Mr Johns had been found dead in the Brisbane River not far from the William Jolly Bridge late one afternoon in 1971. Two fingers had been cut clean from his left hand. All this had happened just days after the prostitute Legs was found dead of a drug overdose.
And it had happened within a few hundred metres of the hotel room of a young police officer from Sydney’s 21 Division who, as the body was hooked out of the river, was packing his overnight bag and heading for the airport and home and possibly into the arms of his future wife.
Anton Johns, the article revealed, was known around town and in art circles as the Priest.
How, then, could he be living in an apartment building that I could see from my caravan park a full thirty-five years later?
~ * ~
11
Up here, people wait for more than ten minutes in traffic and they call it gridlock. They can have fresh seafood, steaks as big as hubcaps and delicious produce prepared by master chefs for a pittance, and they question the size of their bills. They can park in the CBD without having to put a second mortgage on the house, can enjoy some of the great natural beaches on earth and winter lasts for half an hour. It is one of the great mysteries to me, as a freshly-minted retiree to this part of the world, why Queenslanders quite simply take for granted the riches at their disposal.
It’s staggering to have great, primordial rainforests reachable by car in the time it used to take me to travel the nine kilometres from my house in inner Sydney to the Parramatta office of regional police headquarters. And still they grizzle.
After I’d gone through my case notes at the Main Beach Surf Club, I took Pig Pen out on to the Broadwater. I needed to clear my head. Not far past the Spit seaway I beached on South Stradbroke and threw in a lazy line. Looking south, I could see the Gold Coast metropolis, so close you could almost touch it, yet here I was with my bare feet in the sand waiting for the scream of my Alvey.
If I had a spare hand, I would have pinched myself.
Later, I pulled up some shade under a casuarina and read through the information my son, Jack, had sent me on Peel Island. I am a complete computer Luddite. My generation missed computers. Our brains don’t work that way. This is a source of great disappointment to my son. When I need something, I telephone him, then he goes on to the internet, retrieves it, prints it out and posts it to me.
He calls mine a medieval way of retrieving information. I tell him — up yours. I enlighten him that it didn’t hurt the younger generation to know how to lick a stamp. He says, Dad, they’re self-adhesive these days. I tell him not to speak to his father like that.
What was the connection between all these deaths in the art world going back to the seventies, Ian Fairweather, Peel Island and the creeping feeling that my presence in southeast Queensland was not particularly appreciated?
Verne, the van park manager, informed me, on the quiet, that a stranger had been seen loitering about my annexe during my sojourn in Brisbane as houseguest of Igor the Terrible. Verne winked repeatedly when he told me this, indicating that whatever I was mixed up in was not his concern, though it was best I knew of these developments. It was a knowing wink between two old guys, without the nudge.
‘Just giving you the heads up,’ Verne said, with his annoying click of the tongue. I had heard Jack use this catchphrase — heads up — and wondered from whom Verne might have absorbed it. It sounded very odd coming out of this leathery, canvas-hatted Queenslander.
Two of my semi-permanent neighbours at Main Beach had also spotted the mysterious shadow-play of an intruder on the candy-striped annexe that extended off my caravan. There had been ‘a little jiggle’ at my front door. And then the stranger was gone.
My immediate suspect was the Boltcutter, coming to finish the job he had started all those years ago in the dunes of Wanda Beach when I’d felt the cold muzzle of his gun at my left temple. My thoughts, that night amongst the seagrass, had not, curiously enough, been of my wife Peg tucked up at home. Nor did my life spool before my eyes. They were concerned with the frosty touch of the gun at my head, and my conviction that the doorway to oblivion was round, black and infinite.
It was too hot and glary to read on Straddy. I stretched out in the lattice shade of the casuarina and fell asleep. Two and a half hours later I woke, not knowing where I was. It can be very discombobulating when the first thing you see after a deep nap is a large motorised fibreglass banana gliding past in the boat channel.
I was as red as a rash on a baby’s backside. It hurt to move. I didn’t need to be reminded in this way that I was still a novice Queenslander.
Back at the caravan my sunburn deepened and by late afternoon I was as hot as a sliver of radioactive waste. Verne, hearing my whimpering, poked his big, sun-spotted melon through the flap of my annexe and asked if he could help.
‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘Cover me head to foot in cold T-bones. Dunk me in chilled yak’s milk. Anything.’
I ended up being nursed that evening by Verne’s wife, Abigail, who permitted me use of their tiny bathtub, which she filled with tepid water and pungent smatterings of tea-tree oil. Whilst Verne did the van park’s rubbish run, she popped her head into the bathroom several times to check on my welfare. She was, in fact, a little too interested in my welfare. She lingered at the door and shook her head in pity. She looked like a chef waiting impatiently to remove a lobster from the pot.
Back in the van Verne had left me several messages from my estate agent telling me he had many ‘delicious’ prospects for me to view in the morning. There was another from Peg, who said the packing up in Sydney was almost done and she’d be on the road in a couple of days. And what did I want to do with the broken karaoke machine in the garage?
I ignored the messages, and instead rang Jack to ask him to saddle up on the internet and find me even remote references to a woman, first name ‘Rosemary’, who might have been a nurse on Peel Island in the fifties.
Within the hour Verne slipped a sheaf of faxes beneath my van door. Jack had tracked down three Rosemary’s on the internet, who may or may not have been my Peel Island nurse. He had found two Brisbane area phone numbers for two of the Rosemary’s who may or may not have been stationed on Peel Island when Ian Fairweather may or may not have made his pilgrimage to Peel Island, that outpost of suffering and misery and loneliness, where poor James Fenton Browne took his last breath.
I was hesitant to ring the numbers. I was battered and bruised. It was a hall of mirrors. Alice’s wonderland. Every known cliche for a confusing passage to hell. I’d had enough warnings to bolt the van door shut and pull the sheet over my head. Would one of these calls simply trigger another train of events? A train that could end, quite frankly, in disaster?
The first phone number for the woman who may or may not be Rosemary, the Peel Island nurse, rang out.
The second was answered on the fifth ring.