The Brush-Off mw-1 Read online

  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.

  Unless somebody saw me soon, I’d be spending the rest of my life on my knees before Wendy with gravel rash on my forehead. No, to do that I’d have to get down first. I didn’t even have a cigarette to console me. And even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to get my tentacle up to my beak to inhale. I decided I had better prospects at floor level, banging on one of the doors.

  To descend from my perch, I had to turn around, press my back to the wall, and execute a controlled slide. Controlled being the key word. Halfway down, the foot of one of the stilts caught in a snarl of chicken wire lying beside the work bench. Off balance, I pitched forward. Suddenly, I was standing upright, clear of the wall, with no way of maintaining my balance but by taking the next step. Then the next. Then the next.

  I was stilt-walking. Look Mum, no hands. No place to go, either. Arms helicoptering madly through the air, I tottered forward-towards the rim of the empty pool.

  Then Willy rose and swallowed me whole. One moment I was looking down at him from a great height. The next I was in his belly, staring up at a gaping hole in his back. There was a sharp but momentary pain in my left ear. Plunging over the edge, I had crashed straight through the whale’s thin fibreglass shell. Luckily, Oscar’s copious contents helped break my fall. I had landed on a pile of stuffed squid. I was winded, upside-down and my legs were twisted together, but otherwise I was intact. Willy, for his part, was now the only whale in captivity with a sunroof.

  All but hysterical with relief, I jettisoned my ludicrous padding and crawled out the whale’s backside. I could have been killed. I was lucky to be alive.

  I clambered out of the pool and put on my trousers and shoes. My hands were palpitating so wildly I could barely tie the laces. I breathed deeply to calm down and gave myself a quick once-over. No broken bones, but my explosion through Willy’s carapace had done something to my ear. It was bleeding profusely.

  I found a crumpled rag and clutched it to my earhole. Then I picked up the iron pipe and began bashing the fire door. I guess I must have lost it there for a while. I was stir crazy. Cabin fever had me in its grip. I may have even been howling. I wanted out and if need be I’d bludgeon my way through three inches of steel plate. I bashed until my arm went numb and bells rang in my brain.

  Eventually, worn out, I collapsed against the door. Through the metal, I heard the grind of a bolt being drawn. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ a woman’s voice was saying, irritably. ‘Take it easy.’

  The door swung backwards to reveal Salina Fleet.

  But not the Sal I’d been fumbling in the forget-me-nots. Nor the freaked-out Salina lit by the ambulance light at the moat. This Salina was very sober and very proper. A woman who had made up her mind about something. Gidget was gone. This Salina wore calf-length culottes, a fawn blouse and black button earrings, not a hair out of place. This Salina was so composed she could have read the Channel 10 news.

  She took a step backwards. In my panting, dishevelled state, I must have been quite a sight. And not a welcome one. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Snooping through your deceased boyfriend’s personal effects did not, somehow, seem like the appropriate answer. Already it was clear that what had occurred between us last night was ancient history, a dead letter. The fire was well and truly out. Our little nocturnal nature ramble was a temporary lapse to which neither of us would again refer. Nothing had happened. Nothing ever would.

  ‘The minister wants a report,’ I said, self-importantly. ‘On under-utilised Arts Ministry facilities.’ Hand pressed to ear, I must have looked like a harmonising Bee Gee. ‘I was sent on a tour of inspection. A tenant got hostile and locked me in. You didn’t see him, did you? A guy with an armful of violins.’

  Salina shook her head, and cocked it sideways in disbelief. To think, her eyes seemed to say, I nearly took this lunatic to bed.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked. The pretence begun, I had no option but to continue. ‘What are you doing here?’

  She cast her gaze downwa
rds and adopted a sombre tone. ‘Marcus’s studio is upstairs.’

  I nodded understandingly and stepped forward, moving us onward from the doorway. ‘He was the one at the exhibition last night, on the table, wasn’t he?’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise, I mean…’

  She maintained her aloof solemnity. ‘No need to apologise. You weren’t to know.’

  ‘I mean I’m sorry about Marcus,’ I said, gently correcting her. As far as I knew, I didn’t have anything to apologise for.

  ‘Thank you.’ She spoke formally, bowing her head slightly. Rehearsing, I realised, the role of the grieving widow graciously accepting condolences.

  ‘It was on the radio. You were mentioned, too.’

  ‘Ah.’ This information did not entirely displease her. ‘So soon?’

  She turned and began back up the stairs, as if trying to put an interruption behind her. She was carrying a folio case, the sort art students and advertising types use. Evidently she had just arrived at the YMCA and my banging had distracted her from her objective. When we reached the ground floor corridor, she stopped at the open door, anticipating my departure. Up in the harsher light, there was a fragility to her. She’d probably got even less sleep than me. The strain was showing. I reached over and touched her arm. ‘You okay?’

  She jerked away, then softened. ‘I’m fine. Really I am.’ She squeezed out a pained little smile.