Stiff Read online

  ‘I’d like to help you, mate. I really would,’ I said. ‘But you’ve got the wrong department.’

  Ant finished buttoning up the National Gallery, ran his hand through his greasy pompadour and looked deeply wronged. ‘I rung up Consumer Protection. They said I should try my local member.’

  Typical. Consumer Protection took the cake at pass-the-parcel. I nodded understandingly and went through the motions of taking down the particulars. This was the first instance of a dyslexic tattooist that Mrs Wills’ office had ever been called upon to address, I explained. And while the Minister would undoubtedly be sympathetic, in a case like this the powers of an elected member of the state’s legislative chamber of review might be somewhat circumscribed.

  The Sun lay between us on top of my overflowing in-tray, still folded open at page seventeen. If I don’t piss this joker off soon, I thought, Parliament will begin sitting and Charlene will be unreachable for the rest of the day.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere, pal,’ said Ant. ‘Until this thing is fixed.’

  ‘This is a legal matter,’ I said. ‘Restitution, Punitive damages.’ These were words he liked. ‘You need the Community Legal Service.’ The Family Law Act surely included provisions for the irretrievable breakdown of the relationship between a man, his tattooist, and his intended.

  Looking like the height of efficiency, I dialled the CLS and made an appointment, skipping the details in case they thought I was pulling their collective leg. Friday was the earliest the slack-arses could squeeze him in. ‘This lot will look after you,’ I told Ant. ‘Top people.’

  The CLS was half a mile down the road. I drew a map, wrote the appointment details underneath, and slid it across the desk.

  Ant folded his arms across his chest. ‘You’re just trying to give me the bounce.’

  True. But it wasn’t as though I hadn’t given it my best shot first. ‘Look mate,’ I said, marginally more firmly, ‘there’s nothing else I can do. The legal service will handle it from now on. Good luck. Let us know how you go. I’ll keep Charlene informed. But in the meantime my hands are tied.’

  He shook his head and settled his technicolour mass even more firmly into the moulded plastic cup of the seat. I opened Charlene’s correspondence file and buried my face in it, wondering how long it would take Trish to burst in with an urgent pretext. ‘Dear Madam,’ the top letter began. ‘You are a pinko ratbag bitch.’

  Five minutes later I was still pretending to read and Ant was continuing to glare. What did he want me to do? Whip out a bottle of correcting fluid and a blue biro and personally amend his faulty chest? ‘I’ll call the cops,’ I said, lamely.

  He snorted derisively. Quite right, too. For a start, we could hardly be seen having someone dragged away merely for demanding that the government do something about their problems. That, after all, was what we were there for.

  Also, I found it hard to sound convincing. If I called the coppers on every cantankerous customer we had, they’d have to start running a shuttle bus. And given the ongoing budgetary constraints faced by the various agencies under the jurisdiction of the Minister for Police and Emergency Services, a factional ally of Charlene, that was a poor prospect.

  Mainly, however, I couldn’t call the coppers on some lovestruck dumb-bum with Cupid engraved on his left tit because such an encounter was unlikely to be conducive to an outcome of social equity. Let the coppers catch who they could. I’d gone to school with blokes like Ant, and having to resort to the wallopers in my dealings with them would have been an affront to both my personal morality and my professional pride. Quarrels should be kept in the family. ‘Do us a favour,’ I suggested courteously. ‘Fuck off.’

  Ant smiled maliciously and leaned back like he had all the time in the world. Fortunately, at exactly that moment the phone rang. It wasn’t Trish but Greg Coates, a deputy director in the Melbourne office of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs.

  Nearly a quarter of the electors of the Province of Melbourne Upper had been born overseas and it wasn’t uncommon for constituents with an immigration problem to turn up on our doorstep. No problem. Immigration is a Commonwealth matter, so all we had to do was steer them over to the local federal member.

  But, as often as not, the problems were little more than language mix-ups, and it would have been criminal of me to allow an important federal politician to be burdened with such trifling matters. Especially if Charlene could get the credit for fixing them. Which wasn’t difficult to arrange since Greg Coates had been a mate since university, and was both a fellow spear-carrier in my faction and a member of the same party branch. So about once a week Greg gave me a call and we cut a bit of red tape together and swapped political gossip.

