I agreed, too, because Mum wanted me not to, and I had not come home for family bondage.
I agreed because it was impossible not to, once Arry had made his excited bid. Nor could I refuse once Kovacs had fingered me for his partner; he was the last man on Earth I would let find me wanting.
Those things were plain, but why did I say ‘Dad’? It was not involuntary: it was a conscious decision to communicate something. But what? Not affection. Not ever that, I think I was trying to tell Nick that I could work with the man, to tell Mum that resentments could be set aside, to tell Kovacs that I was as good a man as he (I wasn’t) but that I accepted him as boss on his own turf. I was telling him – and, with a sneaking astonishment, myself – that I trusted him.
He thought I mocked him.
When the others had gone he leaned across the table, white-faced, eyes like agates raging in his head, ‘Don’t ever use that word to me until you mean it! I took a lot from you years back but I won’t take blinding shit from an upstart Extra brat of a copper!’
With his face inches away and his anger the most honest thing I had ever seen in him – and with a sense that if it came to violence I would be half-hearted because he was in the right – I had to declare my own self-respect while placating his.
I said, ‘I don’t like you and I never will, but I trust you and respect you for what you are.’
He gave me the shark grin that was worse than a threat. ‘And what I am isn’t much, you think.’
I couldn’t summon the cowardice to deny or evade, just enough to glare and say nothing at all. He nodded violently to himself and left the room.
Mum, who must have watched with something like horror, let out her breath and said, ‘At least that clears the air,’ setting a bad moment in sensible perspective. ‘But he was always good to you and he’s easily hurt.’
‘So, I suppose, are his victims.’
‘I don’t know that side of him, he doesn’t let me see it.’ She fixed on me the sort of gaze with which I imagine the Spartan mothers sent their sons off to disasters like Thermopylae, maternal pride quelling fluttering heart. ‘Look after him, Teddy, he’s getting too old for this work.’
For God’s sake, which one was she worried about? ‘Mum, it’s he who’ll be looking after me and he’s the toughest old bastard you’ll ever set eyes on.’
She looked absolutely proud.
Kovacs came back more suitably dressed for his idea of Sunday – a towel around his waist – as calm as if his dam had not come close to bursting, and began to lay out his ideas for our procedure.
I became fascinated by the untrained but biddable forces he could call on and the extraordinary chances he and his tower folk could take. He could plan actions that PI, hampered by politics and regulations, dared not dream of. At one stage I said, ‘With that sort of influence and the towers to call on, you could take over the city.’
‘You reckon? So we could. Easy. And then what? Would we be any better off when the looting was over? Half a Tower Boss’ job is stopping stupid bastards going on the riot. If we took over, we wouldn’t know so much as how to run the transport, much less Med section or the food supply. Half Melbourne’d starve before we got going again. Never give people what they want – it’s bad for them and everybody else.’
So I understood a little more of how the Sweet/Swill balance was maintained – the Swill maintained it because without it they would be worse off.
Kovacs asked, ‘Did you know that Swill are healthier than Sweet? There’s figures to prove it.’
‘I didn’t know. Why is it so?’
‘Diet. Calories, proteins, vitamins, all that – balanced. They get enough of all the right things. The Sweet get all the luxury stuff on their bonus coupons, so they’re fat and slow and sick compared with us. That’s a joke for you.’
It had its funny-sour side.
‘Something more,’ he said, ‘our Swill are better off in a lot of ways than most people ever were except for part of the last century.’
That was one of the shattering facts of our awareness of general poverty, that most historical periods would have envied our poor, who were at worst fed and sheltered and doctored. What they lacked was the expectation of ever having more.
My view of the Swill fell apart for the dozenth time as he realigned my vision of a community at once disorganized by lack of a goal yet close-knit by its own conventions and concerns. There was order because a majority insisted on order, and disorder because a minority would not be ordered; there were groups of floors where peace and community spirit ruled and there were floors that feuded in blood; there were social strata with Boss families at the apex and street kids kicked around at the bottom and, in between, self-conscious snobberies of semi-literacy, gaming groups, entertainers, valued tradesmen and even such exotics as artists. ‘There’s everything in the towers, rotting because there’s nothing for good brains to do.’
