“If that’s okay?”
“Good, yeah, fine, let me know when and for how long.”
“I’ll talk to you, maybe at the debrief, whenever.”
“Right, say at ten this morning?” Dicky is eager to pass this mess onto me to sign off on. Black deaths in this town can have unforeseen consequences.
“Yeah, ten is good.”
We both fall into a pact of silence and listen to the waking city as early-morning workers start to fill its arteries.
Last week Lally had come to the door of my aunt’s small two-up two-down terrace house on William Street. I was sleeping on her couch while I looked for another flat. They were pulling my old place down. Progress. Lots of “progress” going on in Redfern lately, politicos are adopting the successful New York “broken windows” theory. Repair the architecture and the crime rate drops. Lally lived about a mile away. He’d been doing some serious drinking. He was almost incoherent. My aunt wouldn’t let him in.
“Come on, Auntie, come on, just tonight. I’ll sleep on the floor, it’s pouring out here. You won’t even know I’m there.”
“No, Lally, go home.” Auntie Joyce spoke with her cheek up against the closed door.
“They won’t let me in down there.”
“Of course they’ll let you in.”
“I’m telling you, they won’t let me in, Aunt... not when I’ve been drinking.”
I was sitting at the dining table and didn’t want to intervene but was compelled to call out from the next room. “Go home, Lally!” I shouted in my deep other voice.
“Craigie? Hello, Craigie...”
“Go home, Lally,” Auntie Joyce said again softly.
“Drugs, Auntie.”
“What?”
“Drugs, I’m off my head, Auntie — drugs, lots of drugs, I’m using and can’t go home. Just need to sleep.”
She let him in, filled him with hot coffee, and an hour later he left, sheltering beneath her floral umbrella. He was singing “Rocky Mountain High.” We could hear his voice fading off as he staggered up the middle of the narrow street: “...going home to a place he’d never been before... He left yesterday behind him... you might say he was born again... born again.”
I stay behind after Lally’s body has been removed from the alley and all the cops have left. I want to see his mother and her family at her house. By this time the rain has eased a little.
“I’m sorry, Auntie,” is all I can say, all I can get out. I pull her to me.
“It’s okay, boy,” she whispers as we hug. “The poor little bugger done a lot of bad things, but he didn’t deserve this.”
“That’s right, Auntie, you’re so right,” I mumble. I’m hopeless, anything I think to say sounds trivial. Usually I say as little as possible.
In the room are Lally’s three sisters, all red-eyed, all stunned to silence. Auntie sits down and a tabby cat leaps onto her lap. She strokes the cat and it purrs. I ask what anyone knew or heard; shaking heads, nothing, no one heard or saw anything. Someone pushes a cup of tea in front of me and I drink it as we take turns recalling funny incidents involving Lally and we laugh. Relief. It’s funny that, about grief.
Tucked away at the back of the morgue, the FSG crew has worked overnight. The evidence has been meticulously tagged, arranged, and spread over five stainless-steel trestles. Very anal-retentive people work in forensics. They are startled as I come through the automatic sliding doors into the great room at the center of their complex which butts up to the autopsy theaters next door.
“Woo, you’re early... too soon!” says Matthew, the senior officer. The other two in the room just smile. “Nothing yet, I’m afraid.”
“That’s okay, I’m just on my way home, thought I’d pop in here first on the off chance.”
The team resumes their work, which of course is more important to them; visitors are given second rank here. I admire the work ethic but the staff are difficult to engage.
“I’ll take a look around, if that’s alright.”
“Goodo... but don’t touch or move anything,” Matthew says without looking up from the skull fragments and tissue that are placed like a hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle on his smaller bench. The pieces of what were my cousin’s skull and brain. Matthew has an angioscope and a larger microscope — both have computer monitors linked to recording and printing devices.
I watch him work for a short time, fascinated. Ten minutes later I leave, uttering a polite goodbye. No one responds or even looks up.
Even though I am tired, I decide to walk the mile and a half to Auntie Joyce’s place, through the university grounds and across Victoria Park. A couple of derelict men are there, sleeping rough.
You’ve never had to sleep rough, boy, my dad said to me a few years back, during a playful argument. He and my mother had slept under a tarpaulin hitched to a horse’s sulky for the first two years of their married life. He worked as a boundary rider, fixing fences on large sheep spreads, out of town for weeks on end, sleeping rough. I told him that I had, many times — he knew very little about my hitchhiking, backpacking days. My thing between rides was to find a school as my overnight camping spot for when it got late. The old country school houses all had verandas, I slept on them. But my dad was right. I never had to, it was a choice that I made.
I arrived at the debriefing at the Redfern police station precisely at ten. The place was full, maybe fifteen detectives, some were chatting, someone laughed. I looked across. Must have been a joke. Dicky came in and all settled down, just a few muted whispers hissing about the place. In turn, everyone read from their notes. The upshot was nothing. There were no leads.
Dicky came up to me. “It’ll be hard shit, this. Anyway, I got someone for you from downtown, you know, for you to work with.”
“Who?”
“Brian Lynch.”
“Lynchie the ex — footie player?”
“Yeah. Here’s his number. Hook up today. Okay?”
“Right, okay.”
I waited until I was outside to phone Lynchie. We got on well straightaway, we talked mostly about football. We laughed a bit. Over the following weeks I phoned him twice a day, but there were no leads.
We moved into winter in a blink. I braced against the cold wind as I walked out of Long Bay Correctional Centre after visiting a couple of blackfellas and headed for football training. It’s Tuesday. I play in a semi-professional rugby league for the Redfern All Blacks, the local aboriginal team. It got harder to get fit once I hit thirty.
The Redfern All Blacks Rugby League Club advertised in the local newspaper, calling on those interested in playing in the upcoming season to register now. Last week me and two of my first cousins decided, over a beer, that we would roll up again. The reality of the hardship of preseason training didn’t occur to us at the time.
Training is on Tuesday and Thursday nights, at seven, all winter. I arrive early. I like to kick the ball before training. The coach honks his horn and calls to us from his car as he arrives.
“Laps!” he yells. “Laps!”
There is the usual groan from the men as we form one large pack and set off on our four-lap warm-up run. Calisthenics and wind sprints follow. Then the coach forms us into our playing positions, working on coordinated plays. It takes an hour and a half in all. The Railway Hotel, the club’s sponsor, is full of footballers by nine. It is our duty to support our sponsor, some club wit once said.
After another two weeks of training I feel a real physical difference, I’m more energetic, more alert than I’ve been for years. But I won’t give up the occasional beer, my card games, or betting on the horse and dog races — and especially not my nights out with my mates.