  I swivelled my seat around, pointedly turning my back on the tattooed wonder, and spent fifteen minutes firming up a batch of family reunion applications. Eventually Coates made his way, as if in passing, to the prospect of an early election. There was a lot of speculation about, and what with Charlene being in Cabinet, Coates was always trying to weasel the latest inside info out of me.

  I told him what I knew, which was exactly zip, and we finished off with the customary exchange of promises to get together for a drink. When I spun my seat around to hang up, Ant had helped himself to my Sun and was pretending to read it, something he wouldn’t really be able to do until he developed the intellectual capacity of an eight-year-old.

  I was about to get seriously snaky when the phone rang again. This time it was a nice old Greek pensioner whose plumbing difficulties I had been shepherding through the maintenance division of the Housing Ministry. In comparison with the idiocy incarnate sitting opposite me, the institutional oddities at Housing were child’s play. I made a couple of quick calls to the appropriate authorities, threw my weight about in a minor way, and called the old bat to reassure her that she’d be flushing again before she knew it.

  By that stage, it was too late to call Charlene. Besides which, the day had kicked in with its customary vigour. In rapid succession I had a branch treasurer ring to fish for his postage costs to be reimbursed, a school wanting Charlene for its prize night, and a personal visit from a guy with a Ned Kelly beard describing himself as Citizens For A Freeway Free Future. I took him out to the waiting area and spent half an hour outlining the intricacies of the Western Ring Road community consultative process. He kept his helmet on for the entire conversation, so I’m not sure if he understood everything I told him.

  Just after eleven Agnelli rang.

  Angelo Agnelli was Charlene Wills’ ministerial adviser at Industry. The Industry Ministry was where government policy rubbed noses with the big end of town. The nose was Ange’s weapon of choice and Charlene paid him a princely sum to implement initiatives, expedite the legislative process, keep the mandarins on their toes, and God knew what else. Recently, he’d been making the effort to find the time to look over my shoulder and make tut-tutting noises.

  That day, the big bee in Agnelli’s bonnet was Joe Lollicato. A couple of years previously, Joe had been elected to one of the municipal councils in the area. And in the last round of local government polls he’d been returned with a handsomely increased majority. To Agnelli, who’d never been elected to anything in his life, this sort of personal popularity was both a personal affront and evidence that Lollicato was positioning himself to seize the party’s endorsement away from Charlene.

  ‘Forget Lolly,’ I told him. ‘Parliamentary ambitions are a fact of life around here. Lolly wouldn’t be the first person in local government to start thinking he’s on the up-escalator to Canberra. But if Lollicato wants a stab at Charlene’s job, and that’s a debatable point, he’ll have to wait until she decides to go, then take his chances along with everyone else. If he tries anything sooner, he’ll find out that a stretch at a suburban town hall, a few half-baked factional connections, and an Italian surname won’t be enough to convince a pre-selection panel to dump a sitting member. A minister at that.’

/>   Agnelli refused to be mollified. ‘There are plenty of people in the party who’d like to see Charlene taken down a peg or two. Lollicato’s a sneaky little prick. It wouldn’t pay to underestimate his deviousness. He’s got more friends than you’d suspect.’

  These were facts that could not be disputed, but they were hardly very specific, just the usual Labor Party love talk. The real reason for Agnelli’s antagonism towards Lollicato, I suspect, was cultural. I thought this because sensitivity to ethnic cultural nuances was an essential aspect of my professional capabilities.

  Charlene’s electorate, the whole area in fact, had Italians coming out of its armpits. Fully a quarter of all the Italians in the entire country lived in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, not counting their second and third generation descendants. This was apart from the Greeks, Lebanese, Maltese, Macedonians, Turks and Maoris. All things considered, Melbourne Upper should have been called Wogolopolis. A high level of skill in multiculturalism was, therefore, an indispensable aspect of my job.

