Stiff

by Shane Maloney

  Some inexorable law of mechanical determinism was at work here. Buy something, five minutes later you see a better one at only a fraction of the price. If this builder mate was anything like old Herb himself, he was probably a top tradesman. ‘You wouldn’t read about it,’ I said, ‘I’ve just lined someone up.’

  Gardiner sounded a bit cheesed, like he was being pissed around. ‘Don’t be hasty,’ he said, forcefully. ‘You might regret it.’ Boy, was he toey all of a sudden.

  No point in having him think I was ungrateful. ‘Thanks anyway,’ I said. ‘But tonight would have been impossible anyway. Monthly branch meeting. I’ll be freezing my arse off in a back room at the Lakeview Hotel until well after ten.’

  Poor old Herb shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Like he couldn’t see why I was passing up an offer this good. ‘You sure you know what you’re doing?’ he said.

  I told him that I did, and that I had work to do, edging him out the door. He backed off, looking puzzled, his palms spread. ‘Have it your own way,’ he seemed to be saying. As I bent back down to the agenda papers Trish cleared her throat noisily and rolled her eyes sideways. Gardiner was still standing outside the window, watching. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, beckoning me outside.

  I didn’t have time for this. I turned away, ignoring him. When I sneaked a furtive look a minute later, he was gone.

  Red pulled an envelope out of his schoolbag. It had a Health Department logo.

  Your child has been examined today and found to be infested with headlice. Until appropriate treatment is commenced, he/she cannot attend school.

  With the note came a glossy brochure. ‘Headlice,’ it read, ‘live equally happily on the rich, the poor, the clean and the dirty, regardless of age, occupation and status.’ Genially egalitarian as this made our little visitors sound, if Wendy turned up and found Red off school with a lice infestation, I would never hear the end of it. The moral high ground would rise beneath her feet and become an unscaleable mountain. But what constituted appropriate treatment?

  A haircut, we decided, and a second shampoo. The place Wendy usually took him to was in High Street, Northcote. Snipz Unisex Salon, children a specialty. Only now it was Voula Modes. It smelled of singed cats and was full of bottle-blond matrons in animal print leotards and cashmere sweaters with shoulder pads and appliquéd sequins.

  We walked up the hill, me on the outside, half an eye cocked at the slow crawl of outward-bound traffic in the far lane. A window displayed badger-bristle shaving brushes, briar pipes and a black and white print of Tony Curtis. ‘No way, Jose.’ Red shook his head and we kept walking, past a newsagency with a good price on Winfields.

  The shops changed. Bed’n’Bath and Seconds’n’Samples gave way to an Indian restaurant, hip record store, boutiques. The next hairdresser was called Hair-o-Inn, a retro horror full of lava-lamps and cone-chairs and other knick-knacks of the sort anyone over thirty had spent their adolescence trying to escape. We stepped inside and a tweenie in black came smirking out from behind somebody’s father’s kidney-shaped rumpus-room bar. Red gazed about like he was in a museum, flipped open an English fashion magazine, a catalogue of tribes.

  ‘Give him a trim,’ I told the coiffeur and nicked back up the street to the newsagent. Midweek Lotto had jackpotted to five million that week and the counter staff were flat chat handling a late rush of systems entries and syndicates. It hardly seemed worth the wait considering that I didn’t really smoke. I waited anyway.

  Back at the hairdressers, Red’s Botticelli locks were a trampled heap on the floor. A sheet flapped like a conjurer’s prop and the boy himself emerged from the chair transformed. His upward-tilted moon of a face, his babyhood, was gone. The new face was keenly alert, a face sufficient-unto-itself, a proper boy’s face. My son the apprentice jockey, in a flat-top several sizes too small.

  ‘You’re going to die,’ this stranger accused, glaring at the cigarette in my mouth.

  ‘I’ll be dead when your mother sees you,’ I told him, grinding the cigarette into the linoleum. Furtively I scooped up one of Red’s discarded ringlets, a relic of my baby’s vanished infancy. ‘For the mother,’ I murmured, catching sight of a live louse in the debris.

