Almanac Fiction: Swifty Taylor and the Dead Coach (Episode 2)

 

I had ploughed through the online news reports. Generally speaking, it was agreed by all and sundry that Dean had been deeply unhappy. His wife had recently scarpered with the kids, and he was having issues at work. The black dog of depression is a wild and wicked master, and so many of his friends were not surprised when an old salt had found his partly submerged body floating in the bay, fully clothed. Witnesses had seen him wandering aimlessly along the pier hours earlier, and the coppers had put two and two together. His sister was no mathematician, but believed that four was just a little too neat and tidy an answer.

Conversely, the team that he coached, The Pelicans, were on top of the ladder and had won last year’s flag despite a couple of puzzling losses to lowly ranked teams. The Pelicans were bankrolled by a trucking magnate named Jack Shepherd who, from all reports, demanded his pound of flesh in terms of team selection in return for the dollars he was stumping up. He used The Pelicans as his own personal plaything. There was a lot for me to take in.

Although she had told me she would be in touch, I was getting cold feet waiting for Laura to contact me. So I took it upon myself to have a gander at the spot where her brother took his final swim. The Ferguson Street Pier is a continuation of Williamstown’s main thoroughfare, stretching languidly out into Hobson’s Bay. Moored to the timber structure were boats and yachts of all shapes and sizes, lolling about sadly and silently in the stiff sou-wester which had sprung up. Despite being born and bred here I had never much taken to sailing; I preferred to be standing with surety on terra firma, even though I had often experienced the ground shifting beneath my feet. Like the moment a few days ago when Laura May had re-entered my life.

At the end of the pier was a low handrail, a ladder leading down into the drink, and two largish impressive looking yachts, the Plonker and the Mona Lisa. Everything I knew about yachts could fit through the eye of a needle, but I reckon I knew that this pair were worth a motza. I considered the wealth that some people possessed, amassed through ill-gotten gains, inheritances, or very occasionally sheer hard work. My dad had always told me that I would be rewarded by hard work, but a lifetime of hard labour would not get me within a bull’s roar of these barges. Plus, I was never all that keen on working too hard.

I had been alone with my thoughts, but suddenly a shadow loomed behind me. I turned quickly and was confronted by the familiar form of a man named Mickey Portelli. In his younger days he was a concreter, but his back had eventually given out, and now he was “on compo”. In the bracing wind, he mouthed words which were either “Swifty, my old friend!” or “Swifty, you bell end”. It was difficult to say which, but I probably would have been more offended by the former, as he was no friend of mine.

I nodded a greeting. “What brings you out here?” he asked. I told him that I was thinking of buying a boat, and did he know of any for sale? He shook his head slowly, unconvinced by my words. Pulling his hoodie up over his head, he began to ramble: “I come out here to the end of pier every week to pay my respects. Dean May was like a brother to me. He helped me through some bad times”.  I had no reason to believe otherwise, and looked him square in the eye. “Do you believe he took his own life, Mickey?” He pondered the question for a moment and raised out his weathered hands. They were bigger than Humphrey Bear’s, and a damn sight more menacing. “It’s hard to say what goes through a man’s mind. But I doubt it”. Hmm, another person who did not buy the suicide angle.

He turned to retrace his steps back down the pier to the shore. “I hear that boat just there, the Mona Lisa, is for sale. It belongs to Jack Shepherd”. He shot me a glance over his retreating shoulder and laughed witheringly. “But I’m not sure that a man of your means could afford it”. Jack Shepherd – trucking magnate, footy club financier, owner of the boat closest to where Dean had gone into the drink. It was sounding like he was someone with whom I should have a word. Just thinking about the prospect got me real nervous.

It was a fool’s errand to think that this was all going to end with everyone living happily ever after. But I had been called a fool many times before, and much worse besides. And these days, I didn’t believe in happy endings.

 

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