Crooked House

by Peter Menadue

  At first, I enjoyed the transformation. Recently, it started to irk me. The walls seemed closer together and I kept bumping into things. I yearned for the days when I could leave empty pizza boxes on the coffee table and laundry on the back of the sofa.

  However, because it was my house and my mortgage, I couldn’t just walk out, and didn’t have the courage to ask her to leave.

  When I walked through the front door, she sat on the sofa, watching TV. It was the same sofa that, in days of yore, I would have flopped onto, face-first. Now I felt annoyed I couldn't.

  She turned and smiled. "Hi. How was your day?"

  "Nothing I’ll put in my memoirs. What about yours?"

  "OK. I spent most of it in court."

  Anne worked for a small firm in Civic.

  I sat next to her. "Doing what?"

  "My client owed $4,000 in parking fines. I was trying to keep him out of gaol."

  "Did you?"

  "Yeah."

  "How?"

  "I got him to pay the fines."

  I slapped my forehead. "Oh, what a brilliant legal manoeuvre. I hope he was grateful."

  "Yeah, he was. He’s a dentist. He offered to cap my teeth at a ten-percent discount." She exposed her lovely teeth. "Do you think I should have them capped?"

  I shook my head. "Look great to me."

  "He also asked me out to dinner."

  Something squeezed my heart. I may have had doubts about our relationship, but I didn’t like other bulls wandering into my paddock. "The dirty bugger. What did you say?"

  "I said I was engaged."

  That, of course, was a lie. But it still made me uncomfortable. "Why’d you say that?"

  "Because he was a jerk, and it was the easiest way to get rid of him."

  She stared at me, sensing my discomfort, and enjoying it. There was a long pause. Wanting to change the subject, I said: "Have you had dinner yet?"

  "No. I’ve been waiting for you."

  "OK. What are we eating?"

  "Ratatouille."

  "We had that last night."

  "Not all of it."

  She went into the kitchen and took a chunk of frozen ratatouille out of the freezer. While she stuck it in the microwave, I broke out the cutlery and set the table.

  "Oh, yeah," Anne said from the kitchen, "I forgot to tell you. Rebecca rang."

  "What did she want?"

  "Didn’t say. She wants you to call her back."

  I was married once, for three years. Rebecca was our only offspring. She was now fourteen and lived with my ex-wife, Jane, in Yarralumla.

  I went over to the phone and dialled Jane’s number. Rebecca answered.

  I said: "Hello Becky. How are you?"

  "Fine, Dad. I need to ask a favour."

  I felt a twinge of concern, because when Rebecca wanted a "favour" it usually pushed me closer to the poverty line.

  I said: "You mean you want some money?"

  "Well, umm, yes."

  "What for?"

  "The school's ski club is going to Thredbo at the end of next month. I want to go along."

  She spoke quickly, like a saleswoman talking through a screen door.

  I said: "What's the damage?"

  "About $1,400."

  I wistfully recalled the days when all I had to do, to make her happy, was stick a dummy in her mouth.

  I said: "Jesus. My wallet just had a heart attack. Hang on while I try to revive it. Clear!"

  "Dad, it's not that much."

  "It is to a poor man like me."

  "Come on Dad. You’re not poor."

  "No. I just can’t afford to eat."

  "Oh, Dad, don’t be lousy. All my friends are going."

  I sighed. I felt guilty about being an absentee Dad and rarely denied her anything. This was just a ritual struggle I would eventually concede.

  I said: "I suppose your mother expects me to pick up the tab?"

  "Yeah, it looks like it."

  "Alright, I'll pay, on one condition."

  "What?"

  "You behave yourself until you go. If your mother tells me you’ve been acting up, you won’t get a cent, OK? In fact, I’ll cut you out of my will."

  Empty threats. But they made me feel more like a father.

  She said: "Don’t worry Dad. I’ll be an angel. Thanks a lot."

  "OK. You still want me to pick you up on Saturday?"

  I had access to Rebecca every second Saturday.

  She said: "Of course. Nine-thirty?"

  "OK. Is that all?"

