Stiff (14 page)

‘We’re talking now, aren’t we?’

‘You know what I mean.’

I guessed I did.

‘You’ve got to think about Red,’ she added, gratuitously. Was I right in imagining the Methodist Ladies College was resurfacing in her voice, that censorious interrogative at the end of sentences? ‘And don’t worry, I’ll be staying at Mum’s.’

So, it was out in the open at last. ‘Okay,’ I said meekly. Let her think I was ready to throw in the towel even before the fight began, that was my strategy. Then when the bell rang, come out fighting.

Wendy was booked on a two o’clock flight and told me she’d go straight to Red’s school to pick him up. That’s what she thought. Let Red out of my sight and the next time I’d see him would be on a monthly access visit.

I lit a candle and inspected the damage. As well as the roof problem, I now had a gaping hole in my lounge room ceiling and a severely shorted-out lighting circuit. Nothing that several thousand dollars I didn’t have couldn’t fix. I took the candle into the bathroom, stripped off my clothes, climbed into the tub and sank my fingers into Red’s scalp, rubbing until their tips were numb and both of us were limp with hysterical exhaustion. ‘Mum will be here the day after tomorrow,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘She wants you to stay in Canberra with her.’

‘I know.’

Knowledgeable little bugger. I wondered what else he knew, but decided to leave well enough alone, for the time being at least.

We sat on the edge of the big bed wrapped in towels and he let me comb the dead nits out of his hair by the light of a lamp plugged into the power circuit. Half an hour of nitpicking produced a dozen white pinheads, a couple of dead insects and a child as limber as a rag doll. I engineered Red into his pyjamas, slipped him into the freshly made bed and waited quietly until he was abducted by the sandman. His locks, drying around his drowsy face in corkscrew ringlets, gave him the aspect of a Botticelli cherub.

I took my own scarified dial out into the black hole that was the laundry, rubbed some of the creosote-smelling flea wash into my scalp, pulled on some clean-dirty clothes and went to work.

Navigating by the light coming in the window from old Mrs Bagio’s sleepout next door, I rolled the lounge room rug into a squelching cylinder. It was a tribal kilim, a little something Wendy had picked up in India, way before my time. I dragged it to the back door and pitched it into the yard, managing to snap off her
Grevillea robusta
at ground level into the bargain. Then I used newspapers to mop up the grimy dribble trickling down from above. I did this somewhat reluctantly as the only papers I could find were several dozen back copies of the
National Times
and the
Guardian Weekly
I had been warehousing against the day I got a federal grant to catch up on my reading.

Take my tip. Never use the
Guardian
for this sort of work. The flimsy airmail paper has practically no absorbency. The
National Times
, on the other hand, would soak up practically anything. It was a pity to waste them and I worked slowly, giving the copy the quick once-over in the candlelight as I reluctantly discarded the pages, catching up on a couple of Royal Commissions as I went.

The worst of the wet was just soaking into a ten-page piece on the roots of monogamy when a feature in the finance section from the previous July caught my eye. The article was headed ‘Darlings of the Market’. It was a safe bet that this did not refer to the Trash’n’Treasure conducted at the Coburg Drive-In every third Sunday. Below the headline was a row of photographs of well-barbered male faces sporting expressions that suggested butter might safely be stored in their mouths. Among them was a head I recognised from earlier that morning when I had seen it attached to the body of Lionel Merricks. I took the paper over to the window and held it up to the light.

Lionel Merricks, according to the introductory blurb, was one of the new breed of knock-’em-down drag-’em-out financiers who were cutting a dash through the currency desks with their bold visions of an untrammelled tomorrow. Spread across two pages were illustrated profiles of Lionel and his fellow high rollers, the text even more gushing than the crap coming out of my ceiling. I don’t know what these guys were doing for the economy, but they excited the hell out of the media. Normally I gave this sort of thing a wide berth. But, now that I knew one of these objects of veneration personally, I read on, fascinated.

