How did this all begin?
It ain’t no Hollywood murder drama, I can tell you that. Life — or should I say death — doesn’t work that way. There are two main ingredients in the murder biscuit, son, a wise old homicide-squad detective once told me. Greed and sex. What about killing for pleasure? Revenge? Pure hatred? A pesky mother-in-law? A moment of madness? Too complicated, son. You’re thinking gordon blur (I think he meant cordon bleu) when you should be thinking Arrowroot biscuit, my boy.
The things you learn in the police force.
No, this started in church. Well, let me be specific. This started in a confessional booth in a nondescript house of worship in Gold Coast suburbia. This started with me going down on my spectacularly cartilage-challenged knees in a dull white cube of plywood and pine with a purple plastic faceted door handle in 35-degree heat in late November.
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned ...’ And that, I have to say, lit the fuse.
What was I doing there? What was a grizzled agnostic with dicky knees and half a university degree in nothing much doing in a holy sweatbox in Marilyn Monroe Drive on the Glitter Strip?
My Analyst. I blamed My Analyst.
‘Do you believe in God?’ she had asked me the week before.
‘Do you know, I wish I had thought of and patented that question,’ I said, wriggling my socked toes on her studded leather couch, trying to get some colour back in my pinkies, which I knew were now whities, courtesy of the ageing process, or, to be accurate, grey-yellowish-violetish-custardish protrusions with nails the colour, quality and curvature of a hoary mythical dragon’s talons. (You now know why I don’t remove my socks very often.) ‘I wish I had a dollar for every time you’d asked that question in your professional career,’ I went on. ‘That would have to be the most repeated question in human linguistic history, apart from “How are you?”, “Can you pass the gravy?” and “Where’s the remote control?”‘
‘This is avoidance,’ she said. ‘You are avoiding the question.’
I hadn’t heard her. I was, in fact, asking myself, ‘Where is the remote control?’ I’d hoped to catch a little live test cricket on the television before my session, and hadn’t been able to find the darned thing. I cursed the cleaners. Not only did they take it as part of their brief to rearrange the furniture and alter the geography of the refrigerator during each visit, but they also took the odd swig from the bottles on my drinks trolley. Oh yes, I was onto them. I marked the bottles, and I used an age-old trick suggested to me by an old friend in Fiji, who’d had similar problems with his cleaners. You turn the bottle upside down, then mark the level. They never twig, these hordes of house-cleaning lushes. I ordered Peg to sack them. She sent me back out to the camp stretcher in the garage.
‘Yes?’ my analyst persisted.
‘Yes, what?’
‘You’re avoiding the question. About God.’
‘What do I know about God? If Einstein couldn’t figure it out, then what do you expect from me?’
‘More avoidance. Let me take a wild guess. You had a repressive religious upbringing — you had heaven, hell, good and bad, black and white, you had guilt and subservience, then you went into the police force, into the wider world, saw that life wasn’t so straightforward, read a bit of Jung, toyed with a little Marx and Trotsky, rebelled against the faith of your parents, wore a beret, smoked French cigarettes and decided that was enough to rid you of your theological childhood baggage.’
‘Noooo!’ I said, a little too dramatically.
‘You didn’t do that?’
‘I never wore my beret in public!’ I resented being so transparent. I sulked for a short while. I wanted a therapist who couldn’t read me, went off on wild and amusing tangents about my inner life, gave me laughable remedies and sent me on my way. I wanted to feel superior. It was one of the reasons I was in therapy in the first place.
Wasn’t it the late, great Puerto Rican actor Raul Julia who asked, why spend a hundred bucks on therapy when you could smoke a good cigar for twenty-five, and if your psychological problem came back, so what? Go smoke another cigar. Then again, hadn’t Raul died of stomach cancer? I didn’t want to get into that carcinogenic conundrum. But I would not be accused of wearing a beret in public.
‘See you next week,’ said My Analyst, glancing up at her clock.
But it preyed on me, the question of God. I mulled it over. It grew bothersome. It was an itch that needed a back scratcher.
I got home and double-checked the levels in the whisky and gin bottles and found the remote where the cleaners had hidden it, wedged down beside the couch cushions where I sat every night, and decided to go to confession for the first time in half a century, just to see if there was any life in the old dog yet.
‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned,’ I said in the confessional box in Marilyn Monroe Drive, deep in a suburb that neither Peg nor my friends and associates would ever visit. I had to nut out this question of faith with complete anonymity.
‘It is,’ I went on, ‘it is ...’
‘Yes, my son.’
‘It is ...’
‘Yes, my son.’
‘It is ...’
‘A long time since your last confession?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘So what are your sins?’
Now that’s not a question you hear every day. And it’s not a question any right-minded padre would be asking me, what with fifty years of credits in the sin department. Did this guy really know what he was getting into? It was like someone offering to help take your rubbish to the tip, then seeing a thousand dump trucks, filled to the gunnels with vile detritus, parked out the front of the house. With their motors idling. With crows pecking at the filth.
‘Er ...’ was all I could say.
‘Long time away, comrade?’ the priest asked.
And at that very second I knew it was him. Father Dillon O’Shee. Prison chaplain. Long Bay. Sydney. Seventies. When I was working in 21 Division, the notorious vice squad, I’d crack heads and he’d bless them. We had a harmonious working relationship.
‘Father Dill?’ I asked.
Later, we went out for beer at a nearby tavern in James Dean Boulevard (what was it about street names on the Gold Coast?) and he filled me in on his clerical career. He was due any month for retirement.
‘You look good,’ he said.
‘I look like a dog’s breakfast.’
‘Life’s treated you well.’
‘I have feet the colour of Italian sausage.’
We slotted straight back into our old affection for each other, and as he drank his schooner I noted a little pinch of concern in his eyes.
‘Time for you to confess, Dill.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Out with it, Dill.’