White Dog ji-4

by Peter Temple

  Drew was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘I’m just a solicitor. As you once were.’

  ‘And still am,’ I said. ‘Keep your expectations low.’

  I fought the door handle, useless. I shouldered the door, it gave. I fell into the wet bluestone gutter.

  ‘Great exit,’ said Drew, looking down at me. ‘You leave well.’

  I rose and went into my office and made the call to Simone Bendsten, comber of the public record.

  3

  ‘Nice car, Jack,’ said the man behind the counter at the corner shop. He’d seen me park outside, he didn’t miss much.

  ‘Very nice, George,’ I said, ‘but not mine.’

  He nodded, a man who first opened his shop door in the mid-1950s when almost everyone in the suburb caught the tram to work and having a motorbike was a big deal. Now the place was gridlocked with Saabs and BMWs and what people paid for a worker’s house could have bought the whole block in 1950.

  ‘Where’s that girl?’ he said.

  I thought about the long-ago day I’d come in with a Claire Irish shoulder-high to a medium-size brown dog and held up my daughter for inspection.

  I’d said, ‘Claire, this is my friend George.’

  ‘Gorb,’ she’d said.

  ‘George,’ I said.

  ‘Gorb,’ she said, and gripped the finger held out to her by George.

  Gorb he would always be.

  ‘Still in Queensland,’ I said.

  George nodded. ‘They all come back. Holiday, it’s all right, not bad. Live there, no. Everything stings you.’

  I heard the sound, the dangerous murmur, the jostling, gossiping, teasing, scuffling sound of teenagers released from school for lunch.

  ‘Quick,’ I said. ‘Salad roll.’

  I went back to Linda’s car, sank into the leather and watched the country’s future invade the shop. Longer hair for girls this year, boys in anarchy — shaven, long, greased, bleached, dyed.

  A knock on the passenger window, a big hand. I unlocked the door.

  ‘Gone fucken upmarket, have we?’ said Senior Sergeant Barry Tregear, sliding in, filling the cabin, bringing the smell of cheese and onion chips, cigarette smoke, Old Spice aftershave. He adjusted his seat, belched.

  ‘Excuse,’ he said. ‘Early lunch. Following fucken early breakfast.’

  He produced a cigarette, put it in his mouth, groped himself, couldn’t find anything.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Bastard took my lighter.’

  I pushed in the dashboard lighter. It heated in an instant, changed colour.

  Barry used the lighter, put it back without looking, slotted it, no hesitation in the hand.

  ‘This cunt in Dandenong,’ he said, ‘he goes to call on the ex-de facto, 3 am, he’s off his tits. She’s out of it in the bedroom with the next cab, give or take a good few. The boy’s not happy, goes out to the shed, finds the wood splitter.’

  I was watching a teenage embrace, stylised, she wound around him, found a way to push back her hair at the same time.

  ‘Stop now,’ I said.

  Barry sighed, added a hint of garlic to the stew of scents in the car. ‘Two kiddies in the next room. And teddy bears, whole fucken room’s full of teddy bears. All sizes. I’m too old for this kind of shit.’

  I said, ‘You should have stuck to cleansing the streets of drugs.’

  He shook his head, sighed again. ‘Jesus, that was a good gig. Just walk around and make bear noises at the cunts. They bugger off around the corner, end of story. Now I have to keep up with these fucken shorthairs — they’re on a mission from God.’

  The teen embrace unwound. He flicked the bottom of a tiny buttock with fingertips as she set off for Gorb’s. She turned her head and gave him a look that was not likely to discourage the practice.

  I said, ‘Sometimes I think you’re losing sight of what called you to your work. The burning desire to fight crime wherever you found it.’

  ‘The burning I remember is when you pee,’ he said. ‘Now there’s this woman, they brung her from New South, from traffic, playground patrol, some such shit, wouldn’t know a crim from a fucken cardinal. She’s clean, that’s her qualification. Might as well make Mother fucken Teresa the commissioner.’

  ‘Dead,’ I said, ‘but she’d probably have recognised a cardinal. Man in a purple dress. Is that right? Purple? For what exactly are you blaming the woman?’

  Barry looked at me, incinerated a centimetre of cigarette. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘I blame women for everything. Next item. This Franklin business.’

