ROUNDING A BEND OR CRESTING A HILL IN THE FAMILY CAR when I was a boy, long before I knew my left from right, I was always convinced that the approaching cars wouldn’t know which side of the road we were driving on and we would all be killed in a head-on smash. All my life I have, on occasion, been possessed by a presentiment of doom while driving, the seeds of which I could trace back to that childhood fear. It is a sensation that has never left me, and has never been more acute than the wintry night I drove Max to see Queel. Cars swished past on the wet roads and at every turn I expected to see — too late! — a truck bearing down on us with a spray of water sluicing up from its enormous front wheels, a trucker’s startled face in the headlights, a yelp of fear. Smash.
We were driving to South Yarra, an upmarket part of the city with leafy streets and discreet mansions tucked behind hedges and high brick walls. Although he spoke very little, I could tell that Max was excited, as if he were lit from within. We stopped at a red light at the top of the Punt Road hill. A car packed with teenagers pulled up beside us; I could hear thudding rock music, the excited squeal of their voices. One of them, a chubby blond guy, glanced over and raised his can of Victoria Bitter in salute. They were probably driving to St Kilda to see a band or go to a nightclub, and for a second I envied the simplicity of their night: beer, girls and loud music.
‘I should have seen it,’ Max was saying. ‘I do see things sometimes. They’re visions, I suppose. Remember that Challenger disaster? I had a feeling it was going to explode in that way. I knew it. You remember I said it would never work? On the morning it lifted off? And another thing. You know what the smoke was like, the bits that separated?’
I was anxious, impatient with this discussion. ‘No. What did it look like?’
He placed a raised index finger to either side of his head. ‘The devil. Next time they show that footage on the news, you take notice of it. There, in the blue sky, you’ll see the face of the devil. Hiding in plain sight. Horns and everything.’
The light turned from red to green, and I was absolved from responding to this outlandish claim. The neighbouring carload of teenagers sped off, fishtailed, righted itself and vanished down the other side of the hill. We followed at a more sedate pace.
‘Left at Toorak Road,’ Max said at the bottom of the hill. ‘Left again up here. That’s it. Turn off the headlights and pull over near that building.’
We were in a dark and dripping side street. Water rippled in the gutters. A jogger pounded past.
Max punched the car lighter and waited. When his cigarette was lit, he turned to face me. ‘You’re not very close to your family, are you?’
I was taken by surprise. ‘What?’
His expression was sincere. ‘I don’t mean to pry, but none of them has visited since you moved here. In — what? — eight months. Your mother? Your father? No one. And you haven’t visited them, either. And you never talk about them.’ He paused before going on, as if choosing his words ever more carefully. ‘I think perhaps you are not well loved at your home.’
I was too stunned to speak. Although I had not thought a great deal about it, it was true that no member of my family had visited me, or even offered to do so, and phone calls were infrequent. In March my sister Rosemary had mailed me a postcard (beachside kangaroo in a red bikini) from a Queensland resort where she had holidayed with her family but, generally, weeks passed without contact from any of them. I was not much bothered by this, but the notion this state of affairs might be indicative of a lack of affection for me was thrilling. As a white, middle-class boy I had lacked the requisite background for authentic artistic angst; if nothing else, this would furnish me with one such reason.
‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ Max went on. He waved his cigarette about as if, like air, the answer were all around us and only needed pointing out. ‘It’s hard when you don’t have anyone to show you how to be in the world. We all need someone to admire. Even I had my parents, while they were still alive. My father was always wise.’
He was right. And because my parents (if indeed they were my parents) were hardly role models, I had become wary of adults — real adults, that is, with real lives and real jobs — and it was clear to me how much I flailed around in the quicksand of my life.
‘What would he have done in this instance?’ I asked.
