The Brush-Off mw-1 Read online

  It must have been the weather. All this Greek shit was going to my head. I picked up the phone. ‘Break it to me gently,’ I said.

  For the past sixteen months, since the ’87 stock-market crash, the Economic Development Ministry had been haemorrhaging money. What had started as a trickle had become an unstoppable torrent. The government was losing money faster than it could raise or borrow it. A gesture was required. A head must roll. Bill Hahn, the Deputy Premier, had drawn the short straw. The fag end of January met the timing requirements perfectly. Half the population was too shagged out from the heat to be interested in politics. The other half was busy folding its tents and returning from holidays. When the Premier called an unscheduled Cabinet meeting earlier that afternoon, the agenda was only too obvious.

  ‘It’s over,’ said Trish. ‘Angelo’s just come back.’

  Behind her voice I could hear the mechanical whirr of a document shredder. Which could mean only one thing. There had been a major reshuffle. Angelo Agnelli was no longer Minister for Ethnic Affairs. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense.’ I tried to make it casual. ‘What happened? Did he get the sack or did he get a new portfolio?’

  Trish was Agnelli’s private secretary. I thought I could detect a suggestion of distance in her tone, a hint that old alliances could no longer be taken for granted. The flux was running, changes were afoot up there in the ministerial suite. ‘You’re going to love this,’ she said. She could afford to be flippant. She’d be okay. Whatever happens, they always take their secretaries with them. ‘He’s been given Water.’

  ‘Christ!’ I said. ‘Minister for Water Supply. The very thought of it made my mouth go dry. I looked about the Nea Hellas production room for something to slake my sudden thirst. The only cup in sight contained the congealing dregs of ancient Greek coffee. My future was suddenly as black as that bitter beverage. I touched it to my lips. At least it was wet.

  I’d been at Ethnic Affairs for four years. Employing me as his principal adviser had been one of Agnelli’s smarter moves. In a state whose two major ethnic power blocks are the Greeks and the Italians, giving the job to a man with an Irish name was a masterstroke of impartiality. And since I’d once been party organiser in Melbourne Upper, Agnelli’s electorate, home to the highest concentration of migrants in the country, it wasn’t as though I didn’t have some pretty solid credentials in the field of dago-wrangling. But Water Supply? All I knew about Water Supply was it happened when you turned on a tap.

  ‘And the Arts,’ said Trish.

  Water Supply and the Arts. My heart plummeted. Not only had Agnelli failed to win substantial promotion, he’d managed to put me in very ticklish situation. Local Government I could do. Community Services, no problem. But Water Supply and the Arts? I knew as much about rocket science.

  ‘The Arts?’ I repeated dismally. ‘That means I’m fucked.’

  Now that I had embraced my fate, Trish could afford to allow a little more of the old warmth back into her voice. ‘Yeah,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I reckon.’

  The odds that Agnelli would retain me as his adviser on hydraulic affairs were low. But the very idea that a man named Agnelli might employ someone called Whelan to advise him on cultural matters was inconceivable. The fact that Ange had been born in the Queen Victoria Hospital, not five kilometres from where I stood, was immaterial. What possible assistance could an Australian bog-wog provide to a man through whose veins surged the blood of Tintoretto and Tiepolo? A man sprung from the race of Boccherini and Vivaldi. Dante and Boccaccio. Bramante, Caravaggio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and all those other fucking turtles. ‘What do you know about Water Supply?’ I begged, no longer bothering to conceal the desperation in my voice.

  Trish and I went back a long way. She was a tough cookie who had run the electorate office in Melbourne Upper in the days before Agnelli got the preselection. If it walked in off the street, whatever it was, Trish could handle it. ‘Can’t be too complicated,’ she said. ‘Dams don’t go on strike. Pipelines don’t stack committees at party conferences.’

  She had a point. Water seeks to find its own level. Even as Minister for Water Supply, Agnelli would still need a man with my skills. Someone to write his speeches. Fend off lobbyists. Crack the whip over the bureaucrats. Sniff the air. Test the water. Help him go with the flow. Maybe he’d keep me on, after all.

  ‘He wants to see you,’ said Trish. ‘Now.’

