Sucked In Read online

  Red considered the options, shrugged and slapped the keys into my open hand. ‘Worth a try.’

  I floored the pedal, hit the radio button and we laid into the carbohydrates. The final siren was two minutes away but it might as well have been two hours for all the difference it made. At the close of play the score was 71–102. Our nineteenth consecutive loss at the MCG, said the word from the commentary box. Not bad. After all, this was our first season, per se.

  We overtook the logging truck in good order and headed back through Mansfield.

  ‘Any plans for the evening?’ I asked.

  ‘Videos at Max’s.’ He was making an early night of it, due to a shift-swap deal that would have him shelving cornflakes for most of the following afternoon.

  ‘Seeing Madeleine tonight?’

  He waggled his hand, che sera sera. ‘You?’

  ‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘She’s playing hard to get.’ This was greeted with the silence it deserved.

  ‘Since you’re asking, I’m presenting the trophies at the Somali Youth Association regional basketball finals.’

  ‘Hope your arms are long enough,’ he said. ‘Some of those kids are so tall they have to reach down to shoot for goal.’

  My gig was at seven-thirty. I sat on the speed limit and took no prisoners as dusk descended around us. I kept thinking about the lake, wondering how Charlie and Quinlan had managed to be so far off the mark. Even allowing for the lack of distinctive landmarks, it was a wide margin of error. Yet both swore that’s where Merv went down.

  On a long straight strip just before Tallarook, crows were picking at a carcase by the side of the highway. A fox maybe, or a possum. They flapped upwards at our approach, and when I glanced back in the mirror, they’d settled again, beaks in the mess. It was an image that stayed with me until the sky broke open and torrents of rain threw themselves against the windscreen.

  After that, there was no room for thought of anything but the way ahead.

  Obsessive punctuality is a vice rarely practised by those who have fled to these shores from the war-torn Horn of Africa, so nobody at the Somali Youth Association was fussed by my slightly tardy arrival at its northern region basketball final. The official start time was merely indicative, after all.

  Abdi Abdi, the association president, showed me to my place with the other dignitaries in the Fawkner Park Sports Complex gymnasium just as the whistle sounded. On the bleachers opposite sat an undemonstrative crowd of snaggle-fanged Mogadishu matriarchs, egg-shaped and taffeta-swathed, each attended by a retinue of long, lissom girls with oval faces and gazelle eyes. The menfolk of the community were not much in evidence. Presumably they were busy driving taxis and drinking glasses of tea.

  The collective clout of Melbourne’s Somali population was yet to be tapped but its potential had not gone unnoticed. The evening’s fixture had attracted a number of representatives of the body politic whose interest in both Somalia and basketball was tangential at best.

  I, of course, was one of them. As was the mayor of Darebin, whose bailiwick included the housing commission estate in West Heidelberg, and the Legislative Assembly member for Yorta Yorta, Ken Crouch.

  Ken sat two seats away, on the other side of the imam from the Brunswick mosque. The holy sheikh was blind and wore dark glasses. He spent the match smiling wildly and rocking in his seat, Stevie Wonder in a green turban. Ken spent most of it on the phone, a frown on his dial and a finger jammed in one ear.

  At the half-time break, he unbuttoned beside me in the urinal and revealed the reason for his distraction.

  ‘This fucking preselection deal,’ he groused. ‘It’s turning pear-shaped.’

  Ken was the Shadow Minister for Community Services and a steadying hand on the tiller of the Left. His state lower house seat overlaid the Coolaroo federal electorate to an even larger extent than mine, so he had a territorial as well as a factional interest.

  ‘ALP preselections don’t turn pear-shaped, Ken,’ I said. ‘They’re born that way.’

  In this case the paternity of the pear rested with Barry Quinlan.

  As soon as word of Charlie Talbot’s death got around, Ken explained, the party’s national executive was besieged by aspirant replacements. Every come-again kid, voter-ousted ex-minister, wannabe-politico union official and me-next machine oiler was knocking on the door, flourishing their credentials. All claimed to be perfect for the job, due to either proven experience, self-evident talent, string-pulling skills or the principles of affirmative action.

