can you mate.’
‘Get fucked,’ Merv said, popping his can.
Clarrie cackled. ‘Wish I could. Anyway, I’m a bit forgetful about yesterday and the day before, like, but I can remember things real clear back a bit. We were coming down here from the pub, real late. Fuckin’ hot night and we saw this car parked near Bert’s place. Big, flash car. And there was a woman in it. She opened the door and I seen her in the light. A bloody good-looker. Not Bert’s missus. She was a good sort, mind, that Jessie when she was young, but this was a real looker.’
‘Bullshit,’ Merv said and drank at least half of his can.
Clarrie was trying hard not to look at the money but he wanted it badly, and that made it hard to judge his story. ‘When was this?’ I said.
‘Now I can tell you that, sort of. It was the night that Gough Whitlam beat that little bat-eared cunt. What was his name? What year was that?’
‘McMahon,’ I said. ‘1972.’ Good news, Bert, I thought. Near enough to twenty-five years.
‘That’s right.’
‘What kind of a car?’
‘Jeez, what was it, Merv?’
‘A Merc. White Merc’
‘I thought you didn’t see it,’ I said.
‘I remember now.’ Merv drained his can and made as if to throw it into the scrub. He remembered I was there and just crushed it in his hard hands.
‘Good on you, mate,’ Clarrie said.
It was impossible to tell now what weight to give to the story. I questioned them about what the occupants of the car were doing but Clarrie admitted that he didn’t know. There was a man around but he thought he might have just been taking a piss in the bushes.
Merv laughed. ‘ You were taking a few pisses in the bush that night. Shit, we were shickered after winnin’ the fuckin’ election.’
Which might have been a confirmation of a kind, but didn’t really increase my confidence in the information. I took the photograph out of the plastic sleeve and showed it to Clarrie, keeping my hand across the woman’s body and showing only her face. ‘Could this be the woman you saw, Clarrie?’
He rubbed his eyes and tried to blink away the effect of decades of sun, salt, sand and booze. Merv reached into the esky for another can but Clarrie seemed to have forgotten his.
‘Yeah,’ he said, drawing the word out. ‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah, what?’
‘The woman I saw looked like this one. She had on this tight dress. Great tits. Let’s see her tits.’
I put the picture away, gave them the money and took a can of beer from the esky. I plodded away along the dunes to the track that led up to the shack on Bert’s block. I’d have bet any money that Merv’s can went into the ti-tree as soon as my back was turned.
It was hot, even in the shade, and there was no breeze to speak of. The shack was more solidly built than the boatsheds and had been less exposed to the weather, but it was still a crumbling ruin with cracked and broken window panes, a sagging roof and a list to the right where some hardy vine was trying to pull it down.
There was only one door and it opened as I put my foot on the plastic milk crate that served as a doorstep. The man who stood there had once been an athlete; you could tell from the set of his shoulders and the lines of his body inside a gaping, buttonless pair of pyjamas. But that was a long time and many bottles ago. He was a once-sound but now battered and faded ruin, like his house.
‘Who’re you?’
‘Name’s Cliff Hardy. I’m doing a job of work for Bert Russell.’ I stuck out my right hand to be shaken and held the can of beer close by in the left. If you wanted the one you had to take the other. ‘Merv and Clarrie sent this up for you.’
We shook hands. The bones stuck out through the thin, dry skin. He dropped my hand, grabbed the can and popped the top immediately. He slightly tilted his grey, grizzled head; the faded pale blue eyes slid back as he raised the can to a mouth that was just a space, the lips having sunk into the toothless hole. He sucked the beer down in three long gulps, barely pausing to take in two wheezy breaths. I produced another twenty-dollar note.
‘I need to talk to you, Stan.’
He wiped his mouth and looked at me as if he’d been waiting for me to arrive. ‘It’s happened, has it?’
‘What?’
The pale, red-rimmed eyes went shrewd. ‘You first. Better sit down.’
I thought he meant we should go inside but he merely kicked the milk crate away from the door with his bare foot and squatted down in the doorway with his feet dangling. I sat on the milk crate while he took a last, pessimistic suck on the can.
‘How long have you lived here?’
‘Forever.’
‘How come?’
‘You know Jessie, Russell’s wife?’
‘I knew her, yes.’
‘I’m her stepbrother. Her mother married my father, poor bitch. Jessie said I could stay here after I had my breakdown. I was in the war. Vietnam. Got shell-shocked. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I fought in Malaya,’ I said. ‘Different kind of war, but I’ve got some idea. Bert told me Jessie’s brother had died.’
‘That was her real brother.’
‘Does Bert know you’re his brother-in-law, sort of?’
He laughed, a surprisingly rich sound out of that ruined mouth. ‘No. She didn’t tell him anything about our fucked-up family or much about Gerry, I suspect.’
‘Gerry?’
‘Are you offering me that money?’
‘For information, yes.’
‘We’ll swap, then. You look like an insurance man or a lawyer who’s gone a few rounds. My guess is something’s been found?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah. What? Where?’
‘You haven’t given me anything, Stan.’
‘All right. Try this. Young Tom Russell’s not Bert’s son. Did you know that?’
‘No, and it’s not worth twenty dollars.’
‘How about this then? Tom’s been asking me for years about something hidden here someplace. What’s that worth?’
I gave him the money. He folded the note carefully and tucked it into the pocket of his pyjamas. Once he started talking it was hard to stop him. He paused once, remembering that he was being paid, and I gladly forked over another twenty. He told me that Jessie Russell had been married to a man named Gerry Slim, known as Slim Gerry, who was a tall, pale skinny man. He was Tom’s real father. The boy was about six or seven, Stan calculated, when Gerry Slim was shot dead in his white Mercedes. Slim was a drug dealer and conman who’d formed a close association with some high-ranking American army officers who were stealing everything they could lay their hands on in Vietnam. Something went wrong and Slim paid the top price.
‘Would Bert know anything about this?’
‘Not a thing. She met Bert about a year later and grabbed him. Jessie wouldn’t have said a word. Too much to be ashamed of.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Jesus, I’m really emptying out the family skeletons. I wish I had a drink.’
I gave him another twenty. ‘You can buy something that won’t rot your guts.’
He gave the rich laugh again and put the money in the pocket along with the other notes. ‘Rotted away long