  It wasn’t as if I didn’t appreciate the political realities of the situation. The government was skating on thin electoral ice. A Cabinet re-jig was essential if we were to keep the show on the road. But what was good for the party could hardly have come at a worse time for me personally. Not to put too fine a point on it, with the interest rate on my mortgage nudging 16 per cent, I was no candidate for early retirement. It wasn’t just the money, either. Family matters needed to be considered.

  ‘Oh, another thing,’ added Trish. ‘Wendy called. She says to ring her urgently.’ Wendy was the mother of my ten-year-old child Redmond. They lived in Sydney where Wendy ran equal opportunity for Telecom. ‘Not in trouble with the ex again, are you, Murray?’

  ‘ Malacca fungula,’ I said. A Mediterranean expression meaning ‘Don’t be silly’.

  Trish, who’d picked up a smattering of Southern European at the Electoral Office, pretended to laugh and hung up. Pressing down the phone cradle, I quickly dialled Wendy’s mobile. Trust Wendy to have one, the latest toy of the corporate high-flier. At five dollars a minute, Nea Hellas could cop the tab.

  ‘Yes.’ Wendy’s phone manner was brisk, but she wasn’t fooling me. Somewhere in the background was the gentle lap of Sydney Harbour, the flapping of yacht sails in the breeze, the lifting of shirts. Wendy was probably at Doyle’s, finishing a long lunch. I could see the sucked-dry shells of pink crustaceans piled before her. ‘Oh, it’s you ,’ she said. ‘About time, too.’

  Four years before, I’d assumed the prime parenting role while Wendy took a temporary secondment to the Office of the Status of Women in Canberra. Before I knew it, she was the big cheese in gender equity at the Department of Education, Employment and Training, our marriage was finished, and I’d become the non-custodial parent. By the time she got her fancy new job in Sydney, Red’s access visits had dropped to four a year. One was scheduled to begin that evening. But not before I was subjected to the customary lecture on my deficiencies as a parent.

  ‘I’ve got all the details already, Wendy,’ I told her. ‘How many times have I not been there to meet Red’s plane?’ A couple, actually, but they weren’t my fault and the kid had agreed, for a price, that they’d be our little secret.

  ‘He won’t be arriving,’ she said. ‘His orthodontist appointment was changed and there isn’t another flight until two tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Orthodontist?’ I said. ‘What does he need with an orthodontist?’ Red’s teeth were fine last time I’d looked. This was clearly a pretext to cut short my son’s first visit in more than three months.

  ‘Just a check-up,’ said Wendy. ‘But this guy’s the best overbite specialist in the country. You don’t want second-rate treatment for your child’s teeth do you?’ I let that one go by. ‘Besides which, school doesn’t start until Tuesday, so he can stay until Monday evening.’

  ‘I’ll be at work on Monday.’ I was trying to make a point, but as soon as I spoke I knew I’d walked into a trap.

  ‘Well, I suppose there’s always another time. He’ll be very disappointed, of course.’

  If I missed this chance, it might be months before I saw Red again. ‘I’ll take Monday off,’ I said quickly. The way things were shaping up, I probably wouldn’t have a job to go to anyway. Not that I had any intention of sharing that hot little item with Wendy.

  ‘I daresay the place won’t fall down if you’re not there for a day,’ said Wendy. Telecom, of course, ceased to function every time Wendy stepped out of the room. ‘And don’t forget to see that he wears a hat in the sun. He nearly got
burned at Noosa. Richard had to keep reminding him to put one on.’

  Just like Wendy had to keep reminding me that she had successfully recoupled and I had not. And that her salary allowed her to take Red to fashionable resorts for his holidays, when the best I seemed to be able to do was take him to the cricket or the movies. And the cricket wasn’t even on this weekend. ‘Two o’clock,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there to meet him. Tell him I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘Two o’clock is the departure time, Murray,’ she said. ‘The plane doesn’t arrive down there until 3.20.’ Her maths were top-notch. ‘It’s an eighty-minute flight.’

  I knew that. ‘Three, then,’ I said cheerfully and hung up. I know when I’m licked. I went back down the stairs, past travel posters of old women with faces like hacksaws standing beside piles of picturesque rubble.

