Sucked In

by Shane Maloney

  ‘If we don’t do it,’ he’d say, ‘some other bastards will, and they’ll be even worse bastards than us.’

  Bastardry, in Charlie’s language, was a political attribute, not a personal one. He bore no personal animosity towards his opponents. Not even back in the snake pit of the Trades Hall, back when he was state secretary of the Federated Union of Municipal Employees.

  Then, as now, Labor was out of power, state and federal. Whitlam had crashed in a blaze of futile glory and we were back in the wilderness. Blind Freddie could see that we’d be there forever if we didn’t get our house in order. Pronto. It was the Reformers versus the Shellbacks. The arena was the union movement and the battle was long and bitter.

  Charlie’s tolerance must have been sorely tested on quite a few occasions during those decisive tussles. But it was all ancient history now, water over the dam, a mere footnote. The millennium was approaching, bringing new and urgent challenges. I focused on the computer compliance paperwork.

  Come the apocalypse, nobody could say it was my fault.

  One by one, the afternoon-shift shelf-stackers trickled through the employees’ door of the Bi-Lo food barn. When Red appeared, I gave him a bip and a wave. He sauntered over to the car, school backpack slung across his shoulder, shirt-tail hanging out his pants.

  ‘Good funeral?’ Red knew Charlie. Sporadically over the years, Charlie had taken a vaguely avuncular interest to which Red had responded in a vaguely nepotal manner. Gifts had never been exchanged.

  ‘His best yet.’ I started to open my door. ‘Want to drive?’

  Red looked around and scanned the scene. ‘Now?’

  On quiet Sunday afternoons, Northcote Plaza carpark was a perfect spot for introductory lessons in three-point turns and parallel parking. But this was a midweek evening at the intersection of homebound rush-hour and pre-dinner shopping flurry, dusk blurring the visibility, road courtesy somewhere between endangered and extinct. Out on High Street, the trams were crawling, every stop a stop, the backed-up traffic seething with latent rage.

  Red got into the passenger seat. ‘Not worth it,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you wanted some practice.’

  He rolled his eyes and snorted. ‘Proper practice. Not ten minutes shitting myself in peak-hour traffic.’

  We were built to the same genetic design but Red was half a head taller and two shoe sizes up. And when he was exasperated he was every inch his mother, Wendy.

  ‘You sure?’ I said. ‘It all adds up.’

  ‘Shut up and drive,’ he said. ‘I’m starving.’

  He’d had his learner’s permit for three months and he knew the basics, but it’d take more than an occasional innercity shuffle to clock up the hundred hours recommended by the Transport Accident Commission. He’d need a few decent runs up the freeway, some night driving, a bit of wet-weather work, the odd long haul. It wasn’t going to happen tonight.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ I said. ‘Can’t say I didn’t offer.’

  I moved into the traffic flow and turned at the corner where the Carters’ Arms Hotel had once stood. The spot was now occupied by Papa Giovanni’s Pizza and a branch of the Bank of Cyprus. In the olden days, back when I was younger than Red, my father was the licensee at the Carters’. We lived upstairs, hotel-keeping then being a family business. A peripatetic one, in our case, my father being my father.

  A crawl-line of tail-lights stretched ahead. I dodged down the first side street, opting for the longer but less congested route. The dusk had taken a Turnerish turn, the clouds tinged with pink, the fresh-lit lamps of the outspread suburbs glinting in the gloaming, flecks of mica in a slurry of wet sand. In the far distance, the Dandenongs were a low bulge blurring into the horizon. There was a damp chill in the air, harbinger of the encroaching winter.

  ‘Payday, eh?’ I said, slowing for a speed bump.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he nodded. ‘$81.60, after tax.’

  I extracted four twenties from my shirt pocket. The supermarket job was Red’s idea, a token of his commitment to self-reliance and financial independence. But his wages, notionally earmarked to buy a car, tended to get frittered on six-packs, taxi fares and mobile phone top-ups. Still, the gesture was laudable, parentally speaking, so I matched his earnings dollar for dollar.

  ‘Don’t drink it all at once,’ I said.

  We hit Heidelberg Road, crossed the Merri Creek bridge and turned down a short cul-de-sac abutting the parkland leading down to the Yarra.

