‘Good to know.’
‘Thanks, Jack. Good man. Be seeing you.’
The window rose silently as he started up the car. Jack stood there as he drove off, still trying to process this latest development.
All in all, it sounded okay. Worksafe obviously didn’t want to prosecute, but maybe if he made a statement saying there was no proper equipment or something, they would be forced to go ahead with it. So it looked like an unsubtle hint that he could save himself and everyone else a lot of trouble if he clammed up.
His thoughts returned to his newest problem: Ajit’s betrayal. Switching to driving limos was like a footballer changing teams for more money, in Jack’s eyes. Part of him felt like punching Ajit in the face, but his more rational side recognised that he himself probably wasn’t the best share-partner going around, and Ajit was entitled to a bit of slack after several years of putting up with him.
Where on earth would he find a new partner? Maybe he could interest Rocco in moving back to Melbourne. Or there was that former driver he’d met at the Vine a few months ago: maybe he’d be interested in doing a few shifts. Even if he got someone to cover part of Ajit’s shift, it might still give him enough to meet the lease costs and stay alive.
As he entered the flat and glared at the pile of unwashed dishes waiting for him on the sink, the light bulb in the lounge room popped.
‘That’d be right’, Jack cursed. He recalled Murphy’s Law — what can go wrong will go wrong — to which he’d added Jack’s Law: what can’t go wrong will go wrong, too.
As if to confirm this gloomy view of life, he noticed a few ants crawling over a dirty coffee mug on the sink. Closer inspection revealed there were more than just a few.
‘Shit! Little pricks are unkillable. Cop this, you arseholes!’ He lashed out at the scurrying ants with a damp tea-towel, to little effect. Maybe they’d developed an immunity to Ant-Rid. Or perhaps they were an exotic ant species it didn’t affect.
Clearly, he would have to trawl the internet for a solution. Someone out there would know how to fix it.
Jack glanced over at the dishes again, thought about the sparse pickings in the fridge, and decided to go out and get a pizza. Having just copped an outrageous parking fine and lost his driving partner, he felt entitled to some indulgence. Who cares if I’m expanding a bit? he mused, patting his pot belly with fondness. Impossible to avoid once you hit your fifties.
A new La Porchetta place had opened up recently only a few blocks down Lygon Street, much to Jack’s delight. The La Porchetta chain had driven the price of pizzas down, so a quick capricciosa or margherita wasn’t quite the luxury it once was. Life was too short to waste time on serious cooking, so occasional relief from his monotonous menu of sausages, vegetables, curry, and rice was essential.
He plodded wearily down Lygon Street, trying hard to focus on Emily. A fair bit had happened since the night Dempsey attacked her. He was unsure what state she’d be in now, but he somehow felt responsible for her welfare.
Jack entered the pizza shop and felt the pleasant warmth and doughy smell waft over him. It was too early for the eat-in crowd, and there was no one standing at the counter, so at least it looked like he wouldn’t have a long wait. With a nervous glance around the darker recesses of the restaurant, he established that there was no one lurking around that he should be worried about.
‘Er, just a small Hawaiian thanks, mate’, he said to the young man behind the counter. ‘And give us a bottle of Coke.’
Stepping back a few paces, Jack pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Within seconds, a middle-aged, weather-beaten man in a white apron was leaning over the counter, glaring at him.
‘No smoking, mate! Have to go outside.’
‘For fuck’s sake, can’t smoke anywhere …’ Jack exclaimed angrily. The boss — for he carried the unmistakable air of the owner — misinterpreted his response as refusal.
‘You want me to lose my licence? You want your pizza or not?’ he yelled at Jack. Maybe he’d had a bad day, too.
‘Okay, okay, no need to carry on about it.’
Jack stepped through the door and out onto the footpath, took a couple of deep drags of the cigarette, and then shaped to throw it away.