  ‘Yes. Lips sealed?’

  ‘Dunno. Can’t feel my lips anymore, the dick’s not the same either. You reckon there’s a link between dick and lips?’

  I smoked passively while I thought about the question.

  ‘I have no doubt,’ I said, ‘that a link will be found. Franklin?’

  Barry looked at me, smoked, squinted. ‘Mate, under the new hygiene, people get spanked for talking to blokes like you.’

  ‘Live dangerously. More dangerously.’

  A jet of smoke hit the windscreen, fanned. ‘Well, Drew’ll be looking for manslaughter,’ he said. ‘Looking and fucken hoping.’

  ‘I gather not.’

  He eyed me. ‘Not? She’s Mick’s ex-root, they say he was giving it to the sister at the same time. Had the gun, had a key, there’s a witness saw her near the place. Plus no backer for the cuddled-up-in-bed-at-home-with-a-book crap. Reasonable case, yes?’

  ‘Well. Purely circumstantial.’

  ‘Nailed, mate. Nailed like Jesus.’

  ‘What’s the strength of this witness?’

  ‘I gather she’d seen her before, saw her having a fight with some bloke over a park. Fucken oath, no teachers like that in my day.’

  I looked. A tall woman with cropped hair and long legs was exchanging words with some of the teenage loiterers outside Gorb’s. It was a joking exchange but you could see that she was an officer talking to the troops.

  ‘Just as well,’ I said. ‘Out there in Hay you farm boys were already over-excited by the bra ads in the Women’s Weekly. That and seeing the farm animals doing it.’

  ‘To this day,’ said Barry, ‘a bra ad can put a bit of strain on the daks. Unfortunately just a bit. Then there was the step-ins.’

  Rain on the windscreen, the tiniest drops.

  I said, ‘A fetching thing, a step-in. So no doubt there?’

  Barry had the last of his cigarette, came close to smoking the filter.

  There was no chance of him using an ashtray. I pressed the button, his window sank. He didn’t look when he flicked the butt. It could have landed in a passing pram.

  ‘Doubt?’ he said. ‘Well, the doubt’s either done him or had him done. It’s like a fucken jail. There’s three things to get through. Come from outside, you got help or you go home.’

  ‘And Mickey? Talk there?’

  Barry sighed again, moved the big shoulders. ‘Well, Mick and the Massianis, six years on the job. They say very tight with Steve.’

  ‘I’m slow here.’

  ‘Me too, got to go,’ he said, patted me on the shoulder. ‘Keeping down in the weights, I see. Good dog. Have a drink one day, no business, okay?’ He got out, closed the door, stuck his head back in. ‘This, though. The tip-off. Who was that?’

  I watched him go, heading for Gorb’s, stiff-legged cop walk from too much sitting in cars. The teenagers blocking the door noticed him coming, parted, found reasons not to look at him.

  4

  I left my office and walked the short distance to where the dented, pitted and gouged side door of Taub’s Cabinet-making was set in a redbrick wall on a lane that led to Smith Street, Collingwood. Opening it released the smell of hide glue.

  I was looking directly at a low bench. On it stood the skeleton of a desk, a big and intricate construction, it would be deep enough for two people to lie side by side on its top, long enough for them to be basketball players. Even imprisone
d in a steel cage of clamps, even without its sides, top, doors or drawers, you knew it was a special piece of furniture, probably far too good for the person who had commissioned it. It was probably too good for all the people who would sit behind it, dozens of them, because things made by Charlie Taub could last for centuries.

  The man was standing behind the desk framework, left hand resting on the end of a three-metre sash clamp. Somewhere beneath the huge callused fingers was the spindle.

  ‘So,’ said Charlie Taub.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘So, indeed.’

  ‘A suit?’ He raised an eyebrow flecked with sawdust.

  ‘Been to court,’ I said. ‘For a client.’ All true, insofar as it went.

  Charlie removed the dead Cuban cheroot from a corner of his mouth and looked at it. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Good. A profession. You have it, you should stay in it. Then an old man can get a proper apprentice, person shows some respect.’

  ‘A strong girl,’ I said. ‘You told me.’

