The Brush-Off Read online

  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 undiplomatic, 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.

  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 wou
ld 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.