  "No. Mum wants to talk to you."

  "Sure, put her on the phone."

  Jane came on the line. Although it was a long time since we’d been together, I still felt a little guilty about the way I’d treated her. Thankfully, she was now in a good relationship and happy with the whole world, including me.

  She said: "Hello Paul. How are you?"

  "OK, except I’m poorer than I was five minutes ago."

  "You’ll give her the money?"

  "Of course. But I told her that she’ll only get it if she behaves herself."

  "Thanks" she said. Some women might have said that sarcastically. Not Jane. She really meant it. That’s why it hurt so much. "You still going to pick her up this Saturday?"

  "Yes. I’ll see you then."

  We exchanged goodbyes and I hung up.

  Anne took the ratatouille out of the microwave and brought it over to the table. "What was that all about?"

  "Rebecca just mugged me, again."

  While I ate, Anne regaled me with office gossip. It had taken me several months to work out that she had two colleagues called "Dave" and two called "Robyn". But I still couldn’t work out who was who.

  Later, in bed, Anne rolled on top of me, kissed me on the mouth and rummaged around in my boxer shorts. Soon, we were humping like teenagers.

  I’ll say this about our sex life: it lacked spontaneity and we had to grab a lot of flesh that felt awfully familiar. But at least we knew which buttons to push and knobs to twiddle.

  Afterwards, as usual, I quickly fell asleep. I dreamed I was rowing a dingy across a vast ocean. The sun was high and I was dying of thirst. Huge vessels crawled across the horizon, like slugs on a wire, drifting in and out of haze. I kept signalling for help, but none turned towards me - none at all.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next morning, instead of driving straight to work, I detoured through Manuka to pick up an old friend, Alan Casey.

  He’d worked on the Gallery for almost thirty years and was now Chief Political Correspondent for the Sydney News. He was also, in my humble opinion, the best goddamn political reporter I'd ever met or heard of. His warmth and wit had earned him a far-flung network of contacts, all desperate to leak him stories. Indeed, he was one of the few reporters in Canberra who, if he quoted a well-placed government "source", had actually spoken to the guy. Almost everyone else just manufactures "sources" to mouth their pet theories or hobby horses. I've certainly been guilty of doing that, though I've almost broken the habit.

  He drank booze like an athlete drinks Gatorade. Indeed recently, after downing three bottles of wine in a restaurant, he tried to drive home. On the way, his car jumped a curb and hit a tree so hard the engine landed in his lap and his balls, he claimed, got wedged in the glove-box. The fireys spent two hours cutting him free.

  Only the good die young. He emerged without a scratch and told the attending cop that he swerved to miss a kangaroo. The cop wrinkled his nose and asked him to blow into a breathalyser. According to Alan, when the cop saw the blood-alcohol reading, his eyebrows almost touched his hairline. One Gallery wag said it was amazing the reading showed any blood at all.

  A magistrate took away Alan’s licence for six months. So I often chauffeured him to work.

  He lived alone in a small brick-veneer cottage on a large block. His car sat under a carport, neglected and forlorn. The front yard had graduated from lawn to savannah.

  I pulled up outsid
e and honked my horn. A few minutes later, Alan waddled out, dressed in a rumpled suit, holding a battered briefcase in one hand and half-eaten sandwich in the other. The harsh morning light highlighted the broken capillaries that smeared both cheeks. He was a throwback to an era when the main vices of political reporters were booze and cigarettes rather than party drugs and lattes. But his eyes were bright and alert.

  "Thanks cobber," he said as he sat beside me. "I’ll do the same for you when you lose your licence."

  "That won’t happen, because I don’t drink and drive."

  "Nor do I."

  "You were five times over the limit."

  "That’s hardly drinking. That’s sipping. I was in complete control of my faculties. Unfortunately, the kangaroo was not."

  As he stuffed the last of the sandwich into his mouth, I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.

  I said: "So when’re you going to cut the lawn?"

  "Why, you offering to do it?"

  "No, because I don’t own a combine harvester."

  "Hah. Hah. It’s not that bad."

  "Yes it is. It could feed a herd of buffalo."

