The Big Ask (7 page)

Pushing forty, my ex-wife was a mother again. Twins. A matched pair of infant girls were barfing Gerber all over her Chanel suits. And giving her yet another excuse to monopolise Red.

‘I think Redmond should come to Noosa with me and Richard instead,' she informed me, when I rang to confer on the September visit arrangements. Richard was the new husband, a hot-shot blueblood lawyer. ‘Melbourne's too cold, you'll be busy with work and we've rented a house on the beach. It'll give Red a chance to bond with his new sisters.'

‘Can't they bond at home?' I protested. ‘Surely he doesn't need a beach to bond.' What were they, babies or fucking mermaids?

Wendy sucked in her breath and, through a thousand kilometres of fibre-optic cable, I heard the skin around her mouth tighten. ‘That's the trouble with you, Murray,' she said. ‘You're so selfish.'

‘Selfish?' Twenty seconds into the conversation and I was already on the ropes. ‘I'm lucky if I get to see Red four times a year.'

‘And have you ever considered how emotionally disruptive he finds those visits?'

You can't argue with a line like that, and I knew better than to try. I had her put the kid on the phone and we traded a few masculine monosyllables about getting together later in the year. ‘See you, son,' I said. But I didn't know when. Christmas, I supposed, unless the bonding didn't take or Wendy found another novel excuse.

It seemed such a long, long time since Red and I were bachelor boys together, hunkered down in congenial suburban squalor while Wendy gadded about the countryside, pursuing her brilliant career. He was seven, then, and we were a collective of two, socialism in one kitchen. He was a teenager now and our time together was gathering dust in an empty bedroom.

I continued down the hall. My living room was as I'd left it. Untidy and smelling slightly of those liberties a man who lives alone permits himself. The good elves, I was not surprised to discover, had yet again failed to visit the kitchen in my absence. But three fingers of whiskey remained in my medicinal bottle of Jameson's. The first mouthful stung, the second burned, the third numbed.

Examining my reflection in the tarnished chrome of my toaster, I could just make out the stumps of my frontal tusks peeking from outraged gums. A fortune, I mumbled. An absolute fucking fortune.

On the other hand, I told myself, things are worse in Cambodia. And self-pity is a mug's game. Count your blessings. I counted them out in the back courtyard, pissing on the lemon tree.

For a start, I had a job. This was more than many of my countrymen could say for themselves. Nearly a million at the last count. But Frank Farrell was right. A little over twelve months remained until the election it was universally understood we would lose. After which, my prospects were anyone's guess. First Monday after the vote, I'd be down the dole office.

Previous experience? the form would ask.

No form in the world had enough space to answer that one, not if I told what I could. Which I wouldn't. Secrets were safe with me. Good old Murray Whelan. Party member from the age of sixteen. Assistant secretary of Young Labor, Northern Metropolitan Region. Research officer for the Municipal Employees Union, retired injured. Associate director of the Labor Resource Centre, now defunct. Electorate officer for the Member for Melbourne Upper, Charlene Wills, since deceased. Ministerial adviser to the Honourable Angelo Agnelli, loose cannon.

My lemon tree and I, upon reflection, had a lot in common. Much pissed upon, but still bearing fruit. ‘Buck up,' I told myself. ‘Or bugger off.' The Whelan family motto.

The telephone began to ring. Past midnight and somebody was calling. I was not alone, after all. I foreshortened my micturition and rushed through the back door just as my answering machine kicked in with the message that I was not available.

‘Yeth,' I gasped, snatching up the handpiece. ‘Hello, hello.'

The caller had hung up. I noticed then that the counter on my machine had registered a half-dozen other calls in my absence. I pushed the playback button and listened to the messages.

The first was an invitation from a cold-canvassing telemarketer, an exciting offer on time-share resort accommodation in New Zealand. As if things weren't bad enough, I thought. The second was a jackal of the gutter press, trawling for the inside running on the tonnage levy. Then came a series of hang-ups, three in a row. Maybe I should change my message, I thought. Make it more alluring.