  The neighbourhood dated from the beginning of the century, built to cater for the Edwardian petit bourgeoisie. From its neat brick maisonettes and double-storey terraces, shopkeepers and artisans who had risen above the proletarian morass of nearby Collingwood could turn their aspirations towards the big houses across the river, the boom-era mansions of Kew.

  Our place was a single-storey duplex, half of a matched pair. Its interior had been considerably remodelled over the years but the original façade remained intact, complete with a fretwork arch above the front door and leadlight magpies in the windows.

  It was smaller than the house in Thornbury I’d bought with Lyndal not long after my election to parliament. But with Lyndal gone, the Thornbury place felt like an empty shell, an echoing reminder of her and the child she was carrying when she was killed.

  Over time, my rage had burned itself out. I’d learned to live with my grief, to mourn and to move on.

  Or at least to move house. So what if Clifton Hill was outside the boundaries of Melbourne Upper where, convention dictated, I ought to reside among my constituents? Such scrupulousness was more honoured in the breach these days, and Clifton Hill was only a spit and a piddle from the electorate anyway. More to the point, it was very convenient for Red, what with the network of bike paths just beyond the back gate, the railway station and the bus to school a few minutes’ walk away.

  Not that he’d need bike paths and public transport for much longer. Or me, for that matter. Come the end of this final year of school, the bird would fly the coop, hurtling towards the new millennium in the car I’d helped him buy, leaving me in an empty nest.

  But that was months away. I parked at the kerb and Red hauled his books and laptop inside and retreated to his room on the pretext of homework. Doubtless this would entail much tele-conferencing and net-surfing.

  I exchanged my suit for jeans and a sloppy joe, poured myself a short snort, stepped through the sliding glass doors onto the back deck and fired up the gas barbecue. In the dying light, the sky was the colour of ancient rust and I stood for a moment, drinking it in.

  ‘At the going down of the sun,’ I said to myself, ‘we will remember them.’

  I went back into the all-purpose eating-living area and pointed the remote-control at the television for the ABC news headlines. The Prime Minister was refusing to say sorry for something. Bill Clinton’s penis was facing impeachment. Peace talks, astonishingly, had collapsed in the Middle East. I gave some rocket a spin, ran the sniff test on a block of feta, sliced a cucumber and nuked a couple of kipflers. By then, the hotplate was ready. I seared two slabs of rump and hit the mute.

  ‘Grub’s up.’

  Red materialised at the refrigerator door and scouted the interior, his broad shoulders filling the open gap. Physically, he was nearly a man, the stuff of gladiator sports and conscript armies, bulletproof and bound for glory. But as he crouched there, contemplating the cling-wrapped leftovers, tousle-haired in an oversize sweatshirt and bare feet, he was once again a little boy.

  ‘Beer or wine?’ he said.

  It was five years since he’d opted to join me in Melbourne rather than remain with his mother and stepfather in Sydney, and it felt like five minutes.

  Five years, three houses, two schools, one major freak-out and a fair smattering of the ups-and-downs that come with having a politician for a father. A loser politician, at that.

  ‘Don’t forget to call your mother,’ I said, watching him set the table. ‘It’s her birthday tomorrow, yo
u know.’

  ‘It was yesterday,’ he said. ‘I already rang.’

  I dished up and we ate in companionable silence. Two honest toilers, home from their workbenches, tucking into a manly repast of meat and potatoes accompanied by a tossed mesclun salad lightly drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil and served with crusty ciabatta and fresh-broached Stella Artois.

  The television was burbling in the background, volume low. Half-way through the news, the reporter caught my attention. A big-eyed, round-faced blonde named Kelly Cusack. It wasn’t often that she made the prime-time bulletin. Her usual gig was anchoring ‘On the Floor’, a weekly round-the-nation digest of state political affairs that went to air after the religion show on Sunday nights. Question Time kerfuffles in Hobart, redistribution brouhaha for the Nationals in Queensland, men in suits go yakkity-yak.

  It was a program strictly for the hard-core politics junkies. But for Kelly Cusack it was a foot in the door of current affairs, a step up from her previous gig as host of a gee-whiz techno-buff show.