Then he thought better of it. Just my luck to get done for littering, he thought. So with a theatrical flourish, he walked a few metres down the street until he reached a rubbish bin, stubbed out the cigarette, and threw it in the bin.
By the time he had returned to the pizza shop, the proprietor’s tone had softened.
‘Sorry, mate, not my idea, you know. Fucking health inspectors — council, all that shit. Can’t afford to risk it.’ His accent seemed to confirm Jack’s suspicion that he was of Italian origin, which he found comforting. They’d invented pizza, after all.
‘No worries, mate, not your fault. Bastards won’t let you smoke anywhere these days. And I hear they’re putting the price up again. Pretty soon it’ll be fifty bucks a pack. Fucking outrageous.’
‘The world is going mad. Soon everything will be against the law.’
‘Yeah, stupid arseholes …’
‘Hey, Paolo!’ a voice called from behind the enormous pizza oven behind the counter. The owner responded, and a minute or so later he was back with Jack’s pizza. After a rocky start, they were now almost mates. Jack handed him a couple of notes, and picked up the bottle of Coke that had been placed on the counter.
‘Thank you, my friend’, the owner said as he gave Jack change and a tiny square of paper with an illegible receipt printed on it.
‘Yeah, thanks, mate — sorry about the smoking.’
‘No worries.’
With the warmth from the pizza box radiating through his upper body, Jack walked back up Lygon Street in a slightly better frame of mind. It was still threatening to rain, but that didn’t worry him.
As he sat on his threadbare couch munching away at his pizza, he tried to put the day’s disasters out of his mind and return to Emily. Being attacked and blackmailed by a creep like Dempsey would have a big effect on someone who was healthy. For a woman suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and haunted by sexual abuse as a teenager, it had to be an absolute nightmare.
Don’t know how I manage it, Jack said to himself. First I fall for a Somali single mum tangled up with pirates and thugs, then someone with chronic fatigue syndrome who some arsehole’s got his claws into. Must be about time I wised up.
Jack stood up and placed the empty pizza box on top of the already overflowing rubbish bin. With a contented flourish, he drained the last of his Coke, surveyed the range of urgent cleaning tasks in the kitchen and lounge room, and hitched up his pants.
Emily’s revelations about her stepfather still troubled him. Christ, he thought. No wonder she’s got chronic fatigue. He had no idea if there was a connection, and having once been outraged by a GP’s suggestion that his hay fever might have psychological causes, he assumed the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome came from physical causes. In Jack’s view, the notion that a physical condition might have a psychological cause was simply doctor-speak for ‘I don’t know’. But it made him wonder. It looked like life had dealt Emily a pretty ordinary hand of cards.
10.
Ajit’s imminent departure did have some advantages: he went out of his way to be polite and helpful, and when Jack asked if he could do a split shift on the Saturday that the day of action was scheduled for, Ajit was happy to oblige,
Jack was preoccupied with his own problems: he still had to work out how he would pay the fine, get out of giving evidence in the Worksafe case, find a new driving partner, and deal with the ant plague in the flat. Yet he was still determined to go to the demo, both to stay in Emily’s zone and to keep an eye on Dempsey.
The demonstration was planned for the windswept open spaces on the estate between the main tower blocks, the school, and
the church. Jack had no idea what to expect: he’d been to a few demos in the early 1970s during his brief stint at La Trobe University, but that was a very long time ago.
It took him quite a while to make it back to Carlton after dropping the cab in Reservoir. Trams ran much less frequently on weekends, so he had to spend a good twenty minutes waiting in a blustery wind at an unsheltered stop. And then he had to get off one tram and walk along Bell Street to get another tram at Nicholson Street, which soaked up more time. It was well after midday by the time he got to Carlton.
As he walked up the hill past the Astor Hotel, Jack heard the roar of a large crowd, reminding him of the good old days of suburban football grounds. It sounded like things were already firing up.
