Stiff (22 page)

‘Don’t you want to know why I was looking for you?’ I asked.

‘Sure,’ she said. We’d sat down at the kitchen table by this stage. She didn’t have anything better to do with her time. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’

I gave her the works, everything from disturbing the intruder onwards. I left out the bits about going to the Bell Street cop shop and calling the Gaming Squad. I felt enough of an idiot about having believed Sivan. For once she didn’t interrupt or ask questions, but as I spoke she crossed to the stove, lit a cigarette off the gas jet and began pacing about like a caged animal. ‘So you see,’ I concluded, ‘I’ve been holding off going to the cops with the full story until I had a chance to talk to you. I want to do the right thing by Memo, but I’ve got a child to think about.’

Through the door into the lounge room I could see Red entrenching himself deeper into the television. ‘Turn off that fucking telly this instant,’ I screamed. ‘We’re late already.’ I considered ringing ahead, telling them to start without me. How could they? The agenda papers were on the back seat of my car.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Ayisha was saying. ‘Attacking you in broad daylight. It’s crazy.’

‘You think I’m making it up?’

‘No, no. All I mean is…’ She brushed her hair back off her forehead, as though this gesture might better convey her meaning.

‘We’ll have to finish this later,’ I said. ‘I really do have to go.’ In the lounge room, Red had made no move.

Ayisha brushed past me into the other room and perched on the arm of the couch. Red’s eyes flickered sideways, registering her presence, then re-attached themselves firmly to the screen. A man in a pair of blue rubber gloves was whispering to the camera in a stealthy undertone as he sidled through some shrubbery.

‘This the part with the gorilla?’ she said.

Red grunted in the affirmative, the mutual-recognition signal of the committed video-head.

‘Can I watch with you while your dad goes to his meeting?’ She moved onto the couch beside him, slipping her arms out of that inflatable overcoat of hers.

Could she what. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘The good bit’s on next.’

‘You can wait a couple more hours before calling the you-know-whats, can’t you?’ Red moved aside to accommodate her. ‘Don’t worry,’ she hastened to reassure me. ‘I know the drill. I’ve got five younger brothers.’

There was no fighting it. I’d just been boxed in by the fastest coalition in history. A united front, irresistible force and immovable object.

The Lakeview Hotel was a sprawling ranch-style beer barn in the middle of a residential neighbourhood half a mile from Sydney Road. At nineteen I had worked there in the guise of Fred Engels, pulling trays of jugs and the occasional barmaid. Across the road through a line of scraggy she-oaks lay Edwardes Lake, a flooded gravel pit landscaped with bike paths, coin-in-the-slot barbecues and adventure playgrounds.

The branch met in the Function Room. About the only useful function it served was to store a couple of derelict pool tables and provide a rent-free space for branch meetings. As usual Laurie the publican had laid a sheet of plywood over one of the pool tables, turned on the strip radiator bolted halfway up the wall, and set out thirty chairs on the Prussian blue Axminster. Laurie, a party member since before the Split, was an inveterate optimist. At that time of the year we’d be lucky to get a dozen takers, which was the exact number waiting when I bustled through the door at eight-fifteen. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s get on with it. We don’t want to be here all night.’

We did attendances and apologies first, me putting my hand up for Charlene, Greg Coates and half a dozen others. Thirteen attendances and fifteen apologies out of sixty-seven members on the books. It was the usual crowd—true believers, unreconstructed Whitlamites, reliable booth captains, handers out of how-to-vote cards, knife-sharpeners, has-beens and wannabes. Laurie’s son Barry, a forty-seven-year-old bachelor draftsman at the State Electricity Commission, took minutes on a concertina pile of computer paper salvaged from the SEC recycle bin.

The dauphin, Gavin Mullane, was there, keen to push his traffic safety barrow, and to keep a weather eye on the North West Progress Association, a childless couple in their mid-fifties who stole his thunder on local issues whenever they could. Our resident ex-Trotskyist was a teacher named Vernon Tibbett. Vern had squandered his youth selling
Direct Action
outside factory gates at the crack of dawn and was spending the rest of his life making other people pay for it. Behind him sat Sam Righi, administrator of the Broadmeadows Legal Service where Joe Lollicato worked. This was his first attendance in months. He’d be worth pumping later. A couple of fresh faces were paying their neophyte dues before they stuck their hands up for a job. The rest had always been there, nice old codgers who kept the faith, remembered the ancient enmities, and sat in wise silence as befitted tribal elders.

