Matthew Flinders' Cat (3 page)

If the person viewing the album had continued turning the seven blank leaves until they reached the eighth page, they would have come across one final photograph showing a large tabby cat sitting on the polished, grey-granite apron of a gravesite.

The cat was seated on its haunches, obscuring most of the inscription on the headstone behind it, although above its head the name ‘Charlie’ was carved and etched in white into the grey granite. It was as if the cat was posing rather grandly under its own name, but the camera shutter had captured the cat in the process of licking its chops, its pink tongue obscuring its nose.

The last items to be found in the briefcase were a dozen spiral-bound reporter’s notepads of the kind you can purchase at any newsagency as well as two biros, one blue, the other red. They, more than anything, served to keep Billy anchored to the world outside his life on the street. Billy had become an inveterate correspondent to the letters column of the
Sydney Morning Herald
, where under the pseudonym ‘Billy Goat’ he had become a regular and popular contributor.

Billy told himself that alcoholism and writing enjoyed a long history together. While he had never had anything outside of an occasional legal opinion published in the
Law Society Journal
, he nevertheless cherished the thought of becoming an essayist. He was convinced that, given his interest in the botanical differences that made Australia’s flora unique in the world, he had a subject waiting to be exploited. The average person knew nothing about Australia’s ecosystem and it led to the land being constantly raped. Eighty-five per cent of the world’s plant species were indigenous to Australia and most of its citizens couldn’t tell a dahlia from a chrysanthemum, let alone identify any of the native species. We had conned ourselves into believing that the European floral impostors that filled our parks and suburban gardens in spring and summer gave us our sense of truth, yet these intruders had turned our seasons upside-down and were preferred to the glory of our winter-flowering indigenous plants. Even the neatly clipped lawns we so cherished were constructed from imported grasses that had no right in gobbling up the precious water resources of the driest land on earth.

Billy’s big problem was getting the essays he wrote in his head onto paper. His obsessive personality allowed him to write the essays in his imagination with a white-hot intensity, so that they were all-persuasive, wondrously original and solidly wrought in argument. But when it came to writing the essays in the notepads, his information appeared insubstantial and contrived or, worse still, the ravings of an ecology nut.

The truth was that he seldom remained sober long enough to write an outline and do the required research in the library. His spiral notepads were filled with jottings and promising beginnings, most of which ended abruptly, his neat handwriting slipping into illegibility. Billy set himself high standards and was his harshest critic, so that his red biro, used for crossing out errant sentences, dominated every page.

Billy’s brief and often blistering missives sent to the
Sydney Morning Herald
and, as often as not, accepted for publication, were his only reassurance that somewhere deep down inside him there was a writer trying to get out, an essayist with a profound message.

With the briefcase securely handcuffed to his wrist, Billy continued on his way towards the Quay. He cast his mind back to the moments before the police sergeant had interrupted his conversation with the boy. The lad had thought the cat real and, possibly, that it belonged to Billy. In a funny way he’d been right. Billy would sometimes, usually when he was half-cut, look up at the statue of Trim and wish him good evening and even have a bit of a chat. On other occasions, as the night continued and he became more and more pissed, the conversation with Trim would get quite animated. There were even times, usually when he was reduced to drinking monkey’s blood, that Billy would think he was Baby Grand, the cat in the last photograph in his album, and then he’d happily chat, cat to cat, for several hours. Billy was an unabashed cat lover and, when sober, liked to think that any nation who would honour a cat meant all was not lost. The statue of Trim on the window ledge above his bench was yet another reason why he had no wish to relocate.

Billy now asked himself what he would have told the boy about Trim had they been able to talk a little longer. How would a young lad such as this one ever come to possess a sense of history and some understanding of who he was and where he had come from? Billy had no illusions about himself, he accepted that his drinking was a choice he’d made himself. He also accepted that he was weak and gutless. Having been given every opportunity to succeed, he had failed miserably. Blaming the dreaded grog he knew was pointless, the reason he was a drunk had little or nothing to do with a genetic weakness. His more or less constant state of inebriation allowed him to pull a curtain over the past and, except for rare moments, he’d managed to build a successful screen.

But what of the boy? He knew nothing about the kid, though his expression, the look in his eyes, told him enough. Was the lad already among the doomed, destined to serve his time on the streets until he inevitably experimented with his first drugs? He seemed bright enough, alert to what was happening around him. Billy knew that the progression from what is euphemistically known as a ‘recreational’ drug, usually marijuana or ecstasy, to heroin was a fairly short one. Once addicted, a street kid would need to pay for his habit. Being under-age, he would become the perfect bait for paedophiles, which would inevitably lead him to ‘The Wall’ at Darlinghurst, the high outer stone wall that formed part of the old Darlinghurst prison, where young male prostitutes plied their trade. Any kind of rescue after this would be extremely rare.

What happened to the boy with the skateboard was none of Billy’s business, he couldn’t do anything for him anyway and if he did meet him again, it would probably be to cop the toe of the kid’s runner in his face. Nevertheless, the image of the boy persisted in his mind.