  He shrugged. "Well, I'm not cutting it. Whenever I do, it looks so fucking self-satisfied, because it knows I’ve got to do it again."

  We drove in silence for a while. He said: "Any luck finding a new job?"

  The truth was that since my career had veered off its intended trajectory and landed fizzing in the bureau of the Launceston Herald, I’d spent little time looking for a new job. There was no point while my fistic fandango was still fresh in everyone’s minds. Also, I’m ashamed to admit, I was starting to enjoy working for the Herald. The job had no prestige and lousy pay, but there was little pressure and an easy work-load.

  I said: "No, because, right now, I’m not flavour of the month."

  Alan smiled. "You know, I’ve got a theory that deep down you wanted Bilson to catch you fucking his wife."

  "And get tossed off the Age?"

  "Yes."

  "You mean, I wanted to fuck up my life?"

  "In a way, yes."

  "Why?"

  "Because every time you start getting too much responsibility, you look for a way out. Getting caught provided the perfect escape hatch."

  "Aren’t you overlooking one very important fact: the mad bitch told Bilson about the affair, not me."

  "True, though I’m sure that, given time, you’d have let the cat out of the bag."

  "Really? How much time have you wasted thinking up this theory?"

  He smiled. "Not long. It came to me pretty fast."

  His theory sounded completely crackpot and unnervingly true.

  I said: "I think it's got one big flaw."

  "What?"

  "I’m not that complex."

  "Mmm, you may be right."

  I sighed. "But maybe it’s time I got out of journalism."

  "And do what?"

  I shrugged. "I don’t know. Become a lobbyist or a PRasite, or something like that."

  "Don’t be crazy. You’ve got to stay in journalism, because you’re not qualified to do anything else."

  "Thanks," I said sourly.

  "Stick it out. Something will turn up." Alan took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. "You know the saddest thing about your fight with Bilson?"

  "What?"

  "The general consensus is that Bilson needed a good hiding - he really did - but you were the wrong man for the job."

  "What do you mean?"

  "From what I’ve heard, you two should have been charged with public indecency. Hardly the Thrilla in Manila."

  "Not my fault. He crowded me and stopped me using my jab. I like to stick and move, like Ali, but he didn’t let me dance." To make my point, I took my hands off the wheel and unleashed a barrage of air-jabs that smashed Bilson through the windscreen and deposited him on the hood. "He must have scouted me."

  Alan giggled. "Who do you think you’re kidding? You couldn’t punch your way out of a piss-soaked paper bag."

  I frowned. "It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that I generously chauffeur you to work most mornings without a word of complaint?"

  He shrugged. "We all make mistakes."

  For the rest of the drive, we chatted about politics. That gave Alan a chance to strip off his outer layer of self-protective cynicism and reveal the genuine misanthrope below.

  I drove up Commonwealth Avenue towards Parliament House, which looks like the bunker headquarters of Intergalactic Starfleet Command. Only a super-laser mounted on a Death Star could destroy it. I ignored that danger and zipped into one of its underground car parks.

  When I entered the Herald’s bureau, Michael wasn’t there, obviously incapable of being on time two days in a row.

  Sitting on my desk was a pile of just-delivered newspapers. I sat and picked up the Launceston Herald. The front-page lead was about a group of bushwalkers lost in a national park. It seemed half of Tasmania was out looking for the dozy buggers. My story on the PM’s upbeat prediction about the economy was on page eleven, below a story about a local pet show. Any further back and it would have been in the sports section. Thus I was surprised that a sub-editor had gone to the trouble of mangling it.

  I read through the other papers. Only The Australian grabbed my attention. Near the bottom of the front page, a headline said: "GOVT INTERNAL POLLING SHOWS PM ON ROPES". The story, slugged "exclusive", said the Government’s private polling had revealed that the PM’s popularity had dived to a depth no PM had ever reached.

  What intrigued me most was not the PM’s growing unpopularity, hardly a surprise, but how The Australian got the poll data in the first place. Only a few party high-ups had access to that sort of information. One must have leaked it to the Oz to destabilise the PM. So the PM must be wondering which confidant held a dagger behind his cloak.

