By flash, do they mean a condensed nanosecond of all you’ve experienced from the crib? Or a spool of film, projected at incredible speed, all blurred and making no sense? I prefer a good old-fashioned slide show, with motes of dust tumbling in the heat and light from the clunky projector, and the screen askew on a rust-pitted stand. But a flash? I’ve staged slide nights that made Lawrence of Arabia look like an advertisement for ChapStick.
And when it comes to this final look back, who would know if it happens or not? The person experiencing it, the only punter in the house, is dead anyway. Aren’t they? I’m as sceptical of this as the tunnel-of-white-light loonies. If death is like driving through the sooty tube under Sydney Harbour, I’ll be buggered if I’m paying a toll for the privilege. As my Uncle Felix said on his own deathbed — fiddlesticks.
It was precisely this time last year that my brick-like, stoic mug made it into the newspapers because of all that hullabaloo about Ian Fairweather and Bribie Island, the gangster known as the Boltcutter and the mad race across Moreton Bay to Peel Island where all the fun and games turned fatal.
After that little adventure, for six months, when I should have been taking out the tinny on the Broadwater and giving the Alvey a workout, I convalesced at home on a plastic banana lounge overlooking the canal. I read cheap detective novels and monitored the curious life of man-made canals with a pair of horse-racing binoculars. It’s more interesting than you think. I kept a little logbook by my side, and if I leaf through it now I could tell you that from my sagging fold-out bed I saw several shark fins scissor past, the usual charter boats groaning with tourists, a gondola featuring a genuine gondolier complete with straw hat, tight trousers and striped shirt (I’m uncertain, to this day, whether he was real, or the colourful by-product of my extensive medications) and a naked young lady who zipped by on a jetski, though even she could have been a blurred dream from my youth.
In short, I inched towards my normal self, albeit with a couple of plugged holes in my leg and midriff, and the nightmares of the Priest and the Boltcutter stopped. That’s when I declared to my Peg that it was time I returned to bona fide retirement.
‘No more hijinks?’ she repeatedly asked. Peg had never really grasped the dangers of my previous employment as a police officer. Nor the accidental adventures of last year. She seemed to think that cleaning the streets of criminal vermin, putting life and limb at risk, and getting shot were things men did to let off a little steam and satisfy something in their primitive natures.
‘No more hijinks,’ I said.
For several weeks, early in my recovery, Peg had returned to Sydney to stay with friends and I had been assigned police protection. I told them it was a waste of time — that if one of the Boltcutter’s associates really wanted to exact revenge on his expired, bullet-riddled behalf, it wouldn’t be difficult to steal up on a prostrate ex-copper about to turn sixty dozing off on a banana lounge. When you live on a canal, all manner of murk can inch in with the tide.
So it was I spent interminable hours playing poker on the back deck with my young constable protector, Rory — a wet, fresh-faced kid with an uncertain grasp of his chosen profession. Having said that, he was a whiz on the barbecue and cooked a mean New York cut steak.
‘Rory,’ I said to him one evening, feeling either heavily philosophical or a tad light-headed from antibiotics washed down with VB. ‘Do you really want to end up like me?’
‘Waddya mean?’ he said.
‘Waddya mean waddya mean? Look at me, Rory. I should be supping at the table of life’s rewards. Visited by loving grandchildren and as full as a Catholic girl’s sock with pride at a career spent serving my fellow citizens. Instead, here I lie, fat and foul, sniffing not the roses, Rory, not the roses, but catching a whiff of human sewage off my canal of dreams ...’
I’d lost Rory at that point. I’d lost myself. Write this down as a life lesson from an old warrior — never mix booze with lorazepam.
‘Whatever,’ Rory said, bored in the way that the youth of today get bored when life fails to seize them by the throat. He put his head in his hands.
‘Rory. RORY,’ I continued. ‘What do you want to DO with your life, son. Inspector? Commissioner?’
‘I wanna do schoolies next year,’ said Rory.
At my request, Rory went back to his usual roster and I was left alone on the canal, albeit with a little snub-nosed companion tucked inside the small blue esky that sat permanently beside the sagging banana.
Then Peg returned, and steadily I recovered, making little excursions to the monstrous shopping precinct, Pacific Fair, where I nearly got skittled and killed by the kiddies’ train that tootles about the complex (the driver alleged he sounded his choo choo whistle, but I’ll be damned if I heard it), and back to The Spit, where Peg wheeled my chair beneath a casuarina and I nibbled on crab sandwiches, wondering if I’d ever rejoin society in quite the same way again.
But the human spirit is an amazing thing, and just a few months ago I was walking awkwardly with a cane, and the month after that I was back in my faithful Peugeot 504 running errands and generally introducing myself to the world once more.
It was during this ebullient period that I struck upon a nice, quiet and safe hobby to, as Peg so eloquently put it, keep me out of the hijinks game. I had decided one evening, staring at the wind-ravaged palm tree at the rear of our house, that I would study genealogy and flesh out the leaves on my hitherto bare and undiscovered family tree.
‘It’s time I traced my roots,’ I announced to Peg.
‘That’s nice,’ she said with the same degree of interest she had expressed in prior obsessions of mine, such as tracking every movie appearance of the Peugeot 504 (personal highlight? The Day of the Jackal) and my interest in time travel.
‘As my first senior-sergeant once told me, you shake a tree hard enough, you never know what nuts might fall out.’
‘That’s nice,’ she said.
‘Who knows what I might find, right? Murderers, poets, potters? I’ll be facing the ultimate question, Peg. Who am I? What is it that made me who I am today? Where am I from? And, in turn, what is my purpose? I have stared down death, Peg. It’s natural to be asking these things.’
‘Okay,’ she said, leafing through a magazine.
‘And how much trouble can you get into, tracing your family tree?’
That is the question that has come back to haunt me, as I sit here, chained by both wrists and ankles, with an eyeless hood over my head, in a pitch-black room deep inside Queensland’s oldest building — the convict windmill on Wickham Terrace.
Who could have known that a few insignificant trips to the refurbished State Library on the banks of the Brisbane River, during which I often daydreamed through the library windows, would lead me up the river’s winding course to the great Wivenhoe and Somerset dams, and to a corpse fatefully uncovered by our endless drought, and — thus — to the heart of a mystery that had waited almost two centuries to surface? That just a year after the last fiasco I would be in hijinks up to my cauliflower ears, again?