  Sensing a major affray, and constrained by the deal already cut guaranteeing the next federal vacancy in Victoria to the Left, the executive handballed the fingering job to Barry Quinlan. Barry had dibs on the spot, but nobody specific lined up to fill it. Finding common cause with Alan Metcalfe, who didn’t want a drawn-out brawl in his backyard, Barry nailed down a fast-track timetable and shoe-horned Phil Sebastian into the slot. Phil’s major qualification being that he wasn’t owed or owned by anyone else.

  All this had happened while I was escorting Charlie Talbot’s corpse from Mildura, seeing it into the tender hands of Tobin Brothers Family Undertakers and conferring with the various stakeholders as to the manner, location and scheduling of its interment.

  ‘Made sense at the time,’ said Ken, directing himself to the stainless steel. ‘And it still makes sense.’

  But no sooner had the bell sounded on round one than the would-be contenders were up off the mat and shaping up for round two. Quinlan had exceeded his brief, they were muttering.

  Unsurprisingly, the loudest mutterers were those he’d given to understand could count on Barry’s support whenever the next vacancy arose. And Barry being a master of the dangled expectation, there were plenty of those. All of them members of his own faction.

  ‘I’ve been on the blower 24/7 since Phil Sebastian’s name came out of the hat,’ complained Ken as he shook the drops off the end of his dick. ‘Hosing down half the Left.’

  ‘You’re in an unenviable position, Ken,’ I said, hitting the flush button.

  ‘I think there’s a very real chance of a split.’

  ‘In the Left?’ I zippered up. ‘You’re kidding. You’ve already split more times than a hyperactive amoeba. Do it again and you’ll be holding your meetings in a Petri dish. For Chrissake, Ken, there’s only eight of you still standing.’

  ‘Not the state Left, Murray.’ He spoke as though to a particularly obtuse child. ‘The federal Left. If the right candidate steps forward, he or she could drive a wedge through Barry’s numbers on the selection panel. Split the Left wide open.’

  ‘The right Left candidate?’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. And that’ll leave the Left in a right mess.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, washing my hands. ‘Better get back to the game. I think the Kensington Giraffes stand a very real chance of a comeback in the second half.’

  But Ken was already back on the blower, damping down the embers of smouldering discontent.

  By ten o’clock my duty was done. I’d stood with assorted Abdis, the shadow minister, the mayor and the mufti and handed cups and trophies to a line of slope-shouldered, toothy youths. I’d shaken the tips of their feather-light fingers, partaken sparingly of the potato-crisp and Fanta supper and called it a medium-long day.

  While performing my bedtime ablutions, I studied my face in the mirror. More shop-worn cases walked the earth, to be sure, but my lifelong battle with gravity was entering its decisive phase.

  At fifty, they say, a man has the face he deserves. Fifty wasn’t far away, almost as close as the millennium. What had I done to deserve this particular countenance?

  ‘At least you’ve still got your own teeth,’ I reassured myself. I took a closer look. ‘Most of them.’

  As I fell into that slumbering state that passes for the sleep of a parent—a sober one, anyway—a sharp sound cut the faint swish of the distant traffic. The jarring, metallic screech of brakes.

  It sounded
like an axe being ground.

  The rain that sluiced the roof that night had cleared to a persistent drizzle by seven-thirty, so I togged up and hit the exercise track again, drawstring tight on the hood of my lightweight nylon slicker.

  Where it wasn’t drizzling, it was either dripping from the trees or leaking through my elastic. A pair of kayakers hurtled downstream, chasing thrills down the Yarra’s swollen bacterial brew. Head down, I focused on the way ahead, mouth working as I pounded the pavement.

  ‘,’ I croaked, pushing the guttural ã from the back of my throat onto my palate, then rolling the ñ across the tip of my tongue..

  ‘The cat drank the milk,’ I translated for my own benefit. Bloody wet cat, this morning.

  On Sunday mornings, an informal gathering of my classmates from the Greek course met for coffee, cakes and conversation practice at the Archeon Cafe in Lonsdale Street. My participation was intermittent at best, but I’d missed the last three lessons, so it would be a way of getting back into the linguistic swing. That’s what I told myself anyway, as I sloshed along the riverbank, sweating into my slicker and performing unnatural acts with the fleshy folds of my maxillary tuberosity.

