The Brush-Off mw-1 Read online

  The Brush-Off

  ( Murray Whelan - 1 )

  Shane Maloney

  The Brush-Off

  Shane Maloney

  ‘I can’t think of a single Russian novel in which one of the characters goes into a picture gallery.’

  W.SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  The two cops were virtually invisible. Only the bobbing white domes of their helmets, floating like ghostly globes through the thick summer night, and the muted clip-clop of their horses gave warning of their approach. She hadn’t mentioned the mounted patrol when we came over the fence.

  ‘Look out,’ I whispered. ‘Here comes the cavalry.’

  ‘Ssshhh.’ Salina clapped her hand over my mouth, trembling with the effort of stifling her own laughter. ‘Get down.’

  I got down. On my knees in the leaf litter, nuzzling the pom-pom fringe of her mu-mu. It was the mu-mu that first drew my eye to Salina Fleet. The mu-mu with its palm-tree motif. Then the apricot lipstick. And the terry-towel beach bag with hula-hoop handles. So playful among all those business shirts and bow ties. ‘Rode one when I was ten,’ I mumbled.

  The pub was closed, the crowd from the art exhibition dispersed. And there we were, in possession of two stolen wine glasses and a filched bottle of chardonnay, hidden in a thicket of shrubbery inside the locked gates of the Botanic Gardens. This, I already suspected, was a decision I might come to regret. For now, however, I was game for anything. Ten or twelve drinks and I’m anyone’s.

  ‘Rode a what?’ Sal whispered.

  ‘Rhododendron,’ I repeated. ‘ Rhododendron oreotrophes.’ It was written on a little plaque hammered into the ground beside my foot. I said it out loud, just to see if I could.

  ‘Ssshhhh!’ Again her hand closed over my face. ‘You’ll get us arrested, Murray.’ Beneath the press of her palm, I opened my mouth. My tongue tasted her skin. The horses passed, so close we could have reached out and stroked their flanks. I stroked Salina’s instead.

  ‘Quick.’ She grabbed my hand and dashed across the path, a wood sprite disappearing into a tunnel of undergrowth where the overhanging branches were too low for any horse to follow. Her legs flashed white, darting ahead.

  Playing hide and seek in the Botanic Gardens was not where I’d imagined our acquaintance might lead when Salina and I were introduced at the Ministry for the Arts earlier that evening. I was the new minister’s political adviser. She was the visual arts editor of Veneer magazine. The two of us should probably have been discussing post-modernist aesthetic theory and its impact on social policy. I fixed my eyes on her bare legs, took a deep breath and plunged into the darkness.

  ‘You like it?’ Sal whirled, showing her secret place. A fern gully. Dark, moist, prehistoric. Round and round she spun, noiseless, abandoned, crazy, even drunker than me. She grabbed my hand again and took off, leading me on at breakneck speed. The path forked and twisted, becoming a maze. She let go, disappeared. The night was tropical, full of sounds, water running, the hypnotic thrum of a million cicadas, bird calls, a high-pitched squeaking like a gate swinging on its hinges in a breeze. I plunged on, running headlong downhill, the momentum irresistible.

  A grove of bamboo reared up, the canes as thick as my arm, a kung fu forest. She lay there on a bed of leaves, waiting. I threw myself on my back beside her, and she rolled onto me, straddling my thighs. She could scarcely have been unaware of the effect this produced. ‘ Pinus radiata,’ I said. ‘ Grevillea robusta.’

  We did not kiss. It would have seemed soppy. My hands glided up her ribs, thumbs extended to trace her anatomy through the fabric of her dress. Belly, sternum, ribs. Nipples as hard as Chinese algebra. Her neck arched, her mouth hung open. Dirty dancing in deep dark dingly dell. Above, high above, the sky was a pale blur, immeasurably distant, framed by branches festooned with hundreds of brown paper bags that rustled gently in the still night air.

  My shirt was open. Her dress was runched up around her waist. Fingers tugged at my belt-hers or mine I couldn’t tell, didn’t care. ‘Where is it?’ she gasped. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In your hand. It’s in your hand.’

  ‘Not that, stupid. A condom.’

  If she didn’t stop doing what she was doing with her hand, I wouldn’t need a condom. I didn’t have one. What sort of boy did she think I was?

