100 Years of Vicissitude Read online

  A garden-variety example? That old favourite, an eye for an eye.

  Hamlet dabbled with the notion, while the cantankerous people behind the Old Testament ascribed to this law of retribution. In life, sweet revenge assails us with intoxicating creative juices. Name for me one individual that hasn’t, at some sour point, cooked up recourse against an adversary, former lover, a backstabbing friend, or blood-thicker-than-water-spilling family member.

  Easier still, step back and take a gander at me. Go on, then.

  If I were a spritely (living) person, brimming with the decanted blend of vengeance, I might get rowdy enough to concoct a story—a little ditty about the demise of a gentleman I know named Floyd, my daughter’s killer.

  This is the same man who, I’m positive, shot me in the head in the middle of a lovely glass of bubbly.

  Said ‘ditty’ would need to be penned in the debilitated pulp style Floyd embraced—I picture it sandwiched between two dog-eared, faded covers, with a gaudy image on the front of a mostly-naked lady. The name of the publication would be Dime Store Detectives, Flotilla Magazine, The Noir Visage, or some such nonsense.

  You know, for someone at least half my own age, he certainly acted rather past his prime.

  I’m not above giving it my best shot, however, to conjure up this fitting yarn—in the name of settling scores and of appeasing that sweet tooth I mentioned. While hardly leaving much up to one’s imagination, I do like the coup de grâce, the vendetta appeased:

  The first thing she does is she powders her nose.

  She unzips her tobacco-coloured Louis Vuitton purse in the same manner a lioness, basking in the sun on an African savannah, tends to flick her tail—in a deceptive, lazy kind of way, but in reality it’s a quick and precise gesture.

  She drops her hand in the bag and fiddles about a few moments before her long, slender fingers emerge with a compact. Leaning toward the half-length mirror attached to the wardrobe, as I said, she powders her nose.

  I’ve never seen anybody do it with such style.

  Straight after her eyes in the mirror shift to mine, she smiles a fraction, then changes her mind and blows a kiss.

  I’m pretty certain it misses, and that was the point. Attention returned to herself in the mirror, she adjusts the bra strap on her left shoulder, straightens out the dress strap next to that, rotates both shoulders to make the ensemble sit better, and pushes her hair back.

  ‘What’re you looking at, babe?’ she says in a distracted kind of way.

  I don’t answer. I just stare at the beauty in that reflection and find it remarkable that such a serpent could sit so pretty.

  ‘Snake got your tongue?’ She seems to know my every thought, and I find that spooky. Not that it matters now, I guess. Her laughter is husky and it drifts around me. I loved that sound. I loved her. I thought the feeling was mutual, but I’m beginning to cotton on that I was wrong.

  She’s on top of me now, the aroma of lilacs intense, pressing her face as close as possible to mine, so that our eyes meet and her two hazel peepers become one in my struggling vision.

  ‘Cyclops,’ she whispers—it’s our age-old game of affection, yet right now her tone sounds more vicious than vivacious.

  Straight off the bat she breaks away, sits up, and stares down at me. ‘Well, you are boring today, my love. You could put in a little more effort.’

  She eases herself off my lap, heads into the kitchenette, and pushes two slices of bread into the pop-up. The cap’s off the tequila and she’s swigging straight out of the bottle. She’s wandering that savannah again, eyes pushing wild, before a return to civilization and pouring a shot into a glass.

  She paces the kitchen waiting for the toast. The way she walks takes her out of my sight every now and then, but I can hear her breathing and can smell the perfume.

  ‘You got any Vegemite?’ she asks. ‘Oh wait, found it!’ Her next pace takes her to the fridge, where she peers inside. ‘Oh crap. Margarine? I hate margarine, you know that. Why couldn’t you get Western Star butter? A girl might get the feeling that you don’t care about what she wants.’ The toast pops, and then she’s laughing to herself as she spreads condiments. In her next breath she’s singing Foghorn Leghorn. ‘Oh, doggy, you’re gonna get your lumps. Oh, doggy, you’re gonna get some bumps…’

  The way she stands there on the linoleum floor, I’m watching her from behind. She definitely knows how to move that body of hers in that tight satin dress—truth is she always did, especially in my field of vision. Her hips sway as she spreads and serenades, and it’s a mesmerizing sight.