  It was, I believed, a requirement I fulfilled as reasonably as could be expected for the descendant of three generations of Irish publicans. I had been handing out how-to-vote cards in Italian since I was a teenager. I knew better than to confuse the Federazione Italiana Lavoratori e Famigli with the Comitato d’Assistenza Italiano. I knew who could be relied on at the vegetable market to buy a book of raffle tickets at election time, and whose brother-in-law was private secretary for the Christian Democrat mayor of San Benedetto del Tronto. And while I would have been the first to admit to having trouble picking a Guelph from a Ghibelline in a dappled olive grove in the Tuscan twilight, I could, to the extent required by profession, reasonably claim to know my tortellini from my tartufo. ‘This isn’t some sort of Italian crap, it is Ange?’ I said.

  Agnelli was obsessed. ‘That little shit Lollicato is capable of doing any amount of damage if he thinks he can use it to his own advantage. You see the newspaper this morning?’

  ‘Minister in Pre-Selection Wrangle?’

  ‘Jesus, where was that?’ There was real panic in Agnelli’s voice.

  ‘Relax, Ange. You mean the dead guy at the meatworks in Coolaroo? I’ve been wondering about that. What’s the story?’

  Agnelli’s voice took on a gossipy conspiratorial hiss. ‘What are doing for lunch?’

  ‘I was thinking of having a pie.’ I whispered back. ‘You reckon it’s safe?’

  ‘Be serious for a minute, can’t you, Murray? I’m trying to put something useful your way. Come into town.’

  I swung my chair around. The amazing tattooed nuisance had his boots on my desk, right on top of the in-tray. ‘I dunno,’ I told Agnelli. ‘I’ve got a lot in front of me at the moment.’

  ‘I’ll buy.’ Agnelli’s salary was nearly double mine and this was his first gesture of generosity with anything but unsolicited advice. Clearly, something was going on.

  ‘Ministry or House?’

  ‘House. And since you’re coming in, can you do us a favour and give old Picone a lift. He’s having lunch with Charlene and I want to pick a bone with the old bugger first. Give him the two-dollar tour and bring him downstairs.’

  I took my umbrella off the filing cabinet, turned off the two-bar radiator and gently moved Ant’s feet over to the out-tray.

  ‘Anyone calls,’ I said. ‘I’ll be out for the rest of the day.’

  October was shaping up as the customary disappointment, dithering between erupting into spring or pissing down all the way to Christmas. For the second week in a row, the predicted break in the damp had failed to materialise and rumour had it that the smart money was out the back sawing gopher wood into cubits and collecting matched pairs of animals.

  In the rare intervals between showers, masses of frigid air fleeing north from Tasmania or some similarly dismal polar region swept into town and did their best to give spring a bad name. An hour after Agnelli’s call I was copping the full brunt of one of these tornadoes as I trudged my way up the terrace of Parliament House.

  Our glorious forebears, febrile with easy money and puffed up with Victorian self-aggrandisement, had built the House on a hill and modelled it on classical lines, all monumental portico and reiterated horizontal emphasis. The result was considered by some to be a commanding vista. Personally, with nothing to deflect the nut-numbing elements but a two-piece ninety-nine-dollar del Monaco special, and my pace slowed by the company of a wheezing geriatric, I found it all a trifle overstated. When Ennio Picone stopped for the third time for a bit of a breather. I grabbed his arm and all but frogmarched him up the last dozen steps and into the shelter of the foyer. Gentleman that he was, Picone took it for a courtesy. Gentleman that I was, I let him.

  Ennio Picone was one of Charlene Wills’ prize constituents, an elegant seventy-seven-year-old with fine hands and a matinee moustache. At one time the leader of a dance band, he had spent thirty years tirelessly orchestrating the social life of the electorate’s Italians. He had played at their weddings. He had taught music to their children and grandchildren. And now that they were retired, he organised their leisure—for which their grown-up children were profoundly grateful.

  Those of us who conducted Charlene’s affairs knew that we ignored this little old man’s ceaseless vitality at our peril. He warranted special attention. It was my job to see that he got it. I wondered what Agnelli wanted with him.

