Sometime during the lunch, however, his government friend on the food and wine judging panel had sidled up to the table and uttered some quiet words to Zim. And that’s when Zim wandered out to the flagstone balcony with the million-dollar view, wrote down a few notes on one of his little index cards, then strolled over to inspect the vines that ran in trellises down the front of the red-soiled ridge. Flick had hoped to get Zim — and prevent the bad review — in the quietness of Zim’s own Brisbane apartment with the poisoned VW wines that, through government contacts, had made their way into the reviewer’s hands. But Zim wasn’t of such low breed as Flick. He didn’t guzzle the wine straight away. It was something Flick, despite his physical transformation, could never understand. Of course Zim had cellared the wine. Of course he had postponed the satisfaction for the perfect moment. Had waited for the right meal to complement the wine.
Frustrated, and not sure what Zim knew, Flick had to supervise the killing himself. At the winery restaurant. A heart attack. Right there in front of the lunchtime crowd. Flick knew a thing or two about human nature, I’ll give him that. When Zim went down, the diners didn’t rush to his aid or run about screaming and waving their arms in the air. They did what most people do. They kept on eating, and felt both sorry and embarrassed for the old guy out in the vines. They thought briefly about their own mortality, in between dessert and the cheese plate. And that was that. It would have been bad manners to watch as his body was removed on a stretcher. Zim’s VW wine had been poisoned with something that promoted the illusion of sudden death by heart attack. But those few words on the index card — they were worse than a bad review. And they had survived, and I had retrieved them. Zim. He was a true journalist to the end.
What nobody knew was that when Zim encountered a bad restaurant experience, he gave the establishment the professional courtesy of returning for a second time to test the first experience. Maybe they’d had an off day. He’d been there once before, you see, and filed away his first set of notes. And he’d returned to those exact notes, after his extended tipple in the backbencher’s room at Parliament House, and jotted down some explosive gossip about a German developer called Flick. And there they stayed, in the file drawer.
‘Do you enjoying reviewing restaurants, Zim, even after all these years?’ I had once asked him. And he said resolutely, ‘It’s the job to die for.’
The Kombi made it to the Tweed border before the crank shaft seized and she died on us. Peg hadn’t even finished filing her nails.
As I kneeled down at the back of the van, peering into the engine cavity and pretending I knew what I was looking for, my wife, standing behind me, let out a little exhortation of surprise.
‘Have you been dyeing your hair?’ she asked, shocked.
Ahhh, I thought. Isn’t it nice to be noticed, albeit belatedly?
~ * ~
FOUR
MURDER SHE TWEETED
~ * ~
1
It is said that when grown men are about to meet their maker, they cry out for one of two things — God, or their Mammy.
I have discussed this with my long-suffering wife, Peg — being the post-modern, non-sexist, egalitarian metrosexual that I am. I would probably holler for a doctor. If my doctor happened to be my Mammy, even better. Who would women shout for at their time of death? Their saviour? Their father? ‘Their hairdresser,’ said Peg. I had a feeling she wasn’t taking me seriously.
But I was taking me very seriously. I had been thinking about death a lot. I mean a lot. When you ponder the grim reaper during the drinks break of a cracker 20/20 cricket match, you know what’s in the forefront of your mind. And when you have a dream in which a figure who looks remarkably similar to Ricky Ponting, in a black hooded cloak wielding a scythe, is chasing you through a misty wood at midnight, you know it’s playing on your subconscious. (That would have to be better than Merv Hughes with a scythe, my analyst reasoned. Thank you, I said to her, but can you save the sport-themed gags for a time that’s not on my coin?) And when you awaken bolt upright and lathered in sweat from the aforementioned dream, holding your index finger in the air and shouting ‘Out!’, you know you need professional help.
It was Peg’s idea, the analyst. Peg’s theory was that my retirement had become some sort of subconscious frustration that I could only salve by creating the drama of my previous working life, and that this in turn may go back even further — to a possible undiagnosed post-traumatic disorder relating to the violence inherent in my career as a police officer and the vast quantities of human carnage I had taken on board over the decades. Either that, or I had an undiagnosed tumour short-circuiting my brainbox.
That’s how I met My Analyst, as I called her, who had a small consultation room between a plastic surgeon and an ice cream shoppe at Main Beach.
During this time of my personal angst, my beloved Peg was considerate. During my cricket death dreams she assigned me to the fold-out bed in the guest room. Fair enough. She said if I started calling for a third umpire I’d be in the garage.
‘What is it with you and death at this time of year?’ Peg said. ‘You’re supposed to be happy, full of yuletide warmth, a cuddly Christmas feeling. This is a time for family, not thoughts of death.’
‘And when is your mother arriving again?’
For that little gem I was sent to the garage anyway.
But hey, I have every reason to be skittish. Is it any wonder why, in my sixties, I’m thinking about eternity a little more than usual after all I’ve been through in the past few years? What is it about Queensland? I came up here to enjoy what my colleagues and friends called my ‘autumnal period’, and I’ve been shot at more in the past three years than in the entire thirty-seven I spent in the New South Wales police force. And that’s taking into account the era in which I served, especially around Kings Cross and Surry Hills, when bullets rained like, well, rain. They were tough times, kiddo. You needed a shotgun and a hardhat just to cross the road from the station to buy a cream bun from Madame Petrovsky’s continental bakery on Macleay Street. (Madame Petrovsky, on the other hand, needed no weapons — not with that steely single black whisker squiggling out of a mole on her chin, and a gaze hard enough to slice clean through a block of borodinsky rye.)
But Queensland in the new millennium? Peace and quiet? Forget it. I should have been enjoying some quality time on my banana lounge, watching with fascination the colour change in my feet, year by year, as my circulation plummeted. I should have been left alone in my dotage to find new sprigs of hair in unexpected bodily crevices, remember nothing about the day before yet recall with excruciating clarity the wet carcasses of bunnies swinging on the rabbit-oh’s cart when I was a wee lad in South Sydney, and to discover, all of a sudden, that the only things that really matter at the end of life are food and the exact locations of public lavatories. This was no autumn, brothers and sisters. This was permanent summer, global-warming style.
What did Queensland have against me? Is it because I’m from New South Wales? And before you get started, don’t worry. I know the history. I’ve read all about Separation in 1859 and how the resentment of New South Wales was formally introduced to the Queensland genetic make-up on that day in December a century and a half ago when statehood was formalised from a balcony in Adelaide Street.