I lit up a couple of reefers and passed them out, received assurances from the band that, too right, they’ d square up with me next week, no problem.
Del came back into the studio. She frowned when the smoke was offered to her. Lachie asked did I have anything else. I left the brandy and dexes with them and went back out to the control room while they recorded yet another take, then another.
Having provided the reefers, I was more or less redundant. I hung around reading an old Downbeat, then took a spare guitar and went out the back to practise my strumming. Sitting there, plunking on the guitar, I sort of hit on an idea, a kind of hillbilly-shuffle thing. My guitar playing was still at page three of The Mickey Baker Jazz Guitar Book, but I could strum enough to get out of trouble and this shuffle feel was sounding pretty catchy to me.
Over half an hour or so I came up with some words, half sung, half spoken against a C chord.
There’s no one I can talk to, they’ve all got troubles of their own
I try to tell how bad I feel, I’m on my Pat Malone
But I found a way to have your say, all you folks who have no one
Just sit right down and tell it all to good old number one.
Then came a sung chorus, which went up to the F chord.
Talking the blues to myself
Get another bottle down off the shelf
Tell your troubles to the wall
When there’s nobody who cares at all
Tell the cat how bad you feel
Tell the pooch about your rotten deal
I’m just talking the blues to myself.
Chuffed, I scribbled the lyrics down and went back out to the studio. They were all listening to the latest take of ‘Kiss Crazy’. The general feeling was that that was as good as it was going to get.
Del said she was too tired for any more tonight and went home. But the mob were flying now, full of dexes, Remy and reefer, and they were unwilling to call it a night. They went back to their instruments, jammed on ‘Honky Tonk’ and ‘Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid’, and then I said here, have a go at this, and sang them ‘Talking the Blues’. They thought it was sort of funny and over the next twenty minutes we worked out a quick arrangement, with the whole lot of them singing along on the chorus, sounding like a bunch of drug-addled pisspots. Max switched to steel guitar and played a solo in the middle. The engineer had a bit of tape left over, so we recorded the song right then. It was two o’clock before everyone bolted, but I hung around for a while finishing off the brandy with the engineer while he packed up.
Outside at two-thirty I had some trouble getting the key in the ignition, and when I did the headlights didn’t work. I got out and looked. Both headlights had been kicked in. Then I noticed the new defect notice pasted on the windscreen and a ticket stuck under the wiper. On the back of the envelope was written in pencil ‘Ray Waters, Lest We Forget’.
I drove home along the back streets to my pad at the Kia Ora flats in Moore Park Road and fell asleep in the armchair. At four-thirty the telephone rang. I fumbled with it, picked it up and said hello. The other end hung up. An hour later it rang again and the same thing happened. I left it off the hook.
I woke later with a dry mouth, still in the armchair. It was just getting light outside. I replaced the handset and five minutes later the phone rang again. Without thinking, I picked it up, said hello. There was no reply but I could hear sounds in the background.
There was a kind of laugh, then a voice said, ‘We’re going to get you, cunt.’
I lit a smoke. My hand shook. One more for the list: Never get mixed up in a cop-killing.
Chapter 2
I spent the next morning brooding over the events of the previous day. Whichever way I looked at it, there was no avoiding the conclusion that word had got out that Chief Superintendent Ray Waters was dead and that I was involved. A month before, quite suddenly, I’d started copping speeding tickets when I went driving, parking fines whenever I stopped. Twice I’d come out in the morning to find my tyres deflated. I’d been putting it down to coincidence, but with that anonymous phone call it was time to take action.
First off, I drove my beloved green and white Customline up to the car yard in Paddo and swapped it for a grey Holden, got two hundred quid cash back, smashed headlights notwithstanding. I took it straight out to the Motor Registry at Roseberry and told the kid behind the counter that I’d misplaced my licence and needed a duplicate. He gave me a form to fill in. I wrote down a phony name and address and handed it to him. He came back a while later, said they couldn’t find my records. I huffed and puffed and they gave me a stat dec to fill out, which I did, and they issued a licence to me under the name I’d given them. Then I registered the car under the new name. It was that easy.
I went back to the Kia Ora flats, paid up a month’s rent, then went straight out to find somewhere else to live. I took a lease on the first place I looked at, a flat in Farrell Avenue in East Sydney, behind William Street. It was pretty scungy and smelled of damp, but it was cheap and private and would do me well enough while I waited for the police business to die down. I moved in the same day. I left the phone connected at the old place and got it put on under the phony name at the new joint.
I spent the next day putting things in order. With my record player set up, my framed picture of Rising Fast winning the 1954 Melbourne Cup on the wall, some bottles of beer in the fridge and tea and biscuits in the kitchen cupboard, the flat didn’t seem so bad. It had its own private stairs down the back of the building which led onto a laneway that could have come straight out of a gangster movie. The landlord was a Maltese bloke named Sam. He seemed inclined to mind his own business.
After lunch I opened a bottle of beer and drank a toast to the new pad, allowed myself a little pat on the back for my quick action. I finished the beer, dropped a couple of pills, and presently paddled my board onto that familiar wave of confidence and well-being.
I went into the bathroom, and while I brushed my teeth I took a long hard look at myself in the mirror. My hair was still sandy and most of it was still there, and so too were my teeth. Sure, I could have done with a couple more pounds, and maybe my face was rather drawn. For a 31-yearold, my eyes were a little more bloodshot than they might have been, but what the hell? I ran a comb through my hair and stood up to my full height, five ten. I shaped up, threw a few punches at the bloke in the mirror. I skipped around a bit, dodging behind my guard. That’s the way, I thought, still every inch a champ.
Suitably geed up, I turned my attention to monetary matters. I got out my financial records-an old exercise book-to establish where I stood. It had been a big twelve months, starting with me well ahead, holding the combined take from the J. Farren Price robbery and my share of Lee Gordon’s Little Richard tour. But since then I’d shouted a lot of drinks, fattened up a few bookies, and shelled out some hefty unsecured loans. Now the bank balance was looking decidedly crook. The way it was going, if I didn’t get some real cash flow soon I’d be on the bones of my arse by Christmas.
But I still had a few hundred quid left and there was a chance I could call in at least some of the money I was owed. This ranged from the five quid Lachie owed me for the reefers (which I’d never get) all the way up to up to a £1200 advance that I’d made to Jack Davey six months ago. Retrieving that one would require a careful approach. Despite his being the highest paid entertainer in the country, getting money out of Davey was harder work than brickies’ labouring.
My philosophy on money had always been wait and see what turns up, but while you’re waiting, do whatever’s necessary. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the best course open to me was legitimacy, or the appearance of same. The problem was, short of getting an actual job, I had absolutely no idea how to earn a legitimate quid.
The next morning I went for a run and a swim at the Domain baths, then