The Brush-Off

by Shane Maloney

  His back was turned and he was reaching up to unhook one of the framed certificates. His University of Melbourne law degree. He studied it for a moment, then laid it carefully in an empty grocery carton sitting on his desk. Across the room I could read the box’s yellow lettering. Golden Circle Pineapple, it said. This Way Up.

  Shivering at the sudden drop in temperature, I stepped forward. Agnelli turned to face me. ‘You heard?’

  I nodded. ‘Water Supply and the Arts.’ I showed him my palms. Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.

  Angelo indicated I should sit at the conference table, then crossed to the drapes and tugged them half-open. Harsh daylight swept away the conspiratorial shade. He got a couple of cans of beer out of his bar fridge, kicked his shoes off and sat down opposite me. So, he seemed to be saying. Here we are. Two men who know what’s what. He slid me one of the cans—my poison chalice, I took it. And so it was, as it turned out. But not in the way I thought at the time.

  He shrugged. ‘I won’t say I’m not disappointed.’

  Power had improved Ange, the way a couple of drinks do to some people. It had smoothed down his more abrasive anxieties, made him more mellow, less in need of having constantly to assert himself. But his forties were well upon him, and he could no longer pass for a child wonder. His smooth black hair still came up well in print, and his cheeks still bulged with chipmunk amiability, but the good fairy of middling high office had scattered ashes at his temples and given him slightly more chins than were absolutely necessary. His heart remained where it had always been, though. Marginally to the left of centre, and closer to his stomach than his brain.

  ‘This will mean some changes, of course,’ he said.

  I popped the tab off my can and waited for the bullet. Agnelli’s gaze loitered in midair, among the dust motes playing in the beams of sunlight, as though they might offer him the right form of words.

  ‘Tell me, Murray,’ he said, at long last. ‘What are the Arts?’

  This was very disheartening. Why go through the pretence of having me fail the job interview? I sucked on my can. Bitter, beer, but fortifying.

  Agnelli’s question, it turned out, was entirely rhetorical. He didn’t want my opinion. He wanted an audience. The axe was too brutal. There must needs first be a little armchair philosophising. A deep and meaningful on the complexities inherent in public intervention in the cultural sector.

  ‘Let me bounce this off you,’ he said. A little bouncing before the big bounce. ‘The Arts are the measure of how far we have come and how far we have yet to go. A resource to be developed, an economic as well as a social asset. When I hear the word culture I think excellence and I think access…’

  I wasn’t sure where this was going, but at least he wasn’t reaching for his revolver. ‘Not bad,’ I shrugged. ‘Bit vague.’

  ‘Then you’d better sharpen it up for me,’ he said.

  ‘You want me at Arts?’ I must have sounded a little incredulous.

  ‘If you don’t mind.’ Ange had a way of making you feel like it was your decision, even if he was making it. ‘For the time being. Until things settle down.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then we’ll see.’ No doubt we would. If, he was making it clear, I didn’t botch it.

  So, here I was, my fortunes again leg-roped to Angelo Agnelli. Less than a minute before, I’d been merely apprehensive about my future. Now I had real cause for concern. ‘I’ll line up a departmental briefing, then,’ I said, by way of acceptance.

  ‘Fine.’ Ange tossed his can at the waste basket, scored. ‘You know Lloyd Eastlake?’

  I shook my head. ‘Should I?’

  ‘He chairs the Cultural Affairs Policy Committee.’ In theory, policy committees shaped the party platform and guarded it from the expediency of ministers. In practice, they were ineffectual talking-shops and magnets for inconsequential schemers. That did not mean, however, that due lip-service did not need to be paid. ‘Bit of a mover, from all reports,’ Agnelli said. ‘Well connected in the unions. Not factionally aligned. Seen quite a few arts ministers come and go.’ That wouldn’t have been hard. The arts ministry changed hands more frequently than a concert pianist with the crabs.

  ‘There’s some sort of art gallery thing he’s invited me to this evening. The Centre for Modern Art.’ The policy committee chairman wasn’t wasting any time cosying up to the new minister. ‘Reckons it could be a good opportunity to start developing links with the cultural community.’

