The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  ‘Cor, look at that will you?’ he cried, and I turned to look obediently, wondering if this was his favourite expression.

  Four men in dark suits were walking abreast along the street, their jackets flapping in the wind. Three of them were talking into mobile phones while the fourth looked around uncertainly, as though he’d just lost a friend.

  ‘Do you always walk like this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Like what?’ Ivan shouted.

  ‘You shouldn’t’ve done that with my cyclamen, you know.’

  ‘Why not? I made you laugh! You don’t laugh enough.’

  ‘How the hell would you know? And I didn’t.’

  We found a vacant bench in Glebe Park and I opened my packet of sandwiches.

  Ivan grinned at me. ‘You are a woman who mistrusts loud voices and strong emotions, Sandra. Am I right?’

  I shrugged, and Ivan pulled a folded magazine from his jacket pocket. ‘Listen! Bet this is just up your street! Ready?’ He lifted his lion’s head and raised an eyebrow to make sure he had my full attention, then began to read. ‘Comico editor Andrea Schultz says her company is taking a deliberate chance by targeting the graphic novel to women. The comic-book market tends to be dominated by 15-year-old boys with power fantasies.’ Ivan’s mouth worked excitedly, and his broad flask of a body moved from side to side. ‘Comics have in general ignored women! There you are! A new field!’

  ‘I think you must be mad,’ I told him.

  ‘Maybe it’s something you could get into, comics.’ Ivan saw my expression and said kindly, ‘Well, Sandra, there’s not much future where you are now. I mean, that poster is a case in point.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know.’ I tried to keep my tone light. ‘I might just be at the start of a long and flourishing career.’

  ‘Our lady of the white face and gracious condescension might look after you?’

  I glanced sharply at Ivan, then said, ‘Rae Evans and I have a history. Of a kind.’

  When Ivan said nothing, I asked him, ‘What do you think of her?’

  Ivan made a face and said, ‘When you’ve got the next Prime Minister threatening to abolish your department, and you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in a hammock—let’s just say that over the next few months everybody’s going to be looking for somewhere moderately soft to land.’

  His voice was inflexible, but then he smiled again, no longer ­challenging me, daring me to reject him for his crude behaviour and opinions, his deliberate awkwardness that was like an extra layer of clothes when he already wore too many. It was the shy smile of the day before, that said hello and told me I would do OK.

  I was silent, holding myself in, wondering, while Ivan became absorbed in eating his felafel roll.

  A few minutes before the hour was up, he got to his feet, brushing bits of parsley and Lebanese bread from his lap, and muttered something about needing to buy a toothbrush.

  I nodded and leant back against the green wooden seat, murmuring, ‘See you upstairs, then.’

  Someone had thrown a T-shirt into a tree. At least I say thrown, because it was hanging from such thin branches, twigs really—so thin that a kitten could hardly have climbed out on them. Yet the T-shirt was hanging there as though someone had arranged it deliberately and with artistry, arms out, neck open, ready to slip over sun-warmed skin, the pencil twigs conveniently acting as a clothes-hanger. Had the wind played a clever trick? For whom exactly was it waiting?

  It wasn’t until I stood up to go that I noticed the graphics magazine lying on the seat. I picked it up and began flicking through it. Where was the article on comics for women? Funny. I went back to the beginning, looked more carefully, scanned the index. There was no such piece, no Andrea Schultz. Had Ivan made it up?

  Ivan wasn’t there when I got back to the office. I replaced the magazine on his overcrowded desk.

  . . .

  Looked at now, baldly set out like that, the beginning of my friendship with Ivan seems composed of negatives. My other impressions of him have sunk beneath the theft of my cyclamen and the business with the magazine. It occurs to me that we, or our memories, are never so selective as when reconstructing the beginning of a friendship.

  And something else, maybe peculiar to me. It’s those people who at first meeting make me anxious or cross—a mixture of the two, but there’s always an element of fear—who will go on to be important in my life.

