The Big Whatever (39 page)

“Feel free to put me in my place anytime I'm being a dick.”

“Hmm. Interesting way of putting it . . .”

“Right. Yeah, that too. But back to Richard. How did he go about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did he just ring up the department and say to the public
servant who happened to answer, ‘Hey, my name's Richard and I've got a spiffing idea'?”

“Hardly.” She laughed. “He dealt directly with the federal minister. Tom Uren. They're friends.”

Bingo, I thought. “All right. Great. I need your brother's phone number.”

“What the fuck, Billy?”

I was counting out ten-cent coins to make another call when I saw a figure come out of a building down the street – which had been deserted till then – and stare in my direction. It probably meant nothing, but still . . . I wandered back to the ute. The person – a portly middle-aged woman— was still staring at me, and making no attempt to conceal it. I nodded a good morning in her direction and drove away.

After a dusty few hours driving, I pulled into Brewarrina around lunchtime, stopped at the first public phone I saw and rang brother Richard. He was curious. Denise had told him I might be ringing him. It didn't go so well at first, each of us having major reservations about the other. But we got there. He wasn't the talking law book I'd thought he was. At least, not only that. And I guess I wasn't the lowlife chancer he'd first thought. Not only.

Once he warmed up he was quite keen to talk Labor politics. He cared a lot more than I did, but I was more or less able to keep up. He let on that he had certain ambitions himself in the political area, long term. Good for him. So I told him what I knew and what I suspected, and he responded with more than polite interest. He'd have a sniff around, he said. Could I leave it with him for a while, then ring back?

I had some lunch and bought some supplies. No one in Brewarrina took any special notice of me.

At three o'clock I rang Richard back. We were old comrades now, and he didn't try to hide his enthusiasm. Yes, what I'd suspected was in fact the case, and guess what? There's more. So he'd hatched this plan. What did I think? We mapped out the
next few moves and arranged to talk again day after tomorrow.

I pitched my tent by the Barwon River, a mile out of town. Spent the next day fishing and reading. Fishing meant setting a handline and leaving the reel jammed in the crook of a tree while I sat back in the shade reading. No fish troubled the bait all day.

There was a group of blackfellas a quarter of a mile further up the river. In the afternoon an old couple wandered up and said hello, asked what I was doing. I said fishing, which gave them a good laugh. They left me two cod they'd caught. I couldn't see how they'd done it, since the only gear they had was a bit of old line wound around a stick with a rusty hook and a few budgie feathers.

I stayed by the river for the two days as arranged, went into Brewarrina at nine o'clock the next morning. I pulled up outside the Café Deluxe, got some change, went to the phone booth at the post office and dialled Richard in Melbourne. He answered after four rings, said he'd spoken to Tom Uren. Uren was interested. On the face of it. Yes, it all fitted with federal Labor policy regarding public housing and inner city conservation. But he couldn't act unilaterally. He'd need to take it up with the state mob. They might have their own ideas. “But that's a good result. So far,” said Richard.

“Maybe not,” I said. “I might've tipped our hand there, because I spoke to Neville Wran a few days ago.” I told Richard exactly how the conversation had gone.

“Hmm,” he said. “You should've left that alone. Oh well, it's done now. But from here on, it has to be hands-off. If the politicians get the sense we're pushing them, that the thing isn't under their control or could blow up, or that someone they don't know about might have an interest, anything like that, they'll dump the whole idea.”

“I understand. So how long will that take?”

“I don't know. Three, six months. Maybe a year.”

“Oh shit, that's way too long. Listen, Richard, how about we try to speed the process up a bit?”

“How?” he asked cagily.

“With some do-it-yourself-type public relations.” I told him what I meant.

He wasn't too jazzed by my idea. “That could blow the whole thing.”

“If it doesn't happen soon, it's useless to me anyway,” I said.

I killed some time having tea and toast at the Café Deluxe, then just after ten went back to the phone booth and called the Third World Bookshop in Sydney. Bob Gould picked up. The combined vice and drug squad raid had gone splendidly, he said. He was sufficiently happy that he gave me the phone number I needed. That got me to the editor of the
Nation Review
. Who heard me out, though he sounded less than impressed. Still, I had a hunch he
was
interested, despite his show of indifference.

At eleven I rang Denise's number in Melbourne. No answer.

Another cup of tea. I watched truckies come and go.

At midday I rang again and she picked up. After we got the mutual hello dear, how're you going, I miss you, wish you were here stuff out of the way, I said, “Hey, I might have a bit of an ace investigative reporter–type magazine story for you. If you want to write it. Or know someone who does.”

“Yes?” she said slowly, with doubt in her voice.

“About a women's refuge holding out against secret real estate deals. Speculators. All against a backdrop of freeways destroying old inner city communities. Very Sydney.”

“The fuck, Billy?”

“The
Nation Review
is kind of interested, but not quite a hundred percent sold. Not yet.”

“The fuck, Billy?” Laughing this time.

I gave her the
Review
editor's number, then Terry and Anna's. “The second number, that's my friends in Balmain. They'll show you the ropes, introduce you to the women's refuge crowd. If you want.”

“Well, I suppose it can't hurt to at least ring them.” Her words sounded detached, but I could tell she was fired up. “Thanks Billy. Seriously. So what are you going to do now?”

“I've come this far,” I said. “I'll see it through.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I'll track down the last name on Max's list,” I said.

“Oh, forget that. It's a wild goose chase. Come to Melbourne and stay with me.”

It was tempting.

“And wouldn't that be
names
, plural, to track down?” Denise asked. “The Cat, Brylcreem and Mr Bones. Right? Not to mention the Croaker.”

