The Brush-Off

by Shane Maloney

  The last print was colour, curved corners. A young man with shoulder-length hair and wire-rimmed glasses standing in a row of corn, hoe in hand, bare to the waist, the original ninety-pound weakling. Beside him, leaning on a fork, an older man, barrel-chested, high-scalped. The face unshaven, bags under the eyes, but the same comic tufts above the ears, the same brazen stare as I had seen on Fiona Lambert’s mantelpiece. Victor Szabo.

  The hippy could have been Marcus Taylor. He had the same elongated face, the same feral intensity. It could have been anyone. I held the photo motionless, observing from a great height, staring down like a bird floating on a thermal, waiting for something to reveal itself.

  Nothing did. I was asleep on my feet, miserably hungover. I opened the second drawer, working quickly, feeling furtive. A stamp album, most pages still empty. The few stamps it held were all Australian, low denominations. All bore the Bicentenary logo of 1988. Last year’s issues. Hand-written annotations in tiny print. Whoever lived here was no great philatelist. A new hobby, perhaps, the interest unsustained. Wedged into the back of the album was a bank passbook. I slipped it out of its plastic cover, flipped it open and read the name.

  Marcus Taylor. Bingo.

  The dead have no privacy. I thumbed blank pages, looking for a balance. Thunk. Whirr. Somebody had started the elevator. It shuddered and lurched upwards, the sound magnified in the deserted building.

  Startled by the sudden noise, I dropped the bankbook. It fell down the gap between the desk and the wall. I began to go down on my knees to retrieve it until it occurred to me that this was probably the police, come to examine the deceased’s effects. I felt like a tomb robber. Not that I was doing anything wrong. It’s just that I would have been hard put to explain exactly what I was doing. It was, I rapidly concluded, one of those situations where discretion was the better part of anything else you might care to mention.

  Dumping the rest of the stuff back into the drawer, I stepped out the door. Down the hallway, the lift groaned and shuddered to a halt, a vague shape behind the grille. Immediately in front of me, a rubbish bin propped open a door marked Fire Escape. The layout of the building suggested these stairs opened onto the adjoining lane. I took them two at a time, scattering litter.

  Three flights down, where the street exit should have been, the wall had been bricked up. Half a flight further, they ended at a large door. Environ Mental Puppet Company, it said. Beyond, a broad corridor lined with age-speckled white tiles extended towards the vague glow of daylight.

  I pressed on, and had taken perhaps a dozen steps when a sudden draft of air stirred the grime at my feet. A pneumatic woomph sounded in my ears. I swung around just in time to see the door slam shut behind me. It was some sort of fire door, steel, fitting snugly into a metal frame. There was no handle on my side.

  ‘Hey,’ I shouted, and banged the palms of my hands against the flat metal plate. ‘Hey.’ There was no answer.

  I balled my fist and banged again. The heavy steel reverberated with a dull echo, but there was still no answer. Either a draught in the stairwell had slammed the door shut or somebody was playing funny buggers. If I wanted out of this dump, I’d have to find another way.

  Giving the door one last futile kick, I turned and headed along the corridor. Its white-tiled walls, even in their grimy state, reminded me of a hospital or a science laboratory, a place of bodily messes and antiseptic solutions. Even the air seemed to have a faintly pervasive chemical odour, as fusty as the cracked porcelain of the tiles. I soon discovered why.

  The wide passageway opened abruptly into a cavernous basement, also lined with decrepit white tiles. Sunlight, struggling through a row of frosted windows high up in one wall, illuminated the room with its pallid wash. Occupying almost the entire space was a gigantic cement pit.

  Great scabs of peeling green paint clung to its walls like clumps of dried lichen. Overlapping the edge of the huge trough, at the far end of the room, was a tangle of corroded pipes. Attached to the decaying metalwork was a sign. DANGER, it said. NO DIVING. POOL CLOSED. Lying on the bottom of the empty swimming pool, right in the middle, was a body.

  Numerous bodies, actually. But the one that grabbed my attention was the whale. It was life-sized, aqua blue and made of fibreglass. Scattered around it was a pod of papiermâché dolphins, several dozen polystyrene starfish mounted on bamboo poles, innumerable cardboard scallop shells, piles of flags and pendants embroidered with sea-horses, and a pair of hammerhead sharks made of lycra and chicken wire.