  With Rae, that first meeting, if it was the first, happened when I was still a child. Then at the job interview there was nothing, or only the ordinary reactions of a person being judged. But early in the morning at DIR, when she dropped that on me about my mother and upset me. That’s when it began.

  Jolly Jolimont

  The Department of Industrial Relations squatted on top of a travel centre like a frog on a lily pad. Every time you went in and out of the building, you met people going places. Greyhound had their terminal there; long grey concrete bays for the buses backed on to Moore Street. Next to them was the red Canberra Explorer, leaving regularly on a tourist drive around the city. Qantas was at one end and Ansett at the other. There was Country Link, where you could plan and book your train journey. The ACT Tourist Commission filled the windows along Northbourne Avenue with a medley of local attractions, from Parliament House to the snowfields less than three hours away.

  There were two takeaway food places, the larger being the Jolimont bistro, which had a sit-down menu as well. The music from the bistro blasted out on to the footpath, and was regularly interrupted by ­passenger calls.

  ‘Your attention ladies and gentlemen, this is the first and final call for passengers travelling on Pioneer Service 112 to Orange,’ would be shouted over the top of ‘Jumping Jack Flash’. I wondered sometimes how many passengers had missed their calls because of the Mick Jagger nostalgia of whoever was choosing the music.

  The bistro reminded me of that Telecom ad with Clive James in an American food hall: Clive James plump-faced and deadpan as a koala, trying to decide what to have for breakfast. The other place specialised in muffins big as shrunken heads. You could get every flavour from chocolate to fetta cheese and olives.

  Most of the coach passengers sat on dark-blue chairs set in rows, watching a TV fixed to the ceiling. The loudspeakers were loudest in the toilets, which contained shower cubicles, though I never saw anybody using them.

  Every morning on the way to the lifts, I picked my way between women with bags and rugs, and excited or fretful children. Young couples who’d arrived on the overnight service from Adelaide or Melbourne slept leaning against each other. None of the people looked well-off, and I wondered what they were doing in Canberra. How long would they stay? What did they hope to find here?

  Whatever their hopes, the ugly, barn-like building bustled at the bottom with constant movement, the nervous sweat of travel, the ­confusion of arrival and departure, the faces of men, women and children who would see other horizons, other skylines before the sun went down.

  . . .

  Rae Evans wore the uniform of the successful female executive as though she’d been born in it. Her service industries branch contained half-a-dozen sections, but she took a special interest in clerical work and told me she had always done so. I was still curious to know why I’d got the job.

  If Bambi and Dianne Trapani had been more friendly, I would’ve asked them about Rae, and Ivan Semyonov, and the blond man and woman who shared the office next to ours. We would’ve had a good gossip and got down to work. But they weren’t friendly. They made it clear that they didn’t want me there at all.

  Bambi was constantly moving the furniture around in her corner of the office. She seemed to be in a state of warfare with the objects around her and was always bumping into things. She often wore the red cloak that I’d first seen her in; there was a grey-and-green outfit with overlapping pieces that she also liked a lot. She called it ‘winter water’. All Bambi’s clothes belonged to the categories of earth, air, fire and water, and
she alternated them depending on her reading of the astrological charts and her mood of the day.

  If you wanted to have a sane conversation with Dianne Trapani, you had to go downstairs to the travel centre with her, so she could smoke while she talked. One lunchtime, about a week after I arrived, I saw her sitting in the bistro and decided to take a seat at her table.

  ‘Let’s do a deal,’ I said. ‘We don’t need to piss in each other’s drinking water. I can do my bit of the report and you can do yours.’

  Dianne took a last pull on her cigarette, then bent over and squashed her butt under a sharp black patent heel.

  I looked across at a boy asleep, with the hood of his parka pulled right over his face. The colour had gone in the TV, and the sound was no more than a whisper; but people were still lined up watching it with apparent interest. Behind us, a woman was talking on an orange payphone with the receiver tucked into her neck and both hands over her ears, as though she was in pain.

  Dianne spread her hands, exercising her fingers by pulling them one by one. Then she looked at me and said, ‘Who cares?’

