Sucked In

by Shane Maloney

  I tried to pay for her coffees. She wouldn’t let me.

  ‘Is this a dress-up event?’

  ‘Whatever you like. Long as you’re not wearing a balaclava and carrying a sawn-off shotgun.’

  She chewed her lip, hesitant. ‘Thursday evening, right?’

  ‘I could ask them to change it,’ I said. ‘But Mick and Keef might get shitty.’

  ‘Could take a bit of juggling,’ she said. ‘Can I let you know in a day or two?’

  I nodded, a little too eagerly, and borrowed the cashier’s pen to write my home number on the back of a business card. Lanie glanced at the number, then read the other side. ‘Parliament of Victoria.’ She shook her head dolefully.

  ‘Malaka.’

  Broadmeadows Town Hall was a vision of drear in the afternoon rain, a brick monolith distinguished only by its lack of distinction. As the venue for a wake, it was hard to imagine anywhere more depressingly institutional.

  I directed the cab to the agglomeration of buildings between the K-Mart and the municipal library, hoping that Mike Kyriakis had at least laid on an adequate supply of grog. A wake is not a wake without booze. It was basic multicultural courtesy. The rites were over. The tomb was sealed. It was time to get ragged and maudlin.

  When I was a teenager, Broady was the very end of the earth. Beyond lay only factories and thistle-infested paddocks. Its residents were blue-collar workers, their feet tentatively planted on the first rung of the ladder to affluence. Many were recent migrants whose oily-rag thrift had allowed them to scrape together the deposit on a stake in the Australian Dream.

  Community facilities were basic. The opera rarely performed there. Ballet classes were few and far between. Childbirth often preceded wedlock. The mullet ruled supreme. Sheepskin moccasins were high fashion. Broady boys were generally not a calming presence.

  In the following decades, however, the frontier of suburbia galloped further north. Target and K-Mart colonised the council carpark, school retention rates had risen and a tertiary campus sprang up. It had got to the point now where real estate agents were describing the place as a ‘desirable location’ without the faintest hint of irony or even deception.

  Pity there wasn’t a decent pub in the area. Still, there’s a limit to what social engineering can achieve.

  I paid my chauffeur and followed the hand-lettered signs up the Prussian-blue polypropylene pile to the council chamber, the locus of the gathering.

  The chamber had recently been decommissioned following a forced rationalisation of local government by the state Liberals. While the surrounding offices continued to operate as an administrative centre, decision-making had moved elsewhere. It was now a general function room and storage area for municipal artifacts. Honour rolls of mayors previous. Mementoes from sister cities. Winning bushscapes from the annual acquisitive art award.

  About fifty people had turned up. They were milling around the room, drinks in hand, chatting and raising a gratifyingly loud hubbub.

  Somebody had taped old campaign posters and press photos to the walls. Serious-faced Charlie in front of the party colours. Dark-suited Charlie opening the Community Health Centre. Hard-hatted Charlie inspecting progress on the Meadow Heights adventure playground. Just-folks Charlie living large at the Upfield Senior Cits dinner dance.

  Mike Kyriakis spotted me the moment I arrived. He beckoned me over to a bunch of old ducks who were stripping the buffet of four-point sandwiches and meatballs on toothpicks. At their centre was Mavis Peel, former doyenne of the Municipals’ typing pool. Her bosom had vanished and her hair had thinned to a blue-rinsed wisp. She was deaf as a post and didn’t know me from Adam. But she remembered Charlie Talbot, all right.

  ‘Such a nice young man,’ she reminisced. ‘So considerate.’

  Her companions from the Craigieburn Home for the Terminally Bewildered nodded agreement and sank their talons into the pink salmon sangers.

  ‘Have you got a drink, love?’ asked one of them.

  I couldn’t tell if she was cadging or inviting. Mike grabbed me like a life preserver and steered me to a trestle table where a council hall keeper in a clip-on bow-tie and a neat blue mohawk was pleased to offer me something from his comprehensive selection of wines, beers and spirits.

  ‘This is a fine thing you’re doing, Mike,’ I said, hoisting a stubby of VB. ‘Here’s to Charlie.’

  A lead weight descended on my shoulder. It was the open hand of Sivan Demiral, one of Charlie’s office auxiliaries. He was an old mate, a Kurd who’d helped run the Turkish Welfare League alongside Ayisha when I was the electorate officer for Charlene Wills, many moons prior.