  But none of these were as compelling as the whale. Painted across its deep-sea dial was an idiotic anthropomorphic grin. I was buggered if I could figure out why it was smiling, though. It was high and dry, and so was I.

  The only other exit was a roller door, big enough for a truck and battened down with more locksmithery than Alcatraz. Through the narrow gap at the bottom, I could just make out the surface of a laneway. Blasts of hot air were already rising from the asphalt. I rattled the roller a few times and gave a yell, but there was nobody outside to hear.

  Next door was a long-disused changing room with vandalised lockers and ancient urinals full of desiccated deodorant balls. I tore a length of iron pipe from the wall of a shower recess. When I bashed it against the fire door, it produced considerably more noise than anything I’d been able to raise with my bare hands. Loud enough to make the blood in my temples throb and showers of sparks shoot into my eyes. But not loud enough, apparently, to be heard by anyone else in the building. I bashed away for a fair while, but all I got was a tired arm and an even more aggravated headache. The door was thicker than a Colleen McCullough novel. I could have banged away all day and not got a result.

  I carefully explored the whole place again. The only potential exit was the windows. They appeared to be unlocked. They were also six metres up a sheer wall.

  It had just gone 9.15 a.m. The situation was beginning to give me the shits. This whole spur-of-the-moment garretrifling expedition had been of questionable value in the first place. And taking off like a sprung burglar had only made things worse. At this rate, I’d be locked in all weekend. I slumped down beside the wall and lit an aid to clear thinking, my second last.

  Bone weariness and enraged irritation fought for control of my body, equally matched. I jumped up, sat down, jumped up again. That little smartarse with the armful of violins had done this. Finally, I collapsed back against the wall and drew what comfort I could from my cigarette. If I’d been the Prime Minister, I’d have cried from sheer self-pity.

  Agnelli had got me into this mess, waking me up with his paranoia, sending me to hose down imaginary threats to his public image. Nor was the Premier blameless. If he hadn’t decided to reshuffle the Cabinet, I wouldn’t have been compelled to change jobs. And if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have a hangover and be locked in the storage facility of a marine-fixated puppet company.

  Who was I trying to fool? Sleuthing around in a brain-dead state for no good reason, it was my own damned fault that I’d managed to get myself in this situation.

  In a little over ninety minutes I was due to meet Agnelli, brief him on Taylor’s suicide note and escort him to Max Karlin’s brunch. A side trip to the supermarket in the interim was beginning to look unlikely. Not that Red would need any groceries, not where he’d be. Standing in an airport lounge waiting in vain for his father to arrive. ‘I was only two days late,’ I could hear myself grovelling down the phone to Wendy. ‘You didn’t have to tell the airline people to put him on the next plane back to Sydney.’

  When my cigarette was smoked down to its stub, I ground it out on the dirty cement floor and began gnawing at my fingernails. For the first time since the previous evening in Fiona Lambert’s flat, I thought about the cut on my finger. Peeling away the flesh-toned plastic strip, I examined my wound. The skin was wrinkled and bleached, the cut shrivelled to a tiny slit. My finger looked like a sea slug, horrible little mouth and all. Very appropriate, I thought. The way things were
going, I might as well be part of the flotsam and jetsam in the bottom of the pool.

  Hard against the wall immediately beneath the windows was a work bench littered with piles of fabric, tangled chicken wire, bits and pieces of half-made piscine puppets. Maybe I could find enough timber among all this parade-float junk to rig up some sort of ladder. If I got as far as window level, I could perhaps find a handy drainpipe to climb down. On a building this old, the plumbing was bound to be external.

  But the only timber at the bottom of the pool was bamboo, flimsy shafts with polystyrene starfish jammed on the end. I went around the back of Willy the Whale and stuck my head into his rear-end aperture. More parade paraphernalia had been dumped inside—jellyfish costumes of green and blue lycra, papier-mache fish masks, plastic sheeting cut up into seaweed shapes, bicycle helmets with fin attachments. Beneath all of this, I found two lengths of aluminium tubing.