  We shopped, loading the car with groceries. I was jittery, jumping at the clatter of supermarket trolleys, nervously pacing the half-deserted aisles. After the dramas earlier in the day, these rituals of normality should have brought relief. Instead they made me all the more apprehensive. Red’s presence only made it worse. The package of grass was burning a hole in my pocket.

  A military funeral, Gezen’s confession and subsequent disappearance, an intruder in the house, a wild chase over backyard fences, the business with Bayraktar’s car. Collectively, they were adding up to a mystery I felt powerless to unravel, but whose lingering menace I felt everywhere around me. In the cereal aisle at Safeway I put my arm on Red’s shoulder at the approach of a swarthy stranger. He was looking for the Coco Pops. When no one was looking I tucked the marijuana deep down behind a rack of muesli. A little bonus for the late-night shelf-stackers.

  There I’d been, Mr Clever Dick, bunging on a white knight act, trying to impress Ayisha in front of Bayraktar’s heavy-duty crim mates, when all along she’d been hiding the fact that Gezen was not telling the whole story. Then she’d gone and disappeared, leaving me a sitting duck in a game whose rules I couldn’t even guess at. What a bitch she was turning out to be.

  As the Renault reversed out of its slot in the supermarket carpark, a flash of dusty colour caught the corner of my eye. I pulled the steering wheel in an arm-wrenching arc and craned backwards over my shoulder. You’re chasing ghosts in the twilight, I told myself. Two blocks from home, I glanced up at a stop sign and found a cube of lurid blue framed in the rectangle of the rear-vision mirror, an aqua Falcon, its windows impenetrable in the halogen wash of the newly lit street lights. I barked to Red to stay where he was and stepped out onto the road.

  The Falcon had the same wide-mouthed grimace as before, but in other ways was subtly different. The duco shone with a higher polish, an air-intake duct sprouted from the bonnet, the tyres were comically fat. The plates were personalised. VROOM, they read. The driver’s window came down and Van Halen came out, loud. Then a head, Adonis with acne. ‘What’s eating you, squirrel dick?’ it shouted.

  It was a good question. Before I could think of a pithy retort, the head disappeared and the Falcon peeled past, its horn blaring the first two bars of Dixie. ‘Dickhead,’ said Red. I didn’t dare ask him who he meant.

  Two men in suits were sitting in a parked car at the end of our street, a white Commodore. It was the two CIB dicks from Ciccio’s. I parked outside the house and they got out, hoisting they belts up as they came. When they were two houses away I took out a two-dollar note. ‘Go get some milk,’ I told Red. By the will of Wendy he was still too young to go to the corner shop alone. ‘You can spend the change.’ He grinned wildly and trotted off. With that sort of money he’d be standing at the lolly counter for half an hour.

  I hoisted the bag of groceries and held the gate open for the coppers. ‘Murray Whelan?’ asked the older one. He had a low centre of gravity and a bulbous aggressive nose but his tone was polite. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Dalziel. This is Detective Constable York.’ York had been working out. He nodded, real friendly like.

  ‘Acting on information, gentlemen?’

  York ambled down the side of the house. I put my key in the front door and jiggled it about. ‘Do you have a warrant?’

  ‘Do we need one?’ said Dalziel pleasantly. I held the door open and let him in ahead of me. I hoped to hell nothing else had been planted around the house while I was away. We went through to the kitchen. Out the window I could see Mr Muscle step across Wendy’s rug and stick his head in the toolshed. Dalziel looked around like what he saw confirmed his worst suspicions. ‘You don’t seem surprised to see us,’ he said.

  ‘In my line of work
you learn not to be surprised,’ I said, dumping the groceries on the bench.

  He was walking around with his hands in his pockets, freely scrutinising everything in sight. ‘And exactly what is your line of work?’

  When I told him, he showed no reaction, but I could hear the gears whirring as he tried to place me in the wider scheme of things. ‘People think that their local member can wave a magic wand, fix their problems,’ I said. ‘If they don’t get what they want, they blame me. Some of them start throwing threats around. Anonymous tip, was it?’ I had the groceries out of the bag and started loading the fridge.

  ‘We’re required to follow these things up,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘What was it?’ I said wearily. I prised the top off a stubby and waved it in his general direction. ‘Child pornography? Wife beating? Drugs?’