  Finally breakfast is over, followed by a sizable slug of tequila, and she comes back into the bedsit—with the bottle—to stand before me.

  ‘I’d offer you some brekky,’ she says, ‘but I have a feeling you’d just play mum. You know?’ After she swirls the tequila around, she glances at it and back to me. ‘So, what’s your poison? …Oh, wait, you’ve already had it.’ She leans over me on the couch and pries away the empty tumbler that’s been stuck in my mitt for the past half hour. ‘How’s that paralysis coming along, babe?’

  She puts a playful finger to my mouth, though I can’t feel it. At all. I also can’t catch the lilac any more.

  ‘No need to answer. Shouldn’t be long now. Probably your vision will start botching up next.’

  I can see her clearly enough, but the edges of my sight are starting to get haggard, and that haggardness is creeping in from all sides. She sniffs the glass that she took from me and frowns.

  ‘Say, you can smell the extra bonus stuff a mile off. You really have only yourself to blame. Someone who was a bit more cautious would’ve whiffed this before the first sip. But you just love your booze, don’t you? Down the hatch before you even stop to breathe.’ She sighs. ‘Well, I was nice anyway—at least this concoction isn’t as painful as others. It’s also not very quick. Sorry about that.’

  She’s right. At the moment I’m feeling nothing, my senses numb, but as I say it’s been over thirty minutes according to the big, kitsch, 3D crucifixion-scene clock on the wall.

  There is a query nagging away at the back of my noggin. I just wish I could enunciate it through dead lips, or express it to her via some kind of mental Morse code. Hell, sign language would be fine, if my fingers still worked.

  The question was a simple, one-word no-brainer: Why?

  She picks up the phone and makes a call, and right about then the lights go out.

  Ahh, revenge.

  The thing is, as I mentioned to you, I’m presumably dead. This situation renders pointless such exercises in an imaginative dénouement. It’s passive aggression without a punch line.

  John Milton and old Gandhi had their merry thinking caps on when they asserted that revenge festers old wounds and/or makes one blind, and personally I do like to think Mark Twain receives his tick for the quip that revenge is a lot of unnecessary pain hanging onto anticipation of the beast.

  It’s also not good business, and death, as it shapes up, is a great leveller.

  Living it up here, I’m not in a position to affect comeuppance—I very much doubt I’m capable of haunting anyone. Place a sheet over me and I’d scare only Little Miss Muffet.

  Hence, roiling with post-homicidal notions of reprisal is a wasted effort, and a far better recourse—in truth the only decent one available after that gentleman so kindly (probably) placed a bullet in my belfry—would be to leave Floyd altogether out of the picture. To ignore the man. To deflect all memory of his uncouth inanities and twee judgment calls of liberté, égalité et fraternité.

  Sad, really.

  Shall we tarry forth—tally ho, and all that jazz?

  2 | 二

  While you may not like me, you can place a smidgeon of stock in what I have to say.

  I think the reason for doing so is obvious. Probable death sabotages irate desires like revenge, regret and anger.

  Aspirations I polished up in life—audacity, pugnacity, ambitio
n—have sadly scarpered, fortuitously taking with them qualities I found irritating or just plain feeble.

  One thing that has survived is an appetite for the treasures omitted here.

  Oh, how I’d thoroughly enjoy Eggs Benedict, followed by an aged Johnnie Walker Black Label, served neat at room temperature. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given recent experience, champers I could do without.

  This mind-numbing successor to life goes on and on.

  Perhaps to keep me a fraction amused since I bit the bullet—a turn of expression I’m certain would appeal to someone who shall, henceforth, remain mostly nameless—I met a woman who stood out from the vacuous crowd.

  She was awaiting her knight-errant.

  Yes, I well realize how absurd the idea sounds. Before I died, I would have thought the woman stark raving mad, yet here things have a natural disorder that renders the obscure commonplace and the idiotic reasonable.

  The woman’s hovel, or ‘cottage’ as she more kindly referred to the place, was perched on a windy bluff that jutted out two hundred metres above a raging, steel-grey sea. There was, in fact, more rugged pizzazz in that locale than I’d experienced in an age.

