St Kilda Blues

Melbourne-born Geoff McGeachin has spent much of his life shooting pictures for advertising, travel, theatre and feature films. His work has taken him all over the world, including stints living in Los Angeles, New York and Hong Kong. He is now based in Sydney, where he teaches photography and writes. He is the author of six novels.
The Diggers Rest Hotel
and
Blackwattle Creek
won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction in 2011 and 2013 respectively.

geoffreymcgeachin.com

Fat, Fifty & F***ed!

D-E-D Dead!

Sensitive New Age Spy

Dead and Kicking

The Charlie Berlin novels

The Diggers Rest Hotel

Blackwattle Creek

For Wilma,
because not one word of this
would have been possible without her.

Charlie Berlin didn't want to die, not today and definitely not like this, jammed in the passenger seat of a Triumph TR
5
sports car hurtling through Monday morning traffic on Kings Way in South Melbourne. Besides not wanting to leave Rebecca without a husband and his kids without a father, Berlin was worried that his life might flash before his eyes and there were some parts he really didn't want to experience again.

He clutched the passenger-side windscreen frame of the Triumph, pressed his feet hard into the firewall and braced himself. When a bloke has survived twenty-nine bombing missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, a POW camp and a twenty-day forced march at gunpoint from Poland into Germany through the worst winter blizzards in a century, getting the life crushed out of you under the steel wheels of a Melbourne tram seemed pretty unfair.

Bob Roberts dropped down a gear and floored the accelerator pedal. As Berlin's head snapped back he caught a glimpse of a white-faced conductor in the open doorway and heard the tram driver frantically ringing the bell. He winced at the screech of metal on metal from the braking wheels, saw a shudder from the back end of the tram and then they were round and past. Roberts was laughing, yelling over the wind tearing through the open-topped car, the scar on the left side of his face giving his grin an angry, maniacal edge.

‘Jesus Christ, Charlie, you don't want to live for bloody ever, do you?'

Berlin shook his head slowly, amazed he was still alive. ‘Just till lunchtime would be nice, Bob,' he yelled. ‘If you can manage it.'

Roberts veered right a minute or two later, off Kings Way and on to Queens Road, running a traffic light more red than amber and cutting off a tradesman's Holden panel van. The battered blue van had a couple of ladders mounted on top and the startled driver swerved sideways, leaning on the horn. Roberts pulled a leather driving glove off his right hand with his teeth and raised two fingers over his head. Two fingers spread was the victory sign and two fingers together and slightly bent was a very definite ‘fuck you'. There was little doubt which one Roberts meant.

Berlin heard the horn again and then the sound of the panel van's engine straining at high revs, trying to catch up with them. The sports car easily outpaced the other vehicle on the straight run down Queens Road, which was lucky for the tradie. If he was after an apology from the Triumph's driver he wouldn't get one, and if he was looking to get beaten to a pulp it was London to a brick on that. Bob Roberts was trouble and he was a copper, making him doubly bad for anyone looking for a fight.

Berlin glanced at the parkland to his right, then back over his shoulder into the cramped space behind the bucket seats of the sports car. The covers of the foolscap manila folders were fluttering in the slipstream so he scooped them up, putting them down in the equally cramped space at his feet. Last thing he fancied right now was chasing missing persons paperwork all over the Albert Park Lake golf course.

‘Your mob, eh, Charlie? Wanna stop in for a beer?' Roberts tilted his head to the left, indicating a two-storey building behind a neat hedge. A sign over the hedge read ‘Air Force Association' and above it the pale blue RAAF ensign was flying from a white flagstaff.

Berlin shook his head. He'd had plenty of invitations to join and he was sure they did good works and were a nice bunch of blokes but he wasn't the club type. Besides, they had a bar. He'd been a long time breaking the drinking habit and even now he did his best to avoid temptation. In any case, a lot of those ex–air force types looked back on the war as the greatest days of their lives, and that wasn't how he saw it. Charlie Berlin didn't want or need to be reminded of things from twenty-some years back. He counted off the years in his head. It really was twenty-two. Jesus.