  By the time I’d showered, downed my cereal, read the papers and made my leisurely way into town, Lonsdale Street was parked out by the first-sitting yum cha crowd streaming into Chinatown. I wasted twenty minutes cruising for a vacant space, then put the Magna in the carpark under the Daimaru cookware department and walked the two blocks to the Archeon. At the hoardings surrounding the Queen Victoria Hospital site, I couldn’t resist looking through one of the viewing windows into the massive hole which had once been the maternity wing. Eventually, an international hotel would arise in the spot where Red had first drawn breath. Or a shopping complex, or an office tower, or some indispensable combination of all three. For the moment, it was just an empty, puddle-dotted crater and the prospect of a year’s work for a thousand construction workers.

  Finally, fully half an hour late, I reached the intermittent string of tavernas, pastry shops, worry-bead emporia and travel agencies that constitute Melbourne’s official Greek precinct. In fine weather, we had our practice chit-chats at one of the tables on the footpath outside the Archeon. But the rain-specked tables were deserted. Even by hardy Melburnian standards, this was no day to go alfresco.

  I peered through the window and scanned the interior, a tasteful combination of chrome-frame chairs, ripple-glass tabletops and mirror-tiled walls. Wogarama Deluxe. The Archeon was a popular Sunday brunch spot and business was brisk. The place was chockers. Women with brass hair, men in expensive tracksuits, their fat kids and people who couldn’t get into yum cha.

  I spotted our little kafeneon-klatsch at its usual table in the back corner, away from the worst of the bustle and shielded from the turbo-pop blare of the ceiling-mounted television. There were six of them, a good turn-out.

  I could make out Terri, a children’s book illustrator who claimed to have picked up a smattering of Greek on Mykonos during her hippy days. Her smatter was long scattered but she was doing her best to round it up again. As she spoke, she rotated her wrist in the air, as if uncoiling the tentative thread of her thoughts. The others were leaning forward, the better to catch her drift. I recognised one as Simon, a palliative-care nurse in his early thirties with plans to explore the Peloponnese. And some of the Peloponnesians, too, I assumed. The others, three females and one male, had their backs to me.

  Lanie, I registered immediately, was not among them. My shoulders sagged and I mouthed a silent curse. Malaka.

  I shouldn’t have come. I’d been bullshitting myself. Truth be told, it wasn’t the prospect of refreshing my feeble, faltering Greek that had lured me to the Archeon. It was the dumb, wistful hope that Lanie would be there.

  My gaze dropped to the display of pastries. The syrup-drenched kataificocoons, deep-fried loukoumades and sugar-dusted kouranbiethes. The moist walnut cake and flaking bougatsa. The oozing babas and sticky halva. The suppurating galaktoboureko.

  Butterflies danced a lead-footed Zorba in my stomach. I started to turn away, back the way I’d come.

  Jesus, Murray. Behave yourself. Get a grip. So what if she’s not here? You hardly know the woman, for Christ’s sake.

  But I did know some things. She had a wide, confident mouth and heavy-lidded sensual eyes. She was pleasingly full-figured and her thick mane of chestnut hair went down to her shoulders. She didn’t get impatient when other students slowed down the class because they hadn’t done their homework, even though she always did hers.

  I knew she was a piano teacher. In the first lesson, she’d told us so, fluttering her fingers across an imaginary keyboard. From our practice dialogues, I knew she lived in Abbotsford in an apartment near the river. So I didn’t know nothing.

  Which didn’t excuse the fact that I was pining after her like some smitten teen. I slapped some sense into myself and turned back towards the door.

  But my appetite had gone. For cakes, for company, for coffee. This whole conversation thing was a waste of time. I’d be better off alone, working on my vocabulary or taking dictation from a tape.

  So, was I staying or leaving? A wispy drizzle began, not quite heavy enough to qualify as rain. Even the weather couldn’t make up its mind.

  A Daihatsu hatch-back pulled up, double-parking in the inside lane. The passenger door flew open and a woman jumped out, a flurry of seasonal browns and burgundies. A chunky adolescent girl clambered from the back and took the empty seat. Hasty goodbyes were exchanged, and the car drove away.

