The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  On my way back, I stopped in the doorway and looked over at my companions. Brook’s beautiful nailbrush head was bent, and the two men were sitting shoulder to shoulder, with their backs to me. I noticed an odd thing. Brook in a sweatshirt, Ivan in his old, crap-coloured jumper—their backs were the same shape, big and rounded—they looked like twin thermos flasks that would warm your insides on a cold night.

  . . .

  Ivan told me late that night that Brook had turned up on his doorstep, hat cradled in his arms like a precious bundle, had called him a filthy Russian techno-head and said he was going out to get drunk with him, and that he wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Brook had had some bad news from a blood test. He was starting chemotherapy again.

  Ivan had seen him off in a taxi outside Tilley’s and then come on to my place. We were sitting up in bed to talk.

  There was sex, and skin that moved over muscles and was ageing, and nostrils that went in and out with dark hairs inside them. There was beery breath, and a loose black curly beard hair on the sheet.

  A double anxiety ebbed and flowed around us. There was the primary one, which was that I mustn’t relax my guard. But I had. I was. The second was that, though Ivan hadn’t hurt me, he still might. And to keep sleeping with him, keep putting myself in danger then doubting myself, was a way of going mad.

  I longed to be in America, with the part of me that yearned for a ­relationship with hard edges, fixed dimensions. Yet I knew I was being unfair to Derek, that he too was capable of change, that Peter was happy staying on in Philadelphia with him. Derek had arranged for Peter to go to school. Instead of creating difficulties, he’d risen to an occasion he couldn’t hope to understand.

  ‘Ivan,’ I said much later, shaking him awake, ‘do you think that we—that you and I might—’

  ‘Might what, Sand?’ Ivan heaved himself up on the pillows, an action like a whale breaching, flumping a great volume of doona and sheet over me. When I didn’t finish my sentence, he said, ‘You know, I’ve never been any good at it.’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘The big picture, I guess.’

  ‘I haven’t either. Do you know,’ I said, ‘that dolphin mothers whose babies die will sometimes hold them on their backs up at the surface for days, or even weeks?’

  Ivan said, ‘I suppose it’s the smell of rotting flesh that finally gets through to them.’

  . . .

  ‘Copy anything. Better still, take it with you,’ the librarian at work said in an airy voice, which did nothing to disguise the tension underneath.

  The librarian’s name was Shirley. She used to have a welcoming smile. When I started at DIR, I’d spent a fair amount of time in the library, reading whatever I could find on the regulation, mostly non-regulation, of outwork.

  Shirley’s smile had hardened round the edges. I’d never seen anyone with such a square mouth, as though someone had taken a material usually pliable and willing, folded it to make corners, and stuck them together with glue.

  ‘Nothing gets thrown out in the public service,’ Shirley said, ‘except librarians over forty-five.’ She waved an arm, imperious and casually dismissive. ‘All gone to the archives! Isn’t that just great? Was there myself on Monday for an interview. That was even more fun!’

  Her hair was long, greying and untidy. I usually felt scruffy next to other women, even the eccentrically dressed Bambi. Shirley’s combination of hardwood mouth and messy hair upset me.

  ‘Even if the coalition wins,’ I said. ‘They won’t find it that easy to trash a whole department.’

  ‘Where’ve you been hiding?’ Shirley looked at my arm as though breaking it had been my fault.

  I swung a pile of annual reports down from a shelf with my left hand and chose a corner of the room as far away from the loans desk as I could get, a small table by the windows.

  A layer of grey ash had settled on the shelf above it. Oversight on the cleaners’ part? Laziness gone unnoticed, uncorrected? The fire seemed a long time ago.

  Felix had become IT director at the beginning of 1993. That gave him two years, plus the one we were in. Going by the annual reports, it seemed that he’d had no other job at DIR before that. Where had Felix come from? Another Commonwealth department? Private industry? A local computer company perhaps? A remote possibility, but an obvious one. His name hadn’t appeared in Compic’s list of ­payments, but that didn’t mean he’d never worked for them.