Mercifully there were no Greeks. The local inventors of democracy had their own branch where they could engage in vigorous dialectics in their native demotic until the goats came home, sparing the rest of us the ordeal. ‘Item one.’ I moved briskly into the agenda. ‘Matters arising.’

Tibbett leapt to his feet. ‘Comrade Chair. Point of procedure. I move a suspension of standing orders in order to bring forward agenda item number sixteen, a resolution pertaining to the federal government’s flagrant overriding of party policy in respect of the mining and export of uranium.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Seconder?’

Nobody moved a muscle except a rather jolly nursing aide called Maggie Alcott who was a shop steward with the Hospital Employees Federation. She sniffed and rammed her forearms deeper into the sleeves of her chunky-knit cardigan. I gave it a slow count of ten. ‘Motion lapses for want of a seconder. Now…’

We sped through the next fifteen items in an hour and three-quarters flat, including twenty brain-numbing minutes devoted to Gavin Mullane’s hypothetical traffic lights, ‘not two hundred metres from where are actually sitting at this point in time’. Tibbett’s motion was last up.

For all its outward efficiency, my chairing was driven by a growing sense of impatience and anxiety. After all that had happened that day, how had I been so willing to hand Red over to the first baby-sitter that came along? Ayisha’s five little brothers, her childcare credentials, what were they but proof of her mother’s fertility? You saw those immigrant families all the time, driving along with no seat belts, only the slightest bump away from being catapulted head first through the windscreen. What did I really know about Ayisha Celik except that I was mad keen to pop her in the cot?

The meeting debated Vern Tibbett’s resolution for a tedious half hour, amended it into grammatical incoherence, passed it on factional lines and directed me to convey its views to the national secretary and the relevant minister. By the time I thanked them for their attendance and closed the meeting it was twenty past ten on the Dewars Whisky clock above the bar.

After I’d helped Barry stack the chairs and turn off the heater, I went into the lounge bar to conduct the real business of the night. Mullane saw me coming, emptied his glass, nodded goodnight and ducked out the door. As if I’d want to drink with him. The old blokes were drinking in a school. I bought a round and asked after various grandchildren. No one volunteered anything about Charlene, so the word wasn’t out yet. Sam Righi turned towards me and put two fingers up for another round, an unrefusable invitation. I excused myself and went over.

Laurie’s beer was watered and there was urgent unfinished business elsewhere, but ever since Greg Coates’ remarks earlier in the afternoon a question had been gnawing at the back of my mind. I hoisted the offered beer and once again lubricated my smoke-bruised throat. ‘How’s life at the Legal Service? Joe Lollicato still running the joint?’ I asked, making conversation.

Righi grinned. ‘Not much gets past you does it?’

I fired up a coffin nail. ‘Not if I can help it.’

‘That Lolly,’ he said. ‘Talk about falling on your feet. Good luck to him, that’s what I say.’

He said it, but he didn’t mean it. Righi’s bile was too close to the surface to hide. It seemed that Lollicato had had some kind of luck and Righi wanted to put his own spin on the story. ‘Lucky Lolly,’ I said dryly, as if to say I never liked him either.

Righi was warming up for a full-blooded bad-mouthing session. ‘The silly prick’ll need a business card the size of a surfboard.’

I egged him on. ‘Yeah?’

‘He’s been looking for a way out for months. Made no secret of it. Then, bang, out of the blue an offer like this.’ As he recited, he expanded his hands like an exaggerating fisherman. ‘Senior Lecturer, Intercultural Legal Studies, Faculty of Multicultural Disciplines, University of New England, Armidale.’

I whistled and wiggled my eyebrows appreciatively. So Lollicato was planning on leaving town. Hardly the move of a man scheming his way into a local seat. ‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘Fancy title, but those academic jobs pay shit money.’

Righi hailed Laurie for another two beers, not his round. Lollicato was just for openers, there was something else on his mind, something he wanted. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to think about the by-election yet?’

‘You’ve lost me?

‘When Joe moves interstate, there’ll have to be a by-election, won’t there?’ So that was it. Righi wanted Lolly’s spot on Broadmeadows Council.

