‘Is this Rosemary?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ the woman said. She sounded old but spritely.
I explained who I was, though it may have sounded ludicrous to her. Then I asked, ‘Were you ever a nurse at the leprosarium on Peel Island in the nineteen fifties?’
‘Why, yes,’ she said.
Before I’d realised it, I’d turned into the eager young constable of the sixties.
‘Rosemary, did you or did you not ever meet a painter by the name of Ian Fairweather on Peel Island in the nineteen fifties?’
There was a long silence.
‘Perhaps you’d like to meet for morning tea?’ she said sweetly.
~ * ~
12
It was the novelist William Faulkner who said, ‘The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.’ And it’s a quote that tumbled into my sunburned head as I read about the notorious Peel Island before my meeting with Rosemary, who quite possibly held a secret about the painter Ian Fairweather and indeed the clues to a string of murders dating back more than thirty years.
Life’s strange, isn’t it, when a gentle elderly lady living quietly in an old Queenslander in bayside Manly could unwittingly possess information from the past that may solve a bloody puzzle in the present.
Dear old Rosemary Pentimento, taking her morning walk on the path above the rust-red shoreline of Moreton Bay, the rubber nib of her cane gripping the concrete pathway, the salted gusts riffling her dress, while out in the bay, ancient Peel Island sees the sunsets and dawns come and go, century after century. And a ragged, overweight old ex-cop in the middle of this mess tries to draw longitude and latitude and invisible isobars together, grasping at earth and sky, to form a picture of the past that will solve a riddle of the moment.
Faulkner and Peel and the Boltcutter and the missing eyes of James Fenton Browne. It was all getting too much for me.
I needed a beer. I repaired to my usual table at the surf club for the comfort of the singing poker machines, the voices of excited children drifting in and out, the mutter of gulls. I needed to be tethered to real life to face the historical horrors of Peel Island.
You would have heard of it, Peel Island — an idyllic little 400-hectare jewel of an island in Moreton Bay that, if you study a map of it as closely as I have, resembles a strange, upside down marine creature of mythic quality or, if you want to be more pedestrian about it, a side of beef hanging off a hook in a butcher’s cold room.
It sits off Dunwich on North Stradbroke Island, a forgotten fragment, still with the mantle of death about it, even though the leprosarium and quarantine stations have been shut down for almost half a century.
Studying local historian Peter Ludlow’s extensive writings on the island, the whole place and its history disturbed me. If Queensland was fresh and positive and physically beautiful — which it was — here was its black spot, its own backyard heart of darkness.
I’ll spare you the most harrowing details, though Peel Island and human suffering are indivisible. In the late eighteen hundreds it became a quarantine station when diseases like typhoid and cholera arrived by ship along with their European hosts. The infected, within sight of the Australian mainland, were lodged in draughty houses, huts and even tents. Their chest-loads of possessions were aired on the beach or on the grass in front of their rustic huts. Clothes and blankets were scoured.
It would later become the Inebriate Asylum. A postage stamp of earth, surrounded by shark-infested waters, where alcoholics dried out. I couldn’t imagine the daily horror, the scything duties and work in the mattress factory amidst the tremors and delirium and nightmares of withdrawing from an addiction. According to Ludlow’s history, one patient wrote that Peel Island was ‘this most awful degraded Hell I can imagine darkening God’s earth’.
(In another time, would Peg have sent me to this place? At one stage in my life, after I was transferred from 21 Division citing ‘mental exhaustion’, it may not have been out of the realms of possibility.)
As is the way of human nature, it too became a place where those souls amongst us who did not fit in to what we like to call ‘polite society’ were dumped by their families and forgotten. A place just a quick tinny ride from Cleveland, which may as well have been the edge of the world. A place from which you didn’t return.
Then came the lepers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Another chapter of horror.
I began to understand what had been so attractive about Peel to Fairweather, the hermit genius. Here was a community that exactly mirrored his inner isolation and turmoil. The feelings of abandonment he’d suffered since early childhood, when he was loaned out to ageing aunts and other relatives while his parents continued their gala lives in India, before reuniting with him when he was ten. His knowledge that he did not fit into the strictures and structures of functioning society. Peel Island was his inner psyche. He was Peel Island.
It took me a couple of days to ingest the material. Then I hauled the old Peugeot up to Manly, and took tea with Mrs Rosemary Pentimento.
She was exactly as I imagined. A small-framed woman with a wistful little blue-grey cloud of loosely curled hair, and eyes to match. I shook her hand at the front door to her immaculately neat timber cottage and her skin felt as soft and fragile as rice paper.
‘It’s nice to have company,’ she said, ushering me towards a chair on her sunny front balcony. It was completely enclosed on two sides by glass louvers, and for a moment I felt I was floating underwater.
On a small table sat a teapot and two cups and saucers, all with matching red roses embossed in the glaze, and a plate of golden-topped scones. I felt I had entered another decade.
She sat in the chair opposite me and folded her hands.
‘Thank you for seeing me.’
‘Oh, it’s nice to see a face other than my doctor’s,’ she said, smiling.
‘I may be wasting your time, Mrs Pentimento. I am acting only on hunches.’
‘You wanted to know about Fairweather?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I am amazed at the sudden interest in him.’
‘Sudden?’
‘In the past few months you are the fourth person who has sat in that chair wanting to know about Fairweather.’
‘I am?’
‘One was someone who, once upon a time, we might have referred to as a “spiv”. Are you familiar with the term?’
‘I am.’
‘An objectionable man, he was. I have for many years been involved with the local school of arts, and he was — how may I put it? Not the sort of gentleman I would have expected to be interested in the finer arts.’
She seemed to blush at this.
‘And the other person?’
‘A young man. Agitated, as the young tend to be these days. But most knowledgeable not so much about Fair-weather but about Peel Island and its inmates over the years.’
‘And the third?’
‘You may have seen him in the paper. The director of the gallery.’