  Thick as my wrist and about three metres long, they were painted a mottled greyish-blue and tipped with rubber. This was promising. Grabbing a pole in each hand, I backed out the whale’s bum, dragging them after me. First came the poles. Then a set of rubberised fishing waders. Then a bulbous blob covered in blue and grey fabric. Then some kind of bodysuit covered with strips of coloured plastic. Then a tangle of foam-covered wire.

  I hauled the whole rigmarole up beside the pool and examined it. Metal plates in the insoles of the waders were riveted onto matching plates welded onto the aluminium struts. The bodysuit, complete with foam-rubber midriff, was sewn securely onto the waders. The result was a octopus costume on stilts. The artistry was truly execrable, but the engineering was superb. So much so that it was impossible to detach the poles. Great. Just what I needed. An Oscar the frigging Octopus suit.

  Propped against the wall, the aluminium shafts reached only halfway to the windows. My ladder project was shaping up as a dead end. At this rate, I’d be here for the rest of my life. I returned to the fire door, picked up the iron pipe and pounded away in futile rage. Then I spent fifteen minutes trying to lever the bolts off the roller door. I smoked my last cigarette and realised I was hungry. If this Prisoner of Zenda crap went on much longer, I’d be reduced to drinking my own urine. Eventually, like a dog to its dinner, I went back to Oscar.

  All my previous stilt experience had been on jam-tin-and-string models when I was about six years old. Octopus costume aside, these babies were the real thing, fully three metres tall. Even if I managed to get myself upright, I’d still need to be standing on the bench to reach the window sill. A fall from that height would do nothing to improve my general well-being.

  On the other hand, I had to do something. The Environ Mental Puppeteers might not be back for days. The jerk with the violins said they’d left already. He didn’t say where to. Maybe they were on an international tour. Taking the best of the worst of Australian artistry to the world.

  Oscar was mostly foam rubber. A big foam rubber cocoon. So if I fell, as long as I didn’t topple over the edge into the pool, the damage would probably be limited. A fractured skull, a broken neck. Nothing I couldn’t live with. In a wheelchair. If only I had a few more cigarettes. Just one, even.

  I sat on the floor, took my shoes and pants off, stuck my legs into the trouser part of the waders and hoisted the engorged champignon bit up around my waist. The toes pinched, but the fit wasn’t too bad. Tugging the straps of the overall part over my shoulders, I wiggled my arms down the sleeves and into the washing-up gloves sewn on the ends. A cowl sort of thing fitted over my head, held in place by velcro tabs. The rubbery waders made my legs tacky with sweat and a necklace of tentacles dangled to my knees. I felt vaguely fetishistic. Christ alone knew what I looked like.

  So there I was, disguised as a giant cephalopod, flat on my back beside a dehydrated aquatic facility in a derelict cultural resource centre, with absolutely no idea of what to do next. When I’d taken on the job of adviser to the Minister for the Arts, I somehow hadn’t imagined myself in such a position. If this didn’t work, I swore, I would make it my personal mission as a senior government functionary to see that the Environ Mental Puppet Company never again received a penny of public funding.

  Now that I was togged up, there was nothing for it but to proceed. Grabbing a leg of the bench, I dragged myself upright. Then, flailing my many appendages, I swept the tabletop clear and climbed aboard. By extending the blue poles behind me and pressing my palms flat against the wall, I could form a reasonably stable triangle.

  Thus I advanced, palms splayed out before me. Little hop, inch. Little hop, inch. Palming myself along like Marcel Marceau trying to get out of that fucking invisible box of his. The trick with stilts, in case you ever need to know, is to stay in motion. Much like a bicycle. Or politics. Stand still and you’re stuffed. Keep moving or you take a dive.

  By the time I was five metres up, my priorities review committee had urgently convened. Second thoughts were in the majority. I was bathed in sweat, my arms were aching from the effort, and my sea slug was throbbing. But it wasn’t just the prospect of crashing to the floor in a welter of shattered vertebrae and ruptured organs that was urging me to reconsider my strategy. A structural flaw in the plan had became obvious. The transom was rigged to open only part of the way. Even if I managed to get as far as the sill and push the window open, the gap was too narrow to admit a man with a blue rubber mattress strapped to his midriff.