Think about something else
, he told himself. Down at his feet he saw the name on the top of the pile of folders: Gudrun Scheiner. A German name. There were a lot more foreign names turning up around the traps these days; even the Aussie Rules football teams were fielding blokes with names like Jesaulenko, Silvagni and Ruscuklic. Maybe if Essendon had a few more of those post-war refugee kids or kids of refugees onboard they might have finished better than sixth on the league ladder for the year. Water under the bridge now; Richmond were the 1967 VFL premiers and, as young Sarah had said too many times while trying to cheer him up, there was always next year for their team, the not-so-mighty Bombers.

Through the trees on Berlin's right he could see the cold grey glint of Albert Park Lake. There was a restaurant on the lake, across the other side. The Carousel. He had taken Rebecca there to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary, ten years on from the unexpected pregnancy and his marriage proposal. She'd had ‘chicken in a basket', he remembered, and he'd had a good steak. The St Kilda end of the lake was where Roberts had said they'd found the body of the seventh or eighth girl. That was two weeks back and they would get to her eventually but the most recent missing girl, fifteen-year-old Gudrun, was the priority right now.

He considered picking up the folder and reading about the Scheiner girl, but the wind blowing through the open-topped car made that impossible. And his hands were still shaking from the close call with the tram. He'd know the facts of the case soon enough – too damn soon, from the way Roberts was driving. They were headed towards Brighton, a seaside suburb like its English namesake.

Berlin had gone to England's Brighton by train from the troopship, on his arrival from Canada along with yet another mob of recently graduated Australian aircrew. He guessed that Melbourne's Brighton had never had its mansions and grand houses disfigured with blackout curtains or blast tape crisscrossing the window glass, never had walls of sandbags sheltering its major buildings. The RAAF had its arrivals centre there to welcome and brief the young airmen before they went off to their assigned RAF or RAAF squadrons, off to war and an unknowable fate.

And now Melbourne's Brighton had seen a way-too-young person go off to an unknown fate and Berlin's job was to track her down. In the other, far-off, long-ago Brighton the name Charlie Berlin had once been written on a folder, an RAAF-issue manila folder. In 1944 that folder had been stamped ‘Missing, Ops, Germany', though of course he had eventually come home. But Charlie Berlin now knew a secret, and a very bad secret it was. Charlie Berlin knew that when you've been missing and then get found, not all of you ever really comes back.

Every twitch and jerk of her leg pulled the wire tighter, increasing the torment and bringing her end another minute closer. Tiring now, she was panting from the pain and her long, lonely struggle. She first sensed vibrations through the soil, then heard the sound of the footsteps coming closer, through the clumps of bracken that had once sheltered and protected her. The footsteps were the sound of her death approaching.

The farmer already had two rabbits slung over a shoulder. Tied together by the ears, they were neatly gutted and would be skinned later. Pushing the bracken aside, he made his way towards the burrow and the snare he had set nearby. The boy followed, his tread on the ground softer, lighter. The farmer stopped, studied the rabbit twitching on the wire for a moment and nodded his head.

‘She's a fine fat one, eh, lad? 'Nother good'un for the pot, I'd say. We done well.'

The boy didn't reply. The boy hardly ever spoke.

The farmer put his boot on the doe's neck, bent to grasp her hind legs and pulled. There was a sharp snap as her neck broke. He didn't see the lad's head jerk back as if in sympathy with the rabbit. The farmer bent down and loosened the snare. He took his knife and quickly slit the twitching belly open, flicking the guts, hot, wet and bloody, to one side. Some of the offal splashed onto the boy's face.

The farmer looked up and grinned. ‘Sorry, young'un.'

The was no indication from the boy that he had heard, and the farmer let the smile die. The boy was big for his age, and strong with it. He was a strange child too, that was for certain, sent to them from London six months back by the daughter of the farmer's wife's second cousin. They'd said it was from fear of the pilotless and lethal buzz bombs that had begun to fall regularly on the capital after D-day, though in truth the boy had been sent just to be rid of him.

The child had been made in a dark East End alleyway on a warm summer evening in 1939, three months before war was declared. His mother was not yet sixteen, already with a woman's body and a reputation for being easy. The father was a barrow boy who would rise beyond his humble origins to drive a General Grant tank in the Middle East and be burned alive and screaming inside the vehicle when a German 88 scored a direct hit. At least he had done the right thing, it was agreed by the girl's family, marrying her before being sent off overseas.

