On the first highlighted line I clicked, the computer froze and a box instantly appeared in the centre of the screen. ACCESS DENIED. SEE STAFF.
I could see the sun lowering itself on to the skyscrapers across the river. I hadn’t even noticed that the Martian had packed up and left. I had accidentally tipped over the bonsai fig at my feet and was under the desk, scraping the loose soil off the carpet and back into the pot, when I noticed someone approach the desk.
I re-emerged, red-faced.
‘Yes?’
‘Could you come with me, please?’
‘And you are?’
‘Just come with me, please.’
‘The tree, it’s a gift, for my wife. I accidentally knocked it ...’
‘Just follow me, please.’
She was an elderly lady in a floral shift. She wore large spectacles attached to a white plastic chain that dangled down each side of her powdered face. She scared the hell out of me.
So I followed, too terrified to contradict her. She was the stern teacher from primary school we all had — the one who could make your bladder tingle with fear, and who never seemed to stop haunting your dreams.
We entered the elevator, me with my shoulder bag over one arm and a shivering bonsai in one hand, as I trailed behind her and the neat and affirmative clack of her Minnie Mouse-style white shoes. We entered a long, well-lit corridor, then turned left and into a dark corridor, until we finally came to the John Oxley Library.
She opened the door for me and I quietly walked inside.
It was empty, except for a man standing in front of the far windows with his hands clasped behind his back. He wore black, and when he turned towards me, I noticed his coat had a familiar wrap-over flap, held by a sequence of brilliantly shiny gold buttons.
And he had a long, narrow, aquiline nose, sharp enough to cut butter.
~ * ~
4
What was it about Queensland that kept tangling me up in the lives of strangers and lunatics? I had a very powerful sense of déjà vu in the chilly air of the John Oxley Library, and the man in the black uniform joined a long line of megalomaniacs I had encountered over the years.
He was short, almost Napoleonic in stature and manner, and he reeked of some deep-seated hatred that would take more than a human lifetime to source. In short (quite literally), he would go to God with the kernel of his psychosis intact and unharmed.
I took my standard line, and attacked first.
‘So, you’re a Johnny Cash fan, then?’ I said.
In the air-conditioned hush of the library, I could almost hear his teeth grind.
I plonked the bonsai down heavily on a nearby desk. I had, en route to meeting Mr Cash, stuffed the golden envelope down the back of my pants. As long as I didn’t sit down, all was good.
‘You like bonsai?’ he said, nodding to the fig.
‘Yeah, me like bonsai.’
‘A curious art. I imagine it would involve much patience, of which I have short supply.’ He had an unusual accent, a gruel perhaps of having lived in other countries, with an old-fashioned Australian boarding-school toffiness behind it. In the darkening library, he could have been twenty years old, or sixty. His hair was cut in an early-sixties-style Beatles bob. It was, quite possibly, the first style he had adopted as a young adult, then maintained all his life: some men’s hair remains frozen in the period when they were most vital and exciting and a vibrant part of the world around them. I have always found this extraordinary — how for some, hairstyles are harder to let go than anything else. Mine? It let go on its own.
‘I’m new to bonsai,’ I said, ‘but it does seem to have a cruel appeal to it.’
‘Cruel?’
‘The dwarfing and managing of nature. The conceit that we can control the world. Play God.’
‘Interesting.’
‘The human race produces many little kings, you know.’
‘Oh yes, I know.’
‘I thought you might.’
‘There are some bonsai trees that are close to eight hundred years old, did you know that?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Well, now you do.’
‘What a little font of trivia you are.’
‘Can I make an assumption?’
‘Be my guest,’ I said.
‘Your interest in family trees is possibly linked to your new passion for bonsai. To care for bonsai you must tend the roots very carefully. If I were an amateur psychologist, I would hazard a guess that your search for your family roots, and that little fig of yours, are somehow related.’
‘How dare you make an assumption about my little fig,’ I said. ‘I would hazard a guess that you would make a terrible psychologist.’
‘Fair enough.’
The library lights suddenly flickered on, and he moved away from the window without taking his hands from behind his back. It was truly cold in the room now, yet I felt a bead of sweat trickle towards the gold envelope stuffed down my trousers.
He looked at me with a smirk. I could see now, in the neon light, that he was, in fact, well into his sixties. The dyed bob looked preposterous on his ageing head, like a very bad beret without the cloth sprig in the centre.
‘My interest in my family tree, by the way, is none of your goddamn business. Do you make it a habit to monitor the activities of people using the library computers? You’re the library detective, are you? Chasing down overdue books?’
‘Hardly,’ he said.
‘Or just a garden-variety busybody without a decent hobby. Am I getting warm?’
The smirk had disappeared and been replaced by a thin, mean line of mouth. His eyes were dark and vicious, as some dogs’ eyes are.
‘So you have an interest in Captain Patrick Logan ...’
‘You have a mad scientist-style office, do you, monitoring peoples’ computer activities? A wall of television screens and a big, high-backed chair and a large red button on the desk to destroy the world? I bet you have a big, mean laugh, too, that echoes through the room when you get all girly and giggly with power.’
‘What an imagination you have. I seem to remember you from somewhere.’
‘I don’t think so. Though I was a member of a Beatles fan club in the sixties. Perhaps we met there. Traded some forty-fives.’
‘You were that fellow who made a spectacle of himself last year. Something to do with the illegal sale of some fake Fairweathers.’
‘That was my twin brother,’ I said. ‘He’s one of your artsy-fartsy types.’
‘Is that so?’
‘That is so. So?’
‘So Captain Logan, commandant of the great convict colony of Brisbane, Queensland, is part of your own ancestry?’