  Just your head and shoulders will be enough, I told myself. Even in a precinct teeming with cultural offerings, the spectacle of a man in an octopus suit sandwiched into a window frame could not pass unnoticed for long. Eventually a passer-by would see me, realise I was not an art object and mount a rescue effort.

  Grunting, I pressed on. Finally my fingers closed around the metal of the window frame. Pushing the transom open with my beak, I wriggled forward. Somewhere far below, my stilt feet lifted off the floor. My head and shoulders poked through. My position was as tenuous as the Liberal Party leadership, but at least now I had an outside chance of hailing somebody.

  Immediately across from my vantage point was the saw-toothed roof of a warehouse, closed for the weekend. Below me was the narrow street I had glimpsed from beneath the roller door. It was an access lane to the warehouse. Not much hope of passing traffic at this hour on a Saturday morning. Not that I knew the hour, not with any precision. My watch, along with my wrist, was encased in latex. But I knew that if I didn’t get noticed soon, I might as well throw myself from the window and be done with it. If I didn’t meet Agnelli I wouldn’t have a job. And if I wasn’t at the airport on time my life wouldn’t be worth living. Except that I couldn’t even get far enough into the window frame to defenestrate myself.

  My only hope was the building next door, the Ballet Centre. Its parking levels were faced with vertical steel slats. By pushing myself out the window as far as possible and swivelling sideways, I could just make out a row of parked cars. Eventually somebody would come to collect one of them. Then all I had to do was shout loudly. And hope that whoever heard me would have the sense to stick his head over the edge of the parking deck and look sideways.

  As luck would have it, I didn’t have to wait long. My vigil had scarcely begun when a figure appeared, an indistinct shape bobbing between the cars. ‘Hey,’ I yelled, and waved my tentacles.

  The shape passed out of sight, then appeared again, partly obscured by a concrete column. He was bending, his head in the boot of a car. Then he stood up. He was hard against the periphery of my vision but there was no mistaking that rear profile, that head like a wing-nut.

  ‘Hey,’ I bawled. ‘Over here. Noel. Mate.’

  At fifteen, Spider was a seasoned drinker, or so he claimed. A man with established tastes. Southern Comfort, he reckoned, was cough syrup. Cat’s piss. A man of his experience knew what he wanted. Bourbon. Jack Daniels. In return, I need never worry about the Fletchers again. The Fletchers kept a respectful distance from Spider. He’d done boxing. ‘You look after me,’ he said
. ‘I’ll look after you.’

  Southern Comfort would be easier, I argued. Or Bundaberg rum. The pub sold a fair bit of those. But protection never comes cheap. So, in the end, bourbon it was. Jim Beam. A ‘breakage’ off the top shelf, syphoned into a Marchants lemonade bottle while I was polishing the mirrors in the saloon bar and Dad was downstairs tapping a keg. Not Jack Daniels but I hoped Spider wouldn’t notice the difference.

  The handover was to be in the Oulton Reserve, the local football oval, after training on Thursday night. Not that either of us was in the team, but going to watch the Under-19s train was a good thing to tell a father. What could be more innocent? It was all pretty innocent, I suppose. Until the Fletchers turned up.

  ‘Hey, you,’ I bellowed desperately, wrenching the sound up from the bottom of my lungs and waving a blue rubber glove. ‘Over here. Noel.’ At least I thought it was Noel. He’d moved out of sight again.

  ‘Spider!’ I tried, hoping to trigger a primal reaction. ‘Help! Heeelp!’ The cry was as loud as I could make it. My head spun from the effort. It sounded pretty loud to me, but so did the trucks shifting gears on City Road. Oblivious to my impassioned cries, the figure was moving away. ‘Help,’ I bawled.

  It was a waste of breath. The head bobbed down, a door slammed, a moving vehicle flickered momentarily in the shadows behind the screen of steel slats and the carpark was still again.

  It remained that way for what seemed a very long time. Nobody else came. Nobody else went. Not in the carpark, at least. Down below in the laneway, a minibus drove briskly by, a cricket team of teenage boys hanging out the windows. I waved my tentacles at the flash of upturned faces, but all I got in return was the collective finger.