Young Lionel, it said, had displayed early promise, making book for the upper sixth at Grammar before doing his patriotic stint as a naval supply officer. A blurry photo illustrated this moment, Lionel all white socks and knobbly knees. Barely out of uniform and here he was, the up-and-coming executive, a divisional GM at Ayers Land and Livestock, back before they merged with ICU Resources to form Pacific Pastoral. Here was the mature Lionel coming aboard the board, here Lucky Lionel in the chair. Finally here were Lionel’s visionary plans to hall the ladder up after him and flog off those components of the company currently encumbered by the tiresome necessity of actually growing, making or trading things. The time had come, he declared, to concentrate on the basics. What, I wondered, was more basic than killing animals and cutting them up for food?

Only towards the end of the page did a sour note intrude. The speed of Pacific Pastoral’s asset rationalisation, warned the last paragraph, might be hampered by market concerns at the threat to the value of its meat export operations posed by…
continued on page 47
.

Page forty-seven was a sodden mass, somewhere underfoot, lost in the dark. I searched for it briefly and gave up. Finance was beyond me, and the increasing frequency with which we were bombarded with updates on Dow Jones and the All-Ordinaries had done nothing to enlighten me. Three billion, six billion, nine point eight billion. The press was full of these incomprehensible figures. All it appeared to take to be hailed as a major player was to pick a digit, stick a dollar sign in front of it, add a long row of zeros and wait for the applause.

Some financial wizard, this Merricks. An Anatolian fatso who could barely sign his own name had, in all probability, been tickling his till to the tune of two grand a week and hadn’t even been noticed. But that was the point though, wasn’t it? Not noticing. All the puny fiddles of all the world’s Ekrem Bayraktars would never amount to more than a drop in the vast ocean of moolah that Captain Merricks and his crew of Old Grammarians blithely sailed upon.

And if the Premier, Agnelli, Charlene or anyone else thought they could quietly slip aboard the good ship Big Bucks and run their social agenda up the mast when nobody was looking, they were flattering themselves. Merricks and the rest of his class were no fools. They’d been repelling boarders since back before their great-grandfathers had sailed through the Heads with an axe in one hand and a blank title deed in the other. From high in their glass towers, they could see us coming a mile away.

I dropped Lionel Merricks face first into a damp patch and climbed up into the roof for a spot of damage control. The overalls, heavy with rainwater, had fallen out and knocked over the bucket, possibly as far back as the night before. Using rags and plastic bags I made the best of a bad job, trusting in luck, a change in the weather and the speedy return of A-OK Allweather. Afterwards, I stood in the dark with my head in the laundry tub and washed the parasites out of my hair. Then I went to bed and read
Understanding Family Law
until the words began to blur together, turned off the light, rolled over and parked my lustful dromedary in the caravanserai of dreams.

Two uniformed coppers, one male, one female, with the faces of twelve-year-olds and big revolvers jammed next to their kidneys, were standing at Trish’s desk when I pushed the office door open the next morning. During the night someone had prised the bars off the outside of the dunny window, smashed the glass, climbed in and ransacked the joint. Why they bothered to do this beggared the imagination. The most valuable items in the place were the photocopier and a four-drawer filing cabinet, both of which were still sitting against the wall beside Trish’s desk.

The only thing missing was the petty cash tin, containing a dozen thirty-seven-cent stamps and an IOU from the week before when I’d raided it for lunch money. Total value twelve dollars.

‘Anything else?’ said the girl cop, doodling details onto a triplicate incident sheet. I went up the back to count my paperclips. Everything on my desk had been bulldozed into a heap on the floor, the drawers rifled and my wastepaper basket upended. By the look of it, nothing was missing. Worse luck.

‘You think it’s politically motivated?’ the boy cop said.

‘It’s got Baader-Meinhof written all over it,’ I said.

‘Kids, most likely, then,’ he agreed.

Well it wasn’t the gang from Mensa, that was for sure. It took me a full minute to work out that the thing drawn on the toilet mirror was a dick. While I was still standing there in a pile of broken glass, who should walk in but Adam Fucking Ant. He put a toolbox on the toilet seat and began slipping new panes of reinforced glass into the louvre slots.

‘What’s he still doing here?’ I went out and asked Trish.

‘Making himself a damned sight more useful than you,’ she said and stuffed a fresh batch of phone messages into my paw. Declining to rise to this bait, I went back to my cubicle and rummaged through the mess on the floor until I found the yellow slip from the day before with A-OK Allweather’s number. I dialled, hoping that last night’s little timing glitch had not put me in bad odour with them. They were engaged. So was the other mob. No sooner had I hung up than the phone rang. Guess who?