  Was she saying no-one cared whether I did the work I’d been hired to do? No-one cared if she and Bambi had stuffed up? Whether the report was ever finished? Or that everyone had washed their hands of clerical outworkers? That they were more boring than last year’s Scratch-It results?

  I decided to ignore this and pursue my own line. ‘It’s not as though I’m doing you or Bambi out of a job. I don’t want credit for anything you’ve done.’

  Dianne smiled in a way that made her look much younger.

  ‘You take things too seriously, Sandra.’

  She removed the cellophane from a packet of Longbeach. Instead of dropping the cellophane or crushing it, she flattened it and spread it carefully on the table in front of her.

  I could have asked her what she meant, but I could see she had no intention of explaining.

  I smiled back and said I’d see her upstairs.

  I headed across the travel centre, past a woman with a bright purple-headed mop. On the way, I bought a muffin that tasted of straight bicarbonate of soda. I dumped most of it in a bin next to the lifts.

  . . .

  Black was the favourite colour of the young. Dianne’s was rust black, pre-loved, pre-knocked about a fair bit. She wore grumpy black dresses dating from a time when people still gave each other ashtrays as ­presents. The young. Why did I distance her in my mind like that? She was probably nine or ten years younger than me, but in my more hopeful moments I still thought of myself as young.

  It was because Dianne had said she didn’t want to have children. I knew that the office wasn’t an appropriate place for getting out baby photos; there’d be precious little mother-talk. I didn’t mind. I’d had eight years of that and I was ready for a change.

  Dianne had a stop-go kind of voice, breaking up her sentences in odd places and leaving you wondering about their meaning. She’d let her breath out hard when she said ‘seriously’, back there in the travel centre, and I’d waited for her to cough. Her voice didn’t have a smoker’s harshness, but there was a small cough that followed many of her sentences. I suspected she’d stopped hearing it.

  After our talk, even though we seemed to have reached no sensible conclusion, Dianne seemed willing to work with me, on some basic level at least.

  My time with Rae Evans at the start of that winter was like vertical lines that ran up and down through my childhood and pointed black noses up into the present. I felt proud and privileged that Rae sought my company, but uneasy too. I didn’t want to be reminded of the 1970s, those days of big changes when the landmark equal pay decisions had been made. I didn’t want to be played back in a time warp that made me think too much about my mother.

  Maybe for Rae—it had been like this for my mother in the months before she died—reliving the past was like ritually descending some steps that led to a place that was dark and warm. But the past Rae liked to recall wasn’t one my mother had shared. It was one she’d yearned to share.

  I have a clear memory of Whitlam appointing Mary Gaudron government advocate for the equal pay hearing in 1972, and the historic national wage decision that followed, with its new definition of equal pay for work of equal value. I remember coming across my mother sitting at the dining-room table with a fuzzy newspaper photograph of Mary Gaudron, her bobbed hair and clever, successful face. Mum sitting quite still, with an expression I’d only ever seen before in religious pictures. Me wanting to hug her and weep and shake her and screw up the newspaper all at once.

  What did Rae see in me? A daughter carrying the torch? Or a kind of innocence that set me apart from my colleagues, even those who were younger than I was? I’d seen so much through my mother’s eyes. And now much of what her generation had gained seemed likely to ­disappear.

  It has happened to me before, that an experience, or set of experiences, gains a recognisable shape only when I relinquish them, understand that they are finished. There’s a moment when knowing becomes knowing you can’t go back. I’d grown up in the years between those campaigns and the present. It was like seeing the earth from a distance. I tried to say this to Rae, but it came out wrong. She looked at me steadily without replying for a few moments, then she said that the earth from a distance was very beautiful.

  If the coalition won the next federal election, what remained of ­centralised wage fixing would be a hiccup at the end of a long night’s drinking. And if Paul Keating managed the impossible, and Labor won again? Rae and I agreed that Labor’s enterprise bargaining was a two-edged sword. Under our conversations, running like a tidal drift, was the knowledge that all types of outwork—textile, shoemaking, clerical, you name it—had been growing outside the award system—never ­adequately monitored, let alone controlled. With the breaking up of the system, outworkers would find it harder to obtain fair wages and conditions.