  Felix’s predecessor, a man named William Shaw, seemed to have gone in for self-promotion during his stint as IT director. But Felix had outdone him. Half-page photos in the annual reports, an athletic Felix surrounded by powerful computers. There was no mention of Guy’s or Ivan’s duties, or the rest of the support staff, just their names.

  Felix had even included details of the overseas conferences he’d been to. I was glancing down these when a pair of dates caught my eye. Felix had been out of the country at the time the tender had gone to Compic. Had he made the decision before he left, dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, as anyone knowing him would have expected him to do? Or was it possible that someone else had made the decision in his absence? Perhaps, like other super-organised, rule-driven people I’d known, Felix couldn’t bear to admit that he’d slipped up?

  But did this make sense? Suppose it was Ivan who gave Compic the nod while Felix was jogging the sweat off in Kuala Lumpur. Felix comes back, discovers that there’s been a complaint. Not such a big deal. But then Rae Evans, his number-one favourite female, is asked to handle it. Bit more of a pain in the arse. And then Felix discovers that Rae isn’t going to deal with the complaint in a gentlemanly way. Instead she’s going to dig around, jemmy up a few rocks. At that point, I think Ivan would’ve found his head neatly on the block. If it was Ivan. Or Guy Harmer, if it was Guy who’d bent the rules for Compic. What I could say for certain was that both men were still at DIR. Neither had lost his job or appeared to be under any sort of cloud.

  As I left my booth by the window and made my way towards the front of the library, I spotted Felix chatting to the librarian. He looked up and saw me, surprised and then annoyed.

  ‘Having a nice day?’ I asked.

  I was glad I’d decided not to borrow anything, aware of the librarian’s gaze underneath her scruffy mat of hair.

  ‘Fine thank you,’ Felix replied through pursed lips, his dimple half its normal size.

  I was quite willing to hold up my end of the conversation. ‘Do you like redheads, Mr Wenborn? Always have, or just a passing fancy?’

  Felix glared at me without answering.

  ‘I know you like the colour red,’ I went on. ‘There’s your jogging shorts. And then of course there’s red geraniums.’

  Felix pushed past me with a grunt of fury.

  Downstairs in the travel centre with a cheese roll and a cappuccino, I spied on Jim Wilcox buying a bagful of enormous chocolate muffins. As a watcher in a corner usually reserved for travellers, I kept him in sight until he took the lift upstairs.

  There was a simple reason why it didn’t make sense for Felix to be Allison Edgeware’s partner inside DIR. Felix didn’t need a way into my PC, or Rae’s, or the admin section’s either. As system manager, he could do what he liked with them. On the other hand, if Felix had taken the money, then he had to make it look as though Rae was guilty, as well as creating a web of clues that led away from himself. So why the hell didn’t he go straight to the police as soon as he had that virus disk? Because he’d planted it in the first-aid room himself?

  Another simple reason: if it had been Felix’s shadow in the doorway of Compic’s office that night, runner that he was, he would have caught me.

  The Trojan Dog

  Ivan had used Peter’s Macintosh to draw a desert flower. Its single leaf was brown, its petals thinner than the skin on water. I would have climbed in there, right into the screen and added my tears to give the flower a better chance of life.

  I was still telling Iv
an he’d get his computers back; but I wasn’t sure I believed it, and I don’t know if he ever had.

  The earth around Ivan’s flower was bare and yellow, cracked. A man stood hunched over a pink flower, watering it with his tears. The man could have been Ivan, but he could as easily have been an older, sadder Tony Trapani, with long dark hair and beard. His face wore a look of concentration. He was performing a necessary task.

  A person could fall through the cracks in that landscape, a person grown skinny, weak from malnutrition, losing the battle to find water; or with that other, stick-like thinness that comes from losing hope.

  Was this the Australia that had shot through Ivan’s father’s bones within weeks of setting foot on it, having dreamed of freedom from half a world away? My namesake, Richard Mahony, without the dignity of fiction? Was it Ivan’s father’s tears, his mother’s, or his own, watering the flower?

