These, and other things in that so-called film of my life, unspooled before me as I waited, in agony, for my fate inside that old windmill, a citadel to Brisbane’s brutal founding.
Then I heard a padlock spring open, a chain rattle and footsteps echo towards me.
~ * ~
2
When I was a child, growing up in the greasy back lanes of South Sydney, the highlight of my week was quite literally the call of the rabbit-oh, and I experienced both a perverse attraction and a stomach-turning revulsion at the rows of skinned rabbits swinging with the gait of the horse and carriage as it passed the front of our crumbling terrace house. I didn’t know it then, but I would later earn my living in a profession in which blood and guts were a common part of the landscape.
Another highlight of my childhood was learning that in the nineteenth century, a member of our family had been a bushranger. I became obsessed with bushrangers, and of course Ned Kelly. I was punished for cutting a rectangle out of our only bucket. I ambushed innocent passers-by on our street, ordering them to stand and deliver. They rarely stood, and more often than not delivered a cuff across the back of my square head. There was a kid in my class at school whose name was Glen Rowan. I thought he was the luckiest boy in Australia.
Memory is a strange thing. I had never seen a genuine South Sydney rabbit-oh because they petered out around the end of the Great Depression. But my grandfather had told me of them and must have described them so powerfully that they became a part of the family’s collective memory, and in turn evolved into an actual experience for me. If I close my eyes I can still see them, yet in fact I never witnessed them. How can this happen?
As a grown man, I saw it time and again while taking the confessions of assorted felons. If you ever want to meet the most imaginative and creative people in society, forget the novelists and painters, the poets and filmmakers. A seasoned hit man or con artist can out-create them hands down; can invent the most convoluted, plausible and believable narratives time and again without missing a beat. To be a great criminal is to be a great artist.
I have listened to murderers who can describe a room or restaurant or train carriage in which they swear they were during a killing — the architecture of their alibi — down to such fine detail that I’ve later had to verify it, or not, with my own eyes. The minutiae of their imaginings can be so great, you can smell the coq au vin drifting out from a restaurant kitchen, or hear a specific bus rumbling past a specific house on a specific street at an exact time. They’re so convincing they end up convincing themselves, and all that comes of this are muddied waters and a lot of wasted legal fees at trial.
As for the bushranger, I have never been able to prove or disprove the existence of one in my antecedents, and it has been a question that has haunted my life. Peg says, get over it. But I’m a curious fellow, and I hate things left unfinished.
That’s how I found myself hitting the highway to Brisbane in my coughing, trembling Peugeot, to once again begin a peaceful and measured retirement. I had had a most violent, unexpected retirement interruptus, and I was keen to get it back on track.
This time Peg had organised my first mobile telephone.
‘Now, if you get into any more mischief,’ she said in her sing-along voice, reserved, or so I’d thought, for our son, ‘you can ring home.’
She had of course seen me staring at it on the kitchen bench as if it was foreign matter dropped from outer space, and nudged me towards it.
‘Even you can work out how to use it,’ she said. ‘Green is for go. Red for stop.’
‘Get ready for the yellow light. Thanks, Big Ted.’
‘You can do it.’
How wrong she was. And how totally incorrect she was to think that some flimsy piece of plastic and computer chip could possibly keep me safe in the advent of ‘mischief. I couldn’t see it stopping a speeding bullet.
Yet there it remained, in the glove compartment of the car, and it was still there, chirping merrily, in the cool of the library car park during the hours I spent upstairs, chafing my feet merrily against the floral carpets during those tentative investigations into my family history.
I have a Queensland connection, you see. It was in this fair state that my relatives settled, a long way from the Irish peat bogs of our ancestral home, and scratched out a new life. It was Queensland that proved the perfect Petri dish for the family bushranger. If he had existed, I’d find him here in the State Library records.
What I had not anticipated was the popularity of genealogy. Arriving at the library mid-morning, I was immediately lured by the smell of roasted coffee beans at Tognini’s Café, and sat out on the comfortable cream chairs leafing through my newspaper. I thought I had all the time in the world.
When I finally ambled up to the research room I noticed a queue the likes of which you usually only saw at All You Can Eat food troughs in your local RSL. I stood in the line behind an elderly man with giant ears, and in those ears were lodged a pair of giant hearing aids. Each had several small antennae poking from the device. He looked like Ray Walston in My Favorite Martian. I bet he got great reception on SBS.
‘How long, do you reckon?’ I asked him.
He ignored me. There was a faint whistle about him and his monstrous electronic extrusions. I guessed he couldn’t walk fifty metres without a pack of dogs following him.
I could see into the family-history zone and old men and women were hunched over computers and microfiche machines, so I decided to leave it until lunchtime. I had a hunch most of them would clear out around then.
It proved to be the right decision. It gave me time to explore the library. Somehow, I found myself in a red cube of a room with a little terrace of seats that seemed to hang out over the river itself.
I was the only person in this peculiar but deeply satisfying room, and the little slivers of light reflecting off the surface of the river meandered through the room like a school of pilchards. After a while, I forgot about the family bushranger; the dark, leafless limbs of my family tree yet to be explored; the healing bullet wounds in my leg and torso. I was having, as I had read about but never quite understood, a transcendental moment beside the Brisbane River.
In the end I got the nods. But I didn’t want to leave the room. I would become a Buddhist. I wanted to be connected to all of nature and its beauty and be kind to animals and fill my person full of peace, tight as a helium balloon.
I watched the CityCats glide past like colourful, buoyant moments from my life as a heathen, carouser and all-round larrikin. I got lost in thoughts of the great Brisbane River itself, forming in the Stanley Ranges, meandering down to the city and pushing out into Moreton Bay, and felt I was hovering over it — a curious passage it has, curling and folding back on itself, as if resistant to dissipate and join the salted bay — and viewing my life in its entirety.
Then a single noise dropped me out of my reverie. A small clink. I turned, and there, sitting on one of the wooden benches near the back of the empty room, was a tiny bonsai tree in a jade-green glazed pot.
It had not been there when I entered. I stood, my wounds suddenly dull with pain, and approached the little tree. I sat beside it. Studied it. I’m no botanist, but it looked like the perfect, miniature facsimile of the grand fig trees you see around Brisbane. Under the pot was a gold envelope.