‘One thing there isn’t,’ I suggested. ‘Hiding places.’
‘For what?’
‘Sex. Where do the girls and soldiers go for their hump and grunt? The soldiers can’t go to the towers and the girls can hardly sneak into barracks, and all the rest is empty concrete surrounds where you couldn’t hide a pencil mark.’
‘You mean, where’s the saddling paddock? On the assault course. You know where that is?’
I didn’t know what it was, let alone where.
He dropped into Swill, mocking. ‘Nunno much, Sweetyboy?’
I agreed that I didn’t know all I needed to know.
‘Nunno n’un. A learn yer.’
‘You’ll have to.’
‘Swilly!’ He meant, Speak Swill.
‘Yuh. Yer learn me tops.’
We spoke Swill from then on. It was more than practice: he wittingly sniped at social barriers preserved by superior grammar and accent He was a practical psychologist. I suppose he had to be.
He drew diagrams on scraps of paper, showing how the Newport towers fanned out from a central point with the army barracks at the pivot and behind it a stretch of wasteland reaching to the river. On that stretch was the assault course, a sort of obstacle race of trenches and entanglements and barricades used in training infantrymen. I thought it would be under water most of the time but it appeared that it was built up high enough for the sweating soldiery to use more often than they appreciated. The troops used its shadows and cavities for meeting and saddling up, Kovacs said, nine nights in ten. The girls would sneak around the side, paddling in the river overflow, and scramble up to the assault course on ropes dropped to them.
But how did they make contact to arrange their dates?
‘Arrange dates?’ The idea tickled him pink. (Forget our Swill; much of it would be incomprehensible.) ‘You’ve been brought up by nice people, Sweetyboy. The girls stand in the water and whistle.’
‘And take whoever answers?’
‘You don’t like that? Teddy, those kids are selling gash, not socializing. They’re in business.’
‘For food?’
‘Sometimes. Depends what their pimps are telling them to ask for. Lately they’re asking for chewey – the new stuff’s extra strong and they go for it, God help them.’
‘So we get a girl to find out where the boys get it?’
‘You think he’d tell her?’
No, I didn’t think he would. ‘What then?’
‘What we do,’ Kovacs said, ‘is find us a girl who’ll help us snatch her soldier. He’ll tell me who supplies him.’
I didn’t like the sound of that but it was not a matter for present argument; we might manage without indecent violence. I asked, ‘How do we find the girl?’
‘We don’t. We don’t do anything to get us seen as taking a hand, not yet. If somebody wakes to us it’s Nick that gets it in the neck. My kids’ll organize the girl. They’ll do it easier than you or me would.’
And they did. Two days later a message came from Vi that she had a bird in hand.
2
Returning to Twenty-three by day was a test of my fitting in. Looking right, smelling right, fluently speaking right were not enough. The shoulders straightened by years of physical drill had to be dropped into an easy slouch and the parade-ground stride loosened to an unbusy stroll. I had to be Swill without obviously working at it. On stage you can use gesture, expression, inflection to convince a willing audience but in the corridors I had to be unnoticeably right. It was akin to that most difficult of an actor’s tasks, to be unobtrusive in mid-stage.
Nervousness sharpened my observation. I saw the Swill in the light of Kovacs’ instruction, observing how some showed a hard vitality and others gave in to mere existence, how some dressed while others merely covered themselves, how careful social ritual contrasted with bluntly insensitive behaviour. Most of all I noticed the children and the fact, which seemed to me paradoxical, that generally they were noisy, active and happy. (‘Why shouldn’t they be?’ Kovacs asked. And why not? The child’s-eye view is not fixed on the things it doesn’t have. That comes later.) They romped in the corridors in groups and the adults gave way to them instead of pushing through or ordering them out of the way as Sweet might have done with their own. I had a hazy memory of reading that primitive societies had this attitude to kids and that psychologists spoke favourably for it. The State might learn something from its Swill.
