‘Social nitpicking, you say,’ I said to my son.
‘Social networking.’
‘What is that, son?’
‘Yes, Dad. It’s keeping in touch with friends via the internet on a computer, or your mobile phone. You send text messages, post pictures, web links, that sort of thing.’
‘Why don’t you just ring them up if you want to talk to them, son?’
‘This way, Dad, you can keep in touch with a lot of people simultaneously.’
‘That’s very social,’ I said.
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Are you bleeting now?’
‘Tweeting.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, I am,’ Jack said. ‘I’m telling everyone that I’m a sitting here in a chair beside your hospital bed.’
‘Oh. That’s nice. And your friends would find that interesting, son?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Read it to me.’
‘“Sitting in a chair beside my father’s hospital bed.”‘
‘That’s it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Short and tweet,’ I said. He didn’t laugh.
‘With each tweet, Dad, you can use a maximum of 140 characters.’
‘Only 140?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Who says?’
‘That’s the rules.’
‘What can you say with 140 characters? That doesn’t sound like a lot, son.’
‘That’s the way it is.’
‘What are you writing now?’
“‘Explaining tweeting to my sick father.’”
I’d had the torch ready to blast Beechnut. He’d stopped in the doorway. Perhaps he could smell me. Perhaps he’d detected something different in the soupy bouquet of excrement and urine and dead rodents and filthy dishes and rotting food that was his life, like a hint of soap or deodorant on a human being who actually thought washing and cleanliness were a part of everyday civilisation.
I’d hit the torch button.
‘Thank you, nurse,’ I said. A nice nurse had wheeled in my lunch. I sat up. I lifted the steel tray cover. Roast lamb, peas, mashed potato and some boiled carrot. I belched. Rather loudly. My head pounded.
‘What are you writing now, son?’
“‘My father is having disgusting hospital roast dinner for lunch.’”
‘You wrote that?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
I nudged the peas with my fork.
‘What are you writing now?’
‘“Lunch smells like dog sick.’”
‘Your friends would find that interesting?’
‘Yes, because I’m tweeting it.’
‘So because you tweet it they will find it interesting. I see. What now?’
“‘My father issues foul belch.”‘
I was growing suspicious of Jack and his tweeting. Just 140 characters. I noticed that he hadn’t stopped tweeting since I’d woken from my stupefaction. He hadn’t looked me in the eye. He hadn’t looked at me at all. And his responses to my questions were snappy, clipped, truncated. He was answering me in 140 characters or less. And all the while his thumbs were hammering away at a furious pace.
I still didn’t understand what this twittering business was all about. Lunch? Belches? How could that be of any interest whatsoever to a sensible, sentient, halfway intelligent person? Had the world gone mad? You just blithered away to each other on a computer or phone screen? Whatever happened to meeting people face to face? Chatting over a coffee or a wine? Enjoying the pleasure of another person’s company? How could they call it social networking? Antisocial networking would be more appropriate.
I looked to the hospital door, and again recalled Beechnut’s place. For it wasn’t Alan, the president of the Scarborough Tram Society, who’d taken the full brunt of my torch beam. It was one of the most beautiful, curvaceous, well-proportioned — dare I say generously proportioned in this politically correct age — women I had ever seen in my life. Small. Brunette. A Veronica Lake-inspired fall to her hair. Sheer black cocktail dress. High heels. She made you suck in your breath for a fraction of a second. And she smelled, for the brief time I was conscious in her presence, of a combination of Chanel No. 5 and a very expensive cigar.
She’d smiled. Then her martial arts kick to my head had sent me all a’twitter. And into oblivion.
‘Ha!’ Jack roared.
‘What is it, son?’
‘One of my followers just sent through a tweet. Pretty cool, whatever it means.’
‘What does it say?’
“‘Tell your father — Murder, she tweeted.’”
~ * ~
7
During those restful days in hospital, as my bruised melon returned to its normal size and the stiletto puncture wound to my neck healed nicely, I resorted to my age-old method of detective work. I wrote each pertinent fact on a small five- by three-inch index card and placed each one in front of me on my little tray table like a solitaire player.
What did I have?
I had rekindled my friendship with Father Dill after a chance encounter at his chapel in Marilyn Monroe Drive. He seemed disturbed about a recent event, something to do with an old tin box given to him for safekeeping. Within days Dill was dead, sliced up and stacked like grain-fed wagyu beef intended for an organic-butcher shop window. But not anywhere near Marilyn Monroe Drive. The dismembered cairn of my dear friend had been located in a tunnel vent in Gibbon Street, South Brisbane — a street that had once fallen into the orbit of Dill’s former parish, before he was abruptly relocated around the time of the metal-box discovery.
Dill had told me about a peculiar family called the Beechnuts, Mammy Beechnut having recently passed away, and at Dill’s funeral I’d caught sight of that reprobate Alan Beechnut. I had interrogated the cross-eyed public transport fanatic and turned up little, though an inspection of his Scarborough house, the smell of which would have made the eyes of vultures and hyenas water, had exposed his peculiar fetish. I’d discovered what might have been a clue to Dill’s murder in the old framed tram ticket. Then a long-haired siren had stepped into the picture, and sent me to hospital with one swift kick of her beautifully shod foot. To add to the humiliation she — or was it Beechnut, the putrescent little pervert — had stripped me starkers and left me in my Kombi.
I had not seen Peg enter the room, so enmeshed was I in the twists and turns of this peculiar mystery.
‘Hello, darling,’ she finally said.
She sat in the chair my twittery son Jack had occupied a couple of days earlier.
‘When will this end?’ she asked.