White Dog (3 page)

‘A suit?’ He raised an eyebrow flecked with sawdust.

‘Been to court,’ I said. ‘For a client.’ All true, insofar as it went.

Charlie removed the dead Cuban cheroot from a corner of his mouth and looked at it. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Good. A profession. You have it, you should stay in it. Then an old man can get a proper apprentice, person shows some respect.’

‘A strong girl,’ I said. ‘You told me.’

He put the cheroot back in its corner, waved a racquet-size hand at the desk. ‘Just a piece rubbish,’ he said. ‘Thirty-two joints to glue, who needs help?’

‘Not you, certainly. You didn’t say you were gluing this up today.’

‘You glue when it’s time to glue. You’re ready, you say, now we’re gluing. Then you glue. You don’t write a letter, wait for a reply to come.’

‘That’s a good point,’ I said.

Charlie shook his head and went back to work. I walked around and stood behind him to watch him apply his squares – three of them, short, longer, long – to every angle of the desk carcass. Each time, he put his head back, looking for light between steel and wood. Hide glue was slow drying, slow to grip, it gave you a chance to adjust clamps, to ensure that no clamp’s pressure was distorting the framework, pushing something out of square. Complicated pieces were glued in stages but eventually the whole thing had to be put together and then it took experience to ensure that it didn’t end up as firewood.

Experience was not lacking when Charlie was in charge.

‘Hold,’ he said.

I went around and prevented the sash clamp from slipping as he released it.

‘Down.’

I moved it. Charlie put his head down and sighted along the device. He didn’t need a spirit level. He had one in his head. I put my ill-equipped head down and looked. All I could see of him was one old, calculating eyeball.

‘Up,’ he said. ‘
Ein ganz klein wenig.
’

I moved it a few millimetres.

‘
Ja
.’

Charlie tightened the clamp, tested the angle with a square, grunted.

And so it went, angle by angle, clamp by clamp. When Charlie was satisfied and we were both standing upright, I ran a hand over a strut.

‘Nice bit of planing,’ I said.

I had done the unskilled work on the desk: ripping stone-dry ash for the frame on the venerable German table saw, planing it by hand with a 28-inch Stanley, sole as flat and smooth as plateglass and polished by wear to the colour of old silver.

Charlie was looking at the skeleton, rubbing his hands together. He made one of his nose sounds. ‘A monkey you can teach to plane,’ he said.

‘That explains my wages,’ I said. ‘Are you close to finished here?’

A question expressing a hope.

We went through the knocking-off ritual. I swept and dust-panned while Charlie got out of his glue-stiff overalls, put on his stylish green 1962 jacket with the deep hacking flap. Then he fiddled around, put tools back on the racks, repositioned objects on the work benches, patted machines, tested fences, wound blades up and down, wiped them with an oily rag, dropped the rag in a bin.

I removed the rag and found several other oil-impregnated pieces of cloth, one of them a massive pair of Y-front underpants. Charlie believed that cotton garments once worn close to the body gave a special lustre when used for polishing. I put the items into a plastic bag, squeezed the air out of it, tied it, took it outside, crossed the road and deposited it in the bin beside the door of Kelvin McCoy’s so-called studio, once a self-respecting clothing factory. There was still a chance that these rags would self-combust during the night but they would not set fire to the largest collection of old furniture timber in the country, destroy irreplaceable machinery, some of it made by craftsmen dead these fifty years, and ruin two lives. Instead, there was the hope that the incendiary bag might set alight McCoy’s den of fraud and fornication and purge the earth of a collection of objects more worthless, tasteless and aesthetically offensive than any assembled since the heyday of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Comforted by the possibility of performing a service to the nation, I went back to Taub’s and worked on getting Charlie out the door.

We walked to the Prince of Prussia down old streets pinched narrower by the gathering dark.

‘The baby,’ said Charlie, not looking at me. Eyes on the ground, he touched my arm, the pat of a grizzly bear. ‘No one told me.’

It was a month since my daughter had miscarried at a late stage, the baby’s father at sea but homeward bound, Eric the Viking’s fishing boat running before a tropical cyclone. Claire hadn’t been alone though. Her mother was there, my first wife, Frances. She could organise an invasion of Iraq with a few quick calls. She rang Claire’s stepfather, pink Richard Wiggins, surgeon to the carriage trade. She also rang Claire’s aunt, my feckless sister, Rosa. The pair flew to tropical Queensland on the first available.