Once he passed the Church of All Nations, he found himself immersed in the outer fringes of a large, pulsating mass of people. The amazing diversity of the inner city was on display: African women in brightly coloured robes, students in designer jeans and shock-horror hairstyles, scrawny druggies in multiple shades of grey, older men with disappearing hair and missing teeth, and even a few people who looked like mainstream suburbanites.
Educated, cultured female tones drifted out over a crackly public-address system, barely prevailing over the babble pulsing through the crowd: ‘It is vital that disadvantaged people have a place to live. And you belong in Carlton just as much as anyone.’
Jack couldn’t help noticing the condescension in her voice. Her use of the word ‘disadvantaged’ made it sound like she was talking about a different species. He assumed he was listening to Angela Wright. It certainly couldn’t be anyone who lived in the flats.
He pulled out a battered packet of Peter Jacksons and, noting he only had three left, lit a cigarette. At least no one was going to hassle him about smoking here.
After enjoying the calming feeling of a few drags, he wormed his way into the crowd, heading roughly in the direction of the speaker. It appeared they had the PA set up in front of the school.
Christ, must be a couple of thousand people, he thought, as he wriggled past crumpled men in denim jackets and mums holding shoddy pushchairs.
Using his height to advantage, he could just make out where the speaker was situated, and eventually confirmed it was Angela Wright. She was dressed in a mauve suit, and was clasping a black microphone like a hand grenade she was about to lob at the enemy. She reminded Jack of his third-grade teacher telling off naughty kids.
‘RANC is going to campaign for heritage listing for Carlton. We have to protect our vibrant inner-city culture from greedy developers, freeways, and politicians!’
Heritage listing? Carlton? Surely she must be joking, Jack thought. Quarantine, maybe. But heritage listing?
He chuckled to himself, then felt a light tap on his elbow. Emily was now standing next to him.
‘Hi, how’s things?’ he asked.
‘Not too bad, really. Bit better.’
‘That’s great. Hey, what’s the story with this Angela woman? How come she gets to speak and all that? She sounds like a stuck-up shop assistant in Myers, or something.’
‘Everyone’s a bit frightened of her.’
Jack rolled his eyes.
‘There was a big argument just before we started — about who was speaking, what order, all that stuff. Apparently, some plan Richard Fletcher wrote has ended up with the developer guy. Everyone’s really angry, accusing each other of being spies, and all that.’
‘Doesn’t Mary pull them into line?’
‘Does her best. Once a teacher …’
‘How come she’s in the flats, if she’s a teacher?’ In Jack’s mind, teachers lived in comfortable suburbs like Bentleigh and Wantirna.
‘Husband left her, I think — no money, mostly did casual teaching. Hasn’t got much super, or anything, so when she retired she didn’t have too many choices. Lot around like her.’
‘She seems pretty smart.’
‘She is, just a bit unlucky. Husband was a prick, hid his money, all that stuff. She’s okay now, but she did it tough for a while …’
Emily trailed off mid-sentence, noticing that Fletcher had started speaking.
He quickly built up to a crescendo, almost screaming into the microphone.
‘… it’s time we took direct action against these crooks! Time to defend our homes and defend our rights! Time to show the capitalists that public tenants can fight! Auspart have an office around the corner in Drummond Street. I say we go around and rattle their cage! Let’s go and show them they’re not welcome!’
Fletcher hurled the microphone on the ground and raised his arm straight up in the air, his index finger extended. The crowd immediately around him cheered, and, as if by a prearranged signal, a few dozen people began surging past the church towards Elgin Street, almost forcing the crowd around them to do likewise.
It was like a stampede in an old western. Jack and Emily were on the far side of the swelling throng, but the magnetic pull of the crowd proved too much for them. It felt like the entire crowd was spilling out into Palmerston Street and over into the short section of Drummond Street that started at the boundary of the estate.
Suddenly, everything seemed different. There were lots of scruffy young men carrying banners: some plain black, and some with blue-and-white Eureka symbols. Some wore bomber jackets with CFMEU badges, while others had their faces covered with scarves. The smell of violence was in the air, and there were no mums with pushchairs now.