  ‘Could be,’ I agreed tentatively. No skin off my nose what Agnelli did with his Friday nights.

  ‘I told him I couldn’t make it, got a family function it’s more than my life’s worth to miss.’ In other words, he planned to spend the evening on the phone, doing his factional arithmetic, figuring out where his esteem in the eyes of the Premier had turned to water. ‘I told him you’d represent me. Standard booze and schmooze, you know the drill. He’ll pick you up in front of the National Gallery at 6.30.’

  Luckily, Red’s deferred arrival meant I had a free evening. Not that disrupting my personal arrangements had ever unduly concerned Agnelli. ‘This Eastlake and I don’t know each other from a bar of soap. Do I wear a white carnation and carry a furled umbrella, or what?’

  ‘I told him to look for someone who can’t believe he’s still got a job.’

  I backed off, not complaining. Stroking the relevant policy committee chair was one of a ministerial adviser’s chief chores, after all. And the Centre for Modern Art, whatever that was, had to be a step up from the Maltese Senior Citizens’ Association annual dinner-dance, the sort of delegated duty that normally occupied my Friday and Saturday nights.

  ‘Anything else I should be aware of ?’ I was steering him towards the conversation I had just overheard.

  ‘Matter of fact, there is.’ Agnelli ambled back to his desk and resumed his packing. ‘See if you can’t get me some tickets for Don Giovanni. You have heard of Don Giovanni, haven’t you?’

  ‘Shit, yeah,’ I said. ‘Big in the concrete business, isn’t he?’

  ‘It’s a small portfolio, Murray,’ said Agnelli, signalling that our interview was at an end. ‘Let’s not make a meal of it.’

  I drained my beer and beat a path to the door, grateful for small mercies. I might not yet have Agnelli’s confidence on this fund-raising caper, but at least I was still in work. My fist was closing on the door handle when something crossed Agnelli’s mind. ‘Lots of rich you-know-whats involved in the arts, aren’t there?’

  What was that supposed to mean? ‘I’ve heard rumours,’ I said. ‘Would you like it covered in the briefing?’

  Agnelli turned back to his packing. ‘Piss off,’ he said, not entirely without wit.

  I did, too. I immediately rang the Arts Ministry to confirm that the director was in, stuffed a couple of taxi vouchers in my pocket and went downstairs to Victoria Parade. The Charade could stay where it was until I’d scouted the parking situation at Arts. Besides which, I’d probably be offered a drink or two at this modern art joint. No point in risking the prospect of being invited to blow into a little bag on the way home. A Silver Top cab arrived. ‘Hut,’ said the driver, a wizened Ethiopian. ‘Very hut.’

  The city centre swarmed with schoolkids making the most of the dying days of their summer vacation. We skirted the soaring steel skeleton of the half-completed Karlcraft Centre and crossed the Yarra, glassy beer-bottle brown under the baked enamel sky, and found another Parisian boulevard, St Kilda Road. On one side it was bounded by the expansive parkland of the Domain, on the other by the brutalist boxes of the Arts Centre, squatting on the bank opposite Flinders Street railway station like a gun emplacement guarding the strategic approaches of the town.

  Once upon a time, the riverside had been a jumble of run-down warehouses and obsolete factories, an eyesore enlivened only at night when a huge neon sweet unwrapped itself over and over again in a blaze of coloured lights. But the electric lolly was long gone,
replaced by Arts City. Here—in the National Gallery, the Concert Hall, the State Theatre, the Ballet Centre—the blue-collar Labor constituencies to the north and west of the city paid for the Liberal voters of the leafy eastern suburbs to have their self-esteem massaged.

  Not, I thought, the proper attitude to be taking. Think centre of excellence, I told myself. Think vibrant treasure house of national identity. Think better than unemployment.

  Behind the National Gallery, even newer cultural edifices were rising from bulldozed construction sites. A new HQ for the symphony orchestra, studios for the ABC, a resplendent cultural precinct rising from the flattened ruins of ancient industry. Soon, according to the architects’ models, little stick figures would sip cappuccinos here under little stick umbrellas before ambling into the Concert Hall to soak up a bit of moral improvement. Of the uncouth past, only the mouldering 1920s edifice of the old YMCA survived, crouching behind the Concert Hall as if it hoped to dodge the wrecker’s ball.