The teenagers were less engaging, dirtier than their elders and less kempt, gathering in groups and behaving more like gangs, wearing the air of violence seeking expression. They knew Kovacs and ignored him elaborately in resentment of his authority but they were aware of his presence and that was a sign of respect, however unwilling.
They were probably responsible for the graffiti. The walls were covered – I mean packed, jammed, obscured – with scrawls and drawings accumulated from the day of the tower’s opening, decades before. There were few printed words (those mostly four-letter and misspelled) and not much in the way of thought, but amidst the crudely drawn bodies and monstrous genitals were sweeps of untutored draftsmanship, designs that struck and held, juxtapositions of colour to catch and lead the eye. Rotting because there’s nothing for good brains to do.
Climbing those stairs required usage and the leg muscles of mountain men; we arrived at Kovacs’ floor with my thighs and calves beginning to grind. There we were greeted by what seemed a corridor full of children, a swoop of yells closing on Kovacs with complaint: ‘Auntie Vi kicked us out!’
When he said that she must have wanted some peace, a girl about seven years old contradicted him. ‘No, she didn’t. She’s got Bettine in there.’
‘Which Bettine?’
‘Bitchy Bettine from Five.’
‘Ah. Well, piss off, all of you.’
They fanned back from the door in a semicircle, not ready to go, watching him until he saw what some local artist had done to it. A crudely lined, superhuman penis had been sketched over older decorations in some sticky white medium that glittered, with under it, in shaky letters: BILLY’S BIGGY.
He bellowed at them, pleased as Punch, ‘I wish it was half true, you little buggers!’ The brats squealed with joy and ran off. ‘No use painting it out. There’d be another one by morning.’
As he opened the door and stood back for me to pass I was charged in the pit of the stomach by a shrieking, spitting little hellcat from inside the flat. When I grabbed her she tried to kick me in the crotch, then sank her teeth into my hand. Kovacs cursed and grabbed her around the waist, carried her inside and locked the door before he dropped her.
She stayed on her knees where she fell, glaring at Vi, who sat in her rocker, interested but undisturbed. She squealed to Kovacs, ‘Your bloody old slut hit me!’
Vi murmured, ‘I’ll hit you harder if you don’t watch your mouth.’
Bettine hammered on the floor in a transport of rage that looked to me more like fright pretending courage. Kovacs looked at my bleeding hand and said, ‘Wash that right away.’
Vi heaved herself out of the rocker. ‘Water’s off, but there’s cold tea in the pot. He can use that.’
She took me to the kitchen, poured cold tea over Bettine’s bite and opened an antiseptic pad (fliched from who knew where?) for me to wipe it, then gave me a stickpiece to cover the toothmarks. When she wrapped the discarded pad in a screw of paper and set light to it I asked, ‘Do you think her teeth could carry poison?’
‘Could do. She’s been trading in chewy.’
Until that moment the obvious hadn’t hit me and I don’t know quite how I felt. Perhaps there was nothing much to feel because there was nothing to be done. I was infected or I was not. If I was . . . my first thought was for my future with Carol, and that started cold panic.
Vi said, ‘Tough luck, copper. Professional hazard, eh?’
Her easy brutality brought me back to sense and control. ‘As you say.’ My voice sounded steady to me.
She breathed deeply and shook through all her drapery of fat. ‘I don’t wish you plague though I’ve no love for Conways.’
‘Or I for Kovacs and his brood.’
‘No?’ She wagged a finger in my face. ‘He’ll get you in the end.’
‘Like fuck he will.’
She frowned, then suddenly slapped my face. ‘You know I object to bad language in the home.’
In a half-daze, with my eyes on the stickpiece and my mind on what lay under it, I made some sort of apology.
Bettine had quietened down and was looking miserable. Kovacs glanced at my hand, and away, and muttered, ‘I wouldn’t have had that happen for anything.’ The girl did not seem to gather that it seriously concerned her, but Kovacs was acutely troubled as he asked, ‘How am I to tell your mother?’
