‘Come in,’ he said in a flat voice.
I was dry, retching. I could see, beyond him and into the house, towering piles of old, yellowing newspapers and bags of garbage and, I think, a rat gambolling on the linoleum bench in the dim kitchen.
‘Let’s take a walk, Beechnut,’ I said, and grabbed him by the flannelette arm. It was wet with old, cold sweat.
‘You got a warrant?’
‘Cork it, Alan. I got two fists the size of Christmas hams. That do?’
‘You’re hurting me.’
‘Be a good boy, Alan.’
I let go of his arm and he reluctantly followed. He had the sullen look of a lad whose favourite choo-choo train had just been broken.
We went down to the water. I sat at one end of a park bench and ordered him to seat his rump at the other end. Even through the fishy stench of the bay I could smell him and his house and his dead mother.
‘Friend of Father Dillon’s, were you, Beechnut?’
‘I don’t have to say nothing.’
‘You seemed a pretty happy chappy for a bloke at another man’s funeral.’
‘I could call the cops.’
‘And I could pin those ears of yours back permanently, without surgery. You get my drift?’
‘You a cop? You talk like some TV cop or something.’ He stared out at the water. His left toe was jiggling away inside his sandal. The toe gave him away. People trying to hide something should never wear sandals.
‘I’m the man who can put your egg inside a milk bottle, Alan.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. So tell me, how’s your Mammy?’
At this, his body stiffened and those eyes came alive. Not just alive — they burned with a heat you could roast a marshmallow over.
‘You loved your Mammy, didn’t you, Alan? Yesss. Poor little Alan. Tell me. Did Father Dillon do a nice job at the funeral?’
Beechnut just stared at me. And I saw, as I had at Dill’s funeral, that crooked corner of his mouth. If I had to continue in this religious frame of mind, the only emotion that could produce such a hateful, malevolent, murderous face was pure, organic wrath.
‘Don’t talk about my mother,’ said Beechnut, finally.
‘No? Why not?’
‘Don’t talk about my mother.’ His voice had changed. It now had the guttural whine of a toy losing its battery power and had a deeper timbre. It went to the heart of the Beechnut.
‘I’m just curious, Alan. Why you chose Father Dillon to perform the service, all the way down in South Brisbane, when I’m sure you’ve got perfectly adequate priests and churches and caskets and ground to bury people in, or rose bushes to scatter ashes under, here in delightful Scarborough.’
His toe stopped. He got up and started walking back to his fibro cesspit.
‘Alan!’ I shouted after him playfully. ‘Pweese come back, Alan!’
He strode off, hunched and purposeful. But I wasn’t done with Beechnut yet.
It took hours, but my surveillance paid off. At dusk he pedalled down the side of the house and into the street on a Malvern Star that should have been in a glass museum cabinet.
I waited until he reached the end of the street and turned out of sight. I waited another few minutes.
Then I entered the house of death. Why do I do these things? Why is it so?
~ * ~
5
I tiptoed through the back door of Maison Beechnut, hit the Maglite torch button, and instantly recognised the depth and quality of screwball I was dealing with.
Oh, My Analyst would have loved this little Scarborough seaside shack. There was at least a decade’s worth of work for her in the maze of Beechnut’s psychoses. There was also at least a decade’s work here for my bum-lush cleaners. A quick bench wipe, a run over with the mop and a swig of Bombay Sapphire this was not.
Alan Beechnut was not next to godliness, let’s put it that way.
Luckily I had found some of my emergency leftover face masks from the swine-flu scare tucked away in the Kombi. I snapped one on in Beechnut’s foul kitchen, yet the house’s pungent gruel of dead air still managed to creep through the sieve and thicken my tongue.
‘You dirty little boy, Beechnut,’ I mumbled through the mask. The torch beam picked up a great V-shaped fan of fat on the wall behind the ancient stove. It went up the wall and extended a short way across the ceiling. There was fifty years of grease here, a grand slick of it the colour of nicotine. I burped through the mask. There were sauce bottles on a shelf that had stopped being made when Menzies was prime minister. There were tins and boxes of powdered mustard and jelly that collectors would have bid for on eBay. Just a fragment of the filthy linoleum floor would have excited scientists in any self-respecting disease research unit. I was not amazed that Alan Beechnut lived here. I was amazed he was still alive in this filth.
I passed the bathroom. I didn’t even want to look in there. I imagined the drains filled with human hair plugs. I burped again.
I inched my way down a short hall, squeezing past huge stacks of bundled newspapers, then entered what should have been a lounge or dining room. And there it was — the epicentre of Alan Beechnut.
In my time as a police officer I saw many strange things, let me tell you. You get access to private dwellings and you’re going to witness some weird stuff. You wouldn’t believe the half of what I stumbled upon. Altars. Grottos. Indoor temples. Hundreds of candles around a single photograph or object. Porcelain-cat collections, jam-lid collections, collections dedicated to Elvis, stones, suggestively shaped vegetables, forgotten pop stars, even a dust collection. The strangest was a penthouse suite in Double Bay that venerated a particular breed of merino ... Well, I won’t go into that here.
But I had never, until Beechnut, come across a shrine to public transport.
I whistled through the mask. Public transport en masse would have been odd enough. But, no. Beechnut’s worship was focused. He was, it seemed, in love with the Brisbane tram.
A third of the room was filled with the sawn-off, snub-nosed front end of a real Brisbane tram — a little three-window cabin with a single headlight. I imagined Beechnut sometimes donned a small, stiff white cap and ding-dinged his way down the Queen Street of his imagination. He had shelves and shelves filled with little handmade tram models. On his wall were framed tram-route maps and, curiously, an old advertisement for Vincent’s headache powder.
In a tall bookcase he had neatly placed dozens and dozens of thin, red-coloured notebooks. I pulled one out from the middle shelf, opened it and strafed the contents with my torchlight. There were dates in a left-hand column and notes in tight, cramped handwriting, the letters teeming on the page like sugar ants. The notations were tedious, strangely abbreviated diary entries for tram rides taken in the city of Brisbane dating back to the mid-sixties. I checked the top-shelf notebooks. These were in different handwriting and went back to the late thirties. Perhaps his father’s missives. On the bottom shelf the last notebook ended on 13 April 1969.