  Haile Selassie deposited me in front of the National Gallery and I headed straight for the moat. Its shallow ornamental pools flanked the entrance forecourt, separated from the footpath by a low wall of square-cut stone. Originally intended to mirror the building’s blank facade, its austere lines were now a little cluttered with an embarrassment of artistic riches. First had come a trio of dancing water fountains. Then an iron and polypropylene sculpture modelled either on the inner workings of a spring-scale or a trash-can fish skeleton from a Hanna Barbera cartoon. Then a gravity-fed spiral based on the anatomy of a mollusc. Finally, an enormous ceramic creature, a kind of bifurcated llama that straddled the water like an aquatic mutation of Dr Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu.

  But the moat was still cool. Resisting the temptation to strip off and plunge my head into it, I pulled my tie down a couple of notches and splashed a handful of the wet stuff over my face. It smelled faintly of soda ash. I trickled a second handful down the back of my neck. Then I lit a pause that refreshes and took in the scene, servant of the master of all I surveyed.

  The facade of the gallery rose behind me, a smooth basalt cliff, unbroken by windows. ‘We need the space for hanging,’ explained the Premier who commissioned the building, or so legend has it. His idea of a joke, in those days of capital punishment. Henry the Hangman, they called him. But that was twenty years ago, a benighted age, a time of human sacrifice. We’re more civilised now. We know that the dark forces are better propitiated with social justice impact statements and ongoing consultative processes.

  It was just past three o’clock and, despite the heat, the place buzzed with activity. Air-conditioned coaches lined the kerb, disgorging tourists. Elderly matinee-goers swarmed blinking into the daylight. A queue snaked towards the ticket window at the gallery’s arched entrance, clinging to the shade. Gelati vans did a roaring trade, dispensing ice-cream that tasted like it came from cows with silicone tits. Frazzled mothers pushed grizzling toddlers past a banner advertising the current blockbuster exhibition. In the midst of all this activity, a glistening supermarket trolley lay abandoned on its side, a found object, far from home.

  Beside me, ranged along the parapet of the moat, was a gang of pubescent boys, their sprayed-on jeans and rat-tail haircuts indicating that they, too, were out of place. Marauders from distant suburbs, they were scavenging for submerged coins, their arms plunged shoulder-deep into the water. Egged on by his friends, one swung his legs over the edge and lowered himself waist-deep into the water. Wading out to the middle, he bobbed swiftly to the bottom and surfaced with a twenty-cent piece in each hand. His mates roared uncouth approval. I, too, applauded this community-based initiative in the redistribution of cultural wealth. But I did so silently. These facilities, after all, were now within my purview.

  The kid was about twelve, by the look of him, a couple of years older than my son Red. Little kids are easy. An ice-cream cone, a roll down a grassy hill, that’s enough to satisfy them. But then they get older, their threshold shifts. They start wading about in public fountains, cheered by their hoon mates. They get drunk and steal cars. But not just yet. Not at ten, I told myself. That was something to look forward to.

  Last time Red came to stay, I’d taken a week of leave and we’d headed down the coast. We bought every useless gewgaw in a dozen bait-and-tackle shops, slept in cabins in caravan parks, lived on chips and Chinese takeaway, and fished off beaches and jetties from here to the Cape Nelson lighthouse. But the initial enthusiasm had soon waned. I was trying too hard and we both knew it. After four days we came back to town where Red could do what he’d wanted to do all along. Hang around outside the nearest skateboard shop with his dopey friend Tarquin Curnow.

  This time around, I’d made no special arrangements, except to check that Tarquin would be in town. Tark was an utter dill, gawky and buck-toothed with year-round bronchitis and a tendency to play up when his mother wasn’t looking. But his company took the awkwardness off Red’s visits and for that I was grateful. Splashing a last handful of water over my face, I doused my fag, slung my jacket over my shoulder and hied myself hence to the cultural coalface.