  ‘Murray, my friend,’ he boomed. ‘We have lost a good man.’ He raised his stubby and I seconded the motion.

  An ebullient optimist with the build of a Hittite shithouse, Sivan was forever launching ill-fated business ventures, all the while keeping his hand in local Labor politics. His current project was a Turkish video store, its precarious earnings underwritten by a part-time job in Charlie’s electorate office. Customers with a valid ALP membership card got a ten percent discount.

  We swapped some Charlie Talbot anecdotes and I gravitated towards Helen Wright. She was part of a trio that included Ayisha and a woman from the Broadmeadows Neighbourhood House toy library. They were taking a punt on the white.

  ‘Courtesy of Domaine Diggers Rest, the winery just up the road from Charlie and Margot’s place.’ Helen puffed her cheeks, swished and swallowed. ‘An argumentative little drop with an aftertaste of aviation exhaust.’

  I accepted a glass and took a tentative sip. Helen wasn’t just a fine electorate officer. She had a cast-iron stomach. Perhaps these facts were not unrelated. Ayisha was downing the stuff like a trooper.

  ‘Margot sends her apologies and her thanks,’ I said. ‘If you ladies will excuse me, I think I’ll stick to the suds.’

  I collected a cleansing ale and made the rounds. I knew perhaps half the people in the room. Ron Tragear, secretary of the Anstey branch and C-grade juniors football coach. Signor Panebianco, the Cicero of the Calabrian Club. Lauris Foxe, deputy principal of Strathmore Primary. Doug and Vera Ahern of the Anstey Progress Association. Ada Ahmet from the Disability Resource Centre. Working-bee regulars and old-school true believers, bedrocks of their communities. As big a pack of dags and busybodies as you could ever hope to assemble. The more I drank, the more I loved them.

  ‘Your attention for a moment, folks.’

  I was saved from total immersion in the well of sentimentality by Mike Kyriakis. He rapped on the table with a spoon and Helen Wright hauled her low centre of gravity up onto a chair.

  She made a short speech, reminding us why we were there. It centred on a funny story about the time computers were first installed in members’ offices in the old Parliament House in Canberra. To Charlie’s bafflement, the technician sent to explain their operation kept using an acronym current in the computer jargon of the day. WYSIWYG, pronounced Wizzywig. What You See Is What You Get.

  ‘Charlie Talbot was a Wizzywig man,’ she said, drawing her tale to its point. ‘What you saw was what you got. A man who knew what he stood for, did what he could to the best of his abilities, recognised his limitations and honoured his obligations. The sort of person who restores your faith in politics. I’m not sure if they make ’em like that anymore.’

  And we all drank to that, and shared a silent sniffle. I realised my stubby was empty and, as I turned towards the bar, banged into a vaguely familiar middle-aged woman. She clicked her tongue and gave a reproving shake of her head. ‘Jesus, Murray Whelan,’ she said. ‘Still as hopeless as ever, I see. You don’t recognise me, do you?’

  ‘Course I do.’ I smiled widely and racked my fibbing brain. A committee? A delegation? A primary school pageant?

  ‘Nadine,’ she said. ‘Nadine Medlock.’

  ‘Of course, Nadine,’ I said, my ears turning pink. ‘It’s been a long time, that’s all.’

  ‘Twenty-three
years, four months and five days.’ She eyed my livid lobes, amused, then appraised the rest of me. ‘Don’t worry, Murray. I almost didn’t recognise you, either.’

  The last I’d seen of Nadine Medlock was her bare arse.

  I had a force ten hangover and I was crawling out her bedroom window, shoes under my arms, trying to remember where I’d parked the car. She was flaked out on her doona, her bum in the air and her head buried under a pillow. It took me three days to find the car.

  ‘So,’ I said, bouncily. ‘What’ve you been up to? What brings you here? Didn’t realise you knew Charlie.’

  She cupped an elbow in one hand, sipped her wine and slipped into chatty mode. ‘Been living in Darwin,’ she said. ‘Husband, kids, the full catastrophe. No, it’s been great, actually. Len’s in the PS, Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Transferred back here last year so the girls could finish school. I’ve been working with young offenders and Charlie was a big help with a program at the Sunbury juvenile centre. Thought I’d drop by and pay my respects. What about you?’