Jack and Emily were still close to the edge of the crowd, so he wasn’t too worried, and natural curiosity carried him forward. They were surrounded by people yelling, screaming, and pushing, but still a fair way from the heart of the action.
The waving banners were now concentrated outside a two-storey office building about halfway along the short section of Drummond Street between Elgin Street and the flats. The noise was overpowering: someone was screaming slogans over a megaphone, groups of demonstrators were chanting, and others were yelling out random abuse at the developers.
Jack heard the sound of glass breaking, and then an enormous roar of triumph. It looked like they had managed to break into the Auspart office.
Then he heard someone yell, ‘Cops!’ He looked over towards Elgin Street and saw several policemen on horses, surrounded by dozens of other police on foot. They were trying to bottle the crowd in and contain the violence before it got out of hand, but it wasn’t working. Jack was now being pushed and squeezed by the crowd, and he lost touch with Emily. He looked around in a panic, worried she might be injured in the crush. He was trapped in a jumble of bodies, arms, and legs as the crowd surged and ebbed like a raging beast that had lost its senses.
He groped, shoved, and wriggled his way towards the footpath, hoping to get closer to the buildings along the street, which he thought might offer some protection from the crowd. An ugly confrontation was about to erupt.
A woman dressed entirely in black stumbled against him, and he crashed into a man in front of him and almost fell over. He narrowly missed being hit on the head by a huge banner pole that had been thrown by someone nearby in the crowd.
Jack puffed out his chest and shoulders and spread his arms in an effort to protect his tiny bit of personal space as the confusion mounted. Demonstrators were grappling with cops a few metres from him, with punches being thrown and headlocks being applied on all sides. He’d somehow got sucked into the very centre of what had become an outright riot. Some of the demonstrators had broken into the Auspart office, and it sounded like they were smashing and overturning things wherever they could.
Through a combination of his size, strength, and sheer willpower, Jack pushed his way to the far corner of the building next to the Auspart office, which bordered a tiny cobblestone laneway. He leaned against the side wall, relief flooding through his body, as the melee raged on around him. Now he could gather his thoughts and work
out how to get out of there — and look for Emily.
As he took a few deep breaths and fiddled with his shirt, a nasty voice whispered in his ear: ‘Well, well. Just the bloke we’ve been looking for.’ He looked up, and saw Michael Dempsey standing immediately in front of him. And the look on the face of the man beside him made it clear he wasn’t alone.
‘So what’s …?’ Jack’s opening line was drowned out by another roar from the crowd, accompanied by the sound of more glass shattering. The upstairs window in the office had just been smashed, too.
He didn’t get a chance to say anything more. Dempsey’s companion stepped right in front of Jack, standing nose to nose, and hit him with a short, sharp punch to the abdomen.
Jack’s knees buckled, he gasped for air, and the sights in front of him started spinning around.
As he crumpled to the ground, the man smashed him on the back. He heard Dempsey yell out: ‘He was groping that woman, sleazebag …’
Another large figure loomed over him, one who seemed to be dragging his assailant off. He had him in a headlock as they stumbled and swayed while Jack lay helplessly beneath them.
His attacker broke free, falling across Jack as he did so, but he was too intent on getting away to lay into him again. He scrambled to his feet and hissed: ‘Let’s get out of here.’
Jack saw his rescuer throw a parting shove at the other man, and realised that his saviour was Marko, the giant who’d trashed Dempsey’s office.
As his senses switched back on, he felt someone hiss in his ear, his mouth so close that Jack could almost taste the smell of beer and breath-mints: ‘Keep out of other people’s business, arsehole.’ It sounded like Dempsey.
Then nothing. Lying there groaning, with the noise and confusion disorienting him, he tried to see if his attackers had gone, but could only make out a jumble of legs and bodies. Trying to roll back a little, he triggered a surge of pain in his back.
Comeback Page 9