  The Arts Ministry was across an elevated walkover that connected the rear of the National Gallery to the Ballet Centre, home of the national silly dance company. A gaggle of ballet-school students were clustered around the doorway, anorexic girls with their hair in chignons, lithe boys with flawless skin, none of them older than twenty, all of them smoking. Fifteen years of mandatory package warnings, a total ban on television advertising, a Quit campaign, and the fittest, brightest, most privileged young people in the country were tugging away like racetrack touts. If I hadn’t just put one out, I’d have been tempted to join them.

  ‘I was just sooo embarrassed,’ I heard one of the boys say as I passed. The others all giggled. Scratch the bit about brightest. On the top level, the lift opened directly into the Arts Ministry foyer, an expanse of parquetry with beige walls and rows of little track-lit pictures. The receptionist was fielding a phone inquiry. ‘What’s it in conjunction to?’ she was saying. Off to the side was a glass door marked ‘Minister’. I pushed it open and went in.

  On the other side of a glass partition, two men faced each other across a small conference table.

  The one I recognised was Ken Sproule, senior adviser to the man Angelo Agnelli was replacing, Gil Methven. Ken’s boss punched in a heavier weight division than Angelo and had come out of Cabinet that day holding Police and Emergency Services, one of the big ticket ministries. That made Ken Sproule one of the big boys, too. He was a tough cookie with more suspicion than imagination, an indispensable quality in any major player’s personal fixer. And for all the factional differences between our respective masters, he had yet to do me serious personal injury. Which, in our party, is tantamount to bosom friendship.

  Spotting my arrival, he beckoned me inside. ‘Ah! The changing of the guard,’ he rasped. He wore a short-sleeved business shirt and a no-nonsense polyester tie. He gestured grandly towards the other man. ‘Phillip Veale, meet Murray Whelan, aide de camp of the infamous Angelo Agnelli.’

  Phillip Veale stood up and surveyed me with benevolent curiosity. Where Ken Sproule was fidgety and thrusting, Veale was suave and reticent. He was somewhere in his fifties, smooth-skinned, silver-haired, pink with the exertion of carrying just a tad too much good living. A man without angles or apparent malice who wore his two-toned business shirt, French cuffs and matching tie with all the assurance of a mandarin’s robe. Which well he ought, since Phillip Veale had been Director of the Arts for as long as anyone could remember. Ministers came and went, but Phillip Veale abideth forever. We shook hands, his skin soft but his grip firm.

  ‘I’m looking forward to working with the new minister,’ he said, managing in some intangible way to impart the impression that the change could only be an improvement.

  ‘And Angelo is keen to get started,’ I reciprocated. ‘Would Monday morning be convenient for a briefing?’

  ‘Perfectly,�
�� Veale said, not entirely able to conceal the humour in his eyes. ‘Shall we say nine?’

  This exchange of niceties brought Ken Sproule’s dial out in a big smirk. I was the sheepdog type of ministerial assistant, there to keep the departmental flunkeys all trotting along in more or less the same direction. Ken was primarily a backroom mathematician, one of those blokes who can’t see a head without wanting to sink his boot into it.

  ‘And perhaps while I’m here,’ I suggested. ‘We can go over the minister’s diary.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Veale, backing out the door. ‘It’s been a pleasure working with you, Ken.’ For sure.

  ‘I think you’ve won a heart,’ said Sproule as the door closed.

  I sat down, leaned back in my chair and took in the surroundings. The office was an airy, glass-walled space, a definite step up from the vinyl and laminate world of Ethnic Affairs. A row of floor-to-ceiling windows opened onto the Arts Centre tower and overlooked a rooftop garden at the rear of the gallery, a rectangle of lawn upon which sat an enormous white ball, as though God were about to tee off. The furniture was pale and waxy, crafted from some rare and expensive timber, soon to be extinct. Sproule followed my gaze out into the fiery afternoon light. ‘Not bad, eh?’ he said. ‘For the booby prize.’

  ‘I’ll think of you, Ken,’ I said. ‘Arm-wrestling the Police Association while I sit here contemplating the finer things of life.’