It was getting on for twenty to eleven. A frank and fulsome discussion of Sam Righi’s ambitions would have to wait. I tipped my head back and let the bitter liquid wash across my tongue. As the glass came down, the public bar came into view through the servery hatch. It was deserted but for a solitary drinker wrapped tight around his glass at the far end, his back to the hatch. Something in the way he held himself tugged at a loose thread in my memory. Catching Laurie’s eye, I pointed with my chin. ‘One of your regulars?’

The publican shook his head. ‘Been nursing that drink for half an hour. Better finish up soon or I’ll do my licence.’

I stood up and laid a hand on Righi’s shoulder. ‘If you have any ideas about likely candidates, let me know. They could do with some fresh blood up there at Broadie.’

The guy in the drive-in bottle shop was shutting up, pulling the chains on the heavy roll-down door. I told him I wanted a bottle of white wine. ‘Something in particular, sir?’ he asked, like he was the cellar-master at Chateau Lafitte.

‘A bottle of Hope Springs Eternal,’ I said. ‘If you haven’t got that, anything under eight dollars will do.’ The covered walkway to the carpark led past the public bar. I glanced in the window as I passed, but the room was deserted except for Laurie up-ending stools on the bar top. I shrugged and threw Barry’s minutes into a dumpster, planning to write them properly in the morning. That uranium motion would need substantial rejigging. Buggered if I was going to have the federal Minister for Resources’ office screaming its tits off at me because Tibbett thought his line wasn’t sufficiently correct.

Righi’s little jewel about Lollicato, coming on top of Coates, added to what I was beginning to glean about Agnelli, made it pretty definite that I’d been fed some monumental crap at lunch on Monday. As I crossed the carpark I tried to reconstruct exactly what Agnelli had said, but only fragments came to mind. On recollection, however, it was plain that Agnelli had been feeding me a lot of ifs, buts and maybes, leading the talk in the direction he wanted, encouraging me to put my reservations aside and jump to conclusions. Conclusions that were now looking pretty dodgy indeed. Clearly, Lollicato did not then have, and maybe never had, serious parliamentary ambitions. Clearly, there had never been any genuine likelihood of an industrial flare-up at Pacific Pastoral. So either Agnelli had been misinformed, genuinely ignorant or blowing a cloud of smoke in my eyes. The third option seemed most likely.

Agnelli was enough of a player to know that if he wanted Charlene’s seat, he would need either to win me over or to keep me busy while he manoeuvred himself into position. He also knew the strength of my loyalty to Charlene and that any attempt to sound me out would have set off my alarm bells. So getting me out of the way while he lined up the numbers was the only real option. And what better way to get me to take my eye off the ball while the deals were done than to send me chasing a red herring? That’s what this Pacific Pastoral cock and bull story had been all about. There had been more than one pigeon on the menu at the Mandarin Palace.

Christ, I’d been well and truly suckered. He’d probably even planted the story in the
Sun
. Agnelli hung around the Windsor Hotel, drinking with the political roundsmen, slipping them judicious leaks whenever the government wanted to fly a trial balloon on some contentious issue. Talk enough bullshit, he liked to say, and sooner or later it ends up in print.

The carpark shimmered, a shallow sea of puddles. I turned the Renault into the road. Its headlights found a break in the trees and fanned across the surface of the lake. A lash of wind stirred the darkness and a squall of fat raindrops burst across the windscreen. I headed up hill and it began raining in earnest, heavy sluicing bucket-loads that whistled at the seams of the windows and buffeted the small sedan from side to side with a force that momentarily stalled the wipers in mid-sweep. The windscreen became a lustrous swarming blanket. I could scarcely see past the bonnet.

I turned the wipers up high and leaned forward, peering between their puny swipes. My knuckles were white as the wheel turned to mush in my hands. I was piloting a submarine up Niagara Falls. Slowing to a crawl, I inched forward. Up ahead was a roundabout, then the road dipped again, cutting across the bottom end of the lake where it overflowed across a weir and ran off into a creek so insignificant it had no name. This was where Mullane wanted his traffic lights.

The downpour was flash-flooding across the asphalt as the stormwater drains overloaded and backed up. As I neared the roundabout, the engine shuddered and it seemed I might stall, hubcap-deep. I changed down, slammed my foot down hard and felt the Renault shudder as the wheels threw great pounding jets of water up against the floor like fire-hoses turned on a rioting mob.