I'm Dying Here. Damien Broderick
do at a pinch. I’m a bit dehydrated.”
“Plenty of water in the tap. You’ve got to balance the buggers, haven’t you?”
“What buggers?”
“The Yin and Yang, you’re not brain-damaged by any chance?” I stood, made water flow into a tall glass. Chi sparkled in a beam of sunlight, or it might have been a film of detergent.
“It is indeed necessary to achieve a harmonious accommodation between the forces of Yin and the forces of Yang—”
“—in order to enhance not only one’s physical surroundings but also one’s life, career and interpersonal relationships...that’s right, isn’t it, Purdue?”
“You appear to know almost as much as I do, Share. I see you’ve had occasion to consult a feng shui master before.”
“I’ve read the same bloody website, Purdue.”
“The role of the internet in spreading the good word about feng shui cannot be overestimated. However, a word of warning: full mastery of the insights of this ancient art can be obtained only by many years of study and contemplation at the feet of an enlightened master. The temptation to use a little learning gleaned from the internet—”
“Without paying huge amounts to a charlatan like you.”
“—should be avoided at all costs.”
“Sugar, Purdue. Can you tell me something about its Yin and Yang?”
I was getting whiplash. Maybe I’d nodded off for a couple of seconds, the way you do when you are majorly jetlagged, but I hadn’t been out of the country for years. “What?”
“That white stuff, the sort you don’t snort up your nose. You put it in tea.”
I shook my head sadly. I suspected her tea would be as awful as her coffee. “Feng shui has little to say about sugar, Share. Tea in China is traditionally drunk without the addition of either milk or sugar.”
“But the average race horse in Australia is no respecter of tradition and takes its sugar neat.”
Oh. Oh fuck. I felt sicker, all of a sudden. “Just what is this all about, Mrs. Lesser?” Had we or hadn’t we? I honesty couldn’t remember. Our clothes had been all over the bedroom floor. But I’m notoriously untidy when I’m pissed, it didn’t necessarily signify a night of wild passionate screwing.
“I think you are a man of parts, Purdue. I think it is possible to consult you about a lot more things than this feng shui crap. Or do I mean horseshit?”
“I think it might be a good idea if you said what was on your mind, Share.”
“The stewards were very interested in Canned Fish.”
Yes, correct weight. For about half a minute I just looked at Share and she returned my gaze. She was a good looking woman, all things considered, although she looked terribly strained. Just how far had I managed to get with her? Were we known unto each other? We’d certainly woken up in the same bed. I couldn’t remember a fucking thing, literally. Dreams of my house falling about my ears, that was all.
“Canned Fish,” Share said, just in case I’d missed it.
“It’s a bit early in the morning for canned fish, darling. Kippers, perhaps.”
“No it’s not.”
“Well you tell me,” I said. “Just what do you know about Canned Fish?”
“That the nag suddenly developed a massive turn of speed in the 3.30 at Flemo a couple of years back. A few very select punters did rather well out of it. Your good self included.”
“Jesus, this is history, Share. We’re talking about a bygone era.”
“We’re talking about pet food. About three quarters of a tonne of pet food.”
“Poor old Canned,” I said. “He broke a leg a year later. He was a little battler, but there was nothing we could do. The bullet was a kindness.”
“Cut the crap. About the 3.30 at Flemo. Before the nag got turned into Cat-O-Meat.”
“Just who are you, Share?”
“I’m someone who wants to know about tanking a horse up with sugar. That’s what you used, isn’t it? Just sugar. Nothing detectable by sophisticated methodology. No fancy drugs, no steroids, no growth hormones. Just the old CSR table sugar.” CSR was Colonial Sugar Refinery, the Australian byword for white sugar since my parents’ childhoods, and their parents. I wondered for a moment if the company had changed its name to Postcolonial. “The poor animal went hyperactive, it had to run like stink to burn up the sugar.”
I looked out the large window at the large grassy back garden. Tall native trees blocked out the neighbors. “All horses like sugar lumps,” I said. “You want to hold your hand very flat, though. Just let the lump sit on the palm of your hand. Don’t curl your fingers or you’ll get nipped.”
She regarded me with scorn. “My understanding is that the horse had half a sack of sugar in it. I don’t think it ate that off some guy’s hand.”
“All right,” I said. Her hair was wild and uncombed, a look I approved of, and I still couldn’t remember, but it would have been a good idea. “I’ll tell you. You get a jug and you put some water in it. Then you put some sugar in the water and stir it with a stick.”
“And the horse drinks it?”
“No. You get a plastic tube, a funnel and the bottom half of a hypodermic. You connect them all up and jam the hypodermic into a vein in the nag’s neck. Blood spurts out through the needle and into the tube, so you’ve got to raise the tube to a height greater than the animal’s heart can pump the blood.” The roof of my mouth felt dry, all the wine and vodka presumably. “Are you sure you don’t want to take notes? I could help you draw a diagram.”
“I think I can remember all this, Purdue.”
“So you need a chair. It’s very important to have the chair ready before you start. Otherwise blood goes everywhere. You stand on the chair and hold the tube with the funnel above your head with one hand and pour the sugar solution from the jug with the other. Gravity does the rest. The solution pushes the blood back into the horse and then trickles in after it.”
“Shit, really, you just pour the stuff straight into the bloodstream, no digestion necessary.”
“That’s about right,” I said. “You want to know this why?” “We might have forgotten the chair.” She got to her feet, stepped into the pantry, came out with a half-height aluminum stepladder she lifted easily in one hand. “I assume this’d do the trick.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“You and me, Mr. Purdue. After I’ve made a phone call or two to line up the equipment, we’re going for a little drive into the country.”
“No need to be formal, Share,” I said. “Call me Tom.”
§
I blame my name for leading me into a life of crime. What I told Share was true, as far as it went, but it didn’t go all the way, not by a long chalk. My mad parents were flower children years before Rupert Murdoch and his yellow press mates ever heard of the term. With a handful of their arty mates, they raised us kids in a pile of dirty mud brick mansions and hovels out Eltham way, miles north of Melbourne, still the edge of the scrub when I was a boy. Other artist colonies had the same idea, but my mob was the weirdest of the lot. From the beginning none of the men had shaved, and none of the women either, and this had started before Women’s Lib or third stage feminism had ever been heard of. These hirsute seekers after truth wove their own cloth, milked their own scrawny goats, and taught us in a kind of Steiner curriculum designed by Martin Kundalini Richardson, king of the loonies, a sort of unsuccessful mix of L. Ron Hubbard, George Adamski and ancient aboriginal