  Warm liquid trickled out of the sky and splashed the ground beside us. Rainforest soma, warm and dank. Salina arched her neck again, staring up to where the paper bags shifted and shuffled, fluttering from branch to branch, chattering among themselves, a hundred squeaky gates.

  ‘Bats!’ she shrieked.

  Hundreds of them. Fruit bats, flying foxes, roosting high in the tops of spindly Moreton Bay figs. She leaped to her feet and we ran, she convulsed with the giggles, me stuffing myself back in my pants.

  We exploded out of the fern forest into a circle of lawn. The night sky, drenched with humidity, shone like a sudden spotlight after the jungle depths. We rolled together on the grass, kissing now, all the imminence of the previous moment gone, the compact implicit, a slow build-up ahead of us. Sweet, sweet, sweet. I came up for air. ‘You think any of these are rubber trees?’

  Salina pulled the wine from her bag and we drank from the bottle, getting sensible, keeping un-sober. ‘My place,’ she said. A loft. In the city. Safety tackle, more booze. I pulled her to her feet. ‘Let’s went.’

  Easier said than done. Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens are approximately the size of Uganda. At the best of times, finding your way out takes a compass, a ball of twine, and access to satellite navigation. We sat down and drank some more. She watched me graze her lowlands, then we started up the hill, hugging the dark fringes, cutting through the densest thickets.

  Here and there we stopped, pressed against each other in beds of flowering succulents, stamen brushing pistil, inhaling nectar. Pissed to the eyeballs. My fingers were sticky with liquidambar. My aching prick was as hard and smooth as the trunk of the ghost gum, Eucalyptus papuana, planted here by Viscount de Lisle, Governor-General of Australia, 1961-65.

  Eventually, unpollinated, we found the fence at the top of the hill and followed it. An open-sided rotunda capped the crest, its cupola resting on columns topped with stag ferns cast in concrete. My sentiments precisely.

  Below was the river, its banks hidden by trees. The occasional swish of a car wafted up from Alexandra Avenue. In the distance, tipping the foliage, the neon sign above the Richmond silos told the hour. NYLEX 3.08. The pub had closed at one. Time was meaningless. Across the river, the lights of the city glowed. A loft, she’d said.

  ‘Princes Bridge.’ She cocked her head towards where the fence was concealed in a border of hardy perennials. Princes Bridge was the nearest point we could cross the Yarra. Bliss was a twenty-minute walk away. Never again, I swore by the sacred name of Baden-Powell, never again would I be caught unprepared.

  We climbed the fence and began our way across the treed lawns of the Queen Victoria Gardens. The heehaw of an ambulance siren washed through the night towards us, echoing the pulse of my horny urgency. As we headed for the bridge, the sound grew louder, insistent in the stillness, urging us forward.

  At the floral clock, where the trees ended and the lawn met the broad boulevard of St Kilda Road, the sound abruptly stopped. We stopped, too, and stared.

  Across the road sat the National Gallery, its floodlit facade looming like the screen of a drive-in movie, a faceless wall of austere grey basalt. Extending along the foot of the wall was a shallow ornamental moat, walled by a low stone parapet. In the moat stood a gigantic multi-hued beast with three legs and a head at each end.

  This sight was not, in itself, remarkable. The gallery with its moat and its sculptures was a prominent civic landmar
k. A tourist attraction, a cultural resource. We’d both seen it a thousand times before. But neither of us had ever seen it like this.

  An ambulance was drawn up at the gallery’s main entrance, a dark mouse-hole in the blank wall. Both of the vehicle’s rear doors were flung open. Its light was flashing. Giant shadows, thrown up by the spinning flare, played across the facade of the building like characters from a half-glimpsed puppet show. Like the figures in Plato’s cave. Two men were kneeling on the parapet of the moat. Their heads bobbed. Their arms jerked rhythmically. A little cluster of figures moved about the ambulance, engaged in some obscure task. The sudden silence, the lack of passing traffic, was absolute. The tableau was compelling in its mystery.

  Drawn irresistibly, we crossed the road. It was a pointless detour, a distraction. Stupid.

  The paramedics parted as we arrived, as if to display their handiwork, as if our mere presence entitled us to a view of the proceedings. Except they weren’t parting for us, but were clearing a way to wheel a stretcher towards the yawning doors of the ambulance.