  ‘Hello?’ Red was leaning sideways to block my view of the set.

  ‘Say again?’

  He tapped the side of his head. Wake up. ‘Driving lesson? Saturday?’

  ‘Haven’t you got a rehearsal? Bunking off won’t get you into NIDA, you know.’

  ‘It’s just a run-through,’ he said. ‘We’ll be finished by one o’clock.’

  Red’s ambition was pointed in the direction of drama school. Theatre Studies was his top subject and a lot of his off-hours went into a youth theatre based in an old knitwear sweatshop in South Melbourne. It was a semi-professional operation with a resident grant-funded dramaturg; more than one alumnus had gone on to feature in a distinctively quirky Australian film.

  His mother, of course, took a dim view. Her idea of a proper career was law, medicine or one of the other money-harvesting professions. But the kid was hot to tread the boards. He’d already scored a walk-on in ‘Heartbreak High’ and two lines in ‘Blue Heelers’, and in my wild erratic fancy visions came to me of him holding aloft a gold statuette and thanking the father who’d backed him all the way. If only to give his mother the shits. Currently, he was codpiece-deep in an upcoming production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

  ‘Dunno why you’re pissing around with this poncey thespian stuff,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with plumbing? Steady work and the money’s good. You could start by learning how to operate the dishwasher, not just fill it up with concrete-encrusted cereal bowls.’

  ‘Don’t change the subject. If you haven’t got a fete to open or a ship to launch, we could put in a couple of hours.’

  If memory served, my schedule was clear.

  ‘Let’s call it a strong maybe,’ I said. ‘Die young, stay pretty. Worked for James Dean.’

  Well pleased, Red microwaved a brace of individual self-saucing butterscotch puddings which we ate on the sofa watching ‘The Simpsons’. When he drifted back to his homework, I pulled a cork and retired to my hermitage.

  Ah, gentrification. What started life as a laundry at the rear of the building was now a snug little hideaway, just big enough to accommodate my Spooner cartoons, archive boxes, books and music, and an authentic op-shop Jason Recliner. Its side door opened onto a small patio—a bed of white pebbles beside the ivy-clad wall of the next-door neighbour’s garage.

  I kicked off my shoes, cued an audio cassette and declined on the davenport. There was a hiss, then a male voice spoke.

  ‘Mαθημα Δεκα,’ it said.

  ‘Mαθημα Δεκα,’ I responded.

  Melbourne swarms with Grecians. And having spent half my life up to my taramasalata in the progeny of Hellas, I’d decided it was high time I learned how to order my souvlaki in the demotic. So, earlier in the year, I’d enrolled in a beginners’ course in Greek.

  ‘Στο σταθμο του τραινου.’

  ’ So far, by diligent application, I’d managed to acquire the conversational skills of a speech-impaired three-year-old. On the up side, most of my classmates were female. And a man in my situation takes his opportunities wherever he can find them.

  One classmate in particular had caught my eye. Her name was Andrea Lane, but she was Lanie to her friends and that was the tag by which she’d introduced herself to the class. Our teacher mistook it for Eleni. It was an apt elision. Helen, she who eloped with the Trojan Paris.

  Lanie’s may not have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but it definitely floated my little rubber duckie. She was cheerful, sardonic and fetchingly full-figured. Naturally, she was already taken.

  Hubby had picked her up after one of the first classes, their pubescent daughter in tow. He was a dopey-looking dork, reeking of academia. With any luck, he’d be struck by some fatal skin disease, turn into a mass of weeping pustules and retire to a leper colony. I would comfort his lonely wife and one thing would lead to another. Until that happened, I could only put my hopes for conjugation on hold, try not to ogle her too obviously during class and buff my conversational skills.

  ‘Εχεις πολυ ωραια ποδια,’ I recited. ‘Ti ora fevgi to treno?’

  After thirty minutes and four glasses of Penfolds Bin 28, my concentration was flagging. I stopped the tape, took my wine out to the wrought-iron table in the pebbly courtyard and fired up an ultra light. SMOKING KILLS, it said on the pack.

  So does an out-of-the-blue coronary occlusion in the dining room of the Mildura Grand Hotel. Funny thing, I thought, Charlie dying in front of me in a restaurant. We first met in a restaurant. Toto’s, a pizza joint near the Trades Hall.