  Nadine was, I remembered, a pretty good sort.

  ‘I’m in state parliament,’ I said.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘You poor bastard. What did you do to deserve that?’

  ‘I’m in it for the glamour,’ I said. ‘My electorate’s just down the road.’

  We stood at the plate-glass window, looking down at the K-Mart carpark, and traded ancient gossip about half-remembered acquaintances from our long-gone twenties.

  For a while, I recalled, Nadine was a barmaid at the John Curtin Hotel, the watering-hole directly across the street from the Trades Hall.

  The Curtin was an institution in those days. ACTU headquarters was just down the road in Swanston Street and it drew thirsty union officials like flies to the proverbial. In its beery swill, sanctified by the name of Labor’s most revered and contentious prime minister, loyalties were affirmed and animosities stoked, rumours circulated and deals done, old alliances eroded and new ones forged. Every inch was staked out. The Right sat by the window, the Left near the cigarette machine. The pragmatists held the bar, leaving just enough room for the Maoists. People went there as much to fight as to drink.

  ‘You don’t happen to remember Merv Cutlett, do you?’ I wondered.

  ‘How could I forget? The old letch cost me my job.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I topped up her glass. ‘How so?’

  Nadine shrugged. ‘Usual story.’

  ‘Got a bit frisky, did he?’

  ‘Downright grabby,’ she said.

  ‘Tell all,’ I said. ‘Paint me a picture.’

  She heaved a reluctant sigh. But reminiscence, after all, was our pretext for an afternoon on the grog.

  ‘It was a Friday night, right. Bedlam hour. Cutlett was perched at the bar, usual pozzie, with his bandicoot-faced little hanger-on.’

  ‘Sid Gilpin?’

  ‘I forget the name. A cut-price Bob Hawke, always cracking his knuckles and twiddling his pinkie ring and tugging at his earlobe.’

  She smoothed back the hair at her temples, mimicking one of Gilpin’s grooming gestures. She had him down pat. I laughed appreciatively, egging her on.

  ‘As per usual, the little grease-ball had his head so far up Merv’s bum you couldn’t see his neck. Anyway, this night, for some reason, the two of them were particularly full of themselves. Carrying on like they’d just pulled a major swiftie. Sold Sydney Harbour Bridge or something. Patting themselves on the back. And hitting the amber pretty hard in the process. Eventually, whatsisname, Sid, got totally legless and lurched off. So Cutlett turned his attention to yours truly. Stupid old fart tried to crack onto me. Really laid on the charm, told me how much he admired my tits.’

  Nadine’s tits weren’t bad, if memory served, but they weren’t anything to write home about. My eyes started slipping downwards but I got them back to Nadine’s face before they disgraced me.

  ‘Of course sexual harassment was an occupational hazard at the Curtin,’ she said. ‘Bar work, it’s no job for a shrinking violet, but even you proto-SNAGs assumed it was open slather.’

  Before she got any further down that particular detour, I steered her back to Merv.

  ‘He was pissed and arrogant and I wasn’t in the mood to be nice. So I tried for a swap with Terry, the barman upstairs. He reckoned he was flat out, too, and I should just cop it and carry on. Anyway, Cutlett keeps it up, so I banged his next beer on the bar so hard it slopped into his lap.’

  ‘Bet he loved that,’ I said, the scene vivid in my mind.

  ‘Went off like a pork chop. Said he knew exactly what I needed and he was just the man to give it to me. There’s a scrum of drinkers three deep at the bar, waving their money in the air, grabbing glasses off me. Every time I lean across the bar, he puts his hands on me. I go to the boss again, said I couldn’t work under those sort of conditions, tried to get shifted. He said “Later”, so I cracked the shits. “Take this job and shove it,” I told him, “I ain’t workin’ here no more.”’

  ‘Johnny Paycheck,’ I said.

  ‘Dead Kennedys, the way I did it,’ Nadine laughed. ‘Felt good at the time, but I was jacked off about it later. Turned out to be the weekend the old goat got himself drowned. He never went back to the Curtin, so I needn’t have quit on his account.’