  It was Ivan’s gift that made me part of the story that he told in ­pictures. It was his gift not to reproduce the likeness of a person or a thing, although he could do this. Felix and Rae on jousting horses, as clever a caricature as any political cartoonist’s. But Ivan’s greater skill was to make the viewer enter, become part of his subject. Computer animation, interactive graphics—these were like the technology of silent movies at the beginning of the century, creaking, unsubtle, relying on mechanical techniques. Ivan’s horse was crude and obvious if you studied it second by second, took it apart and analysed it. But when you put on the helmet, moved the joystick, you were there.

  If this had been the first decade of the twentieth century instead of the last, fin-de-siècle dog days and all that went with that, Ivan might have become famous as an early director of silent movies. Would he have had the push, the charm, the entrepreneurial machismo? What stopped him now from promoting his talent, the way others, less ­talented, pushed theirs?

  You can have an enemy and pursue her, or him, and find them, and have it out with them. High Noon in Northbourne Avenue. Aren’t such confrontations a staple of story-telling, nothing new about them? Or your enemy can be in your bed. You can discover him there. You can wake up, and there she is beside you.

  But the enemies computers make are different, in quality and kind. They prolong discovery, and stretch and tease it out, and play their own games with disclosure. In the middle of the night, I found myself ­perversely wanting to go back to those moments at the school, wishing I’d stayed and confronted the shadow, body to body, flesh on flesh, and one of us had won. The waiting and stumbling, the trial and mostly error were becoming unendurable.

  I hoped one more meeting with Gail Trembath might help to tip the scales.

  . . .

  ‘Look at those two women smoking,’ Gail sighed. ‘Isn’t that just the loveliest thing?’

  ‘Your method seems to have worked.’ I could feel my smile of welcome was a sour one, but I couldn’t help it. This time, Gail had been forty minutes late.

  She threw me a look that said, what would you know? She was right. In the days when Gail had started getting herself hooked on nicotine, I’d chucked my heart out one night in the ladies’ toilets at Watson’s wine bar, from a combination of raw red wine and cigarettes, and I’d never been able to look at either since. I wondered if Gail remembered that night as well as I did.

  Gail dumped her bag on the floor beside her chair, and picked up a menu.

  ‘I suppose it’s a stupid question,’ I said, ‘but why are you always late?’

  She pretended not to hear me.

  The Cafe Mediterranean was more upmarket than any of the places we’d met before, all chrome and glass, white walls with arches. There was no-one there but us, and I tried not to look like a sitting duck.

  Gail took so long with the menu that I figured she must be reading every item at least three times. I didn’t think I’d get any sense out of her until she’d eaten.

  ‘Seems like a perfectly ordinary takeover bid,’ she said finally, opening her mouth wide enough to cram in half a foccacia stuffed with ham and cheese. ‘Aren’t you having anything, Sandy?’

  I pointed with my elbow to my empty cup. ‘Two coffees while I was waiting.’

  ‘How much are Phoenix offering for Compic?’ I asked, after she’d ignored my jibe.

  ‘Not disclosed. Probably won’t be.’

  ‘But you can find out?’

  ‘From the horse’s mouth?’ asked Gail, filling hers again.

  I smiled and raised an eyebrow. ‘Mouth, I wasn’t thinking of exactly.’

  ‘He’s nice, eh?’ Gail smiled. ‘Got something? That guy with the wall eye? I could tell from the way you talked about him.’

  ‘Just kidding,’ I said hastily. ‘Remember what I told you. Stay away from Compic.’

  ‘You don’t know he’s from Compic.’

  ‘We don’t know he isn’t, either.’

  ‘Whitelaw’s a businessman,’ said Gail.

  I stared at her, wondering what she meant. A burst of flamenco guitar music fell on top of us, each note a distinct, hard drop, hurting my ears. Without noticing it, I’d chosen a table right underneath a speaker.

  ‘Why’s he doing it?’ I shouted to make myself heard above the music. ‘How can one-eyed Whitelaw take over Compic when his company lost half a million bucks last year?’

  Gail made a face.

  ‘You’ve been talking to him, haven’t you?’ I said. ‘Was he the one who rang that time, offering to sell you something?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Yes, you do. Gail, be careful. I thought you told me he was a New Zealander?’

  Gail shrugged. Making a mistake over Whitelaw’s accent, if it was a mistake, obviously didn’t interest her. Neither did my warning.