  He put the cheroot back in its corner, waved a racquet-size hand at the desk. ‘Just a piece rubbish,’ he said. ‘Thirty-two joints to glue, who needs help?’

  ‘Not you, certainly. You didn’t say you were gluing this up today.’

  ‘You glue when it’s time to glue. You’re ready, you say, now we’re gluing. Then you glue. You don’t write a letter, wait for a reply to come.’

  ‘That’s a good point,’ I said.

  Charlie shook his head and went back to work. I walked around and stood behind him to watch him apply his squares — three of them, short, longer, long — to every angle of the desk carcass. Each time, he put his head back, looking for light between steel and wood. Hide glue was slow drying, slow to grip, it gave you a chance to adjust clamps, to ensure that no clamp’s pressure was distorting the framework, pushing something out of square. Complicated pieces were glued in stages but eventually the whole thing had to be put together and then it took experience to ensure that it didn’t end up as firewood.

  Experience was not lacking when Charlie was in charge.

  ‘Hold,’ he said.

  I went around and prevented the sash clamp from slipping as he released it.

  ‘Down.’

  I moved it. Charlie put his head down and sighted along the device. He didn’t need a spirit level. He had one in his head. I put my ill-equipped head down and looked. All I could see of him was one old, calculating eyeball.

  ‘Up,’ he said. ‘ Ein ganz klein wenig. ’

  I moved it a few millimetres.

  ‘ Ja.’

  Charlie tightened the clamp, tested the angle with a square, grunted.

  And so it went, angle by angle, clamp by clamp. When Charlie was satisfied and we were both standing upright, I ran a hand over a strut.

  ‘Nice bit of planing,’ I said.

  I had done the unskilled work on the desk: ripping stone-dry ash for the frame on the venerable German table saw, planing it by hand with a 28-inch Stanley, sole as flat and smooth as plateglass and polished by wear to the colour of old silver.

  Charlie was looking at the skeleton, rubbing his hands together. He made one of his nose sounds. ‘A monkey you can teach to plane,’ he said.

  ‘That explains my wages,’ I said. ‘Are you close to finished here?’

  A question expressing a hope.

  We went through the knocking-off ritual. I swept and dust-panned while Charlie got out of his glue-stiff overalls, put on his stylish green 1962 jacket with the deep hacking flap. Then he fiddled around, put tools back on the racks, repositioned objects on the work benches, patted machines, tested fences, wound blades up and down, wiped them with an oily rag, dropped the rag in a bin.

  I removed the rag and found several other oil-impregnated pieces of cloth, one of them a massive pair of Y-front underpants. Charlie believed that cotton garments once worn close to the body gave a special lustre when used for polishing. I put the items into a plastic bag, squeezed the air out of it, tied it, took it outside, crossed the road and deposited it in the bin beside the door of Kelvin McCoy’s so-called studio, once a self-respecting clothing factory. There was still a chance that these rags would self-combust during the night but they would not set fire to the largest collection of old furniture timber in the country, destroy irreplaceable machinery, some of it made by craftsmen dead these fifty years, and ruin two lives. Instead, there was the hope that the incendiary bag might set alight McCoy’s den of fraud and fornication and purge the earth of a collection of objects more worthless, tasteless and aesthetically offensive than any assembled since the heyday of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

  Comforted by the possibility of performing a service to the nation, I went back to Taub’s and worked on getting Charlie out the door.

  We walked to the Prince of Prussia down old streets pinched narrower by the gathering dark.

  ‘The baby,’ said Charlie, not looking at me. Eyes on the ground, he touched my arm, the pat of a grizzly bear. ‘No one told me.’

  It was a month since my daughter had miscarried at a late stage, the baby’s father at sea but homeward bound, Eric the Viking’s fishing boat running before a tropical cyclone. Claire hadn’t been alone though. Her mother was there, my first wife, Frances. She could organise an invasion of Iraq with a few quick calls. She rang Claire’s stepfather, pink Richard Wiggins, surgeon to the carriage trade. She also rang Claire’s aunt, my feckless sister, Rosa. The pair flew to tropical Queensland on the first available.

  She did not ring Claire’s father.