  Lanie Lane, looking a little cross, flung her scarf back over her shoulder and marched towards the coffee shop.

  ‘Ti kanis?’ I said brightly. ‘Kala?’

  ‘Kala.’ She twitched her mouth, erasing the frown.

  ‘Better late than never, eh?’ I said.

  She grimaced and tossed her chin in the direction the car had taken. ‘My bloody ex. You’d think an IT expert could tell the time, not turn up an hour late.’

  ‘I’ve just arrived myself,’ I said.

  Her ex! Things were looking up. Potentially.

  I held the door open, then followed her into the filo-and-cinnamon scented fug of the coffee shop.

  ’ ‘Latte, parakalo,’ she smiled, ‘as they say on Santorini.’

  We joined the others. Space was made, greetings exchanged. ‘Kalimera, kalimera. Kala?’

  Everybody was poly kala. Simon, the palliative-care nurse, was explaining that he had been to the kinimatografos. Was it enhromo asked Julie, the florist, or an aspromavro? It was a komodhia. Yesterday, I informed them, I had visited exohi. I had not gone by train. I went there by aftokinito. Lanie had been to a sinavlia. Her friend played the klarino. Friend, masculine. Just who was this tootler, I wondered?

  After half an hour of mangling our generatives and spraying our fricatives, slipping in and out of English to encourage and correct each other, our number began to dwindle. Other customers were impatient for tables and the waitress confiscated our chairs as fast as they were vacated. Eventually, it was down to me and the object of my desire. We dawdled, guarding our cups, neither of us in a hurry.

  A waitress started clearing the table. I scooped up the book illustrator’s leftover baklava as the plate was whisked away. Nothing wrong with my appetite now.

  ‘Abbotsford, eh?’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Bought if off the plan. Saved a fortune in stamp duty.’

  There are places in the world where conversation revolves around subjects other than real estate. Melbourne is not one of them. Lanie told me about her place. I told her about mine. In the process, we sketched the bones of our personal histories.

  She’d bought her apartment, she told me, with her payout from the Education Department. A high school music teacher, she was one of the thousands made redundant in the wave of school closures initiated by the incoming Liberals. As well as her job, she’d lost her husband. Given him the flick for fooling around
. He was now shacked up with a marketing consultant. No great loss, she said, and the divorce had left her with half their house in Balwyn.

  ‘Fifteen years of capital gain, tax free,’ she said, scraping the bottom of her coffee cup and licking the spoon.

  She’d bought the Abbotsford place because she liked the location and it had enough room for her grand piano.

  ‘It’s leased. But nothing impresses the customers like a grand. Means I can charge twenty dollars an hour above market rates to teach little Griselda her scales.’

  Talk came easy to us. We got and gave in equal measure, and Lanie learned at least as much about me. From real estate and work, we moved to children and education. Her daughter, Nicole, was in year seven at McRob Girls’ High. She had the second bedroom in Abbotsford, plus a room at her father’s place in Prahran. I reciprocated with the potted history of Red and Wendy.

  The only subject I deliberately elided was Lyndal, but I read in Lanie’s eyes that she had an inkling. Many people did. The murder had generated a fair amount of press.

  The waitress came back, a bottle-blonde dragon with a cat’s-bum mouth. She stared at our empty cups and flicked her towel. We were getting the heave-ho. But there was still one subject yet to be broached.

  ‘Stop me if I’m speaking out of turn or making a fool of myself,’ I said. ‘But I wonder if you’d be in a position to accompany me to a sort of semi-official, semi-social event thingo on Thursday evening?’

  Lanie smiled at the construction. ‘A semi-official semi-social event thingo?’

  I made a sheepish face. ‘The casino opening, actually.’

  ‘I thought the Labor Party didn’t approve of the casino?’ Her tone was teasing.

  ‘It’s a reconnaissance mission,’ I said.

  We stood up and made for the cashier, my eyes on the sway of her hips. She looked back over her shoulder. ‘So a hand of blackjack and a spin of the roulette wheel would be out of the question?’

  ‘Fan tan, craps, two-up, you name it,’ I said. ‘We can even pull some slots with the hoi polloi if you like.’