Floodtide

by Judy Nunn

  'Nobody calls me Mickey Mouse.' Gordy looked at his mother as if she came from another planet.

  'But they might at high school, darling. Adolescents can be very cruel.'

  'I don't want to have my ears pinned back. They're fine the way they are.'

  'They won't be later in life, Gordy,' she said sternly. God, how she wished Cynthia had had Ian's done. 'You'll thank me for it, believe me.'

  Gordy made no further reply, but marched into the nearby bathroom where, through the open door, she could see him studying himself in the mirror. He pressed his ears back against the side of his head, then released them to their normal bat position. Good, she thought, he'd got the message.

  But Gordy hadn't. He stormed off to his father's study.

  Ian was sitting mindlessly at his desk, miserable and self-pitying as he had been all day, when his son burst into the room.

  'I don't want to have my ears pinned back,' Gordy announced.

  'What?'

  'I don't care if it's genetic.' Gordy looked at his father's ears. They did stick out a bit – he'd never really noticed before. Why should he? His dad was just his dad. And Grandpa Gordon had had big ears. Not that Gordy remembered himself, but they sure were big in the picture on the lounge room dresser. But Grandpa Gordon had been an old man and old men always had big ears.

  'You don't care if what's genetic?' Ian asked, confused.

  'Your ears stick out, and Grandpa's did too. What's wrong with that?'

  'What are you talking about, Gordy?'

  'Mum's booked me in with a plastic surgeon. I've got an appointment next week.'

  'Oh?' Ian was raised from his torpor.

  'Nobody's ever called me Mickey Mouse. Nobody. Ever.'

  'Fine.' The boy was very defensive, Ian thought, what was going on? 'Who said that they did?'

  'Mum. Well, she reckons they will. But I'd just like to see them try.' Gordy, the apple of his grandfather's eye, stood defiant. 'I don't want to have my ears done, Dad. And I won't.'

  That was the night Ian and Arlene did have their first serious altercation.

  'How could you call the poor kid Mickey Mouse!' Ian had been outraged. 'You could have undermined the boy's confidence for the rest of his life. Thank God he's got guts.'

  'Oh, for goodness' sake, I didn't call him Mickey Mouse. I simply preempted the cruelty of others. You know what school children are like.'

  'Well, let him cope with it in the playground. He doesn't need stuff like that from his own bloody mother!'

  Arlene had applied her customary feminine wiles, turning tearful at being so sorely misunderstood. She was doing it purely for the boy's sake, she said.

  'No, you're not, Arlene, you're doing it for yourself. God only knows why.'

  She took umbrage at that. How dare he!

  'I have nothing but Gordy's future happiness at heart,' she declared haughtily.

  'He's happy the way he is, can't you see that? He likes the way he looks. Leave him alone.'

  Arlene, finally realising that her husband was not putty in her hands, which in itself was a revelation, admitted defeat and left the room in a huff.

  But the true realisation was Ian's. He realised that he'd ignored his family to the point where his son's wellbeing had been threatened. He further realised, for the first time in his marriage, that his wife had a tendency to manipulate.

  Arlene had successfully, albeit unwittingly, got her husband back on track.

  The following day Ian reported in to Farrell Towers. But he didn't go to the Excalibur Holdings offices on the third floor; he went straight to Spud's main office suite on the ninth.

  'Sorry I've let you down,' he said. 'I'm ready to go to work now.'

  'Welcome back to the land of the living, mate.' Spud circled his desk and shook Ian's hand, then led the way through to the lounge room and bar. He was greatly relieved. 'What brought about the change?' he asked as they sat in the comfortable armchairs by the huge window with its panoramic views of the city and the river.

  'I had a row with Arlene.'

  'Really?' That'd be a first, Spud thought, Pembo never said boo to his wife. 'What about?'

  Ian decided not to mention Gordy's ears, it wouldn't be fair to the boy. 'She wants to move into the Peppermint Grove house, and I don't.'

  Well, of course she'd want to move in, Spud thought, she'd probably been lusting after the house for years. He wouldn't have been surprised if she'd shoved the pills down poor old Cynthia's throat herself. Spud couldn't stand Arlene. The cold-shoulder treatment she'd given Cora for years had been unpardonable. But the woman was more than a snob and a racist, in his opinion. She was dangerous. Pembo, of course, was blind to the fact. He couldn't see that his wife was a real cunt.

  'Anyway, it shook me out of myself,' Ian said. Then he changed the subject; he really didn't want to discuss Arlene. 'So what's happening? You said on the phone we had big things to talk about.'