  I walked Picone across the coat-of-arms inlaid in the foyer floor and led him into a spacious, high-ceilinged hall with an iceberg of white marble shaped like the young Queen Victoria embedded in the carpet. Leading off to one side was a corridor and a high double doorway. ‘Charlene will be with you as soon as possible, Maestro Picone,’ I said. ‘She’s a bit busy right now.’

  I shouldered one of the doors open and casually displayed the interior of the parliamentary chamber. It was quite small, hardly more than twenty paces deep, but utterly fantastic, the plaster and gilt hallucination of an imagination overdosed on allegory. Not a surface in the entire room had escaped being moulded, embossed, inlaid, fluted, scalloped, gilded or engraved. Ant’s tattoos had nothing on this joint.

  An arcade of ivory columns flanked the walls. Above, a squadron of bare-bosomed Amazons brandished symbolic artefacts—the Spear of Boadicea, the Laurels of Victory, the Sheathed Sword of Mercy, the Chain of—what, of Command? Unicorns capered down the wall, and eagles fluttered on high. Heraldic waffle-work of every description abounded unbound, cascading downwards to the rose of padded leather upon which the Honourable Members of the Legislative Council lounged like so many bull seals on a rocky headland.

  Best of all, and this was even more than I could have hoped for, Charlene Wills herself was holding the floor.

  Charlene was in her mid-fifties, at the height of her powers and, apparently, enjoying herself immensely. When the Cabinet posts had been dished out after the election, there had never been any doubt that Charlene would get a guernsey. For a start she had the factional support, but on top of that she was popular, visible and had a tone of voice that scared the living shit out of the boys in the caucus.

  She was using it now, a relentless, piercing monotone capable of reducing even the most fractious party conference to numbed compliance. Her topic was obscure—some amendment to some paragraph of some sub-section of some Act, but she was giving it her usual all. You could tell straight off that she knew her stuff and would waste no opportunity to bore it right up the Opposition first chance she got. She was loyal, conscientious, devoted to her constituents, and I loved her like a mother, which was convenient as I no longer had one of my own. Her colostomy bag you couldn’t notice, even if you were one of the very few who knew about it.

  Unfortunately I’d seen less and less of her in the previous two years. What with being a senior minister and Leader of the Government in the Upper House, she found it hard to make time for electorate matters and had been forced to leave me more or less to my own devices. It was getting so that I virtually had to f
ight my way through a phalanx of bureaucrats and ministerial advisers just to talk to her, apart from our regular fortnightly meetings. And she’d cancelled the last two of those.

  Which reminded me of Agnelli. I allowed Picone a lingering moment to fully register the sumptuousness of his surroundings, and Charlene’s central place in them, then tapped him on the shoulder. ‘This way, Maestro.’ I made a courtly sweep of the arm. Ostentation is never wasted on Italians.

  Parliament, we both knew, was a pantomime. Real power was exercised across the road in the Department of Premier and Cabinet, in Management and Budget, in offices with whiteboards and synthetic carpet tiles. But you could hardly impress a constituent with an open plan office and an ergonomic typist’s chair, however artfully constructed.

  I led Picone along the oak-panelled corridor and down a narrow staircase into a vaulted chamber of bluestone and exposed brick, the law’s subterranean forge. Charlene’s parliamentary office was a glassed-in alcove tucked under one of the supporting arches. Two desks took up most of it, each buried under piles of well-thumbed papers, sheaves of documents bound in manilla folders thick with registry notations. Shelves crowded with green-bound volumes of Hansard and glossy policy proclamations ran up the walls. What little space remained was occupied by a heavy leather chesterfield and a cheap glass-topped coffee table littered with government brochures and the day’s newspapers.

  A tinny speaker on the wall was broadcasting Charlene’s oration from the chamber above. Underneath it, sitting on a corner of one of the desks like he could think of nothing more deserving of his time than greeting the Minister’s visitors, was Angelo Agnelli. It was novel to see him sitting somewhere other than on a fence.

  Ange was pushing forty just a tad harder than it was pushing back. He had a full head of photogenic black hair, a chubby boyish face skin-deep in conviviality, a manner calculated to make people feel that he had their number. Angelo Agnelli collected numbers. Sometimes they even added up.