‘Tweet, Dad. And that was it.’
‘What?’
“‘Nice spot on the grass with your little bald friend.” Then, “As the clock strikes midday, let the madness begin.” Then, “Bye bye, Barrie Barry Barrey Barry Barrie Barrey.” Dad? Dad? You there, Dad?’
~ * ~
9
Thank goodness for Tex Gallon. Tex Gallon gave me comfort. Tex Gallon gave me shelter. Tex Gallon also knocked me out with his horse.
To know Tex Gallon was to love him. No, he was not some whisky-soaked country and western hack who played out his life in remote Australian RSL halls singing songs about other whisky-soaked hacks who cried into their bourbon in remote RSL halls pining the loss of a woman, a dog, a horse, a ute, whatever. No, Tex Gallon was the city hall reporter for The Courier-Mail and I’d met him a year ago at the funeral of my old friend Westchester Zim. And yes, Texaco Gallon was his real name. His father, a one-time oil rigger in the States, had named him after an oil can.
Tex lived in Brisbane, but he had a property on the Queensland-New South Wales border, and some time ago he’d invited me there for some R and R and a chinwag about journalism and police. Really, he just needed someone to give him a hand cutting back the noxious weeds on his little ponderosa. It was just me and Tex in the bush. For three days, and in something of an alcohol-related stupor, we told stories around an open fire, and played games with sharp hunting knives, and lassoed cattle (at least I think they were cattle, groggy as I was) and plaited his horse Bingo’s mane. Surprisingly for a big man, Tex could fashion a very delicate plait. He rarely went anywhere without Bingo. Sometimes he stabled Bingo in his house in inner-city Brisbane. Tex wasn’t married, and he didn’t mind the smell of horse manure, the two necessary qualities a cowboy has to have if he’s stabling a horse in his city pad.
On the afternoon Jack phoned me to say I was being spied on in the Roma Street Parkland by a person or persons unknown, I didn’t know what to do. I rushed towards King George Square, noticed the statue of King George V astride his horse, and thought of Bingo. I went straight into City Hall and asked an attendant for the press room. As I walked down a long, dark corridor I could hear honky-tonk music. It had to be Tex. And sure enough, there he was squeezed inside the impossibly small closet of a room, leaning back in his chair, his briar and teal-coloured Buckaroo boots up on the desk.
‘Hey, pardner!’ he hollered. Sometimes, it has to be said, Tex slipped into stereotype. ‘You look like you just found a rattlesnake in your rhododendrons. What’s up?’
I spent the afternoon with Tex, who had nothing better to do. Council wasn’t sitting.
I told him I was very concerned for the welfare of my friend Barrie Barry.
‘Say that again?’ he said.
‘Barrie Barry.’
‘You pulling my cowpoke?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Council engineer, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll make some calls. First, I want to show you something.’
Tex gave me a guided tour of City Hall. He pointed out the water-damaged walls. We went up to the former library and he gave me a lengthy dissertation on its cracked concrete beams. Then he took me downstairs, through a low doorway and down another set of wooden stairs into a small, gloomy room. He lifted a little hatch set into the floor.
‘Take a look,’ he said, pointing down.
‘Is that water?’ I said.
‘Yes, siree,’ he replied.
It was a metre or so deep. Black as ink. No wonder the place was going down. Thousands of tonnes of copper, glass and sandstone were sitting on a sponge.
‘One last thing,’ Tex said. He took me through a maze of corridors to a storage-room door. He swung the door wide open.
‘Bingo!’ I said.
There she stood — Tex’s horse — polishing off a large bale of sweet hay. The room reeked of the digested product of the hay, which had dropped out of Bingo’s rear end.
‘She’s going to be a star,’ said Tex, patting her flank. ‘She’s in a friend’s daughter’s school Christmas pageant tonight in the main auditorium.’
‘Don’t you have donkeys in Christmas pageants?’ I asked.
‘You know how much it costs to hire a donkey in Brisbane these days?’
No, I didn’t. But Tex did. He knew those sorts of things. Still, I was pleased Bingo was making her debut.
Later, back in the press room, I ran a few things by Tex.
‘Ever heard of a lunatic called Alan Beechnut?’ I asked.
‘Scarborough Tram Society,’ he said immediately. ‘He sends me two dozen emails a week. One was fifteen thousand words long. A treatise on the Brisbane tram. Not long ago he sat outside the mayor’s office eight hours a day, five days a week, for a fortnight, dressed as an old-fashioned tram conductor. A silent protest. I couldn’t write about it. Too pathetic. Editor’s sick of Beechnut too. He gets more emails than me. No tunnels! Ban the car! Bring back the trams! Editor didn’t even run the picture of Beechnut dressed up as a tram in the city a few years ago. Police arrested him in the Mall. Didn’t know where to cuff him, all tucked up inside that cardboard tram of his. Mayor’s worried, too. He’s had his car tyres slashed. Threatening letters. Then there’s the sabotage in the tunnels. And the red lines.’
‘What red lines?’
‘Started about eight months ago. This nutball started painting red lines down the centre of a few roads in Paddington and Toowong. Then more appeared in other suburbs. People were waking up to find a bright red line down their street. This kept happening in the dark of night, see? Nobody knew what to make of it. They had a few vague sightings but that was it. But now they’ve worked out what the fruitcake is doing.’
‘What is the fruitcake doing?’
‘Painting the entire old Brisbane trams route map on the roads.’
‘That’s not just peculiar. That’s insane.’
‘Could be Beechnut. Who knows?’
‘Smells like Beechnut,’ I said, knowing a bit about that.
It was getting late. I’d successfully hidden myself from my enemy, had had no more details about tweeting from my son, and was due to meet Barrie Barry out the front of City Hall at eight that evening. So to kill some time I waited with Tex and Bingo backstage at the Christmas concert. It was heart-warming to see the little children dressed as Mary and Jesus and the Three Wise Men. Made me feel Christmassy all of a sudden. Then the children poured onto the stage, and finally Tex and Bingo. Tex was dressed as Santa, and Bingo was wearing some antlers.
‘Break a leg, Tex!’ I said. Which is exactly what he did about a minute later. For while I was peering from backstage at the wondrous spectacle, I was suddenly enveloped in an invisible cloud of very expensive perfume, and before I could turn around, the cold steel of a handgun muzzle was pressed against the back of my neck.
‘Ding-dong,’ a sultry voice whispered.
And I said the first thing that popped into my mind was: ‘Avon calling?’