  On the stretcher was a body. Alive or dead, man or woman, it was impossible to tell. All I could see were legs, clad in wet black jeans. Then my view was blocked by a gallery security guard. His trousers, too, were soaked. Water trailed across the footpath. Someone had been pulled out of the moat.

  There was a kind of bleak formality to the scene. Sombre work was being undertaken by those trained to its demands. The climax, whatever it was, had already been played out. We had no business here, gawping at its aftermath. I turned away, embarrassed, a little ashamed of my curiosity. Besides, I had more vital concerns. That loft in the city was only ten minutes away.

  But Salina had slipped between two of the uniforms. ‘Hey, Marcus,’ she called, like it was all an elaborate joke being staged for our benefit. ‘What’s going on?’

  Then I saw what she had seen. A pair of cowboy boots, tooled leather toes pointing at the sky, jutting from the end of the stretcher.

  Things happened very quickly after that. A police car disgorged two uniforms, one male, one female. A security guard, some toy copper with pissant insignia, grabbed at Sal, caught one of her hula hoops. I pushed forward, but one of the cops got there first. She had Salina by the arm, holding her back. ‘You know this person?’

  In the staccato explosions of light, I saw Salina’s face as it bent above the stretcher. Saw it change, frame by frame. Recognition. Shock. Panic. Her eyes were wide with dread. ‘He’s my…’ The words hooked in her throat.

  ‘His name?’ The policeman was in no mood to be stuffed about by a half-drunk dolly bird. One of the security guards had handed him a wallet, and he was reading a plastic card.

  ‘Marcus Taylor.’ Salina’s tone was defiant now, as she fought for control. The officer nodded, acknowledging her right to be there, conceding nothing else. The stretcher was almost all the way into the ambulance. Even without looking, I knew who he was, this Marcus Taylor.

  ‘He’s my boyfriend,’ said Salina. Then she corrected herself. ‘Fiance. He’s my fiance.’

  The policewoman drew her back, making room for them to close the ambulance door.

  Salina turned then and looked at me like it was all my fault. ‘Bastard,’ she swore.

  I’d been given the brush-off before, but this was a bit rich. I could see that the woman was upset, but she could hardly blame me for what was happening.

  Twelve hours earlier I’d never even heard of Salina Fleet, or this Marcus Taylor who was being fed feet-first into the ambulance. Twelve hours earlier, the idea of romping in the rhododendrons with a blonde cultural critic in a pom-pommed mu-mu was as remote as my chances of being appointed ambassador to the Holy See. Seeing a floater being pulled out of the moat of the National Gallery had not been pencilled into my diary.

  Half a day earlier, I wasn’t even on this side of town. I was stuck in a stifling room behind a shopfront in Northcote, being given the hairy eyeball by Leonidas Mavramoustakides. It was the last Friday in January 1989, the stinking hot end of an overheated decade, and I was waiting for a phone call. I wished it would hurry up and come.

  Mavramoustakides was once a major in Greek army intelligence. That was twenty years earlier, during the military regime. He still cultivated the style. Crisp white shirt, hairline moustache, dark tie, gimlet eyes. The dye he used to keep his hair jet black was beginning to run in the heat and little dribbles of it were trickling down beneath his collar. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. Not with the attitude he was taking.

  He was sitting behind a tiny imitation baroque desk made of plywood. Most of it was taken up by a voluminous white marble ashtray, and by two pompously over-flowing correspondence trays, one weighted down by a small plaster bust of Aristotle. Mavramoustakides crushed the tip of his cigarette cruelly into the ashtray, put his elbows on his desk and smiled a mirthless smile. ‘If we don’t get your cooperation,’ he said. ‘We can make things very uncomfortable for you.’

  It was difficult to conceive just how he proposed to do this. I was already about as uncomfortable as humanly possible. The air of the minuscule room was thick with stale cigarette smoke. My shirt was drenched with sweat and stuck to the back of a vinyl chair. My teeth were caked with grounds from the cup of muddy coffee in front of me. And Jimmy Papas, Mavramoustakides’ overweight sidekick, looked like he was about to lumber to his feet and smack me across the chops with his fat hand.

