Shooting Star

43

On the way, too early to pay the call, we parked in Eltham’s main street.

Orlovsky lit a cigarette with the slim stainless-steel lighter he’d always had. Then he had a thought, offered me the packet. I took one. He lit it, regretted it instantly.

‘That’s not good,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t smoke, I’m not comfortable with you smoking.’

I knew what he was talking about. I’d taken a cigarette off him on the night C Troop went to hell.

‘Omens now,’ I said. ‘Mick, it’s just a fucking smoke. Why don’t you get your palms read? Palms. Soles of your feet. You could get your dick read. There must be some meaning there.’

He blew a thin stream of smoke at me. Contemptuous smoke, his composure regained. ‘Flippancy,’ he said. ‘You cloak yourself in flippancy.’ Then he changed tack. ‘Ever given your command instinct any thought? What it might stem from?’

‘I have,’ I said. ‘It stems from a fear of being led by idiots. The only worse fear is of being followed by idiots.’

Cigarettes didn’t last long, promised more than they could deliver. I’d forgotten what hot and acrid teases they were, tiny unbalancing hits. I threw the end out of the window.

‘Time to go. Think like an inspector.’

The house was hidden from the road behind a dense screen of mature gums. A long steep unmade driveway curved to the right. We drove up and parked in front of a low building surrounded by vine-covered pergolas built from massive timbers. There was no garden, just native plants everywhere, many close to death.

‘Do inspectors have the power to hurt people?’ said Orlovsky.

‘Like tie them up and torture them?’

‘I don’t think so.’

The front door was huge, double doors, metal-studded, probably saved from some public building hammered to fragments by the wrecker’s ball. I rapped a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a clenched fist.

We waited, quiet here, no sounds except birds in the gum trees, waited.

I dropped the knocker again, once, twice.

The lefthand doorknob turned and the door opened, just the width of the opener’s face.

‘Yes?’

A tall man, in his thirties, thin, clean-shaven, long hair combed back, dirty fair hair, touching his shoulders. I looked into his eyes, didn’t feel anything.

Orlovsky said, ‘Mr Guinane?’

‘Yes.’

Orlovsky offered him a card. ‘We’re from Powertron, your electricity supplier.’

He looked at it. ‘Powertron? The bills come from EasternPower.’ He had a thin, scratchy voice.

‘They did. EasternPower is now Powertron. Your bills will come from Powertron from now on.’

He gave Orlovsky the card back. ‘Okay. Is that it?’

‘Well,’ said Orlovsky, ‘we’ve got a problem. We don’t have any power usage pattern for this address.’

‘What?’

Orlovsky ran a finger along his upper lip. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing but before we took over, EasternPower managed to wipe the consumption records for this whole area. So we don’t have any record of your power usage over the past few years. The pattern of usage.’

The man opened the door a little wider, shook his head, impatient. He was wearing an old sweater over a tee-shirt, camou-flage pants. ‘So? We’re not behind. The bills get paid on time.’

Now Orlovsky scratched his head. ‘They do, yes, that’s not the problem. May I ask, are these domestic premises?’

‘Domestic premises? Do you mean, do we live here?’

‘Not business premises? Industrial?’

‘What’s this about?’ He was annoyed now, not just impatient, getting angry.

‘Mr Guinane. Mr K. Guinane, is it?’

‘Keith, yes.’

‘Mr Guinane, these premises use far more power than we would expect from domestic use,’ said Orlovsky. He coughed. ‘Now the usual practice in these cases is to notify the police, but…’ ‘The police? What for, what are you talking about?’

‘We don’t wish to do that because of the embarrassment it can cause. And because we don’t have the usage records, we thought…’ ‘Notify the police about what, for fuck’s sake?’ High voice, loud.

‘If we can be satisfied that you are using the power for some legitimate purpose, then we can simply note that.’

‘What’s illegitimate?’

Orlovsky coughed again. ‘Well, for example, people growing certain kinds of plants under lights tend to use large quantities…’ The man smiled, a smile in which he didn’t open his lips.

‘Oh Christ, is that it? You think we’re growing dope. It’s computers, we use half-a-dozen machines.’

We both smiled back at him. ‘Right,’ said Orlovsky, ‘right, computers, that makes sense.’

‘Yeah,’ said the man, ‘that’s it.’

‘Could you just show us that?’ said Orlovsky. ‘We have to report that we’re satisfied the usage is for legitimate purposes.’

‘You’re like an arm of the fucking cops,’ Keith Guinane said. ‘Come in, I’ll show you.’

As he opened the door, I saw movement in the second doorway along the passage. He led us down a wide passage with a polished concrete floor, mudbrick walls, doors opening on both sides at the end. The second door on the left was open. He went in first.

It was a big room, dark, heavy curtains drawn. There were benches along the inside walls and on them computing equipment, screens glowing with coloured images of people running, all slightly different. At first, I thought they were photographs but there was something of the comic strip about them.

A man was standing in the righthand corner, his back to a screen. He was the double of Keith, right down to the clothes and the long dirty hair combed back.

‘This is my brother, Victor,’ said Keith. ‘These people are from the electricity company,’ he said to Victor. ‘We’re using so much power, they thought we were growing dope under lights.’

Victor laughed, a screeching sound. ‘Growing dope under lights,’ he said, delighted.

It was like rewinding a tape, playing it again, listening to the same speaker.

…growing dope under lights. Rewind, play: …growing dope under lights. Alice on the monitor in the television studio:

Not similar, the same. At first, I thought it was someone talking to himself, having a conversation with himself.

‘Well, that’s all we need, Mr Guinane,’ said Orlovsky. ‘I can see where the juice’s going. Sorry we had to bother you, but you can understand, there’s not many houses pulling this kind of current.’

‘Yeah,’ said Keith Guinane. ‘I know. Just doing your job.’

He went out first, then Orlovsky.

The door across the passage was open. I had a moment to see a section of wall. It was covered with photographs, at least a dozen framed photographs of different sizes, some of them school photographs, class pictures, all arranged around a big picture of Cassie Guinane. On a table in front of the pictures, a candle was burning, a candle in a silver candlestick on a small table covered by a white lace tablecloth.

There was something odd about the school photographs.

I took an extra pace across the passage, focused on a picture of girls in school uniform.

A girl had been blacked out.

In every school class picture, a girl had been blacked out.

It would be Stephanie Carson. Stephanie Chadwick.

We went down the passage, walking behind Keith Guinane. On the way, I put out my hand and touched the wall, ran my fingertips along it.

Mudbrick, mud-plastered mudbrick.

Adobe.

…and I thought they were lovely, adobe, sort of Moorish-style and we unpacked and I went to have a shower and I got out all wet, water in my eyes and I had to steady myself and I touched the wall…Repulsive, revolting, the feel of it…I ran out, I didn’t have anything on, I think I was screaming, I gave my mother a terrible fright…

Alice, talking to me. How long ago that seemed.