  Having practically licked her plate clean, she fiddled with toothpicks in a holder like an oversized thimble, then tipped them out on the table and began arranging them in groups of four.

  ‘If it’s a real takeover,’ I ploughed on, ‘I mean, if Whitelaw’s fair dinkum and he does work for Compic, he’d be attempting to take over himself.’

  ‘It might be quite simple,’ Gail said, scattering the toothpicks and beginning again with groups of six. ‘Sharks like Compic—bound to get pulled up sooner or later. Umpteen regulations covering how the government spends its money. This way they wipe the slate clean, work up some sexy new product, start over again. Opportunity for your babe at DIR to rub out her connections.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s a man,’ I said. ‘Inside DIR.’

  Gail looked up. ‘Shit. Eat something, will you, you skinny bitch.’

  She grabbed the menu and flipped it over to desserts and beverages. She decided on profiteroles with extra cream, which she chewed and swallowed silently for several minutes. I thought that I could get fat just by watching Gail eat.

  ‘Goldilocks might run home through the woods,’ she said, grinning around choux pastry and chocolate sauce.

  ‘Might give herself a well-earned holiday in Scotland?’

  ‘Popular spot.’ Gail nodded. We laughed, and I felt close to her again, like that afternoon with the microphone.

  ‘Makes sense,’ she insisted. ‘Plug up the holes before Evans goes to trial.’

  ‘So I’ll have to make my move now,’ I said. ‘If I’m ever going to.’

  ‘Tell me, Sandy, why is it that the idea of a health farm in Scotland beggars credibility?’

  I stared at Gail, scarcely taking in her question, while she answered it herself. ‘Too bloody cold. Golf, yes. Running round in a bikini, yichk!’

  ‘Where did you get health farm?’ I said. ‘I thought it was supposed to be a nunnery.’

  . . .

  ‘When I puke,’ Brook whispered hoarsely. ‘There isn’t that much warning.’

  Brook’s arm, with a drip attached, was stretched out on top of a green cotton hospital blanket. His bleached hand was loose and open, and I was sure that if I cut it there’d be no blood at all. Yet his eyes shone, dark with life.

&
nbsp; ‘So?’ Ivan asked from behind my left shoulder. ‘You’re up for it, you reckon?’

  Brook hitched himself against his pillows and said with an effort, ‘You’re bloody mad, the pair of you.’

  ‘Just a little bug,’ Ivan told him, grinning. ‘Nothing fancy, because we’re in a hurry.’

  Brook let his arms fall back against the blanket and said, breathing heavily, ‘I have a small problem with mobility.’

  ‘Balls. You’re just gonna have to get up and do your duty as a policeman.’

  Brook tried to laugh, and coughed instead. ‘When’re you planning this little celebration?’

  ‘ASAP.’

  ‘Security in this place is tighter than a fucking jail.’

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Ivan was too quick for me. ‘No problem. Just tell me who to go and see.’

  ‘I think I’ve got a better idea.’ Brook called to the sister, ‘Nurse, I need a hat!’

  The sister walked over and stood by his bed. ‘You’re not going anywhere, mister,’ she said, having obviously heard this request before.

  ‘I know that, sweetheart. Just need to be presentable for my official visitors.’

  When we said goodbye, I hung back to squeeze Brook’s hand. He winked at me and whispered, ‘Tell that Russian ape he doesn’t know his luck.’

  On our way out of the hospital, Ivan said, ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s a piss-poor effort. I can’t think of anything better.’

  ‘I’m sorry too.’

  We stared at each other and my heart jumped to think what might be coming next. Then the moment sank back on itself, like a wave that’s climbed halfway up a sea wall.

  I pulled Ivan by the arm, thinking of the last time I’d been to the hospital, Tony with his head covered in bandages.

  Tony had moved into Dianne’s flat and was coming along fine. I guessed that was something.

  ‘Let me get it straight one last time,’ I said.

  Ivan groaned, then looked forbearing, ticking off each point on his fingers.

  We’d written a fake message to send to Claire Disraeli. The guts of it was this. Compic was going to be named in Parliament. Claire herself would be named, under privilege, as having taken a bribe from Compic. We’d prepared a question on notice from the shadow Minister for Industrial Relations.