  The copper ignored the beer. He tapped the window and waved York back out front. ‘Do you have any idea who might make such allegations?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But when you find out I’d certainly like to fucking well know.’

  Dalziel handed me his card. ‘I don’t think we need to disturb you further,’ he said. At least he didn’t shoot me, which is more than some people can say about the Victorian police.

  Being a functionary of the party in power arguably put me on the same side as the police. But as far as I was concerned, no quirk of political circumstance could alter the fact that, by disposition and training, all coppers were bastards until proven otherwise. I had suspected as much as a child, watching my father unlock the saloon bar in the lull after the six o’clock swill. No point in getting on the wrong side of the law, he’d whisper reaching for the top shelf. My ambivalence was violently reinforced one afternoon in my first year at university.

  There was a march. I can’t even remember what it was about. It was a demo a minute in those days. This one was nothing major, no Springbok tour or US Consulate job. Just a few banners and Eureka flags. A couple of hundred chanting long-hairs. I’d just tagged along for a look. The hard left were a pack of wankers, as far as I was concerned, middle-class kids trying to pass themselves off as otherwise with bad manners and a lot of beer. But there was this girl, Georgina something, that I was thinking of making a play for. She was right up the front, holding the lead banner.

  We were almost back on campus, when the ambush happened. Hundreds of blue uniforms appeared at the top of the rise, more of them than us. An inspector with white epaulettes bellowed something unintelligible through a megaphone. An order to disperse, I guess. There was nowhere to disperse to. Then they charged. They went through us like a dose of the salts. Batons, horses, you name it. They’d taken off their numbers, so they could get energetic without fear of being identified. And they really knew how to enjoy themselves.

  A big sergeant got me in a headlock while two of his mates took turns giving me the old one-two. I’d lost two teeth and nearly choked on my own blood before their interest flagged and they moved on. Georgina’s boyfriend had his collar-bone broken, so from my point of view it all turned out to be for nothing. The next time I saw the sergeant was a decade later. Deputy Commissioner/Operations I think his title was. He was sharing an official dais with Charlene.

  But we get nowhere dwelling on past grievances. The dicks were gone and Red was back with a musk cigar and a packet of gum. Big bubbles. No troubles. I stuck him in front of the telly with the chicken pie we had picked up priced-to-clear at the supermarket bakery counter, rolled up my sleeves, and waded into a frenzy of housework. Wendy would be arriving tomorrow. Things needed to be done. The nit scare had been bad enough; having her find the house looking like a half-demolished rat-trap would have been tantamount to self-destruction.

  I drained the lounge room swamp, washed dishes, vacuumed floors and hung damp laundry over the clothes horse to dry. While it felt somewhat ludicrous to be window-dressing the house I had shared with Wendy for seven years, it was also imperative that she find no evidence of inability to cope, no pretext for complaint that the child’s welfare and comfort were at jeopardy in his father’s hands. I did a particularly fine job on the toilet. In my experience, the link between bathroom cleanliness and female psychology cannot be overemphasised.

  All this mindless activity gave me time to think. Someone breaks into my house, plants drugs, then calls the cops. The same somebody tries to run me over. It was impossible not to believe it was all connected to Memo Gezen and the toughs in the grey BMW. But how did they know where I lived? And what was all this supposed to achieve? And what if they came back? Was Red safe? Maybe a few days with Wendy might not be a bad idea, after all. Just until I got this business sorted out.

  I was on my knees with a brush up the S-bend when the phone rang. Expecting it would be Wendy, I braced myself. It was old man Picone. Agnelli’s uncle’s brother-in-law, a market gardener from Werribee, had been at a family lunch on Sunday. Over the vitello tonnato he had been told that Agnelli would definitely be in parliament as of the next election.

  I called the House straight away. Charlene wasn’t in either her office or the chamber. I asked to be put through to the members’ dining room. The head steward came on the line, recognised my voice and informed me that Mrs Wills had just had some kind of collapse and a colleague had taken her to hospital. He didn’t know which one. I rang the Royal Melbourne, the Women’s, the Queen Victoria and St Andrew’s, which was the closest to the House. She hadn’t been admitted to any of them. All I got on her home number was the answering machine.

