moving chain and failed in every attempt to jump a light mid get a run. On the north side the traffic moved faster and I could have got into top gear. Instead I pulled into a garage for petrol and a check on the oil and water. I used the lavatory and the smell of the greasy food in the place’s snack bar reminded me that I hadn’t eaten for ten hours. I bought a hamburger and a carton of chips and ate them as I drove. The Falcon groaned a bit under the unaccustomed load of the full tank, but nothing dropped off and when I’d made it to the beginning of the tollway I felt confident that she’d go the distance.
Since they put the tollway in, the drive to Newcastle is easy. The only danger in driving it at night is falling asleep at the wheel. I warded this off by taking quiet slugs from the Scotch bottle, letting (he liquor jolt me but not taking enough to get me drunk. My head was aching and the whisky was good for that, too. I should have been asleep in bed. Instead I was driving a tollway at night and drinking whisky. Mother wouldn’t approve. Father wouldn’t approve. But then Father never did approve. Funny thoughts. Maybe I was drunk. A few cars passed me but neither the Falcon nor I was feeling competitive and we couldn’t have done much about it anyway. The road was slippery and I swayed about a bit and got bored by the dark, indeterminate shapes whipping by. I wished I had a radio. I wished I had new tyres, but I stayed loyal – I didn’t wish I had a new car.
Like all big cities, Newcastle emits a glow which you pick up a few miles out. It’s composed of neon glare, factory smoke and the small glimmers of a hundred thousand light globes and television screens. There’s a good measure of the day’s wastes drifting about as well; Newcastle is like Sydney, you can taste it about as soon as you can see it. I felt the grittiness of the air and its load of rubber and gas between my teeth as I began the descent from the hills towards the city.
Newcastle sprawls about like a drunken whore: it trickles off towards the coalfields in one direction, climbs up into the hill country in another and slides down to the sea on the east. The beach is a surprise; a fair-sized slice of white sand in front of a reasonable stretch of water for humans to swim in. It’s like a reward to the city’s inhabitants for putting up with so much else that is appalling. I hadn’t been there for five years but the bird’s eye view I got of it from the highway suggested that it was much the same, only worse. The long flat approach from the south is a ribbon of used car yards, take-away food stands and decaying wooden houses. A string of motels five miles out from town invite you to stop over, miss the city and push on to the clean country up ahead. I pulled into one of them, the Sundowner, which had a “Vacancy” sign with the second “a” flickering fitfully on and off.
A middle-aged blonde woman with big bouncing breasts under a black polo neck sweater was behind the desk in the office. She ran an experienced eye over my clothes and wasn’t too happy. Also I wasn’t carrying luggage and they never like that. She sneaked a look past me at the Falcon and wasn’t impressed by that, either. Luckily I wasn’t planning to stay. She probably would have made me pay in advance and leave a deposit. I reached into my pocket for the photograph of Noni and laid it on the desk in front of her impressive mammaries. I opened my wallet, letting her see the fifties in it and took out my operator’s licence which I put down next to the picture.
“Ever see her?” I asked.
She looked at it for a hundredth of a second. “Sure.”
I was so surprised I had to ask her again. It isn’t usually that easy. My puritanical soul told me it shouldn’t be that easy. But I’d heard her right.
“Anyone along here’d know her.” There was a tone in her voice that was hard to interpret, maybe amusement. I looked at her and noticed her colossal double chin. She smiled and the chin tensed up a bit. “That’s Noni Rouble. Haven’t seen her for years.”
“How is it you know her then?”
She asked me why I was asking and I told her some lies. She looked closely at the photograph of me on the licence, the one taken three years back and in a good light. She wasn’t too happy about it so I eased a five dollar note out of the wallet and let it sit on top to get some air.
“I suppose it’s alright,” she said, eyeing the money. “Noni was an R and R girl around here – oh, seven or eight years back.”
“R and R girl?”
“Right. Not to put too fine a point on it, she slept around with the American soldiers. You know, the ones on leave from Vietnam. She stayed here a couple of times. She stayed all up and down this strip.” She waved her hand at the road.
“Somebody had to do it I suppose,” I said.
“Yes.” She shrugged and her heavy bosom lifted and subsided like a swell on the sea. “Nothing to do with me.”
The thought crossed my mind that she was just the right age to have done the same thing when the Yanks were here in World War Two and to resent the passage of time.
“You didn’t like her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Too flash, she made you feel she was doing you a favour shacking up in your place.”
“I see. Well my information is she’s headed this way. You wouldn’t know where she’d go?”
She sighed, the way hotel keepers do when the beds aren’t full and the overheads are going up all the time. She reached out a meaty hand, knocked about from cleaning rooms and wrinkled around the three rings on her fingers. The fingers closed over the money.
“I haven’t seen her, but if Noni’s back in Newcastle she’s at one of two places.”
I waited.
“If she’s flush she’ll be at the Regal in the city.”
I thought about it. “I don’t think she’s flush but I’ll check it out anyway. What if she’s not?”
“She’ll be at Lorraine’s boarding house, Fourth Street. It’s a brothel.”
“Literally?”
She looked puzzled.
“I mean is it really a brothel?”
“Oh no, not strictly speaking, not any more. Probably was once. I mean it’s a dump, you can flop there for a dollar a night, single or double.”
“Sounds choice.”
She chuckled. “Right. Lorraine’s got one rule.”
“What’s that?”
“No blacks.”
I grunted and asked to use her phone. She pushed it across the desk to me and I reached into my jacket pocket, took out a pen knife and sawed through the cable.
“Hey!” she yelped and banged one of her big red hands down on the desk.
“You can splice it,” I said. “Give you something to do in the wee small hours.”
“You bastard. I could go out and phone.”
“You won’t. You don’t care that much.”
She grinned and picked up the cut ends of the cord. “You’re right. Give Noni a belting for me.” She rubbed the ends together. “Hey, there’s no electricity in this is there?” I told her there wasn’t.
Outside the Falcon was clicking and squeaking as it cooled down after the long drive. It started under protest and I had to coax it out onto the road. I joined in the thin stream of traffic, mostly trucks, heading for the city. The drizzle had stopped and the clouds had peeled back leaving Newcastle squatting sullenly in a pool of moonlight. It opened its mouth and sucked me in.
9
The Regal Hotel is in the middle of the city and it dominates the scene on the skyline and at ground level. The building is a tower with black and white facades alternating each storey so that it looks like a giant pile of draughts. I parked outside and made my usual mistake of trying to push open the self-opening doors. This leaves you with a hand held out impotently in front of you and gives the desk staff an initial advantage. Under the lobby