  The first time I beheld it, I thought of Ireland or the coast of England, or some nameless rural borough in Scandinavia.

  This makes the setting sound terribly Emily Brontë, but the house belied the notion. The building was a dysfunctional architectural graft of medieval European peasant cottage and a tall-ceilinged, thatch-roofed Edo period farmhouse in Japan.

  No other structure, person or wraith wandered into view as far as the eye could see—which, to be honest, is not saying much since I’d been shipwrecked here without my bifocals.

  I’d never once before felt the need to pay a house call on the residents of the insipid landscape elsewhere, so I don’t know why I adapted my policy here. Perhaps it had something to do with the underlying moxie of the elements and the kooky setting.

  Before me stood a peeling white picket fence that surrounded a lush herb garden, protected by a hedge seemingly bent at right angles by the gale.

  Nearer the dwelling, in a small plot of land serving as a yard, was a scarecrow propped up beside an abandoned wagon wheel. A brown and white Jersey cow chewed grass around this, while next to the entrance lurked an old statue of a comical raccoon dog with a party grin, a wide-brimmed hat, and rather enormous testicles. He held a bottle in one paw and a book in the other—possibly it was the missing ledger I mentioned earlier.

  The track leading up to the house detoured around a gnarled tree I took to be a hazelnut, embalmed in honeysuckle vines, and nearby leaned an empty kennel where a rooster poked about.

  I don’t exactly recall how I arrived.

  One moment I wasn’t there, the next—voilà. Since the feat lacked a puff of cheap stage smog or the disorientation of parlour mirrors, it was refreshingly simple.

  I peered at the face of the scarecrow, troubled that it knew things I didn’t, before a gust of frigid air picked me up like a kite and deposited me on the doormat, right next to the jocular raccoon and a brass sign saying ‘Chevrefoil’.

  Then the door opened to inky depths and I heard a woman declare ‘Yōkoso!’

  I fathomed—and counted on—this being some type of word of welcome, since she grabbed my right elbow; I was yanked inside, and then shuttled over to an ivory leather couch positioned close to a fire in a pit. Thankfully, said blaze gave out no smoke, yet my sight was taking its jolly time adjusting to the switch in illumination.

  ‘Welcome, Mr Harker.’

  ‘My name is not Harker.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t. I was just having fun, playing up the Dracula angle—gloomy chalet, and all.’

  ‘Not quite the chalet,’ I grumbled.

  ‘Well, excuse me. Mr Deaps, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. How did you know?’

  ‘Ahh, if I revealed that, we would lose half the mystery.’

  ‘Mystery? What mystery?’

  ‘Just wait and see.’

  I felt an acidic sensation in my throat, but once I’d sunk down into the settee I discovered a cup of a warm liquid in my hands, and took a cautious whiff—I have no idea why. Conceivably my surly, hardboiled tale about Floyd was ringing in my ears.

  The odour was unique, the faintest vanilla tossed with fruit, flowers and something else I couldn’t hope to identify. Still, I recognized the combination. Not bitter almonds, no carafe of haemoglobin, and by no means poison. It was Japanese saké.

  Heavens above or below or wherever they were, I needed no encouragement.

  I mentioned that this pitiable excuse for an afterlife has in no way deprived me of my love for creature comforts, even if some of them—such as a nice drop of Camus Cuvée, or one of my prized Havanas from the final box of Coronas del Ritz—were no longer on the menu. And for someone with minimal feelings left to call my own, I felt chilled to the bone.

  ‘Marvellous! I like saké.’

  Straight after I sipped the alcohol, an errant thought occurred to me, a silly recollection from a film I’d seen decades before. My inaugural experience was when it screened at our neighbourhood movie theatre, and I wasn’t out of short-pants.

  By God that comes across geriatric—I refuse to accept I would stoop to such a broken-down commentary. Where was I? Ah yes, the film.

  I was aged about seven (and you can forget the short-pants), a student at a primary school called Gardiner Central, located in Gardiner—a leafy, often drizzly eastern suburb of Melbourne.

  We lived three minutes’ walk from Gardiner Station, around the corner from Gardiner Newsagency, and next to a tiny stream named Gardiner’s Creek. I think the cinema was called Gardiner Picture House, or something of the sort.

