The Promise by Tony Birch Page B

dead.
    â€˜I’m not sure, Doc. I don’t have your experience, you see?’
    She sat me down and told me straight that if I didn’t get off the drink I’d likely be dead in six months, cranking the story with a mess of scare tactics to frighten me off. I forgave her good intentions. After all, she was a doctor.
    â€˜Do you understand that I am trying to help you, Mr Holt?’ she asked, ramming the point home.
    To be truthful I was finding it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. I just kept thinking about this mechanic bloke who checked out a secondhand car I’d been thinking about buying many years back. The car was a red Laser, as I remember, and he reckoned I should pass on it because the clutch was about to go.
    â€˜You won’t get to the next corner on it,’ he warned me. ‘A clutch’ll cost you more than what you’ll pay for the car in the first place.’
    I chose to ignore both his expertise and his doomsaying. I bought the car anyway and drove it around for the next six years without it missing a beat, until I rammed it into a factory wall taking a bend too fast in the rain. I wrote the car off and ended up with a broken arm and some stitches in my head. It was the last time I got behind a wheel.
    â€˜Mr Holt, do you realise the seriousness of what I am telling you?’
    â€˜Oh, I do, doctor. I do. Trust me. You’ve just convinced me I’ve had my last drink.’
    She smiled at me, not because she believed a word I said, but because she was certain I was bullshitting.
    I met up with Curtis the next day and sat with him under the tree sharing a bottle. I’d already decided it would be best not to spoil a nice afternoon with a tale of woe from the doctor. And I didn’t want to interrupt the story he was telling about the night his second wife ran off on him and he got down on his knees in the kitchen and prayed to his long dead mother to help him get the love of his life back.
    â€˜I had my eyes closed, and I heard this roaring wind, and she came down the chimney over the wood stove, there in the kitchen. She slapped me hard across the face and told me I didn’t deserve a woman, good or evil. My own mother used those very words.’
    He took a swig from the bottle, wiped it on his sleeve and passed it to me. I held it in my hand and thought long and hard about a drink without taking one.
    â€˜How long had she been dead by then?’
    â€˜A good twenty years. Maybe thirty.’
    â€˜How’d she look after being dead all that time?’
    â€˜Just as I expected. Like an angel.’
    Curtis and me drank away the afternoon and into the night, trying our best to out-bullshit each other, until he passed out against the tree. I sat staring up at the big black sky until I fell asleep too. I don’t remember getting to my feet, or taking off for anywhere, but when I woke the next morning, I saw a hot sun lifting in the sky. I was lying in a paddock in the middle of nowhere. My shoes and socks and shirt were missing and I had bruises and cuts on my arms and feet. I didn’t know where I was, how I’d got there, and my pockets were empty as a ghost’s coffin. I’d also taken a decent belting. I got to my feet and stumbled across the paddock, trying to stay out of the way of the thistles and thorns.
    I came across a road and started walking. It wasn’t long before a copper came along. He pulled onto a rise on the side of the bitumen. I was in trouble but was worn out and ready for him to put me away. But he never. He drove me to the local lock-up, dug out a flannelette shirt and some shoes and socks from the lost property box, wrote me a rail pass, even gave me a twenty-dollar note from his own wallet and dropped me at the railway station.
    â€˜Your train should be here in around forty minutes. It will get you back into the city.’
    I thanked him. And I meant it.
    â€˜How’d you end up out