  I remember sitting in the public gallery of the Melbourne Arbitration Court in 1969, watching ACTU advocate Robert Hawke argue the case for equal pay. It was the year I discovered drama.

  Hawke’s entire attention, all his body language—though of course I wouldn’t have used that phrase—was directed towards the other side, the opposition. I don’t recall him once looking up at his supporters.

  The public gallery was on a mezzanine. Looking down on the actors, sitting there beside my mother, whose respectful attention never ­faltered, I became convinced that the decision on equal pay had already been made. Maybe the rest of the audience understood that too, for all I know.

  It wasn’t a conviction I knew how to explain, but an emotion, bound up with the knowledge I was greedily swallowing about all aspects of the theatre. There was bluff and shadow-boxing, the willing suspension of disbelief. I enjoyed that, even if I only understood it with my nerves.

  Hope was what kept the equal pay campaign going, the hopes of people like my mother, who was never an actor, but helped to keep them on the stage.

  My mother’s name was Lilian. She married Simon Mahoney and kept his surname, though he left us when I was barely a year old. She worked as a shorthand typist at the Trades Hall in Lygon Street. At the end of the 1960s, when she started taking me with her to meetings and demonstrations, two unions were sharing her. One was the meatworkers, and I can’t remember the other one. My mother didn’t dislike her job; she said it gave her opportunities she would never have in an ordinary office. But she was basically a servant. I used to wonder what she would have done if she’d had the opportunity of staying home—that is, if my father hadn’t pissed off and left her to bring me up. She never seemed to show any interest in remarrying.

  Rae and I had lunch at Cafe Moore, off Pilgrim Place, practically across the road from DIR. Rae never took more than half-an-hour for lunch, so going somewhere close was crucial.

  It wasn’t really cold in the cafe. Most of the patrons had taken off their coats and scarves; only one or two were still rugged up. Rae’s nose had turned p
ink in the short walk across Moore Street. Her hair was silver in the light, her silk shirt ivory.

  She smiled and said, ‘I knew you were your mother’s daughter the minute I set eyes on you.’

  Our vegetarian filos came with salad. I didn’t feel like eating in front of Rae, but I made myself. Her claim on me caused splinters of doubt under my skin. But I wonder now if perhaps I’m exaggerating that, if all the things that happened since have made me more conscious of my doubts than I was at the time. I was proud of my mother, and I told Rae that. I was aware that Rae had chosen me. It seemed more than enough.

  We talked for a few minutes about Edna Ryan, who’d moved to Canberra, then I said, ‘Why did you hire Bambi and Dianne for the outwork project?’

  ‘I would hope,’ Rae answered carefully, ‘that if I needed it, someone would give me a second chance.’

  She must mean Bambi, I thought, looking at her in search of an explanation. Her eyes matched the cafe’s warm blue shimmer, but did not offer one.

  ‘And Di Trapani?’ I asked.

  ‘Dianne has a first-class degree in statistics.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘We had a—a personal disagreement.’

  ‘She won’t do the work? Smokes too much? If she wasn’t shaping up, why didn’t you get rid of her?’

  I blushed, knowing I’d gone too far. Rae seemed to invite familiarity, even intimacy, then at the crucial moment to draw back.

  ‘You’re new to the public service, Sandra, or you’d realise how hard that is. Besides, I don’t want to. I’m sure Dianne will come round.’

  Rae smiled her distant, patrician smile.

  ‘Come round from where?’ I asked.

  ‘The project was running over time. I knew how important it was to get it finished before the elections. I managed to scrape together the money to hire you.’

  ‘You know,’ Rae went on, ‘I sometimes wonder if the sole purpose of being promoted to the SES is to get yourself into a position where you can no longer do anything worthwhile. I spend my days in meetings, dealing with administrative problems which God knows I have no interest in, drowning under seas of paper. I can’t recall when I last got my teeth into a project that mattered to me.’