  The air in Mavramoustakides’ office, what there was of it, was thicker than ever. And not just with cigarette smoke. Sophie came out the door blowing her nose into a tissue, looking like she’d just been betrothed to a donkey. She flounced back upstairs.

  ‘Okay,’ I announced. I hadn’t driven all that way in the heat to trade pleasantries. ‘This is the deal. You report the government in a more balanced way and Nea Hellas gets a regular advertising contract with a major government campaign.’

  Mavramoustakides looked like he’d never for one moment doubted his newspaper’s capacity to strike fear into my heart. Papas wanted details. ‘What campaign?’

  I’d brought a bone with me, hidden up my sweaty sleeve. I pulled it out and tossed it. ‘Keep Australia Beautiful,’ I said.

  Leo and Jimmy lit up with a mixture of avarice and incomprehension. As far as I was concerned, Australia the Beautiful could look after itself. I was more interested in keeping my job. That, and a three o’clock appointment at Tullamarine airport the next afternoon.

  We sealed the deal with a handshake beneath a poster of Mount Olympus. The gods, if I had bothered to look, were laughing.

  Melbourne’s weather teeters forever on the brink of imminence. If it is warm, a cool change is expected. A day of rain bisects a month of shine. Spring vanishes for weeks on end. Summer arrives unseasonably early, inexplicably late, not at all. Winter is wet but not cold, cold but not wet.

  So far, that summer, all we’d had was heat. Through a city limp and surly beneath its oppressive demands, I steered my butter-yellow 1979 Daihatsu Charade towards my waiting fate. Past the airless bungalows of Northcote and the tight-packed terraces of Collingwood, through the reek of molten asphalt and the baked biscuit aroma of the brewery malting works, I drove to Victoria Parade, a boulevard of canopied elms marking the northern boundary of the central business district.

  Laid out by city fathers with Parisian fantasies and strategic interests, Victoria Parade was where the young gentlemen of the Royal Victorian Mounted Volunteers would have drawn their sabres if ever the working-class mob had come storming up the hill from its blighted shacks on the flat below. As it turned out, the tide of history had run the other way. It was the slums that had fallen, captured by the gentry. And me, for my sins, rapidly becoming one of them.

  The Ministry for Ethnic Affairs occupied the top three floors of a brick-clad early-seventies office building overlooking the elms. I drove around the block and parked on an all-day meter beside the Fitzroy Gardens. The Charade was a step in the direction of anonymity I’d taken after a demented constituent ran my previous vehicle into a lake one dark and stormy night several years before. It was less conspicuous than my old Renault, but it didn’t do a thing for my image.

  Short of walking around the block in the blazing sun, the quickest way into the Ethnic Affairs building was via its basement carpark. Suit jacket hooked over my shoulder, I advanced down the ramp into the half-darkness. The carpark was small, its twenty-odd spaces reserved for the building’s more important tenants. Agnelli parked there on the odd occasion he drove himself to work. The Director of the Ministry. The Commissioners of the Liquor Licensing Board. Senior managers from the private companies which occupied the building’s middle levels.

  Taking up two spaces at the bottom of the ramp was a huge silver Mercedes, top of the range, an interloper among the familiar collection of managerial Magnas and executive Audis. At the far end of the garage, next to the lift, was a luminous white blob, Agnelli’s official Fairlane. Beside it, wiping the windscreen, was Agnelli’s driver, Alan.

  Not Alan, I realised, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom. Alan was in his mid-fifties, a fastidious ex-corporal who spent his off-road moments burnishing the Fairlane’s duco and picking dead insects out of its chrome work. But, apart from sharing his general height and build, this guy bore no resemblance whatsoever to Alan. Nor was he cleaning the Fairlane’s window. Palm cupped, he was scrutinising the car’s interior with what I instinctively took to be no good intent.

  He was somewhere around my age, mid-thirties, and he affected the style of a spiv. His dark hair was sleekly combed, his trousers and tie black and too narrow. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled to mid-forearm. He carried himself with the loose-limbed posture of a man who wants it understood that he is handy at close quarters. The only thing missing was the jemmy in his hand. As I drew near, he leaned insolently against the Fairlane’s door and tracked my approach through the twin mirrors of aviator sunglasses with an air of casual menace.

