‘Ding-dong,’ the voice repeated, ‘you’re dead.’
With astonishing agility, I sprang onto the stage from a standing start. The children howled and screamed with joy, thinking I was some demented surprise element to the show. I stepped to the right, then the left, trying to dodge a bullet that never came. I was bamboozled by the lights, the squealing of small children, a Wise Man I had sent flying in my panic. I slipped. And that’s when my forehead connected with Bingo’s bony knee. When I hit the knee, Bingo apparently reared up (I would only find this out later, as I was unconscious, again, before I hit the stage floorboards) and tossed Tex for six, fracturing his ankle. The pageant had become a horror show. I was out onstage. Tex was howling, grabbing his leg above his left Buckaroo boot. Bingo was limping casually amongst the traumatised Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Wise Men. And my killer was somewhere backstage probably having a good laugh.
When I woke up I was lying on the floor in the Red Cross room of City Hall, a bandage on my head. Sitting in a chair beside me was Barrie Barry.
‘That was some performance,’ he said.
‘How’s Tex?’
‘You mean Santa? Santa’s gone to hospital.’
‘How’s Bingo?’
‘You mean the horse? She wandered out into King George Square, couldn’t find any grass, and came back in. We’ve got her temporarily housed in the press room.’
I sat up with difficulty.
Barrie Barry checked his phone and smiled.
‘What is it? I could do with a laugh,’ I said.
‘You’re famous. They’re tweeting you.’
‘What? Who?’
‘The kids in the audience. The staff here. They’re tweeting all their friends. You’ll be a viral smash hit by tomorrow. ‘
‘I see,’ I said. I didn’t know what ‘viral smash hit’ meant, but it sounded nasty. And the ‘s’, when I said ‘see’, came out strangely. I’d chipped a tooth. The ‘s’ came out suspiciously like a little birdie’s tweet. ‘To be honest, Barrie, tomorrow can’t come soon enough.’
It came soon enough for Barrie Barry. In just over a week I would face eternity, strapped inside the bell in the clock tower. But tomorrow, tomorrow, they would find my little bald council engineer friend naked, his body painted completely red, dead atop the unfinished Go Between Bridge. Go figure.
‘First, I need to show you something,’ Barrie Barry said, helping me to my feet.
And that’s when I went back down into the bowels of City Hall, and found God. Oh, and the first stop on my short tram ride to hell.
~ * ~
10
Lashed inside the giant bell in Brisbane’s City Hall clock tower, the timepiece about to be redecorated with my brains, I could smell that cigar smoke getting stronger and stronger.
Yes, I was about to meet my killer. The last person I would see as the old year folded into the new. The last person I would see, full stop.
As the Monte Christo grew more pungent, I thought of Peg and Jack wondering where I was (or not); the laundry tub back home full of party ice and cheap champagne, a few friends, the air a’twitter with fresh starts, with New Year resolutions.
I had a few. I vowed to trust our house cleaners, even if they did constantly lose my remote control and hoover my booze. I vowed not to get knocked unconscious and turn up naked in the back of the Kombi ever again. I vowed to steer clear of public-transport fanatics with shell-shaped ears. I vowed to investigate this Twitter thing now that my own teeth twittered and tweeted, and to send inoffensive messages to my Twitter friends such as, ‘Just had a piece of lemon meringue. Numnumnum.’ I vowed to be a better husband. And to be nicer to God.
Then my femme fatale was standing below the bell, looking up at me.
‘Happy New Year,’ she said, dragging casually on her cigar. The tip glowed a menacing red. Her greeting came out ‘Appy Nu Yee-har.’
‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Monte Christo,’ I said. ‘We have met before, haven’t we, Mont?’
‘We ‘ave?’ she said in her strange, Euro-trash accent. She was wearing a black cocktail dress, high heels and diamonds twinkled on her ears. ‘Am not sure eef we ‘ave. Your face, zough, eet rings a bell.’
‘Now that’s a knee-slapper. You’d get along very well with my wife. Hey, why don’t you let me down so we can have a decent chinwag and sort this out. ‘ I was losing circulation to my feet. Half an hour ago they’d been tingling. Now I couldn’t feel them at all. Her elaborate rope work would have won her a badge in the Scouts.
I couldn’t see her face properly from my elevated position. But she looked tiny. Embarrassingly so, having had my physical measure on each of our encounters, though I guess she wasn’t responsible for my forehead connecting with Bingo’s knotty knee.
‘Don’t theenk so,’ she said. ‘Not until I have ze box. No box, no deal.’
‘What is this, a game show?’
‘Is no game,’ she said. ‘Give me ze box.’
‘Then you get me away from big clock donger?’ I said, adopting her truncated Eastern European patter.
‘Box first, zen maybe no donger for you.’
Could I have ever imagined being stuck in a life-threatening situation in a dark clock tower with a pocket-sized assassin saying ‘Maybe no donger for you’ when I first moved to Queensland to retire? I won’t answer that.
‘You know Beechnut?’
‘What nut you talk of?’
‘Alan Beechnut?’
‘Allah who nut?’
‘You decked me in his house.’
‘Ohhhh,’ she giggled. ‘Smelly man. I just following you. I not know smelly man.’
‘Why you want box?’
‘No business of yours.’
‘You kill me for box and it no business of mine? Ding-dong, you are joking. Tell me why you want box first.’
I was getting tired of speaking like a Romanian potato grubber. And I was getting tired of hanging around. Literally.
I had seen the holy box, of course. Oh yes. That poor shmuck Barrie Barry had taken me down into the deep, dark foundations of City Hall, a place he knew like the back of his hand, and removed it from an old brick cavity, where he’d stashed it. The box was pitted with rust. But its contents were remarkably well preserved — a small diary, a sheaf of letters, a set of wooden rosary beads and the porcelain statue of a small bluebird, all wrapped in a sheet of soft leather. I sat beside that moist, damp, dank subterranean foundation wall beneath Brisbane and read the diary entries and letters by torchlight. What I saw convinced me — oh he of little faith — that Mary MacKillop would become the first Australian saint. South Brisbane. 1870. Not far from Gibbon Street. A boy kicked in the head by a carthorse. And Mother Mary kneeling beside his still warm corpse. I won’t go any further. You’ll read about it in the future. But this was dynamite. This was of major theological and historical importance.
If the insane Beechnut had gotten his grubby mitts on the box, it might have halted the Clem7 tunnel and given his insane Millennium Tram Master Plan some more traction. But Father Dill and Barrie Barry were right. These relics could not be used for political purposes. Certainly not by some unhinged Scarborough missing link who only changed his Y-fronts once a week.