Truth May Rise in the Classified Creamy Froth of the Next Beer
Sally Ryhanen
If there is a patron saint for the evil of heart, she must be Irish. There was my target, dangling upside down from a rustic lighthouse, begging to be rescued. Smack in front of an Irish pub. Sanderson’s regular position, according to the barman of the Shamrock Hotel, Townsville, Queensland, Australia.
I normally annihilate without formal introduction. The ‘good afternoon’, or in this particular instance something akin to ‘’ow yer goin’?’ is noticeably absent prior to my bullet insinuating itself into a forehead. But I called out to my sagging baggage of a victim as he had work to do before his deletion.
‘Git me down,’ he replied.
‘Come to Daddy’ was a response that sprung to mind, but speedily discarded. I blessed my recalcitrant saint and bellowed comforting words to the mangled baggage. My theme concerned the pragmatism of holding fast.
I had not heard his story at that stage, not close up. Not watched skin flake from lip sores as his soul brawled with volcanic emotion; not recoiled from the alcoholic stench that works to inveigle itself with my own osmotic aura. The stench that whispers, ‘So easy, this can so easily be you.’
I had tracked him from Melbourne and unearthed unsavoury sediment about his life in Sydney, Newcastle, and then Mudjimba on the Sunshine Coast. Finally, albeit reluctantly, I pressed the flesh in Townsville. An arse-upwards downhill road, they call it. A loser’s deal with desperation, crawling northward. Sleeping rough is easier when it’s warm. A sea shower is free. Darwin, a northern apex, they suggest, has a finality that is difficult to avoid.
My classified brief stated,
…this witness disappeared before the hearing.
At that point, the dangling derelict should have dissolved into a nothingness, redundant, the zero he openly bore as his totem.
…the Bishop, however, was convicted on the evidence of the other abuse victims, thus validating the veracity of Sanderson’s written statement…any future allegations from this witness will be deemed credible to any court or media…’recovered’ memories are insinuation enough to convict by media and international opinion…
My orders signed off with a blunt demand to locate, utilise and terminate, penned in silken, totalitarian soft speak.
Sanctions. The new killing fields, sans armoury and overt blood. Its modern soldier sits in poverty, fatigued and grey at her sewing machine, stands idle in a hard hat on a bare construction site, or lies hungry at its mother’s arid breast. This bloodless soldier screams, but the sound is languorous and silent. With the tremor of a butterfly wing, as distant to Sanderson as sobriety, the lifting of Sanctions, led me to stand beneath this stinking collection of snot, horror, and pathos with the absurd idea I might be able to break his fall.
So, I climbed.
Twelve days later, Sanderson and I happen again to share space. This time inside the Shamrock Hotel. A Queensland beauty they say, in Townsville. Far north of Australian civilisation; at the bottom of a planet that is destined to spin obliquely out of control, piloted by an orange-face grasping its tiny appendage, which a jocular god has shaped into a mini-me atomic explosion. The current Australian Prime Minister will be placed centrally up the pilot’s arse, up the nether regions of the President of the U.S. of A.
The too-far-Right of the 2020 world are leading the starvation of the reasonable, into the punitive world of Sanctions. Only the unreasonably too-far-Left are mean enough to save them. Yet, only the too-far-Left will pay me to besmirch the Australian Prime Minister.
I sit steeped in the beauty of the only true beer in this piss swilling country, the Guinness. My forefingers trace the sides of the glass, glorying in the yin and yang of creamed froth and ebony body gloss. Perfection. Unlike my surroundings.
He, Sanderson, meanders, trailing rejection around a bunch of tradies in the front bar, young students in the beer garden and a group of pensioners on the pokies. A few bar flies attempt to curtail him.
‘Pull your fekin’ head in, Sandy.’
One withered fly goes to touch him but thinks better of it. Instead he tells Mr Sandy Sanderson his fortune.
‘You’ll end up cryin’, you’ll gee up the wrong bloke one day, mate.’
My mind applauds the forecasting of the fly, and I feel, like a mother feels a child’s fear, Sanderson’s sinking shock as his hands and feet slither across the grease he will find at the top of his lighthouse perch. One day.
Sanderson grabs peanuts off the bar and open hands them into the oracle’s mouth, before doing a brown eye through the glass door of the smoking area.
‘Send the bastard over to the AJs,’ someone quips, ‘they’ll pull out his spark plugs.’
I slide into the smoking area; my Devil’s patron saint having tossed me a further opportunity to mount a white charger.
‘Look, sorry,’ I stutter, as I reach towards Sanderson with my palms open. ‘I’ve left my cigarettes at work, could I…oh, are you the guy the other night…up the lighthouse?
Sanderson stares. His eyes flick skyward to the side, seeking a feigned solution to my intrusion. He checks suddenly, and a few sparks of sun flicker through cloudy eyes.
‘Mebbe. You the guy that climbed up an’ grabbed me?
‘Yes.’
‘Well I ‘spose I thanked ya. That’s enough. Don’t expect me to pay ya in fags now.’
‘No. Well, that’s okay. But I really came in to suggest you avoid the AJs, is that what you call them? I…’
Sanderson turns, and hunches lower into the nocuous balcony haze.
‘Fuck off.’
‘Oh. Well, okay. I just didn’t want to see you hurt.’ I chuckle. A sound that seems to entice him. ‘I have never had the honour of saving a life before, well not physically, they say I do it often on an emotional level. I just wouldn’t find it funny to have saved you and then watch a bunch of army jerks beat the crap out of you.’ I laugh out loud now. ‘Would seem such a waste of my energy, don’t you agree?’
I had him.
He cackles near fit to wet himself.
‘I heard the AJ’s, ah, suggesting that if you come back into the bar, they will re-decorate the walls with the liquid parts of your anatomy. Or words similar.’
He cackles again.
‘Who the bleedin’ hell are ya, mate, talking pommy toffee like.’
‘Nobody really, but may I walk you safely out to the garden? Perhaps with a beer and I’ll tell you who I am, if you are really interested. But you tell me first, what level of intelligentsia parks a lighthouse in the middle of the road?’
Sandy Sanderson is spectacularly uninterested in who I am. I hint at my official work as ‘psycho to the returning AJs’, based at the Lavarack Barracks. The northern Australian base, with its Asian-like terrain, was a knee jerk response to the perceived threat of a communist attack, in the Vietnam war times. Splendid irony. Here I am, the hidden commie attack, counselling Australia’s forces. Attack wears a myriad of faces.
Sandy Sanderson is, however, spectacularly interested in sharing his life with me. Topping up the medicine, to a level where a non-functioning alcoholic would be eating worms, only serves to energise his tongue and self-pity.
‘Something happened,’ he repeats, laying his arms across the beer barrel that is pretending to be a table. ‘Shouldn’t have happened to a dog.’ His speech slows as the alcohol concentration in his blood increases, but conversely his fluency and diction improve. It is as if his daily garb falls away and the man he protested earlier, ‘I shud have fuckin’ bin’, steals a look at me. And appears to approve. As long as I am buying the piss water.
It will take two further weeks of tea and sympathy before I steer the talk towards the Prime Minister of Australia, recovering a memory or two. Towards the time the politician was a priest, under that kiddy fiddling prick of a Bishop. After all, our leaders agree, truth is no longer truth. Truth may rise in the classified creamy froth of the next beer.
Sally has been honoured in local and international competitions and journals and her work is regularly presented by professional actors. Shortlisted for the Iceland Writer’s Retreat Alumni Award 2017, she meanders through a Creative Writing degree, loving life in an Australian surfing town. Her companions are an ancient Finnish marathon runner and two borrowed budgies.