Make Me Rich by Peter Corris Page A

suburb, once intensely working class, now saved or ruined by a middleclass invasion, depending on your point of view. Unlike a lot of Brisbane, it is hilly and I noticed an encouraging number of pubs while I got myself lost in the dark, leafy streets. There had been some rain and the gardens gave off a moist, lush smell that would have gone better with the growling of tigers than the barking of dogs, which was what I got as I stumbled around looking for numbers on fence posts.
    It was after midnight when I found the house: it was set high up on stilts with a lot of discarded furniture and machinery quietly mouldering and rusting underneath it. The garden was overgrown and fragrant with the wet, night smell. No dog. I pushed through the undergrowth and went up a set of rickety steps to a wide verandah. I knocked, waited, and knocked again. A light came on in the house and a frightened female voice asked from close behind the door who was on the other side.
    â€œI’m looking for Chris Guthrie,” I said.
    â€œHe isn’t here.”
    â€œHe does live here?”
    â€œYes, sort of. But he’s not here now.”
    â€œDo we have to talk through the door?”
    â€œGo away. I’m sick of people coming around at all hours for him. I have to study and I have to sleep. Go away!”
    â€œJust a minute. What other people? When?”
    â€œThere was a guy tonight who said he was his brother and all the others for the past couple of months—the ones who look like cops, and sound like you.”
    â€œWhere is Chris? D’you know? It’s important.”
    â€œWill you go away if I tell you what I told the last guy?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œOkay. Ask at the railway freight yard at St. Lucia. I think he works there. He pays his room rent here sometimes but he moves around a bit. That’s all I know. Please go away.”
    â€œHe’s a student.”
    â€œHe dropped out.”
    â€œWill you look at a photograph, please?”
    â€œNo!” The light went out and I was left standing at the door with a photograph in my hand. There was a low hum of insects from the gardens, but otherwise the night was graveyard quiet: there’d be a lot of noise if I tried to force an entry and I didn’t imagine the Brisbane cops would be amused at a Sydney private man pushing the citizens around in the wee small hours. I put the photograph away, said goodnight to the door, trying not to sound like a policeman, and left the house.
    It was too late to do anything more. I stopped at the first open motel I came to, put crosses at random on the breakfast menu and fell into bed. I lay there with my mind buzzing. “Achieve one thing every day,” my Scots grandmother advised me when I was young. I wondered what she would count as an achievement. I wondered what she would call a day. It was about thirty years and ten thousand days too late to ask her. My mind was hopping, leaping about now: a lifetime could be about twenty-five thousand days.
    Grandma Kelly had lived to be eighty-odd; had she achieved thirty thousand things? Maybe she had. My one thing—locating Ray Guthrie—didn’t seem so much now, but it didn’t seem any easier, either. I went to sleep trying to count the things I’d achieved in forty-odd God-fearing years.
    At 5 a.m. it was getting light, and I was wide awake. I stuck my head out the door and sniffed the soft, sub-tropical air. I wrapped one of the motel towels around me and went down to the pool and swam a few laps in the nude. The water was cold and too heavily chlorinated. I stayed under a hot shower for fifteen minutes until I was warm and decontaminated. Then I had an hour to wait for breakfast; Ispent some of the time thinking about the information conveyed by the disembodied voice of last night:
other enquirers, moving about, drop-out, voices like cops.
It sounded something like a Brisbane version of the events in Sydney, and wasn’t