  Eric the Viking rang me. Within minutes of his storm-tossed barque making a landing, he was at the hospital. Soon after, from Claire’s side, he rang me. I talked to her, said what could be said. Nothing.

  I didn’t go to Queensland. Rosa came back and said she’d thought Frances had rung me. I said it didn’t matter, which was a lie. Frances rang and said that, in all the drama, she had forgotten about me and she was abjectly sorry. But I probably wouldn’t have gone anyway.

  I didn’t say anything for a while. The practice of the law teaches restraint, the disciplining of the emotions, the need always to be measured.

  Then I said, ‘I should kill you, you nickel-plated bitch.’ I tried to give this expression of unhappiness some extra bite by banging down the receiver.

  But a click is just a click, as time goes by.

  Now, I said to Charlie, ‘It could be someone has decreed that I’m too young to be a grandfather.’

  ‘To be a father,’ he said, all sympathy gone, ‘some men, they’re not fit at all.’

  I pondered this, not for the first time. ‘Well, it was only the one,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s entitled to an experiment.’

  The Prince was in sight. It was dark now, the old pub’s lights lying yellow and comforting on the rough pavement. My father and my grandfather would only have seen that sight if they had looked back at the Prince, bustled out at closing time, bladders distended by as many beers as it was possible to drink between knock-off and 6 pm closing.

  Charlie shouldered the door and we entered. No more than a dozen customers. The Prince had been quiet since the dotcom avalanche buried the shaven-headed net visionaries and their geek slaves who had briefly adopted the place. At the bar, in the corner, three heads turned in unison, like fairground clowns, chins lifted, mouths open to receive a ball. The Fitzroy Youth Club was in place.

  Charlie raised a hand at the members and, like a thirsty dog to its water, went directly to the bowls table where two fellow trundlers awaited him.

  Stan the publican wasn’t in view. He was probably behind the scenes assisting his lovely wife, Liz, to microwave a few freeze-dried delicacies for the customers. If so, we would soon hear the sounds: glass breaking, heavy objects falling, grunts, then screams and yelps. In extremis, Stan screamed and then yelped, that was the sequence: first the worse, then the bad.

  I joined the Youth Club, put a foot on the brass rail and an elbow on the counter. Its surface was pattern
ed by the rings of glasses beyond number, its round edge scalloped by thousands of burns, cigarettes put down when both hands were needed for a few seconds to explain something.

  ‘Jack,’ said Norm O’Neill, not looking at me, giving me the full right profile. On his remarkable nose sat big spectacles that bore the scars of doubling as safety glasses in his workshop. ‘You bin scarce.’

  ‘Trying to cut down on the beer,’ I said.

  They all eyed me with interest.

  ‘Keeps ya healthy, beer,’ said Wilbur Ong, nodding, looking vaguely mystical. ‘They done tests to show that.’

  ‘What tests?’ said Eric Tanner, the man against the wall. ‘What’d they test?’

  ‘The human body,’ said Wilbur, still nodding, the sage.

  ‘Done me no bloody good, beer,’ said Norm. ‘Still, the son-in-law’s pure as the driven snow, blighter’s crook all the time.’

  ‘Where’d ya get this tests crap?’ said Eric to Wilbur. ‘From the dentist?’

  Wilbur’s grandson was the rich’s dentist of choice. He ran a three-chair operation in Collins Street — one waiting, one injected, one getting a brief fiddle. In his time, he had numbed every gum of importance in the city.

  ‘Read it,’ said Wilbur. ‘Somewhere. Can’t remember where.’

  ‘Does bugger all for the memory, beer, I kin tell you that,’ said Eric.

  ‘Speakin of memory,’ said Norm. ‘Jack, my boy, we have to think about this Saints business again.’

  My spirits were not elevated by this utterance. I had convinced the Youth Club to come out of the exile it had gone into when the Fitzroy Football Club was executed and its proud, tattered banners sold to a club in Brisbane. I had led the ancient Lions followers to the St Kilda Football Club, a journey more taxing than moving the Falashas to Israel. I meant well. I thought I was doing the right thing.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Norm. ‘I don’t think these Saints people give the boys enough support. Too critical.’

  ‘You men could set an example,’ I said, relieved. ‘Men noted for their compassion for losers. Where’s Stan?’