for Indian hemp in the entire city of Sydney.
They were in the main studio. I sat down with the engineer, handed him the brandy bottle and watched the proceedings through the control booth window. Max and the boys were playing back-up to the lovely Del Keene, singer, dancer, comedienne, and, as of two months ago, my ex-girlfriend.
She was singing a tune she and Max had co-written called ‘Kiss Crazy’. It was intended to be their ticket to television stardom, if only they could get it arranged right. The song was a straight twelve-bar, but Max had put some stops at the end and added bongos to give it a Latin feel, he said. To me it sounded more like Charleston than cha-cha, but what would I know? I asked the engineer what he thought. He told me that in London before the war he’d worked with all the greats—Formby, Fields, Lynn—and if this was a hit record, he was in the wrong game.
They finished the song and Del came out to listen to a playback. We said hello and kissed. She made a show of waving away the alcohol fumes. I went into the studio.
Max was retuning his guitar. He said howdy partner. At the age of thirty-five he had already clocked up twenty years in the entertainment business. As a one-time Hawaiian guitarist, hillbilly yodeller, juggler, piano player, band leader, radio actor and now bearded bongo beater, Max Perkal had experienced pretty well all that show business had to offer, barring success.
Lachie the drummer came bouncing over to me, slapped me on the back and asked if l had any dope. I told him maybe, did he have any money? He said no, but he would have tomorrow, or maybe the day after, and he’d gladly pay me Tuesday for a reefer today. I thought of the ‘money can spoil a good friendship’ line, but kept it to myself.
I said, ‘Shit, Lach, fair go. You think I’m in this game for fun?’
He said, ‘Man, you’re wound tight. You need to loosen up a bit. You better crank up one of them reefers fast, get mellow.’ Lachie using hip talk with a broad Aussie accent.
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