I wondered who my most recent caller had been. But I didn't wonder long. I was battered, bruised, miserable and alone. My head was thumping and I sprayed when I spoke. Bed was looking like a very attractive proposition. Dumping my damp, blood-spattered shirt into the laundry tub, I gingerly brushed what was left of my teeth and crawled between my cold and loveless sheets. Nobody had remembered to turn on the electric blanket. Again.

As I lay there in the dark, shivering slightly, knees drawn up to my chest, the pillow cool against my cheek, I fixed my despicable assailant's features in my memory. That well-fed smirk, that air of entitlement, that flop of rufous hair. I'd remember him always, I vowed. And if I ever saw him again, I'd punch his fucking head in.

‘Come on,' I sighed, losing the battle against sleep. ‘Have a go, you mug.'

While I slept, a front of low pressure advanced across the continent, sucking moisture-laden air out of the icy wastes of the Southern Ocean and depositing it on the lower edge of the land mass. By the time I awoke, a steady drizzle was drenching the city, rendering the roads slippery and the outlook gloomy.

Mine in particular. I steamed my lips open under a hot shower, rinsed my mouth with orange juice and worked my way through the telephone book until I found a dentist who was open for business on Saturday mornings. Dr Freycinet had a cancellation, his receptionist informed me, in half an hour. His emergency ministrations, she did not need to add, were going to cost me plenty.

With that thought in mind, I pulled on a sweater, donned a waterproof jacket, sprinted to the end of the street and climbed aboard a city-bound tram. Sitting among other glum-faced, wet-shouldered passengers, I scanned the morning tissues. To my considerable relief, it appeared that the tonnage levy beat-up had withered on the vine. Then, as I flipped through the business section of the
Age
, I noticed a half-page spread headlined STUHL SLAMS GOVT COSTS.

Bob Stuhl was the founder and CEO of Stuhl Holdings and nobody had more clout or more trucks than Bob. Over seven hundred of them at latest count, readily identifiable by their distinctive orange livery and the punning brag that each bore on its rear bumper bar:
‘
Bob Stuhl Is Big.

'

Big Bob was a legend. A rough-nut among the silvertails. The man they couldn't root, shoot or electrocute. Not just trucks but shopping centres, hotels and a major stake in an airline. You name it, Bob had a piece of it. Net worth, according to the
Business Weekly
annual rich-list, in excess of eight hundred million dollars. But doing it tough, he wanted us to believe. The story quoted him as warning that transport industry margins were tight and the rumoured state government tonnage levy would send freight costs soaring and bring the economy to its knees.

Wondering if an economy could really be said to have knees, I studied the photograph which accompanied the piece. The
Age
had chosen Stuhl's corporate portrait, headand-shoulders, full-face. It showed a besuited bulldog with heavy jowls and a thick neck, his luxuriant head of silver hair teased into a grizzled quiff with matching sideburns.

Although he looked like some kind of superannuated old rocker, Bob Stuhl managed to project a potent aura, an amalgam of physical bluster, raw willpower and grasping ambition. Nothing, it was clear to see, had ever been handed to Bob on a silver platter. What he had, he'd wrung from the world with his bare hands. Wrung it until its arteries burst. His eyes, staring out from their sacks of flesh, had an unflinching hardness that made the Ayatollah Khomeini look like Bambi.

In the manner of all great tycoons, Stuhl's ruthlessness was matched by his philanthropy. His largesse included an entire intensive-care wing, donated to the Mercy Hospital after his eldest son was brain-damaged in a swimming pool accident.

The story was a put-up job if ever I'd seen one. First the Haulers, now Bob Stuhl. Head throbbing, I could sense Angelo's irritation turning into a full-blown persecution complex.

I got off the tram at the top end of Collins Street, a block from Parliament House and the Metro. Flecked with drizzle, I hurried along the footpath, counting off the street numbers. At the entrance of almost every building were the brass plates of specialist quackery. Fellows of the Australasian College of Radiology. Dermatologists, haematologists, ophthalmologists and gastro-enterologists. Every one of them with a string of hungry polo ponies or a daughter at a Swiss finishing school. Even their poor cousins had shingles on display. Podiatrists, osteopaths, physiotherapists, contact lens practitioners and dentists.

