I know there’s blood in the soil in Brisbane. The lash across the convicts’ backs. The hanging of two innocent Indigenous men from the Old Windmill on Wickham Terrace. The murders. The barbarity. The suffering. And then there’s State of Origin. So don’t get pernickety with me.
But there’s something about the folk up here that likes a stoush.
Recently, Peg and I were in Brisbane town for a show and stayed overnight in a hotel. (From our window we could see the night lights of the Gabba, and I had to request a change of room. Reminders of cricket, death and all that. Peg said nothing during this, my delicate stage, but her eyebrows did move up and down curiously.)
Anyway, early the next morning I decided to take some exercise. I happily strode the walkways alongside the river. The birds were a’tweeting. The river a’wending. The light was a glorious dawn orange. I was slap-bang in the middle of a darned Constable landscape (the only artist I knew from that period, or virtually any period, because it had been a trick question on one of our cadet police examinations, constables needing to know Constable, a joke that had circulated forever in police circles, ha ha) when, in a flash, an elderly helmeted cyclist with yellow teeth was gnashing and spitting an inch from my face.
Why don’t you $5#@@! watch where you’re %8$#@! going you &A$#@!’
‘And good morning to you, sir,’ I said.
‘You’re walking in the *A$3(#@! bike lane you halfwitted *A7%$##@’—f?/ moron!’
‘Do you always cuss in clusters of symbols and asterisks at this time of day?’ I asked him politely. ‘Get on your bike, dropkick, before I do the job your orthodontist should have done years ago.’
He continued to rant and rave at high decibels, to the point where everything was jiggling obscenely in his baggy lycra kit. He was like an old hot-air balloon losing its flame. I won’t go into his straggly wicker. For some reason his outfit was covered in sponsor logos and various tidbits of advertising. He’d either stolen the gear, or someone was paying an enormous amount of money for this spotty old geezer to haul his bony backside up and down the Brisbane River at a little over walking pace, his knees clicking, his ancient sweat splashing the path, and his methane output making him a serious climate liability. He had to be stopped for the sake of the environment alone.
In the end, I snapped back, which wasn’t very Christian of me, but I had to put an end to the flow of spittle. It was flipping my stomach.
‘Listen, Lance,’ I said, ‘I’m terribly sorry if I accidentally interrupted your interior fantasy monologue of doing that final stretch of the Tour de France down the Champs Elysees before thousands of your adoring fans despite rattling like a pharmacopeia, but you’re in Brisbane, and there is no one cheering you on, and your arse in those pants looks like a broken umbrella, and you need to get back to your job as parking meter coin counter at the council before I kick you up your velodromes and send you and your frackin’ tricycle to hospital!’
He stopped then, offended. A reasonable response.
‘I don’t work for the council! I’m retired. I’m a multi!’ he spluttered.
A multi? A multi? Did he really just say that?
‘Yes,’ I said in a language familiar to him, ‘a multi-#@!&*A’~!!!’ And I walked off.
Hair triggers, I told Peg over breakfast. They have hair triggers in Queensland. She said ‘Hmmm’ between mouthfuls of fresh pawpaw.
But how else can you explain the fact that just a week later when I was back in Brisbane on a strange religious pilgrimage, suggested to me by My Analyst, I found myself in yet another pickle. But no ordinary pickle. Oh dear me, no. This pickle would make my other recent skirmishes with psychopathic antique dealers, murderous billionaire developers, the rabid relatives of long-dead Brisbane historical figures, Kombi-loving career criminals and the killers of benign and learned restaurant critics look like a small dish of soggy cocktail onions.
This pickle would see me drawn into a festering and fatal mystery involving church and state, a time capsule full to the brim with religious relics, and the ancient secrets of a swamp slap-bang in the middle of the Brisbane CBD. It would take me underneath the metropolis and into catacombs that you never knew existed in the Queensland capital. It would result in me being knocked out by a horse on the City Hall stage in front of the giant organ pipes. Stripped naked. And it would bring me into close proximity with an angel of death who twittered like the most beautiful nightingale, yet was as deadly as anyone or anything I’ve ever met in my meagre time on earth. Even if she did wear Chanel No. 5.
It would also bring me precisely to where I am now: trussed — courtesy of some elaborate and impressive handiwork, I have to admit — to the inside of the primary bell in the clock tower of the Brisbane City Hall.
I’m sure the view up here during the day is very nice. But it’s dark now, in fact getting close to midnight. Has anyone below noticed that the dear old bell has not tolled the hour, or quarter, or half, for the last three hours? No, why would they? It’s New Year’s Eve. I can hear the little squalls of their laughter and hooting and happiness down in King George Square.
You see, Peg? Do you see now why I was obsessed with the grim reaper? Lord knows I warned you, Peg. But who listens to an old former cop with his feet the colour of marbled Sicilian sausage, his memory shot, his portly frame oft shot at, and his foolish trusting heart in the goodness of the human race broken more times than white plates at a Greek wedding?
I can, too, see my wristwatch from this uncomfortable trussed position. In exactly twenty-seven minutes my tweetering songbird will reactivate the clock, and the enormous clapper will strike my head against the waist of the brass bell. And it’s goodnight nurse for me.
Down below, they will cheer in the New Year to the familiar sound of a much-loved donger, albeit in a slightly wet A-flat.
~ * ~
2
I’ll tell you one thing. Proximity to death certainly clears the head. And nasal passages for that matter. I found, strapped and dangling inside the City Hall bell, that my sense of smell became extremely sharp. I could pick a lamb kebab being scoffed in Queen Street a few hundred metres away. Some jasmine, probably way over in the Roma Street Parkland. And I caught a whiff of cigar smoke somewhere down below me in the clock tower. My killer, my little tweety bird, was having her last suck on a Monte Christo before the New Year.
There, ninety metres above King George Square and its monster Christmas Tree and star, with my melon just minutes away from being dashed by a clock hammer against a 4.25 tonne bell (ding-dong, you’re dead), I thought of what Peg might put on my tombstone. He Was Never Immediately Recognised, but His Face Rang a Bell? Not even Peg would stoop that low. (Would she?)