  I had neither reason nor inclination to respond to the implicit challenge of his stance. Carpark monitor wasn’t my job-if I still had a job. The security of Agnelli’s vehicle was Alan’s responsibility, not mine. Unfortunately, the stranger was between me and the lift, making no effort to move aside. To get past, I’d virtually have to brush against him.

  As I closed the last few paces between us, the man’s features became more distinct. I realised, with dismay, that I knew him. Nearly twenty years had passed, but it was impossible not to recognise Spider Webb. Mr and Mrs Webb may have called their little boy Noel, but at school he was always the Spider.

  Despite his nickname, there was nothing arachnoid about Spider. No spindly limbs or jutting canines. On the contrary. He had an athletic build, high cheekbones and fleshy, petulant lips. He would almost have been handsome if not for his ears. You only had to look at Noel Webb to know why they called them jug ears. Chrome-plated, his head wouldn’t have looked out of place in a trophy cabinet. Wing-nut would have been a better nickname. But Spider, despite Noel’s dislike for it, was the one that stuck. It suited him. There was something predatory about Spider, cold-blooded, self-serving. He’d been like that at sixteen, and he was still like that. You could read it in his pose. We’d been friends once, or so I thought. Then things had happened, violent things that gave me no reason whatsoever to want to renew our boyhood acquaintance. Especially since Spider had clearly fulfilled the criminal promise of his youth. I hoped to Jesus he didn’t recognise me.

  As I approached, he massaged a piece of chewing gum loose from its pack, tossed it into his mouth and rolled his head like a prize-fighter readying himself for a bout. I resigned myself to our reunion, waiting for him to speak.

  But Spider said nothing, gave no explicit sign of recognition. It had been a long time. With luck, he might not remember me. If he didn’t speak, I decided, neither would I.

  Back to the wall, I sidled past, head up, eyes straight ahead. We were almost exactly the same height and so close that my own face stared back at me from the mercury pools of Spider’s sunglasses. Stereoscopic reflections, I thought, of a man not quite succeeding in mastering his loathing.

  Spider straightened a little to allow me passage but still he said nothing. His face had slackened into a sphinx-like inscrutability. Only the muscles of his jaw moved, flexing almost imperceptibly around his gum, a gesture of contemptuous amusement at the discomfort of a stranger. Still an arsehole after all these years.

  I pressed on. As I crossed the final few paces to the lift, I heard a dismissive, barely audible grunt and felt hidden eyes boring
into my back. Then the lift doors yawned before me and out stepped Alan, a polystyrene cup in his hand, his gaze darting towards the Fairlane. Nodding, I stepped into the lift. As the doors whoomphed closed behind me, I felt a shudder of what could have been either relief or foreboding.

  If ever there was a bird of ill omen, it was Spider Webb. Loosen up, I told myself, pushing the button for the top floor. It’s only a job. It’s not the measure of your worth as a human being. There’s always the slow descent into alcoholism and penury to look forward to.

  The door slid open to a re-enactment of the evacuation of Saigon. Boxes of documents littered the corridors. Base-grade clerks from the Translation and Information sections bustled about, pushing trolleys in and out of rooms. Trish stood feeding files into the shredder. I recognised one of mine, Current Issues in the Macedonian Community. It was a slim document and held no state secrets, but that wasn’t the point.

  Agnelli had been at Ethnic Affairs long enough to generate more than enough stuff-ups to provide ammunition to his political enemies. Especially those from his own party. So before his replacement arrived everything short of the potted plants would be fed into the shredder. By the end of the day, some of my most skilfully wrought briefing papers would be reduced to a pile of fly-specked tagliatelle in the ministerial dumpster. I prayed that I wouldn’t be in there with them.

  Back when she ran the electorate office, Trish had been a rough diamond, well-upholstered and ready for anything. She was efficient, smart and knew her stuff. Eventually, Agnelli was persuaded to overlook her rougher edges and reward her loyalty with a promotion. A monster was born. Within a month of being made his private secretary, she’d joined Gloria Marshall and taken a course in fire breathing. Success, in accordance with the fashion of the day, had gone straight to her shoulders. She glanced up from the papery gnashing of her task and tossed a nod in the general direction of Agnelli’s shut door. ‘Take a number and wait,’ she commanded.