Читать книгу The Dragon's Skin - Ross Gray - Страница 15

Tommy discovered it was difficult maintaining dignity and engaging in civilised and reasoned argument when your fly was undone, your nose was in a urinal and someone’s foot was on the back of your neck. This was hardly a revelation. There was no need to experience the situation to appreciate it. Simple use of imagination would suffice, but why would you imagine such a circumstance? You’d have to be some kind of sick wick-twiddler, like a masochist or a novelist, to bother.

Tommy had ducked down to the Valley at sparrow’s fart to catch the canter of a couple of likely gee-gees and grease a strapper he knew who knew things – things about horses. He’d watched a gallop or two, milked the strapper for all he could – which proved to be a half a cup of soy – and was legging it for the car park when nature whistled urgently from his satin polyester boxers. Cold weather and coffee: the bane of the baby boomers.

He thought he might have to piss against the back of the stands but, as luck would have it, the public toilets were open – and deserted. He drained the dragon and was giving its head a damned good shake, wondering if he could get out before he was asphyxiated by the pungent fumes of disinfectant, when something like Phar Lap at full gallop slammed between his shoulderblades, and spread him like Vegemite over the porcelain tiles. Then his legs were either taken from under him or they chose to cut and run without telling him. He found himself flat on his belly, his face wrenched painfully to one side, trying to suck into his lungs air that was not diluted by urine.

Through the pinheads of light that were bobbing before his eyes to the rhythm of his agony he could see his stainless-steel thermos still standing where he’d placed it an aeon ago. Perhaps if he could just reach it he could – what? – impress his assailant with his ability to pour a cup of kindness, yet? His assailant: now there was the rub. It might be helpful to figure out who that might be. Let’s see, to whom did he owe money? Well, fuck, everyone. But he wasn’t in so deep that anyone would kill him. Was he? Nah, that’d be just bloody silly. How’d they get their money if he was a worm farm? And you wouldn’t feed a greyhound a pound of his flesh. Nah, just a friendly warning.

His brain was clearing. He began to run a list in his mind. It was a long one, and he didn’t think he’d left anyone off. There wasn’t a name on it that would have scratched him – not yet. He couldn’t pick a favourite. He decided he wouldn’t lay out on this one, he’d just lie here, patiently, until the stewards announced the result of the photo.

It seemed as if he’d been there for hours before he heard the voice, but it was probably only seconds. Time dragged when you weren’t having fun.

‘Nice coat, Tommy – cashmere, alpaca? Nose hairs of the Afghan Fruit Yak?’

‘Oh shit!’ said Tommy. Because his left cheek was pressed like a waffle into the stainless-steel grid over the urinal trough it sounded more like ‘Ugh thshith’. ‘Maeve?’ he added, panic pinking his voice. It sounded more like ‘Maypth?’.

‘G’day, Tommy.’

Oh shit, thought Tommy, becoming really concerned for his wellbeing for the first time since hitting the wall, I’m listening to my own piss dribble by under my left ear and Maeve Maguffin’s size ten Doc Marten is jammed under my right. In Tommy’s narrow universe this was a revelation, of the apocalyptic kind. And Maeve assumed the proportions of a rider capable of sitting astride all four horses. Oh shit!

‘G’day, Tommy,’ Maeve repeated with prejudice. The pressure on his face printing the words in bold type.

Oh good, thought Tommy, the cops’ll be able to take a plaster cast of my cheek and identify the bitch by the tread of her clodhoppers.

‘G’ay, Maypth,’ he said. It looked like his luck, a rank outsider at the best of times, might have thrown a shoe. Maeve-fuckin’-Maguffin! Built like a brick shithouse, with a face that kept a thousand ships in dry dock. She hadn’t been on his mental list. He didn’t owe her money but she’d be representing someone to whom he did owe money – and more; someone his list had also not included. A teensy oversight there, Tommy.