‘Well?’ said Agnelli.

By that stage, considering the more pressing domestic disasters I was battling, any lingering curiosity about Ekrem Bayraktar and the goings-on at Pacific Pastoral had well and truly evaporated.

‘Just like I said it would be,’ I told Agnelli. ‘Nothing to connect Lollicato to anyone at the Coolaroo plant. And even if there was, industrially the place is as dead as a dodo. On top of which nobody out there has a good word for the dead bloke, who by the way was probably on the fiddle in at least two different directions at once. In short, a total fucking waste of time. All of which will be in an appropriately worded report on your desk at the close of play today, as promised. End of story. Full stop.’

Predictably, Agnelli had to put up a fight. ‘Half a day, Murray, is not what you might call an exhaustive approach to the issue.’

I got down on my hands and knees on the floor and began searching the desk debris for the Pacific Pastoral file. If I could find that list of bogus names—Gherkin Marzipan, Cartoon Niblet and the rest of them—I could send Agnelli off chasing his own tail around the Trades Hall while I got on with the more urgent task of repairing my near-derelict hacienda.

‘And what about the funeral?’ Agnelli was saying.

‘What?’ I was buggered if I could find the bloody folder.

‘Dead bloke’s funeral. Mood of the crowd and so forth, always a good indicator in this sort of case.’ Agnelli sounded like he’d been watching too much television. The idea was bizarre.

I had six months worth of paperwork spread out across the carpet tiles by this stage. Still I couldn’t find the fucking file. Worse, I was starting to listen to Agnelli. And that, believe you me, is never a good idea. ‘Who did they release the body to?’

‘Stuffed if I know,’ said Agnelli. ‘Family, I suppose.’

As far as I knew from the coroner’s documents there wasn’t one. ‘Who’s doing the honours?’

‘Martinelli.’

‘I thought Martinelli only did Italians.’

‘Martinelli will bury anyone. Believe me, mate,’ he said. As if he’d know. ‘It’s listed for ten at Fawkner. Call me back afterwards and we can discuss the report then.’

That’s what he thought. Personally speaking, I had better things to do with my time than go tramping about a cemetery in the rain looking for a scene out of a social realist movie. Things like getting my desk back into some sort of order and finding a roofer and an electrician. I was thumbing through the phone book with exactly that in mind when there was a knock at the partition and Xenophon Xypnitos from the community health centre came in and opened his briefcase.

This appointment had been in my diary for a month, so there was no getting out of it. On top of which Trish’s crack about my recent absence had been quite correct. It was about time I got back to doing what I was being paid for. In this case it meant reviewing the terms of reference for a survey of projected needs in the provision of health services to the aged. Charlene had swung the funding and the consultants were being paid a small fortune, the sort of money you don’t fork over unless you know the results in advance. I got up off the floor, apologised for the mess and started talking service delivery.

By the time Xenophon closed his briefcase it was just about to go ten. Fawkner Cemetery was only a kilometre or two up the road. I rang Martinelli’s funeral home and commemorative chapel and got directions to the plot. The interment, as they called it, was imminent. Questions about who was paying for it were politely deflected.

Before I left I quickly drafted the final version of my report to MACWAM, concluding that there was no evidence of incipient industrial action at the Pacific Pastoral plant. I gave it to Trish to type and put it in the internal courier. If Agnelli thought I was going to spend any more time on this crap than absolutely necessary, he was mistaken.

The outlook that Wednesday was for showers, with fresh to strong westerly winds ahead of a change, a gale warning for the bays, and a sheep weather alert in southern and mountain districts. I didn’t have any sheep worth alerting. I took my collapsible umbrella instead. Three blocks up the highway a sign read Mulqueen and Sons, Funeral Directors. Underneath it said
Provinciale Servizio Italiano
. Weren’t the Irish dying fast enough? Or were they all dead already? They might as well be. Once upon a time party and union rolls in this town read like the Ballymalarkey baptismal register and the sons of Erin cut some ice. But those days were long gone, thanks to the Church and the Left and about a thousand boatloads of Thracians and Piedmontese.