THURSDAY'S ORCHID Read Online Free PDF Page A

treated Peggy: how he had fornicated, wined and dined attractive women, travelled the world – without giving poor Peggy even a thought; about poor Peggy who had stuck by him: taking the little love and affection he saw fit to mete out; about poor Peggy: shriveling before his eyes, gurgling and gasping as the end drew near, and yet still uncomplaining. He cried with his head in his hands, his hair matted and twisted from clawing fingers.
    “What good is all the damn money?” he moaned, looking up at me through red eyes. “It couldn’t do a damn thing to stop the cancer. What good is it to anybody?” He looked down at his slippered feet and then back up to me. “We’ll all be going one day, Jeff,” he said softly.
    I did my best to calm him, explaining that Peggy knew what he was like, what his needs were; and that his happiness was what she had wanted most. I told him that she would have left him if she had been unhappy, but she had stayed – content with him and his boisterous ways.
    I believe I convinced him of Peggy’s love, assured him that if he hadn’t been the man he was then she would have missed out on many things, things that had made the last years of her life rich and full.
    For the next couple of weeks or so he seemed calmer. We went to the races in Brisbane and to the dog track once or twice, and even took in a nightclub. It was probably the nightclub that did it, for after the nightclub he became even more lethargic than before, shuffling around the apartment, hunched over like some old man. He began to close himself off in his study, the study in which we had spent so many hours planning and scheming our way to the money we now had locked away safe and sound in Switzerland, and other places. Each time I entered – on some pretext or other – he would simply raise his head from his papers, covering them with his hands, and stare at me until I left.
    The windows were kept closed, the air mouldy. His once massive frame was dwind ling, the shirts sloping away off his shoulders.
    Time. It was only a matter of time and he would come right, or so I kept telling myself. But I knew it wasn’t true. He was becoming worse as each day went by.
    About a couple of weeks after he had started spending those solitary days – and sometime entire nights – immersed in his papers, I went looking for a copy of a magazine I had left in the study. Gorge was asleep in his bedroom, exhausted after an unusually long confinement at his desk.
    I noticed that he had been using the tape recorder. And more out of curiosity than with any in tention of eavesdropping, I wound the tape back and switched it to play . George was sleeping like the dead with his bedroom door firmly closed. There was no way the noise would wake him.
    Sitting down at the desk I began to flick through the magazine, wondering at the properties displayed by certain of the sensuous forms, with only half my mind on the tape. George’s voice droned on, difficult to hear and to understand; but slowly my unconscious mind began to grasp the fact that he was discussing the finer details of the last illegal transaction we had worked on. I put down the magazine, turning my whole attention to the tape. In between his mumbling and his murmuring he had set out the whole deal: the people involved; the money earned, and where it had gone.
    I locked the study door; not actually locked it, as there was no key; but I propped one of the chairs under the door handle and wedged it in tight. I needed privacy. I tried the drawer to the desk. It was locked. But I knew the key would still be where it had always been kept: under the large porcelain ashtray.
    I took out the papers I had seen him working on over the last few days, and the rest of the tapes. It took me nearly three hours to go through the lot. The entire collection was a petition, a confession of his evil life. He was begging for punishment for everything he had done throughout his life. It went back to the days