Max stared through the windscreen with smoke trailing from his nostrils. ‘That’s a good question,’ he said. ‘I can no longer see what he might have advised — my memory of him is fading. Most likely he wouldn’t have been so dumb in the first place. There are things I have never learned, things I’ll never learn now. I make it up as I go. There are no shoes for me to fill. That’s what’s hard, isn’t it? And you have an orphan’s heart, too. It’s one of the reasons I like you, I think. You’re lucky you met us. We’ll be your family now. I am so looking forward to taking you to France: you’ll love it. You’ll write novels there, I know it. I see the future better than I see the past, and that is definitely one of the things I can see — all of us in the garden wearing straw hats. I’ll finish Maldoror; I’m almost there. You’ll be Uncle Tom to our children, you know. James tapping away at his typewriter, you unwrapping the very first copy of your debut novel. Wine in the afternoons. Cheese. Imagine it. We can go to Berlin to visit Edward and Gertrude. They can get off those awful drugs.’ He shook his head. ‘It would be dreadful if things fell apart now, if Queel somehow wrecked it all. We’ve planned our escape for so long.’
I was unaccountably moved by Max’s speech — by his sensitivity to my familial situation — and had to fight down a lump in my throat. No one had ever been so generous towards me. And it would be terrible if things fell apart now. The very idea that our plan of getting to France could be disrupted at this late stage was intolerable.
‘To complete a stage of a journey in a single breath is not easy, and the wings become very weary during a high flight without hope and without remorse.’
Bemused, I could only stare at him.
‘From Maldoror,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘One of my favourite bits.’
For several minutes we sat smoking, before Max ground out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray and pulled his coat tight around himself.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and chat to our friend Queel.’
We stepped from the car into the cold winter air. Did I know what was going to happen that night? For many years I told myself: no, I didn’t. But, really, I probably did.
*
Queel lived on the top floor of an apartment block built in the late sixties; stylish rather than fancy, cut like a good suit. Although there was a lift, we took the inside back stairs. We saw no one else, heard nothing from any of the floors as we ascended. Once upstairs, we shuffled our feet on the thick, blue carpet outside Queel’s door. Max put his ear to the door to listen.
‘Alright,’ he said, and pressed the brass doorbell set into the wall.
A grinning Queel opened the door at once, as if he had been hovering inside awaiting us.
‘’Allo, gentlemen,’ he said, with a shallow bow, ushering Max and me inside. He was, as usual, inordinately pleased with himself.
The apartment was enormous, lamplit, fragrant with tobacco, liquor and cologne. The floors were strewn with Persian carpets, and the walls were covered with dozens of paintings and drawings. Line-drawn nudes, expressionist portraits, at least one Roy Lichtenstein print. In addition, there were piles of art and fashion magazines on sideboards amid sculptures and esoteric trinkets, African masks and the like: a wooden bowl glittering with jewellery; a painted Egyptian bust. The place was like nothing I had seen before, outside the pages of a magazine or the reels of a James Bond film. I was dumbfounded.
Max, too, looked uncharacteristically unsure of himself. He clasped one hand in the other; his knuckles strained white against the thin sheet of his skin. Like a hungry waif he looked around and licked his lips.
Queel gestured for us to follow him into the open-plan lounge room. He glided soundlessly towards a sideboard on which bottles of liquor and glasses were arranged like a miniature city of crystal. He brandished a bottle of Scotch. ‘Drink?’
We nodded. As soon as he had turned his back to mix our drinks, Max hissed at me, ‘Keep an eye on him.’
Max left my side. ‘I might use the bathroom,’ he announced.
Queel shrugged and handed me a tumbler of Scotch and ice. ‘As you wish. Why don’t you sit down? Tim, isn’t it?’
I watched Max creep up the hall, out of sight. I stepped forwards and took the glass of liquor. ‘It’s Tom.’
‘Tom?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ve met a few times at openings. I’m friends with Edward and Gertrude.’
Queel ran a finger delicately across his mouth and lowered himself with a greasy creak into a paunchy, black-leather couch. He crossed his legs, revealing a hairless shin above the line of one grey sock. A red handkerchief peeked from the breast pocket of his pinstriped jacket. He inspected me, nodding and smiling to himself as if what he were seeing accorded with a rather unfavourable conclusion he had already formed. ‘A friend?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah,’ he mimicked. ‘In French we have a different word for this: arriviste.’
Although I didn’t understand this expression, the tone in which it was uttered left no doubt as to its implied scorn.
‘How did they do it?’ Queel asked.
‘Do what?’