  ‘Remember,’ warned Mavramoustakides. ‘We are more than half a million Greeks in this city.’ The way he said it, you’d think he was claiming personal responsibility for the fact. ‘You can’t afford to upset that many people.’

  Actually there were only 326,382 Greek-speaking residents of Melbourne and scant few of them paid any attention at all to Leonidas Mavramoustakides. The only reason we were having this conversation was because he and Jimmy Papas were getting to be a pain in the neck. They’d been ringing around and writing letters and two weeks earlier Papas had confronted my boss, Angelo Agnelli, at Kostas Manolas’ daughter’s wedding and threatened to make a scene. Angelo, naturally, had immediately agreed to an appointment. Then, naturally, he found he had an unavoidable engagement elsewhere and deputised me to solve the problem.

  ‘Piss off, Leo,’ I said, staring at the phone, willing it to ring. ‘You’re talking crap and you know it.’

  We were in the editor’s office at Nea Hellas, a Greek-language tabloid with an ultra-conservative political line and a weekly readership of about ten thousand. Leonidas Mavramoustakides owned and edited the paper and Jimmy Papas was its business manager, a job that consisted largely of convincing delicatessen owners and fish-roe importers to buy advertising space they didn’t really need. This task was proving increasingly difficult, which explained why the two of them were getting so pushy.

  ‘We only ask what we entitled to,’ growled Papas, doing to his worry beads what he’d like to do to my testicles. ‘ Neos Kosmos, Il Globo, El Telegraph, all these papers get government advertising. How come we don’t get our share? If we don’t, our readers will not vote Labor at the next election. You tell your boss Agnelli that.’

  A little respect would not have been out of order. For me, and for my boss. The Honourable Angelo Agnelli was a Minister of the Crown, the Minister for Ethnic Affairs. Ours was a Labor government, democratic in temper, so obsequiousness was unnecessary. Just a little less contempt, that was all I asked. The kind of scorn that Mavramoustakides displayed was the prerogative of colleagues and associates, not superannuated torturers.

  ‘Get real, Jimmy,’ I said. ‘None of your readers vote for us anyway. Most of them can’t even read.’

  The function of the Minister for Ethnic Affairs was to spread a microscopically thin layer of largesse over every ethnic community in the state. My task, as his adviser, was to help wield the butter knife. On a day like this, dealing with pricks like this, it was a job whose appeal was limited.

  Fortunately, before I could say something undip
lomatic, Sophie Mavramoustakides stuck her head around the door. ‘Phone call for Murray Whelan,’ she chirped, in the manner of a hotel bellboy paging a guest. ‘You want me to put it through?’

  Sophie had a hair-do like a haystack and a lot more va-va-voom than she could burn off working as a typist at her fascist father’s rag. She splashed some of it over me. She was wasting her time. I was single but I wasn’t suicidal.

  Only Trish at the office knew where I was, so this was the call I’d been waiting for. But the last thing I needed was Leo and Jimmy breathing down my neck while I got the news. I unpeeled myself from the plastic chair and indicated I’d prefer to take the call in private. Mavramoustakides grunted. My preferences were beneath his dignity. He’d wanted to talk to the organ grinder, not be fobbed off with the monkey. As far as Leo was concerned, I could go climb a tree.

  Sophie, utilising as much of her bottom as possible, led me upstairs to the chaos that passed for the Nea Hellas production room, indicated which phone I should use and returned Eurydice-like into the Stygian realm below.

  Nea Hellas was on the Northcote hill, one of the few elevated points in the otherwise flat expanse of Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs. The view out its first-floor window swept in a broad arc across the baking rooftops of houses and factories, all the way to the glass-walled towers of the central city, a shimmering mirage on the far horizon. Above, an unbroken blue sky beat down with the full power of a forty-degree summer afternoon. Below, a metropolis of three million lay prostrate beneath its might.

  For much of the decade, the state of Victoria, of which this city was the crowning jewel, had been ruled by a Labor government. For a while things had gone well. More recently, the auguries were less auspicious. The previous year’s election victory had been snatched from the jaws of defeat only by the narrowest of margins. In politics, as in our city’s notoriously fickle weather, nothing is certain. When things change, they change quickly. From the direction of Treasury Place, at the foot of the towering office-blocks, wraiths of heat haze ascended to the remorseless heavens like smoke from a sacrificial altar.