  All the Gardiners in the area were ratcheted up to honour John Gardiner, a nineteenth-century Irish-born banker and pastoralist of no actual note.

  As with a marriage, the area may have remained bound to the Gardiner name, yet it gradually shed all the visible romantic charms I recalled from boyhood.

  The school was torn down to erect a glitzy elderly citizens’ home, the theatre demolished to make way for a petrol station, and a concrete freeway was thrown slap-bang on top of the waterway. So, on second thought, perhaps I am fossilized—that was sixty-odd years before I settled down here.

  Anyhow, I digress.

  There was this resuscitated film memory to share, a throwaway quote continuing on from ‘I like saké’, to ‘especially when it’s served at the correct temperature, ninety-eight point four degrees Fahrenheit, like this is’.

  While my impromptu adaptation lacked flair, I’m certain I nailed it verbatim.

  Age does, however, continue to play featherbrained—my eyes were taking a month of Sundays to get accustomed to the dim inside light. I looked up from the drink to focus on the woman’s silhouette, stoking the fire. There were small flames, but again no smoke.

  ‘You Only Live Twice,’ I heard her surmise.

  ‘Well spotted,’ I chuckled.

  ‘The Japanese title was Double-O-Seven Dies Twice, odd given that James Bond “died” only once in the movie.’

  ‘That is strange. It’s remarkable how much is coming back to me—I haven’t thought about the film in years! Let me tell you, I was marginally beguiled by Kissy Suzuki. It’s likely dated, but—ahh—my first taste of Japan. The sumo and the Shinto wedding, exotic pearl divers, Bond’s counterfeit Oriental makeover, those bungling ninja at the training school next to Himeji Castle. And of course the saké. It’s no surprise I ended up with a skewed opinion of Japanese culture, women in general, and an affection for fine drinks.’

  I stopped for breath, and then remembered my breeding.

  ‘By the way, wonderful to meet you.’

  ‘You too, Mr Deaps—it’s nice to be able to squeeze a word in edgewise,’ the woman laughed.

  ‘I apologize. That was a complete ramble. Put this down to lack of decent conversation for, I don’t kno
w, far too long.’

  ‘Never mind. I’ve been looking forward to our meeting. In particular, I do like your beard. It gives me something to hang on to, if need be.’

  ‘Er… Righto. Returning to Sean Connery’s splendid turn as Double-O-Seven, have you ever heard the rumour?

  ‘My answer would depend upon which one.’

  ‘Now, there’s a fine point. I’ll tell you about a political associate of mine, a fellow named Denslow. Someone in-the-know when it came to Japanese cuisine, but a blockhead in most else. He mentioned that Roald Dahl, the scriptwriter of You Only Live Twice, may have got the saké thing wrong—but he didn’t sound confident. I put it down to scuttlebutt.’

  ‘All right, now you’re losing me. “Scuttlebutt” I’d expect from a retired sea captain.’

  I chuckled. ‘There’s a reasonably salty ring to it, yes. Perhaps we should take out my private yacht for a spin? Scuttlebutt is a rumour—in this case, that saké served at such a hot temperature, thirty-seven degrees Celsius for those of us who are Fahrenheit inept, is an inferior blend, lacking in quality.’

  With a shrug, the woman stood upright and collected together a few utensils including scissors and a box cutter. If I wasn’t dead already, I might have been concerned.

  ‘Fascinating,’ she finally declared in a tone so thoroughly flat I could detect no sarcasm—which is not to say it wasn’t there. ‘Yes, I remember that was the case in the middle part of the 1960s, round the time You Only Live Twice was filmed. Certain breweries fortified their nihonshu with distilled alcohol—an extended hangover from rice shortages in the Second World War.’

  ‘Crooked.’

  ‘I always had a soft spot for “dodgy”.’

  ‘Not such a bad turn of phrase.’

  ‘Right?’

  Things around me were starting to take on an orange-tinged visual clarity. The woman’s hair, the same colour as the charcoal on the brazier in that smokeless fire pit, was long and tied back in a bun. She had a low nose and an oval face, without makeup, devilishly pretty, and eyes of a burnt sienna hue flecked with chestnut. She was wearing a shift of fabric, like rough cotton or linen, that hung down one very narrow body to her ankles, and her feet were bare.