‘I mean the painting is only small but …’ He sipped his drink and then slapped his knee, as if what he had imbibed sparked inspiration within him. ‘Perhaps you’re the thief, eh? The newspaper said someone was maybe hiding in the cupboard. Was that you? Amazing. What I do not understand, though, is why there were three versions of this Weeping Woman painting at the studio.’
I looked around for Max. From a far corner of the apartment I heard a tap running, the slam of a cupboard door. What the hell was he doing?
Queel contemplated me, wiped his mouth again. ‘Let me give you some advice. You should be more careful who you associate with. They are — what? — fun, interesting?’ He gave a theatrical shiver. ‘They are glamorous; all this is glamorous. You want to be like them, don’t you? But that is not the same as being their friend. I saw you with them at some openings. They let you come along with them, like a leetle, um … pet. That’s all. I can see maybe what you get out of it, but what do they get from you? Who knows, eh?’
My determined refusal to answer only goaded him. ‘And that girl, what’s her name? Sally? Leetle, innocent Sally. Very attractive, no? She would pretend anything to get what she wanted. Let’s say you would not be the first to fall for her. In fact I myself —’
‘Shut up, will you!’ I said, furious — not because I thought he was wrong, but because I feared he was right. Embarrassed at my outburst, I scrutinised the ice melting in my glass.
He raised one hand palm outwards in surrender and recrossed his legs. ‘I have a sense for this sort of thing. Besides, I saw you and her together. At that Roar Gallery in Fitzroy, out the back one time.’
I knew the night he was referring to. It was a month or so ago, at the opening of an exhibition of drawings by a friend of Edward’s. We were all there: Gertrude, Edward, Max and Sally, even James. The crowded room was thick with the fragrance of hair gel and pencil shavings. It was not long after Sally and I had spent our first night together, and I was sick about her. I had drunk too much cheap white wine, and when I happened upon her alone in the dim back stairway, I couldn’t resist clasping her around the waist in a clumsy attempt to steal a kiss. It happened quickly, but the memory of it was still vivid: her warm body pressed to my own, her hand at my hip, the winey flavour of her lips. My actions were stupid, dangerous, but I was confident that nobody had seen us.
I said nothing, but Queel — relishing the raw nerve he had touched — smirked. ‘You’re lucky it was me who found out,’ he said. ‘Lucky it wasn’t someone else.’
I didn’t know if he was referring to the theft or to the incident with Sally, but at that instant Max materialised in the lounge room. He was pale and war-eyed, like a desperado from one of Egon Schiele’s drawings come to life. My first thought was that he had done something terrible.
Queel sprang from the couch to fix Max a drink. ‘There you are, Max. Now join us and let’s have a good talk. We were chatting about your wife.’
I couldn’t stifle a low groan. Surely he wouldn’t say anything about Sally and me? My body felt heavy, almost too much for my legs to support.
Although I have — most reluctantly — relived the next few seconds over and over in my mind, what happened is forever unclear. The memory footage is grainy and scratched.
Max strode across the room as Queel turned (wet smile on his fishy lips, tumbler in hand) to face him. An expression of puzzled alarm.
‘What do you have there, Max? No!’
Then a crack. Queel grimaced and doubled over. The glass slipped from his hand as he collapsed to the floor. The twitch of his leg, ice glistening on the plush carpet. I had never seen a man shot before, but I was familiar with the choreography of murder from a thousand such cinematic snapshots and realised at once what had happened.
For the following twenty minutes we might have been underwater. Noises dark and muffled, gliding down the back stairs and onto the street. Not a word about what had happened. The drag of a wet, black night. Driving up Punt Road, tail-lights of cars ahead fragmenting beyond the glass, the digital clock on the abandoned silos displaying — between juddering swipes of windscreen wipers — 11:12. A city soundless and full of sound. 11:13. 12°.
‘Merde,’ Max said as we passed beneath the Richmond station bridge. ‘We did it, Tom. We did it. What a thing to do. It’s not like I thought it would be. I have a weird taste in my mouth. Like metal. I never heard of that. Have you got that, too?’
I shook my head, watched the traffic straight ahead. But I felt his searching gaze upon me. Those glittering eyes, that beatific smile, the exultation eerily reminiscent of the minutes after the Challenger disaster. We drove on. Our breathing loud and close in the car interior. And seconds passing like hours.