He felt the pressure from Maeve’s boot ease. Tentatively, gingerly, he struggled to his elbows. The vapours of his breath and the vapours of his waste entwined like old friends snuggling against the chill.

‘Don’t bother to get up for me, Tommy. Just make yourself comfortable while we chat.’

‘Can’t I at least turn around, Maeve? Y’know how I love t’see ya.’

She gave him a not-unfriendly cuff over the ears that buoyed his hopes – a little. ‘Don’t get frisky, Tommy, this is business.’

Her mouth was closer to his ear when she said this and the sour fumes of alcohol swam to him through sweet waves of mint. Tommy’s hopes lost their water wings. Jesus! Maeve was off the wagon. A sober Maeve was fearsome; a drunk Maeve was awesome. She was not a happy inebriate. And a less than sober Maeve on a mission for the sisterhood was – well, there wasn’t a word in the dictionary; not that Tommy had looked lately.

He began to adjust his demeanour to one more suited to his new appreciation of the circumstances. Adopting a querulous tone seemed to have a soothing effect on Maeve’s savage breast. Not that he was an expert. He hadn’t had that much to do with Maeve. She loomed more as a legend in his life than a corporeal presence: a whispered sanction, like the bogeyman.

She was a dyke, so they said. And they said she was a dyke because she was too fucking ugly to get a bloke. And she had a chip on her shoulder the size of a mallee root because she was too fucking ugly to find another dyke who would let her save the Low Countries. That’s what they said. She certainly didn’t spend anything on appearances or self-improvement. In fact she seemed intent on the reverse. Like a sort of anti-Michael Jackson, time seemed to be colluding with Maeve to carve her into Captain Hook rather than Peter Pan – or maybe the crocodile. Maeve had been a cop back in the good old days before Commissioners of Police marched in parades of gay pride. They said she put the hard word on a superior officer and was on the footpath in civvies before the ink dried on her resignation. That’s what they said.

Tommy understood those good old days. These days? Shit!

Maeve was patting him down. She had his wallet. He felt his scrotum, and everything in its proximity, shrivel. Christ, now she had a handful of his belt and had hefted his backside up to grope around his balls. She wouldn’t find anything there: he doubted that his ship would ever leave dry dock again. She removed his shoes.

‘Jesus, Maeve,’ he said, querulously. ‘I just paid off on a tip. I’m runnin’ on empty.’

‘Who’s my client, Tommy?’ Maeve coaxed.

His voice wound up in pitch. ‘How the fuck wo—’

‘Tommy!’

‘Janet,’ he conceded with a sigh.

‘And what does Janet want, Tommy love?’

‘Three thousand two hundred and seventy-two dollars.’

‘And …?’

‘And forty-five cents.’

‘Glad you’re retaining your sense of humour, Thomas.’ She flicked him on the tip of the ear with her finger. ‘And …?’ she prompted.

‘And the kid’s birthday present,’ he said grudgingly. And querulously.

‘She’d like that delivered,’ said Maeve. ‘Personally.’

‘Aw jeez, Maeve …’

‘And then there’s the matter of my fee.’

‘Oh jeez, Maeve!’ Querulous scratched. Indignant in the mounting-yard.

‘Tommy.’

‘If the tip I just got doesn’t pay off, Maeve, I’m rooted. Honest. I’m down to me uppers.’

‘A lotta tread there, Tommy,’ she said, tapping him on the head with his Florsheims.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Serial monogamy is a lifestyle for the rich and famous, Tommy, not the piss-weak and poor. You’re lucky this ain’t a class action.’

Tommy looked as if she’d accused him of child molesting. She dropped his shoes under his nose. ‘Must be getting cold down there, eh Tommy? Here, get up and park your arse in the bog and we’ll discuss terms.’

‘Thanks, Maeve,’ he said, genuinely grateful. She wasn’t a bad old piss­ant after all.

When he was settled in the toilet stall inspecting the damage to his clothing and relocating his jaw she said, ‘If the tip pays off Janet gets fifty percent.’ He began to protest but she silenced him with a scowl. ‘Then fifty percent of your winnings until you’ve paid back what you owe her – plus costs.’

