Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [25]
I pick up a copy of the local paper discarded on the counter, wrinkled with spilled beer. I want to hide in their words, lives unconnected to mine. The lead story is about a funding award to renovate the local park. Dominating page two is a letter to the editor warning about addiction to slot machines, ‘pokies’. I look up from the article where men huddle around a bleeping, flashing, money eater. Before I turn back to the paper, Chukka, the happy gambler, catches my eye and wobbles over.
‘I bet you’re a Pom. A thousand bucks.’
I bet him a thousand bucks he’s Australian.
‘Too right.’ He slides along the bar. The Billy K face stares from his chest. ‘You don’t look like a backpacker. You here on business?’
I tell him research, that I’m from a university. Before I fabricate further he stops listening and starts talking, slurring the ends of his words. ‘Nothing against you fellas. And fuck, a shitload of people hate your guts. Bloody Poms, they say. Not me. Me mum’s got a plate on the wall with a picture of old Lizzie in the middle.’
I suggest we might even be related, go back two hundred years, and who knows?
‘Bloody truth. Get this. Me brother, real smart. He’s the manager at P&G tool hire, on George Street. Well, last year he fucks off to Canberra for business. You been there?’
I tell him I haven’t.
‘Don’t fucking bother. Fake town. Shit pubs. But straight up now, me brother comes back from his business trip, with guess what, only the family bloody tree.’
Then Chukka looks down at his chest, studying the T-shirt, as if the Billy K face might join in the conversation. He starts patting the material and I have no idea what’s happening.
‘Where the fuck’s that gone? Shit. Don’t tell me I’ve lost it. Hold on.’ Next he starts undoing his work shirt tied in a knot around his waist. ‘I know, mate, I’m a fucking mess. Just don’t tell the missus, ay.’ He undoes the shirt and opens it out. ‘Here it is.’
He thrusts a large white badge into my face. A speech bubble from a cartoon man with a ball and chain says, Convict and Proud.
‘Me brother went to the national records. Turns out me great great granddad stole a loaf of bread and got thrown in the brig. And I tell you what, better finding out I’m a crim than a copper, one of those bastard redcoats.’
I laugh. I say, ‘Who’d wear a badge that said, Policeman and Proud?’
I still have my clothes in a plastic carrier bag. When I stand before the bold lines and columns of the National Library, the stately, whitewashed pillars reflected in the lake, I feel too dirty to enter, a rootless hobo.
About a minute after drunken barfly Chukka showed me his Convict and Proud badge, I walked to the bus station and bought a ticket to Canberra. If it occurred to me to check out McCreedy, then Monique Cabanne’s mystery visitor might have also wondered about the connection. Perhaps Billy K, a man obsessed with the words of the journal, suddenly hearing a new name in the story of Babbage and Thomas, wanted to know more too.
But of course I don’t believe I’m suddenly on his trail, do I?
The next morning, before beginning the search for McCreedy at the convict archives, I go into a public toilet with a plastic razor and shaving foam bought from a chemist. I’m shaving for other people, not me. Appearance is a luxury right now. Massaging the foam into my stubble, feeling the skin tug on the cheap blade, I wonder if Billy K stands before a bathroom mirror each morning. Can he look himself in the eye, his very own ghost? And if he is out there, alive and kicking, does he know I’m after him?
At the bus station in Canberra I had bought a leather holdall. With it swinging from my hand, I feel respectable enough to walk through the grand doors of Australia’s depository of knowledge. I ask at the front desk about researching the convict records, and fill out a request card with little more than