‘Then the caretaker found the real body of Captain Logan,’ I said. I wanted to hold up a revelatory index finger, but I couldn’t, manacled tight as I was.
‘After all those years, who would have thought? The official history was a lie. Logan had to be upheld as a shining example of colonisation. Murdered by an Indigenous tribe. Not delivered to God by a sensitive young private who had for years carried the guilt and shame of this man’s cruelty, and even more so been the recipient of it. On behalf of the penal colony of Brisbane, Collison snapped, and exacted retribution. How would Logan have looked then, murdered by an underling and no longer the heroic explorer, after which cities and rivers have been named? So the body of a convict was honoured in his place, and nobody was the wiser.’
‘And you, sir, are a descendant of Private Collison?’
‘Proudly so,’ he said. ‘You see, it was in our best interests, too, to keep the family secret. We may have changed our name more than a century ago to protect our interests, but we’re a very wealthy and influential Brisbane family, my friend, and a murderer in the cupboard would simply not do.’
‘Let alone a contemporary Collison going about murdering people.’
‘History is a very powerful thing,’ he said from under the hood, and Brisbane is full of very powerful secrets.’
‘And Mr Logan, from the library?’
‘A cruel little man. Wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if he had suffered the identical fate as his long-lost relative after all this time? A blood relative of Logan, murdered by a blood relative of Collison. Two identical murders, mirroring each other, almost two centuries apart. Isn’t that interesting?’
‘And the corpse of Logan himself? The original Logan? The real Logan?’
‘He made a wonderful fire. And the chestnuts I roasted over the flames were delicious.’
‘You’re insane, Collison.’
‘But my dear fellow, that’s not my name. I’ve never heard of this Collison you talk of.’
I said: ‘Two lines of a family tree collide. The apple ...’
‘... doesn’t fall far from the tree,’ he said.
Of course he let me go. He muttered something about history not being history unless it had its witnesses. I walked out of the Old Windmill and was blinded by the afternoon light. And Collison was gone.
~ * ~
Later, on the Gold Coast, Peg bathed the back of my head and wrists. I didn’t have the energy to explain the wounds, and she didn’t ask. How could I tell her that many years ago, a man had murdered his superior in the scrub outside Brisbane, and the descendant of the murderer had destroyed the corpse to keep the secret and protect the family name? Which suited a descendant of the victim, who also didn’t want his noble relative to lose his place in history?
‘History,’ I muttered to myself. ‘A minefield.’
When Peg was done patching me up, she said: ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’
‘Please. No more surprises.’ I was finding Queensland simply too full of surprises.
She walked me onto the back deck and pointed to the bonsai in the centre of the table. It was my tiny fig. The soil was black and moist, the roots healthy and several baby shoots were appearing on the limbs.
History. It was never dead, fixed, chiselled into stone. It was like the bonsai. A little attention, a bit of close scrutiny and it could flare to life again.
‘The family tree,’ I muttered.
‘What?’ Peg asked.
‘Nothing.’
~ * ~
THREE
MURDER ON THE VINE
~ * ~
1
I would never have had the misfortune of meeting the reprobates from the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe if I hadn’t had the dream. And I would never have had the dream of the Kombinationskraftwagen if I hadn’t watched that darned Kevin Costner film, Field of Dreams, for the ninety-third time. And I might not have watched the Costner film if I hadn’t been seduced by all that seventies ‘peace not war’ palaver, and the battered Kombi that Costner crosses the country in looking for the meaning of life, and James Earl Jones to boot. I don’t think I’d have even been watching Field of Dreams, either, if I hadn’t been invited back to the inner-city Brisbane apartment of my old friend, the bon vivant and restaurant critic Westchester Zim, to share a few bottles of some of his secret ‘finds’ — hush-hush.
We drank a lot of wine, and when I drink a lot of wine I get melancholy, and when I get melancholy I watch Field of Dreams. Enough said. Might I have been seduced by any of this if I wasn’t a sensitive soul with a nostalgic bent for the seventies, having lived it, and felt, in these troubled times, that what the world needed was a bit more love and a lot less war? I didn’t know my entry into the Kombi world would lead to very little love, and a whole lot of war.
You see, I had a dream. A dream where all vehicles were created equal. No, I said that for effect. For levity. For any pitiful little chortle that would take me away from the nightmare of my acquaintance with the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe. You would think I could get through a single year without putting my life in danger, but no. Round the inside of the fishbowl I go, not recognising the same miserable sprig of weed, the lifeless, helmet-wearing deep-sea diver.
This time it wasn’t my fault. I could blame Zim, but he’s dead. I could point the finger at the unexpected demise of my beloved Peugeot 504, which accidentally caught fire in the car park of the Main Beach Surf Club late one afternoon as I was enjoying a dip at dusk. Oh, it caused all sorts of panic. The next morning the local rag claimed that Al Qaeda had come to the coast! Suicide bomber at the beach! But, alas, a post-mortem of the Peugeot’s charred remains revealed just a rupture in the fuel tank on a hot day. A veritable confluence of unfortunate circumstances, which saw her blow like a cheap Chinese firecracker. I have to say, it was pretty impressive. Even from the shallows, where I was wallowing, oblivious, the car park’s neighbouring casuarinas went up with an impressive whoof.
So I was car-less. And it was then that I felt a nostalgic pull for all things simpler and purer. Sure, I’d loved the Peugeot. But I’d always yearned for a Kombi van. And thus the dream of a Kombinationskraftwagen. Not a splitscreen, or a Splittie, as they’re so eye-wateringly known. No, nothing pre-seventies, but a classic Bay Window model. I would buy the ultimate freedom box. I would have one restored, fitted out as a camper, and I would take my son, Jack, away from his fraught, TV-dominated, computer-game-ravaged pixel-poxy future. I would remind him of the forests and the oceans, and we would sit about a campfire on weekends away and bond, as they say these days, and have real discussions, and we would fish and swim and take in lungfuls of fresh, eucalyptus-scented air on our bushwalks, and with any luck he would remember these moments, and possibly take them into his own fatherhood, and hand the baton over to his children. (And being happily predisposed to me, courtesy of all those Kombi trips, lodge his dribbling, incontinent, befuddled old father in a better class of nursing home.)