She did not ring Claire’s father.

Eric the Viking rang me. Within minutes of his storm-tossed barque making a landing, he was at the hospital. Soon after, from Claire’s side, he rang me. I talked to her, said what could be said. Nothing.

I didn’t go to Queensland. Rosa came back and said she’d thought Frances had rung me. I said it didn’t matter, which was a lie. Frances rang and said that, in all the drama, she had forgotten about me and she was abjectly sorry. But I probably wouldn’t have gone anyway.

I didn’t say anything for a while. The practice of the law teaches restraint, the disciplining of the emotions, the need always to be measured.

Then I said, ‘I should kill you, you nickel-plated bitch.’ I tried to give this expression of unhappiness some extra bite by banging down the receiver.

But a click is just a click, as time goes by.

Now, I said to Charlie, ‘It could be someone has decreed that I’m too young to be a grandfather.’

‘To be a father,’ he said, all sympathy gone, ‘some men, they’re not fit at all.’

I pondered this, not for the first time. ‘Well, it was only the one,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s entitled to an experiment.’

The Prince was in sight. It was dark now, the old pub’s lights lying yellow and comforting on the rough pavement. My father and my grandfather would only have seen that sight if they had looked back at the Prince, bustled out at closing time, bladders distended by as many beers as it was possible to drink between knock-off and 6 pm closing.

Charlie shouldered the door and we entered. No more than a dozen customers. The Prince had been quiet since the dotcom avalanche buried the shaven-headed net visionaries and their geek slaves who had briefly adopted the place. At the bar, in the corner, three heads turned in unison, like fairground clowns, chins lifted, mouths open to receive a ball. The Fitzroy Youth Club was in place.

Charlie raised a hand at the members and, like a thirsty dog to its water, went directly to the bowls table where two fellow trundlers awaited him.

Stan the publican wasn’t in view. He was probably behind the scenes assisting his lovely wife, Liz, to microwave a few freeze-dried delicacies for the customers. If so, we would soon hear the sounds: glass breaking, heavy objects falling, grunts, then screams and yelps. In extremis, Stan screamed and then yelped, that was the sequence: first the worse, then the bad.

I joined the Youth Club, put a foot on the brass rail and an elbow on the counter. Its surface was patterned by the rings of glasses beyond number, its round edge scalloped by thousands of burns, cigarettes put down when both hands were needed for a few seconds to explain something.

‘Jack,’ said Norm O’Neill, not looking at me, giving me the full right profile. On his remarkable nose sat big spectacles that bore the scars of doubling as safety glasses in his workshop. ‘You bin scarce.’

‘Trying to cut down on the beer,’ I said.

They all eyed me with interest.

‘Keeps ya healthy, beer,’ said Wilbur Ong, nodding, looking vaguely mystical. ‘They done tests to show that.’

‘What tests?’ said Eric Tanner, the man against the wall. ‘What’d they test?’

‘The human body,’ said Wilbur, still nodding, the sage.

‘Done me no bloody good, beer,’ said Norm. ‘Still, the son-in-law’s pure as the driven snow, blighter’s crook all the time.’

‘Where’d ya get this tests crap?’ said Eric to Wilbur. ‘From the dentist?’

Wilbur’s grandson was the rich’s dentist of choice. He ran a three-chair operation in Collins Street – one waiting, one injected, one getting a brief fiddle. In his time, he had numbed every gum of importance in the city.

‘Read it,’ said Wilbur. ‘Somewhere. Can’t remember where.’

‘Does bugger all for the memory, beer, I kin tell you that,’ said Eric.

‘Speakin of memory,’ said Norm. ‘Jack, my boy, we have to think about this Saints business again.’

My spirits were not elevated by this utterance. I had convinced the Youth Club to come out of the exile it had gone into when the Fitzroy Football Club was executed and its proud, tattered banners sold to a club in Brisbane. I had led the ancient Lions followers to the St Kilda Football Club, a journey more taxing than moving the Falashas to Israel. I meant well. I thought I was doing the right thing.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Norm. ‘I don’t think these Saints people give the boys enough support. Too critical.’

‘You men could set an example,’ I said, relieved. ‘Men noted for their compassion for losers. Where’s Stan?’

Something of substance struck the closed serving hatch between bar and kitchen opposite us. A moment of silence, then I thought I heard the sound of someone being strangled, the noise of a last, agonising intake of breath.