He was long gone when the child was born so he never had to see the cold eyes and lack of expression that made the boy's otherwise unremarkable face something of dread. The girl had first ignored her son and had then grown to fear and hate him for his stillness, lack of tears and inability to voice a cry even when hungry. The child was five when the German victory weapons began to fall on London, and that was as good an excuse as any to get rid of him. The girl often wondered why she hadn't thought to get rid of him when he was in her belly.

Another reason to be rid of the child was that he made things awkward when the girl was entertaining American servicemen in her tiny bedsit. She usually favoured officers but wasn't that particular – if someone was generous to her, she was generous in return. As he grew bigger, the boy became even more difficult to palm off on one of the neighbours. This was not because he was a badly behaved child, in fact he was too well behaved. He simply sat and stared. If she was unable to get rid of him for an evening she made the boy sit and face the wall while the bed squeaked and banged and captains and lieutenants and even once a general laughed and gasped and groaned and quite often called on God, though not for salvation.

There was a roar from behind the farmer and the boy. A black-painted Halifax bomber lumbered into the air above them, its four Bristol Hercules engines screaming. Seconds later a glider attached to the bomber by a long heavy cable lifted into the air behind it, the wind whistling over the plywood fuselage and wings. This must be something big, the farmer realised, given the number of planes he had heard taking off so far. He had listened to the bombers and gliders taking off last June to spearhead the D-day invasion of Hitler's Europe and, months after that, for the Rhine bridges in Holland. He knew the creaking wooden hulls of the gliders were packed with nervous young members of the elite 6th Airborne Division, glider infantrymen being dragged silently through the sky to an unknown fate.

His own boy might be on board a troop-carrying aircraft right now, bound for the same destination as the gliders. The lad was Airborne too, a paratrooper, proud possessor of a jaunty red beret that marked him as special and earned him free pints at the pub when he was home on leave. Parachuting into France in the first hours of D-day he had been blooded in battle, jumping again months later into the disastrous flaming hell that was the Dutch town of Arnhem. He was one of the few survivors to make it back across the freezing, flooding Rhine, guided to the Allied lines and safety by red tracers fired intermittently into the night sky from a Bofors gun. The lad was different after that, more thoughtful, moody, quieter.

When the paratrooper came home on leave after Arnhem the young'un had been sleeping in his bed. They shared the small loft bedroom for a week and the farmer often heard them talking well into the night. This was surprising, since the boy had spoken barely a dozen words since the day he arrived on the train from London.

The soldier's leave had been brief and too soon over. The war in Europe was coming to a close and the farmer hoped his son would be safe and manage to stay alive until the war was over. But even though Hitler was almost finished now, the Japs had shown no readiness to surrender, so soldier men would still be needed for the killing business in India and Burma.

The farmer reset the snare and tied the gutted rabbit by its ears to the pair already on his shoulder. He saw some flecks of gore on the young'un's face and leaned down to brush them off with his rough farmer's hand.

The boy didn't react. Behind the blank face he was thinking, wondering. The hot, wet guts of the rabbit had stung his cheek, which he understood, but there was something else, something confusing. He was wearing rough corduroy trousers, a singlet, a ragged woollen jumper, and on top of that a too-big, hand-me-down tweed jacket the farmer's wife had pulled from a cupboard. He was bundled up against the late winter chill, trousers tied tightly about his waist with a length of hemp in place of a belt. How, he was wondering, had it happened? Had the guts of the rabbit managed to find their way inside the barrier of his clothing, past the rope and fabric bunched around his waist, dribbling somehow down his body and finally stopping between his legs? That must have been it, he decided, that must have been how it had happened.

He had watched the farmer slip the knife blade down into the still-twitching belly of the rabbit and then upwards, casually flicking the entrails away. The sensation of the warm offal splashing on his cheek had been matched by an instantaneous and unexpected burning between his legs. His little jigger had suddenly felt strange, different, like it was on fire, like it was in flames. But the burning sensation, though odd, wasn't all that uncomfortable. It wasn't uncomfortable at all in fact. There was not much that the boy had ever liked in his young life but now he decided he liked that strange feeling of heat at the base of his belly, right between his spindly legs. He liked it very, very much.