Billy smiled to himself at the boy mistaking the statue of Trim for a real cat. If Orr hadn’t arrived, the least he could have done was tell the boy to go to the Eye Hospital in Woolloomooloo and have his eyes tested. Then he recalled that the Eye Hospital had moved and the building it had occupied was in the process of being converted into apartments. Its close proximity to the city, the Harbour and the Gardens made it one of the projects favoured by a nationwide developer attempting to gentrify the essentially working-class suburb. The famous Finger Wharf, with its warehouses near the same location, was another project designated as luxury accommodation for wealthy bankers, brokers and media folk. In the end the rich got everything worthwhile while the poor were moved along. With the Olympic Games coming to Sydney in four years, the state government would want the poor tucked away out of sight.

Instead, he would have had to take the lad to Sydney Hospital in Macquarie Street where the police sergeant had suggested he go for his leg. It wasn’t more than a hundred and fifty metres from the library. For a moment Billy imagined himself turning up with the boy, but now doubted that he would have gone. In his day, kids didn’t like being called ‘four eyes’ and it would still be the same. Glasses weren’t tough and such a boy would need to think of himself as tough.

One thing led to another and Billy began to think how he might have told the story of Trim if the boy hadn’t left. Would the boy enjoy a history lesson? Probably not. He’d have to keep things light. How light? He stopped, looking skywards, and watched as the latecomers among the fruit bats continued coming in, wheeling above him, their wings shaped like nomad tents flapping lazily, dark silhouettes against the pale-blue sky.

Perhaps he could start by telling the boy the story of the fruit bats, how they were the only remaining colony of a rare species now threatened with extinction. He would tell him how they had found refuge in the Botanic Gardens slap-bang in the middle of a large city when tree-felling on the north coast had destroyed their natural habitat. But now the fruit bats were damaging the trees they chose to roost in and it had become a matter of nature versus nature, with the authorities scratching their heads for a solution where both the trees and the fruit bats might be saved. Billy loved trees, but he also cared about the fruit bats and he thought how typically the dilemma was of our own making. Would the boy be interested in or care about the fruit bats or the trees? Probably not.

Billy continued on his way down to the Quay, thinking now how it was that humans seemed to destroy almost everything they touched in nature. He knew this wasn’t an original thought and whoever had first come up with it, probably Charles Darwin, would soon enough have realised that it was one that had little or no power to change things. Humans, like all creatures, put themselves first. The only difference was that, unlike other species, they had the power to alter the balance of nature, and it was this that made them so dangerous. History was all about greed. Enough is never quite enough.

Billy had momentarily forgotten about the boy but soon found himself thinking about him again. He told himself that his mind was like a sieve and if he couldn’t get the street brat out of his head, he’d have to
think
him out of the way. He’d get on with the story about Matthew Flinders and his cat and try to make it sound like a story and not a history lesson. It would have to entertain or, at the very least, amuse the boy. Having told him the story, if only in his head, the child would become less of a distraction.

He accepted the challenge that this was the age of television, where pictures were the true language and the spoken word was merely the frame that gave them focus. In the cartoon world in which Billy assumed the boy’s vocabulary largely existed, the cat would take on a far more important role than the great navigator himself. The lad had ignored the statue of Matthew Flinders, only glancing at it briefly. His sole interest was in the cat. Trim would tell his story in a way natural to a cat without wanting to alter everything to suit himself the way humans do. It would be history seen from a cat’s point of view.

Billy started to imagine . . .

As it turned out, one of the world’s most famous loners, Matthew Flinders, the great navigator who first mapped the coastline of a large and mysterious landmass he would eventually name Australia, was never quite alone, because, you see, he had as his constant companion and fellow explorer a tomcat named Trim.

Matthew Flinders was a ship’s captain, by nature stubborn, impatient and self-righteous, much preferring his own intelligent company to that of his boorish shipmates. Trim Flinders, his cat, was quite the opposite. He was a ship’s cat and, while capable of being ‘quite the proper gentleman’, he possessed in him the spirit of a larrikin and was given to the company of rough men and always happy in boisterous and even drunken company.

While Matthew Flinders earned their admiration and respect, he was never much liked by the men who sailed under him, but Trim received their unequivocal love. His periods of indifference, common among all cats, were always short and the seamen would hear no ill spoken of him even if sometimes he appeared to take their abounding affection for granted.

Billy was aware that he was using words that might be too complex for the boy but as this was only an early draft he would correct it later. The thing was to get the sequence down correctly. And so he continued . . .

The fact that, like most cats, Trim dozed roughly eighteen hours a day seemed to bother none of his admirers. ‘Aye, he does his share o’ graft does that one, never shrinks from a task given,’ the bos’n might remark, pointing to Trim asleep in a patch of warm sunlight atop a water cask. ‘I’ll vouch there’s naught of his kind on the seven seas that could take our Trim on at the ratting trade.’ It was a sentiment they all shared. Trim Flinders was fireproof and could do no wrong.