  'We sure do, mate. There are major times ahead. We've never had it so good.' He told Ian about the party donation he'd made. 'Just the first of many, Pembo, and believe me, we'll see a return on it. Burke's making his intentions plain right from the start.'

  The Labor Party had come into power in WA in February, ousting the Liberals after a nine-year reign, and the new Premier, former television journalist Brian Burke, was indeed aligning himself with the hard-core circle of Perth's entrepreneurs.

  'You should have heard him carry on at lunch last week,' Spud said. 'I think he was practising his speech for the media. Of course, everyone was half-pissed and they all applauded him, but he was dead bloody serious.'

  Spud rose and struck a stance in mockery of Brian Burke, who had indeed waxed loquacious. 'An elite of the able, that's what he calls it. He's going to create a new order where the government works closely with business for the advantage of the state.' Spud gave Burke's quotes their full oratorical ring of passion. 'It'll be the salvation of WA and the salvation of the country!' Then he flopped back in his armchair. 'You're bound to read all that and a whole heap more in the press – he's got the media in his pocket, particularly television. All his old journo mates are on side.'

  Taking a cigar from the humidor that sat on the coffee table, Spud carefully clipped the end off into the large ceramic ashtray. 'Of course, he's a total wanker and it's a load of bullshit, he's in it for himself, but that's fine by me,' he said, lighting up. 'After lunch, when we were mingling, I offered the donation and we had a bit of a chat.' He pulled heavily on the cigar, watching the plumes of smoke rise. 'Like I said, Pembo, we've got it made.'

  Spud had been paying money into the coffers of successive governments for years, but he'd never received quite such unashamedly blatant promises in the past. Brian Burke's elite of the able was right up his alley, he'd decided.

  He and Ian spent the next half-hour considering the various favours they might call in and the advantages they might seek in exchange for their generous party donation.

  'There's another angle too,' Ian said thoughtfully, after they'd discussed sundry possible business or property acquisitions, and which government building contracts were up for tender. 'What about the Institute? It's an open conduit for funding, has been for several years. And we're on the board.'

  The Farrell Corporation and Excalibur Holdings had been the first sponsors to offer donations in the founding days of the McAllister Research Institute. Spud and Ian had been keen to help Mike, of course, but their very public donations had been an excellent tax write-off, and their involvement so beneficial to their respective public profiles that they'd even become honorary executive directors.

  'What exactly did you have in mind?' Spud asked, looking shrewdly at Ian. God but it was good, he thought, to have Pembo back.

  The first hint of Brian Burke's corrupt regime was discovered by none other than journalist Sally Jordan.

  By 1985, Sally Jordan had risen in rank to become the senior reporter on ABC Television's Statewide Live, which was not surp
rising. Now in her late thirties, she'd been with the show for over a decade. She produced her own segments and essentially had carte blanche in the choice of her material, although she naturally conferred with her executive producer.

  During this particular day's conference with Patrick, her EP, she ran past him the two major stories that she planned for that week. The second was to be a segment about heritage buildings currently under threat by real estate developers, to which Patrick gave his immediate approval. In running through the first of her intended stories, however, Sally was a little close-lipped. She had her doubts about Patrick. Brian Burke had been in power for over two years now and yet Patrick seemed reluctant to go with any story that criticised the government. She suspected no sinister motive on his part, but he'd worked closely with Burke in the past and any possible hint of mateship in his reticence met with Sally's strong disapproval.

  'I'm going to cover the protest meetings by the Nursery Growers Association,' she said. 'They're up in arms about the virtual takeover of WA Flower Power Pty Limited.'

  The cutely named Flower Power Company had in the short year of its existence cornered the major export market for the growth and sale of flowers both wild and domestic. The Nursery Growers, having just eighteen months previously contributed money for a government bureaucrat's overseas trip to find viable markets for their produce, were naturally not happy about the Flower Power takeover.

  'Fine,' Patrick said. He knew of the fracas and it sounded like a good local story, although he was surprised Sally was interested in wild flowers. Sally wasn't, but she'd done her homework. Patrick hadn't.

  The bureaucrat, a man called Dan Scully from the Department of Agriculture, had returned from his trip, funded jointly by the WA government and the Nursery Growers, and had promptly retired from the public service. Within six months, he'd set up his own private company, a nursery which he'd called WA Flower Power Pty Limited, and had picked up virtually every major overseas contract in the offing.

  Sally filmed the public protest meetings, getting the cameraman to zoom in close on the angry faces and the placards reading Give us our money back and Government pays to put us out of business.