‘Jesus, Maeve, I got other people I owe.’

‘No kidding. Tell me their names, I’ll have a word.’

‘Would you, Maeve?’ he asked, eagerly.

‘Get y’hand off it, Tommy,’ she said, dryly. ‘Now. The details. Horse? Race? And remember this: I know the strapper. More important, he knows me.’ She put her eyes right on his and rammed them against the back of their sockets with her glare. Tommy felt any chance of getting out of this cheaply evaporate. ‘And even more importantly, Tommy, I know where you live.’

Well, there you go, the fix was in. Maeve in the trifecta. He sat staring at the stained, cracked floor tiles. ‘Howja know I was here this morning?’ he asked.

‘How d’you know a gorilla shits in the mist?’

He looked up with heavy-lidded eyes and a doleful grin. ‘What’d I do to deserve this?’

‘Now you know why mother taught you to be a cunt, Tommy. She meant you for someone ’xactly like me.’

As Maeve Maguffin drove to her little place in Brunswick for breakfast, Etta James’s version of ‘At Last’ was played on the ABC. She knew how it would affect her but she couldn’t bring herself to turn it off. She never could. And it always reminded her of the blonde sergeant. Every-fucking-thing reminded her of the blonde sergeant: that most disastrous misreading of the signs in a long and execrable history of misreading signs that began when she was fourteen. Why was she, Maeve Maguffin, who was so fucking good at sussing character and motive in the criminal underclasses, so fucking inept when her heart was involved? Jesus, she couldn’t even tell if the object of her desire was gay or not! Christ, that sergeant was beautiful.

The café’s façade looked like an abandoned laundrette that even graffiti artists shunned. But the food was so good she salivated every time she passed an abandoned laundrette. She was hunkered down behind her newspaper in her warm corner trying to slip her coffee a wake-up call with a wee dram from her hip flask, when she heard a chair scrape the floor on the other side of her table. She allowed the newspaper to droop as she prepared to snarl across the top of it. At first she didn’t recognise the intruder. Sunlight reflecting into the café from the wet road and buildings was causing a glare that threw him into sharp silhouette.

‘G’day, Senior Constable Maguffin,’ he said.

He always said that. He still thought of her as a cop – or pretended to – even if no one else did. She leaned back, sliding the flask surreptitiously into a pocket below table level.

‘Oh, it’s kiddie-cop,’ she said flatly. She’d been his first partner when he dropped off the Academy assembly line, legs all wobbly and pinfeathers gummed to his body. She’d taught him everything he knew about the streets.

They sat staring at each other for a long time. He was the only one who could hold her baleful stare for any length of time. It was an unacknowledged game they played, to see who blinked first. A waitress came with her breakfast and to take his order so they could both withdraw from the field with honour.

‘What do you want?’ she said as she cut into her eggs benedict.

‘I want you back on the wagon,’ he said. If the loaded fork hesitated on the way to her mouth it was virtually undetectable. ‘I have a job and you’ll need your wits about you.’

‘I’m not interested in the scraps from your table.’

‘I wouldn’t offer them. This is one I can’t do. I’m too well known by the subject.’

‘Who?’

‘Sharon Kitchen.’

‘Ben Bovell’s squeeze?’

‘She know you?’

‘Nup. Lately, she’s been on the box a bit.’

He nodded, satisfied.

‘You’re the mysterious “friend who didn’t want to be named who helped police with negotiations”?’ She semaphored quotation marks with her knife and fork.

He nodded again.

‘What do you think she’s done?’

‘I hope she’s as clean as a fresh coat of Teflon.’

She chewed some more egg. ‘Should I use harsh abrasives?’

‘As much as needed to test the warranty.’

‘You’re almost sexy when you talk like that,’ said Maeve.

‘I know what women want,’ he said with all the sincerity of a chocolate-coated Ryvita.