30 Days in Sydney Read Free Page B

drank too much red wine, was argumentative and opinionated. Yet he was unfailingly generous and he had been my friend for twenty years and I knew I should not have left him and his son at the airport and I felt guilty and, suddenly, emotionally discombobulated.
    My Filofax contained a mess of numbers for Sheridan, erasures, arrows leading down and up like Snakes and Ladders. I rang them all, but never got anything more encouraging than an answer machine with Clara's voice on it. I then tried Jack Ledoux but Jack's number was busy and I turned my attention to Kelvin's fancy new espresso. It was nine in the morning in Sydney and I was jet-lagged and fuddled, and wrongly estimated that it was midnight in Manhattan. I could see my wife and children sleeping, hear their breath like prayers whispering through the dark. By the time I had the coffee in its elegant white cup I was home and homesick all at once.
    I should have got on the phone and talked to the friends whose stories I wished to collect. I had already categorised them as Earth and Air and Fire and Water. All I had to do was call them but instead I wandered through Kelvinator's paint-perfumed house like a ghost, from light to dark, from dark to light, from late-Victorian front door to a café-modern kitchen whose steel-framed glass doors looked over a black swimming pool. It was hard not to be at least a little jealous. The house itself was only thirty feet wide, but after Manhattan the space seemed limitless. The hallway was generous, the ceilings high. The deep double front room had once been two rooms but now it was a big cold dining room - why did no one in Sydney ever heat their house? - and a library filled, mostly, with biographies and history books. I could find only one novel, The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien.
    This was a strange discovery in a house where no one read fiction, but when I opened the book Sheridan's handwriting appeared before me. Suddenly it was not strange at all. Sheridan always gave away novels, not only novels, but all sorts of writing, scraps of wisdom, useful facts, passages of beautiful prose. To Janet and Kel from Sheridan, I read, in memory of the silver wind. Silver like a knife. January 3 1996.
    Sheridan had no respect for books as objects, writing in their margins, dog-earing their pages, interleaving them with his candy wrappers and socks and other unlikely bookmarks. But I never knew a man who had such faith in words, for he was always trying to give his friends that piece of jigsaw which would fit the gap, ease that ache that ignorance must surely be making in our hearts.
    Page thirty-one of this first edition of The Third Policeman was dog-eared, and he had marked the following dialogue with a heavy ballpoint pen.
    'No doubt you are aware the winds have colours,' he said. I thought he settled himself more restfully in his chair and changed his face till it looked a little bit benign.
    'I never noticed it.'
    'A record of this belief will be found in the literature of the ancient peoples. There are four winds and eight subwinds, each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a shining silver . . .'
    Why had Sherry marked this passage? It wasn't hard to figure out. He had signed his inscription on January 3, the high season of the southerly buster. My guess was that they had all just been crewing Meredith's boat on Pittwater. They had been hit by a deadly silver wind and something had broken or busted: they'd had some wild torquing adventure that popped the cabin furniture out of the floor. They were all cowboys, the women too. Kelvin's photo-editor wife was the wildest of them all.
    Jack Ledoux sailed with them sometimes although he once intimated that they were too reckless for his taste. Tell me, Jack demanded, after Kelvin and Sheridan had shredded one more spinnaker in a Force 6, why are they always getting into trouble, Peter? And raised those eyebrows so high they disappeared beneath his