  She visited the Flower Power nursery and attempted her trademark foot-in-the-door approach, but met with little success in the form of direct confrontation. Dan Scully's repeated 'no comment' responses from behind his firmly locked flywire screen, however, spoke multitudes. And when he finally slammed the inner door shut, she took great satisfaction in barrelling to the camera: 'Well, I think that just about sums it up, don't you?'

  She wrote her own voiceover material to go with the footage, as she always did, but this time she didn't give it to Ryan, her assistant producer, to transfer to autocue. Young Ryan was ambitious and a bit of a toady. She thought, in his haste to ingratiate himself, he might run off to Patrick.

  'It's all visuals,' she said. 'I'll just read from my notes.'

  The segment was hard-hitting, a definite indictment.

  'Is this where our taxpayers' money should be going?' Sally's voice queried over footage of the lavish Flower Power Nursery. 'To feather the nest of an expublic servant?' Over a shot of the protesters: 'These people have every right to be angry.' Over a shot of Dan Scully behind his flywire door: 'This man used their hard-earned cash to gain knowledge of the overseas market, then set himself up in direct competition.'

  At the end of the segment, when they returned to studio, Sally directed her closing statement down the barrel, summing up the state of play as she saw it.

  'Dan Scully should answer for his betrayal of the trust placed in him during his employment as a public servant. And the government should answer as to how and why such an abuse of funding, both public and private, was ever allowed to occur.'

  Sally left the studio that night pleased with herself. She was aware that Ryan was looking at her askance, and that she'd probably cop a talking-to from Patrick the following day about why she hadn't warned him she was doing an exposé. But who cared, it had been a bloody good segment.

  'What the hell did you think you were doing?' She copped far more than a talking-to from Patrick.

  'The Premier called the ABC manager at his home last night. Burke's furious, he wants you sacked.'

  'Well, that'd be dumb, wouldn't it?' Sally said boldly. 'It'd only add fuel to the fire.'

  She was taken aback at such a knee-jerk reaction, but the mention of dismissal didn't alarm her unduly. They couldn't possibly sack her – they'd have to know that she wouldn't leave quietly. By God, she thought, she'd go public with a vengeance if they dared give her the boot. Their hands were tied, there was nothing they could do.

  But as it turned out, there was.

  Several nights later, Sally's story on heritage-listed buildings under threat went to air. Again, most of the segment was visual footage shot on location with her studio voiceover. This time, she'd given her notes to Ryan for transferral to autocue as she normally did.

  'These grand old buildings that stand as monuments to the past,' she read, 'are under threat from greedy developers with no care for our city's history . . .'

  At first she didn't notice the changes in the footage, she was too busy concentrating on the autocue. Then, from the corner of her eye, she caught the monitor. That wasn't the building she was speaking about, she thought, horrified. It wasn't even one of the buildings she'd filmed. She read on, glancing regularly at the monitor. Much of the footage was different. Shots of other old buildings had been salted in amongst the carefully documented heritage-listed architecture that was under threat.

  She tried to ad-lib. 'And here's another fine example of our early architecture,' she said. She didn't even know what building it was.

  At the close of the segment, when the studio camera light came on, she was completely flustered. Normally she rounded off her story with a personal pithy comment, but she was at a loss. What should she do? She did nothing, simply read the autocue introduction to the lighter segment that always ended the program.

  'And now for a report from the fashion show in Sydney, here's Alison Summers with the latest designer trends in store for us this coming winter.'

  She fronted Ryan the moment they were off air.

  'What the fuck's going on?' she demanded. 'What happened to my footage?'

  'What do you mean?' He obviously took offence at her belligerent tone. 'That was the tape that came up from the editing suite. I naturally presumed that you'd looked at it.'

  Sally had. She'd run the footage and written her notes accordingly. But someone had switched the tape.

  The ABC received a number of complaints, and the next morning Patrick demanded she apologise on air that night. It was Friday and Statewide Live didn't air again until Monday, so the problem had to be rectified immediately, he said. He was furious.

  'We can't afford sloppy work and badly researched material, Sally. Do you realise the damage this sort of thing could do to the ABC's image?'

  'But the tape was switched,' she said. 'Half of the shots weren't mine. I didn't even film some of those buildings.'

  He looked incredulous, and Sally knew herself that it sounded pretty far-fetched. But she continued vehemently.

  'Come on, Patrick, you know me. I don't fuck up like that. I've never fucked up like that. And if I ever do make a mistake, I bloody well take the rap for it.'

  Her argument rang true. Patrick had to admit that Sally Jordan's research was invariably spot-on, and she was certainly never one to pass the buck.

  'How the hell could a thing like that happen?'

  'Don't ask me, but it was an act of sabotage. Someone's out to discredit me.'