles, God put everything there for a purpose and now the time had come when his arms would prove their Darwinian value. He grasped that twisted eucalypt and, completely forgetting his age, lowered himself in the direction of the ridge.
His arm was yanked like a bone from a rotisserie chicken. He kicked at the rock and gained no purchase. He swung with his feet twitching and shuddering like a hanged man. As always, part of his mind was administered by a cartoonist and he was encouraged to believe he might somehow slither down the remaining inches to the ridge.
Instead, he fell, scratching, scraping, slipping past whatever ridge or ledge he had imagined. Death awaited him. He awaited death. He landed in a twisted eagle’s nest of wattle and lantana where the black plastic bag was pushed like a horse’s arse against his face. All three bags had been partly inflated with accidental air, so it was this, not the sand, which cushioned the final fall.
His face stung. He loudly fucked and shat. A fierce pain assailed his shoulder as he splashed along the waterline. He wrapped his arms around his treasure, binding it to his chest, like a spider with a sac of eggs. Cautiously, he made his way under the gloomy mangroves, amidst the forest of aerial roots, until he arrived at the place where he had beached so long before.
He showed not the least interest in his bullet-riddled dinghy but hurried along the track, breathing through his open mouth, squelching up the protesting stairs. When he entered his former refuge the air was cold and sour with wine. Typewriter ribbon adhered to his sodden shoes and he did nothing to untangle it. He sat in the gloom, gingerly, embracing the bag, mindful that it might hold evidence that would prove Gaby Baillieux innocent. What would Woody do with that? What would he do himself? He did not wish her to be innocent. He wanted her fearless, guilty of courage, of principle. If his writing would get his name on the so-called “Disposition Matrix,” he wished her to be worthy of the pain.
Now he lifted the remaining vodka and touched it to his stinging lips. For once he did not drink. He examined the abandoned iPhone, turned it on, then failed in his attempt to throw it out the window. The screen glowed briefly then went dark. There was no illumination but that provided by the deep charcoal-blue of the Hawkesbury River.
Felix?
The voice was close, in the doorway, but there was insufficient light to distinguish the doorframe from the space it might have defined. He held the plastic bag like a child with a pillow.
Felix, right? Mr. Moore?
The voice that of a young man. He was perhaps tall, with fair hair.
Who are you?