  I wasn’t upset The Australian got the story instead of me, because nobody in federal politics leaked good stories to a tiny rag like the Launceston Herald. And even if someone did, Dirk Tucker would probably bury it in the back of the paper, if he ran it at all. Then I’d have to explain to my source why his hot story sunk without a trace.

  Of course, if I wanted to get back onto a major metropolitan daily - where I belonged - I needed a big scoop. But I'd started to realise I had more chance of finding diamonds in my back yard.

  After reading the papers, I waded through the mail and consulted my diary to see what newsworthy events were scheduled for that day. I noted the Minister for Defence, Vincent Martin, would be the guest speaker at a Press Club luncheon.

  Martin was Government’s brightest hope: the star player on a losing team. He was intelligent, telegenic, popular with voters and full of unquiet ambition. Indeed, he was widely touted as the strongest potential challenger to the PM.

  Of course, so far he’d denied coveting the PM’s throne. But I’d heard that, behind the scenes, he was canvassing fellow MPs for support with considerable success.

  In politics, when opportunity arrives, you’ve got to grab it with both hands, because it might not come again. Martin’s big moment had arrived and the big question was whether he’d seize his destiny or seize all of the available excuses: too young, too inexperienced; not sure of his support; not a good time to lead. Was he a real politician with real balls or just a faker? We’d find out soon enough.

  I'd better attend the luncheon, in case he dropped a hint about his future intentions. And even if he didn’t, I’d still get a free meal.

  Michael Boyd slouched into the office, looking, as usual, like a reporter for the Zombie Times. I gave him a few press releases to play around with and headed off to have coffee with a few Government backbenchers.

  Several hours later, in the auditorium of the National Press Club, a ravenous horde of political reporters sat around a dozen tables, wolfing down food and guzzling plonk.

  Up on the dais, Vincent Martin and a several club officials sat at a long table, eating and drinking a
little more decorously. Martin was tall and well built, with a mop of silvery hair and a slightly fleshy face that hinted at self-indulgence. Power made him glow.

  I found a vacant seat and got a waiter to bring me roast chicken and some wine. I’d just started disembowelling the fowl when the bulky figure of Tom Riddick, Martin’s press secretary, loomed up behind me. Tom was once a third-rate reporter. Now he was a first-rate prick who doled out stories as if throwing scraps to pigs.

  Most press secretaries quickly realise their Minister is just another grasping and opportunistic political hack, but keep working for him because they love the perks of office and proximity to power. Not Tom. He was a true believer who’d hypnotised himself with his own spin.

  He had a pile of documents under his arm. He handed me one - a copy of Martin’s speech. I tossed it onto the table and looked him in the eye.

  I said: "Interesting story in The Australian this morning, about the PM’s declining popularity. Any idea who leaked the poll data to the Oz?"

  Tom only told the truth under duress. So I didn’t expect a big admission. But I enjoyed watching him dissemble, which he lacked the wit to do well. It was like watching an elephant dance.

  He tugged his earlobe and his voice fluttered: "Of course not. I don’t get access to that sort of data."

  "The story will certainly help your boss if he decides to challenge the PM."

  "Maybe. But we didn’t plant it."

  "OK. But when’s Martin going to stop flouncing about and act like a man?"

  I expected him to flatly deny Martin was planning any sort of coup. But, to my surprise, he just shrugged and smiled thinly. "Why don’t you wait and see?"

  A huge blip appeared on my news radar. "What does that mean?"

  Another watery smile. "It means you should wait and see."

  Before I could ask any more questions, he scurried along to the next reporter and handed him a copy of the speech.

  I put a slice of rubbery chicken in my mouth and chewed over what Riddick said. Something big was about to happen. I knew it.

  I was still destroying my molars on the chicken when the Club President strolled to the lectern and introduced Martin. He said Martin had been a commercial barrister in Sydney for 15 years before entering Parliament five years ago. After only 18 months on the backbench, he joined the junior ministry. A year later, he entered the Cabinet as the Minister for Defence.