  The rain had let up, so I took a Vegemite jar of Jamesons out into the backyard and we incinerated a couple of tobacco bushes together. When I thought about it, Charlene had been burning the candle pretty brightly over the previous two years. The election, the euphoria of winning office after so long in the wilderness, overhauling a moribund ministry, ramming through a hefty raft of reform legislation, it was all bound to take its toll. I should have been looking after her, shouldering more of the burden.

  When she’d cancelled the last two of our regular sessions at the electorate office, our fortnightly chance to catch up with each other, I hadn’t even asked why. Preoccupied coping with Red, running maintenance on the house, and stewing in my own juices over Wendy, I’d even been relieved. Not that enquiring after Charlene’s health would have got me more than a gruff affirmative. She took far too much pride in her reputation as a tough old chook to solicit sympathy. But that shouldn’t have stopped me asking.

  The whiskey and nicotine must have fired me up. The urge to do something, anything, gnawed at me. This Bayraktar business was a real piss-off. The last thing I needed to be doing right now was looking over my shoulder every five minutes for the boys from the Anatolia Club. But until Ayisha or Gezen turned up I was left hanging. Or was I?

  I rifled the phone book. Fifteen Celiks were listed, ten in the immediate area, none with the initial A. There were no Gezens at all, and no listing under Anatolia Club. A gambling club, Ayisha had called it. Perhaps I was coming at the subject from the wrong angle, thinking about the car. Rational thought hadn’t been getting me anywhere. Trying to second-guess the dark recesses of the right-wing Turkish mind could easily take forever. It was time for some direct action, even if it was a blind punt.

  Under Police was a listing for the Gaming Squad. A machine answered and told me to leave a message. I hung up, collected my thoughts and rang back. Anonymous denunciation was a game two could play. My accent was terrible, more Bombay than Bosphorus, made even worse by the pencil clamped between my molars. Maybe I sounded like a crank, but I didn’t imagine they got too many calls from a prisoner at the Anatolia Club, 636 Blyth Street, Brunswick, pleading to be rescued before he was castrated for his gambling debts. And like the man said, they were required to follow up these things.

  The odds were long, but with a smidgin of beginners luck, Bayraktar’s buddies would at least be getting an enquiring official knock on their glossy green front door within a day or so. W
hether it would be enough to teach them a bit of road courtesy remained to be seen. Jesus Christ, I thought, as I hung up. What had started as a strategy to save the government from embarrassment was turning into a very bad vaudeville routine.

  Branch meetings started at 8 p.m. As the product of two inveterate meeting-goers, Red had accepted from infancy the normality of spending at least one night a week under a table with his colouring pencils at some discussion group or executive committee or task force. At seven-thirty I told him to get his coat.

  ‘I’m not going,’ he said, digging his heels in. This tough new haircut was going to his head.

  I offered him a dollar. He was unimpressed. A dirty brown banknote and a glass of pink lemonade were lousy compensation for being bored out of your brain for two hours while your father massaged the grass roots.

  But the options were non-existent. My old man was in Queensland, not that he would have been much use even if he was closer. Wendy’s parents were getting on, lived in Camberwell and never volunteered. Besides, they voted Liberal. I couldn’t see myself calling them up and explaining the urgency of chairing a Labor Party branch meeting.

  Red began to whine. Great. Here we were fighting on what was possibly our last night of bachelorhood together before Wendy arrived and started making trouble. There was not alternative but to put my foot down and take a firm patriarchal stance. ‘Five dollars,’ I said. ‘Plus a packet of chips.’

  Right then the front doorbell rang. Red, looking for an out, flew up the hall and flung it open. ‘It’s a lady,’ he yelled.

  It was no lady. It was Ayisha, draped nonchalantly against the verandah post in her quilted overcoat. ‘Sivan said you wanted to see me,’ she said, as though she had no idea why. ‘What’s happening?’

  This sudden materialisation on my doorstep set me back a pace. To be discovered like this—a tea-towel across my shoulder, hectoring a small child—wasn’t going to do my image any good. How would I ever be able to pass myself off as a Gramsci-reading, internationalist sophisticate after this? Aside from which, where did she come off with this casual attitude? I tucked the tea-towel in my hip pocket. ‘What’s happening?’ I snapped. ‘You fucking well tell me.’