His dismay let me feel stronger, superior, able to make decisions. ‘Why tell her? We might have got to it in time. It’s a weak organism when it’s exposed.’
He shook his head, bitterly unhappy. I saw on Vi’s face, before she quickly composed herself, an expression queerly compounded of malice, satisfaction and pity.
Kovacs, unable to cope, turned his attention to Bettine. ‘They tell me you fuck with a soldier.’ Vi opened her mouth to lay down the language law, then shut it. He said, ‘Under age, aren’t you?’
She spat at him, ‘I’m seventeen.’
Vi interrupted. ‘My record says she’s fourteen. She’s Sally Beech’s oldest, from down on Five. They call her Bitch Bettine because she’s a scrapper.’
‘Good one, too,’ Kovacs said. ‘Fights with everything at once. Who’s your soldier boy?’
‘What soldier?’
‘The one you fuck with. And he gives you these.’ He held up a piece of blue-green chewey.
‘Go stuff yourself.’
The way he smacked her mouth seemed loose and lazy but the contact cracked like a strap. I surprised a flash of shame on him as she squealed and scrambled under one of the beds, rage blazing at him out of the half-dark. ‘Bastard!’
‘Maybe so. Now, this soldier—’
‘What soldier?’
Vi said tiredly, ‘Come off it, girl. My kids saw you with him last night. You weren’t the only one hanging around the assault course. That’s why they suckered you up here.’
She squalled, ‘Think I won’t get those bastards! Just think I won’t!’
Kovacs asked, ‘Where’s Stevie?’
‘What Stevie?’
‘Your pimp. The one who sends you to the soldiers to get chewey.’
She took her time deciding that he knew more than denials could evade, then said sullenly, ‘He’s sick.’
‘How sick?’
She shrugged. ‘All shivery and talking silly.’
‘You fuck with him, don’t you?’
‘Course.’
She could be a carrier, herself immune, never sick, a spreader of sexual goodwill. My bitten hand itched.
‘Well, he won’t die on you.’
‘Who cares? There’s plenty of boys.’
�
�Belts you, does he?’
‘Don’t they all?’
‘Great boyfriend!’
‘They’re all the same. Shits.’
Kovacs held up the chewey again. ‘Does he chew?’
‘Course.’
‘You?’
‘Course.’ Then, most petulantly, ‘Not the good stuff. Keeps that for himself, the mean bastard.’
‘The good stuff is what made him sick.’
She said, with the boredom of disbelief, ‘Balls!’
She took a lot of convincing. She took more still to come around to the idea that her generous Sweet soldier boy was doing some sort of mysterious harm, even if unintentionally. When it finally sank in that the chewey was responsible for Stevie’s illness and wandering mind and perhaps for the sickness of a few dozen others, she stopped being tough and lay under the bed, crying. Vi heaved herself up to drag her out and comfort her in her enormous lap.
When it came to the point of kidding Bettine into just one more rendezvous with the soldier – he would be expecting her the following Thursday night, two from now – she was persuadable. Kovacs sold it to her as cloak-and-dagger stuff, beautiful spy leading the enemy to his doom, and it went down like chocolate. Besides, she considered she owed the bastard one for Stevie.
After he had finally sent her home, Kovacs said to me, ‘You’d better get back to barracks and get your meds to look after you.’
I tried to look as if I wasn’t ready to scuttle to them like a scared rabbit. ‘I’ll be back Thursday night.’
‘No, no, stay out of it. Everything I’ve done with you boys has gone wrong.’
His breast-beating made me obstinate. ‘I work for Nick, not you. If I haven’t got the bug I’ll carry on with the job and if I have, I might as well carry on as sit around waiting for symptoms and feeling sorry for myself.’
He put his face in his hands. ‘It’s me that’s sorry.’ But he did not argue. ‘I’ll see you down the stairs.’
The Sea and Summer Page 29