Dr Freycinet's surgery was in one of the street's few remaining art deco buildings. He had a mottled pink scalp and well-scrubbed fingers like hairy little weisworst sausages. Prodding me with chromium implements, he stared down at the poignantly truncated stumps of my tusks. ‘Bet that hurt,' he tut-tutted, with all the cheerful certainty of a man well on his way to his second million.

I scarcely had time to agree before he snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, jammed a dental dam in my mouth, plunged a syringe into my upper gum and proceeded to drive a pair of self-threading stainless-steel posts into the front of my face.

‘Relax,' he urged. ‘A couple of temporary crowns and we'll have you out of here in a jiffy.'

Ninety minutes later, I was teetering in front of his receptionist's desk, numb from the navel up, wearing a pair of interim plastic incisors. ‘Have a nice day,' she chirped, handing me a bill. Four hundred dollars, plus an estimate for the installation of permanent porcelain crowns. Grand total, two thousand three hundred dollars.

The sum reverberated like a gong in my befuddled brain. Twenty-three hundred dollars could've bought me a business-class return trip to Los Angeles, including eight nights accommodation, car rental and a family pass to Disneyland. Two mobile phones with carry cases and battery recharger units. A second-hand car, if I wanted one. Five months of child support payments.

Not that I'd made any recently. Not since Wendy decided to be bloody-minded about Red's access visits. Anyway, Wendy and Richard were probably pulling a cool quarter million a year between them. My maintenance cheques, intended to keep the boy in tennis shoes and subscriptions to
Marsupial Monthly
, were probably going on pool-care products or subsidising Richard's marina fees.

To compound the issue of cost, I felt like I'd just escaped from a cement mixer. All that drilling and grinding, compacting and scraping had taken its psychic toll. Waves of peevish misery sloshed around inside me, searching for an object upon which to break. Had my cowardly assailant been there, I would gladly have throttled him on the spot. Taken my revenge in full view of the passing traffic, confident that no jury in the country would have convicted me. But the prick wasn't there, was he? I didn't even know his name.

Back home, I devoured a handful of industrial-strength aspirin, crawled back into bed, pulled the cover over my head and once again sought catatonia's embrace.

Occasionally, the jangling of the telephone hauled me up from the depths. But I let the machine answer in the other room, slipping back into a dazy doze as soon as the ringing stopped. Probably Angelo, I thought, aerated about the story in the
Age
. Let him share his hair-trigger insecurities and hare-brained schemes with somebody else. His departmental bureaucrats, for instance. There were plenty of those. His other advisers. His factional cronies. His press secretary. His wife.

Even Angelo had somebody to share his bed, I grumbled to myself. Could he really be getting a bit on the side as well? It was just too ludicrous to contemplate. Not to say unfair. I was single and the closest I ever got to romance was the occasional fling with Mrs Palmer and her five daughters. And I wasn't even in a fit state for that sort of consolation.

A bang woke me, an insistent rapping on the back door. A six-year-old child stood on the step, her face beaming up at me, a tiny moon in the murky twilight. ‘Mum thed to come and have dinner at our plathe,' she lisped, the gap in her milk-teeth mirroring my recent condition. ‘If you want.'

Her name was Chloe and she lived on the other side of the cobbled lane that ran behind my house. Her parents, Faye and Leo Curnow, were my closest friends. Family almost. The sort of people who take an active interest in a man's misfortunes. Faye was a journalist at the
Finance Weekly
and Leo lectured in something mathematical at Melbourne University. Their other child, Tarquin, was the same age as Red and the two boys had been pals since kindergarten.

Now passably fit for human intercourse, I accepted the invitation. While Chloe rushed home to lay me a place at the table, I dressed and checked the phone messages. Four calls, all hang-ups. Crossing the lane, I stepped into the fug of domesticity, the heady aroma of drying laundry and vegetable soup, the reassuring cacophony of the television: ‘Hey, Hey, It's Saturday'
.

Reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose, Faye was simultaneously whisking the contents of a saucepan and consulting a cookbook. Leo was wrestling the cork from a bottle of red wine. The kids were arrayed on beanbags, glued to the box. Tarquin glanced up, then did a double take and squinted at my lips. ‘Have you got cold sores or something?' he demanded. ‘You look really gross.'

‘Somebody smacked me in the mouth,' I said. ‘If you're not careful, it could happen to you.'