  In 1978 I was a political science graduate, still in my twenties. I’d been working on a health and safety campaign for the Combined Metalworkers, a futile attempt to convince welders at the naval dockyards to stop getting shitfaced at lunchtime and falling off their gantries. My tenure had just fizzled out and I was pondering my employment prospects.

  Charlie was sitting at a table up the back, having lunch with Colin Bishop. Purged from the public service in the aftermath of the Whitlam dismissal, Col was carving a niche for himself as education guru to the unions. From time to time, he’d employed me as a casual teacher at the Trade Union Training Authority. He waved me over and introduced me to Charlie.

  I knew him by reputation, of course. He was state secretary of the Federated Union of Municipal Employees, elected on a reform ticket. A former bible basher, he had a reputation among the more hard-nosed blue-collar types as a bit of a boy scout. Somewhere in his forties, he was a stocky, sandy bloke. Teddy-bearish, you might say. Soft spoken, no side, real smart. I liked him straight up.

  We made some chit-chat, ate some spaghetti, drank some coffee and I walked away with a job. Assistant Publications and Training Officer. Six days a fortnight, beginning immediately.

  My job was producing the monthly newspaper that went out to the Municipals’ fifty thousand-odd members. Boilerplate stuff—a paste-up of reports from the state branches, advertisements for the credit union, updates on award negotiations. Between issues, I slaved over a hot photocopier, organising the schedules and study materials for Colin Bishop’s weekend seminars for shop stewards. Spiral-bound folders with diagrams of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, that sort of thing.

  I worked out of the state office, a modern, low-rise building in Queensberry Street, not far from the crumbling mausoleum of the Trades Hall. Our queen bee was Mavis Peel, a woman of indeterminate age and towering coiffure who directed the daily ebb-and-flow from behind a golf-ball Selectric, a PBX and a Rothmans.

  Mavis had been with the union since the days of the dunny men and she brooked no cheek from anyone. In her twin-set and diamante frames, she looked like a character from an Ealing comedy, fielding calls from shire clerks with brisk efficiency and guarding our two typists, Margot and Prue, with the ferocity of a mother lioness. Never mind that they were grown women, both already into their thirties, and well able to look after themselves. T
o Mavis, they were her ‘girls’, targets of opportunity in the blokey world of the unions.

  Years later I wondered if Mavis had registered what was going on between Charlie and Margot. If so, she certainly kept it very close to her twin-torpedo chest. I definitely didn’t twig, nor did anyone else at the time, far as I was aware.

  Not that I was paying much attention. My relationship with Wendy was moving inexorably towards cohabitation, home-ownership and parenthood and it simply didn’t occur to me that hidden fires might be burning behind Charlie Talbot’s well-ironed shirtfront. He was just too straight for that sort of thing. Too married. And Margot, lovely Margot, she had more than enough to keep her hands full elsewhere.

  And then there was the quite unlovely Mervyn Cutlett. Merv had ruled the union since the mid-fifties. He was a wily old throwback, half class warrior, half lurk merchant. A product of the Depression and the War, he regarded the Municipals as his personal property, maintaining his tenure by sheer bloody-minded intractability and a sharp eye for potential challengers.

  When he wasn’t interstate, shoring up the loyalty of the various state secretaries, he was ensconced in his nicotine-drenched, pine-panelled, shagpiled lair in the basement of the Trades Hall, holding court with his well-stocked bar fridge, his kitsch collection of wartime memorabilia and his attendant gopher, an ageing rocker named Sid Gilpin.

  Merv and Charlie were the union’s yin and yang, its past and future. As one of Charlie’s appointments, yet another university-educated smartarse, I was bound to be viewed by Merv as an object of suspicion.

  ‘Just make sure his picture appears on every page of the union news,’ Charlie counselled. ‘And try to keep out of his line of sight.’

  I took his advice. And later, after he made the switch to parliament and I’d become a minister’s minder, I kept taking it. No matter how busy, Charlie was always good for a word of wisdom when I needed one. That was something else I was going to miss about him.

  I finished my cigarette, took the bottle back inside and restarted the tape.