“Brylcreem and Bones are in the UK, shoplifting. The Croaker died of a morphine overdose early this year. I'm down to just one name: the Cat.”

“Maybe he's gone too?”

“He was at the races in Sydney two months ago. And if the book is to be believed, the Cat was the last person to have dealings with Max before he blew his mind. He's around somewhere.”

“According to Professor Perkal, that would be—” I heard her riffling through the book, “That would be, ah, this:
A rundown tropical town . . . a dump. There was no surf, just shitty farm land round about. No natural features to speak of. There were no hippies, no trendies. Just white trash and blackfellas
. That would include an awful lot of New South Wales, would it not?”

“Most of Queensland, too. Where I am now, I can cut across to the coast, make my way back south, checking out the likely towns on the way.”

“On the other hand, if you come to Melbourne, we'll have fun.”

“How long is that offer good for?” I said.

“Not forever.” A pause. “But for a little while yet.”

“Keep a light in the window,” I said.

* * *

I crossed into Queensland and cut east through Roma, then Chinchilla, sleeping by creeks and billabongs. I pushed north east all the way up to Cooktown. It was definitely tropical. Also
drab, untrendy, and without surf. So were Port Douglas, Cairns, Gordonvale, Innisfail, Tully, Ingham, and so on. So was most of northern Queensland.

But there was no Cat.

I checked in with Eloise again after a week. As I'd expected, Donny had been around again. He was frantic. I needed to front Joe and Phil, pronto. Or else.

“Or else what?” I said. Eloise said that's what she'd asked him. At which Donny had just shaken his head and said, This is bloody serious now. Abe's involved. Billy needed to sort this out as a matter of extreme urgency, or he, Donny, couldn't be held responsible. “Any message?” said Eloise.

“Not yet, but stand by.”

After another week I'd worked my way down to Central Queensland. I became very familiar with the details of chemist shops, and was probably better provisioned with toothpicks, razor blades and underarm deodorant than anyone in the country.

My money was nearly gone. Canvas was showing through on the tyres, and the starter motor was on the way out. I signed on to do a day's work on a tomato farm, trimming the laterals off the bushes. That night I was sunburnt and sore, went into a dead sleep at eight thirty.

Two days later, further south, I took on three days' work chipping weeds in a sugar cane field. The first day was tough, by the third I felt okay. Then I did a whole week in a sugar mill – scored an easy job checking off the loads of cane that arrived hour after hour, day and night, on the puffing billy rail line. That time of year there was work to be had all over coastal Queensland, all of it low-paid.

I'd got my dress code worked out and become pretty much invisible: a bloke in his late thirties, maybe early forties, dressed in clean, faded King Gee work togs, driving an old but looked-after ute. I came and went, neither welcomed nor farewelled. Got nearly every job I asked for, though. I looked the part.

I avoided pubs, killed time off the road in movie theatres and drive-ins. Saw the year's big ones,
Serpico, The Sting
. Finally caught
American Graffiti
, which had one scene I liked, hot rods in the pre-dawn, their lights on, driving slowly towards the camera with ‘Green Onions' playing on the soundtrack. Saw some other films I liked,
The Long Goodbye
and
The Laughing Policeman
. Also a late-night double feature,
Badlands
and
Two-Lane Blacktop
. The latter was about a pair of longhaired street racers and a girl hitchhiker getting around the boondocks in an old Chevy. The longhairs enter into a driving duel with Warren Oates. One of the drifters was played by Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boy. Both films were a bit on the slow side, and the longhair actors were kind of wooden. But they were okay for late-night viewing.

Then it started raining. Monsoonal rain. A thunderstorm would build up all day, drop two or three inches in half an hour, then clear before evening. It was the same every afternoon. I worked a few days at a mill near Bundy, but the rain halted the cane cutting, so I moved on.

When it got too wet to camp out, I spent a few nights in a motel outside Brisbane. Watched late-night television. Saw an old movie I'd liked when it first came out years before,
Thunder Road
. Robert Mitchum driving moonshine out of the mountains in a hotted up car, outrunning the traps, stopping every now and then to drop in on a hillbilly party.

I crossed back into New South Wales, moved down through the Tweed Valley. There were longhaired, down-at-heel hitchhikers everywhere. I picked up a couple at Murwillumbah. She was pregnant, he was drinking from a beer bottle, at one in the afternoon.

“Your muffler doesn't sound too good,” he said.

I shrugged. “Been that way for a while.”

“Pull up in the shade, if you like, I'll have a look.”

Twenty minutes later, using a few bits of fencing wire and a pair of pliers, he'd managed to jerry-rig the exhaust, reduced the racket by two-thirds. I dropped them at the Burringbar turn-off, slipped them twenty bucks. I drove off with the radio playing for the first time since I'd bought the car.

I called into Byron Bay, even though it had hippies, trendies, diverting natural features
and
a surf break. There were head shops in the main street. Garish murals here and there. I bought a hamburger in the milk bar and kept going. Drove inland, through Lismore, the instant hippieville of Nimbin, month by month filling up with longhairs, dope-smokers, girls with long flowing hair in long flowing skirts, drooby strummers on street corners, their guitars always slightly out of tune. One kid was singing “Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless.” A cocky walking past caught my eye and muttered, “
Hope
less, more like.”

The hills were green and lush, with clear streams running down through hidden valleys. I was told you could snap up an abandoned hundred-acre dairy farm with a rambling old timber house on it for a song. The hippies were realising now what Mullet and Katie had wigged years ago: this was prime dope-growing country. Provided you could hack all that hippie cuteness and macrobiotic chow.