  I shook my head at the injustice. ‘And here we are,’ I said. ‘Twenty-odd years later, at the wake of the man who jumped into a freezing cold lake trying to save the bastard.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ she said. ‘That’s the difference between the Merv Cutletts of this world and the Charlie Talbots.’ She held out her glass and I topped it up with Domaine Diesel. We gave a desultory toast and I sucked meditatively on my stubby. Down in the K-Mart carpark, Sunday afternoon shoppers were dashing though a downpour, their purchases clutched tight.

  ‘Cutlett and Gilpin,’ I said. ‘You don’t happen to recollect what they were so pleased about?’

  Nadine gave a derisive snort and eyed me like I was nuts. ‘Christ, Murray, it was twenty years ago.’

  I tried a little charm of my own. ‘Still,’ I said. ‘You do have amazing powers of recall.’

  ‘Careful, Murray.’ Nadine fixed me with a wry look. ‘I might start remembering things best forgotten.’

  My ears flared again. I racked my brain. What exactly had happened between me and Nadine? ‘Yes, well…I, er…’

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, letting me off the hook. ‘It ended well. I walked straight into a job at the Dan.’ The Dan O’Connell was a folkie pub. Wack-fol-the-diddle, electric bush bands and outlaw crossover. ‘That’s where I met Len. And I’m still with him. Just goes to show that things work out for the best sometimes, eh?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  By seven o’clock it was down to the hard core.

  Somnolent, we sprawled among the ravaged platters, devastated dips and knackered plastic glassware. Helen Wright had taken off her shoes and propped her stockinged feet on a stackable vinyl chair. Sivan toyed with a bottle of raki, unscrewing the cap, thinking about it, then sealing it back up. Ayisha began clearing up. Mike Kyriakis told her not to bother, the cleaners would take care of it in the morning. Sam Aboud, the administrator of the Meadow Heights Community Health Centre, managed to scavenge enough sachets of Nescafe to make a round of coffees.

  Darkness had fallen outside. One of the fluorescent ceiling lights spluttered sporadically. Mike took the Australian flag from its stand and poked the tube with the pole. It hummed, plinked and expired.

  There were a couple of other lingerers, faces I knew less well, their names slightly out of range. A young psephologist with an attempted beard, one of Charlie’s part-timers, sat on the floor with his knees cradled in his arms. One of Mike Kyriakis’ council confreres, an official with the printing industry union. He’d souvenired one of Charlie’s campaign posters, rolled it up like a telescope and was trying to focus down the tube.

  We were all somewhat oiled, but I was proba
bly the worst offender, flopped in an armchair and sinking gently into the west.

  ‘I’ve done my sums,’ said Mike, dragging a chair into the circle and dropping into it with an air of finality. ‘And I gotta say, I’m more tempted than ever to put my hand up for Charlie’s old seat. I reckon he’d want me to, too. What do you say, Helen, how about seconding me? And Sam, you too? Between the lot of you, I reckon there’s just about enough signatures for the nomination form.’ He gave the flagpole a slow wave. ‘It’ll be a glorious defeat. Gallipoli all over again.’

  Sivan languidly returned the wave with his bottle of raki. ‘Didn’t we win that one?’

  Mike was warming to his theme. ‘I’ve got no illusions about my chances, but I reckon I can make those know-it-alls in Canberra sit up and take notice.’

  He’d been though the membership rolls with a fine tooth comb, and he’d come up with a strategy.

  ‘Everybody’s been stacking branches for years, right? And both sides have about equal numbers, right? But it’s like the nuclear balance. It only works if it isn’t tested in practice. As long as they’ve got the numbers on paper, they never need to actually mobilise them. All they need in any vote is enough to make a symbolic showing. So next Saturday, come the plebiscite of local members, there’ll probably be a turn-out of less than fifty percent of the eligible voters, right?’

  The question was rhetorical. We settled further into our seats and let him answer it.

  ‘If I can round up three hundred surprise punters, which I think might just be do-able, I really put the cat among the pigeons.’

  He paused pregnantly, awaiting a reaction. Eventually Ayisha obliged with the obvious questions.

  ‘Where are you going to get three hundred stray votes, Mike, and how are you going to keep them up your sleeve until Saturday?’

  In Coolaroo, as in most ethnically diverse electorates, membership management was a highly developed science. Between the six of us, we knew every trick in the branch-stacking book.

  The game had begun in the sixties when party rules were amended to allow branches to conduct their meetings in languages other than English. This, it was believed, would encourage migrants to join.