We looked at one another, waited. Silence from the kitchen.

Norm thumped the bar, thrice. ‘Stanley, service needed here,’ he said at full volume. ‘Customers bloody dyin of thirst.’

The door to the office opened and Stan came out, running a hand over his pig-bristled scalp. I thought I saw a flushed patch on his pink cheekbone, an incipient bruise, bluing by closing time, dark in the shaving mirror in the morning.

‘No need to get excited,’ he said, breathless.

‘A round if you please, landlord,’ I said.

Stan went to work, casting glances over his shoulder at the service hatch. When he had the glasses down, I said, ‘Conjugal bliss behind the scenes, I gather.’

He put both hands on the counter, leaned across, was about to speak.

‘Stanleeee!’

Liz at the office door. ‘Your father,’ she said, in the tone a clergyman might adopt to announce the arrival of his teenage daughter’s forty-four-year-old biker boyfriend.

Stan hastened away. He was back inside a minute. ‘He’s after you,’ he said, not pleased.

Nor was I. Stan’s father, Morris, ran the Prince for forty-five years before his wife nagged him into retiring to Queensland. Now he sat in his sun-kissed villa hating it and fretting over his Melbourne properties. I handled Morris’s dealings with his tenants, and had I used the normal billing practices of city firms over the years, I would now want for nothing.

The Prince’s office had not changed since my last visit. It was still running on the Rogerson’s Pharmacy calendar of 1979. I went around the desk to the cove where the telephone sat surrounded by dusty paper cliffs. Now I could see a change: a small television set on the filing cabinet. It was on, soundless.

‘Morris.’

‘Jack, my boy, listen, what’s going on down there?’

‘Nothing. Signed Enzio’s lease yet?’

‘Yes, yes, that’s not it, I’m taking your word he’s reliable, not that I don’t always, don’t get me wrong. Jack, that’s not the point.’

‘Morris,’ I said, ‘what can I do for you? I’m tired.’

‘What’s going on with Stanley? Shuddup, Zelda, I’m on the phone. Sorry, Jack. He rings every day. He’ll get the pub, what’s the hurry now?’

‘Maybe he wants to do something else, maybe he’s tired of running a pub. I don’t know.’

‘Something else? What else? The little prick doesn’t know anything else. He doesn’t even know how to run a pub yet. I think I’ll come back, take over.’

‘Morris, I’ll ask him. Ring me tomorrow.’

‘Find out, Jack. Something going on there. The wife if you ask me. I warned him about her.’

‘Goodnight, Morris. Post that lease.’

Sarah Longmore on the television, outside court. She looked even younger on screen. I rose and turned up the sound. Drew appeared, looking like a pillar of the law. ‘I have no comment at this time,’ he said.

I was hardly back in my seat when Stan was opposite.

‘Wits’ bloody end, Jack,’ he said, softly. ‘She says I get him to sign it over now or she’s off.’

I reflected that some people did not know a golden opportunity when it sounded like the Crack of Doom.

‘Off?’ I said. ‘Off where?’

Stan’s eyes flicked to the Youth Club but they weren’t listening, they were discussing the value of things their doctors prescribed for them. I detected a certain negativity.

‘Taken to visiting the sister in Castlemaine,’ Stan said. ‘Didn’t want to know her before she went to this wedding. Her niece. Now it’s up the bloody highway every second day, stays over.’

‘Siblings often grow closer over the years,’ I said, speaking from no knowledge at all.

Stan shook his head. ‘Not a word about the sister. Listen, Jack, it’s all smiles before she goes, gives me a kiss, that’s a novelty I can tell you. Comes back, she’s like a bloody snake, vicious, don’t dare open my trap.’

‘And you read what into this?’

With a gentle finger, he touched his flushed cheek-bone, a tumescence now evident. ‘Mate, what do you think.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘Came back today, did she?’

Sombre nods.

‘And you’d like to patch things up, get title to the place?’

‘Well, yes.’ More nods.

I leaned forward. We were closer than we’d ever been. ‘Stanley,’ I said. ‘Consider this possibility. Morris signs the Prince over to you. The next day, Liz leaves. She wants a divorce. She’s got twenty years of sweat equity in this business. You’ll have to sell it and give her half.’

Stan’s eyes went large, went thin. He shook his head, smiling, not the cheeriest of sights.