Stiff Page 5

  I was watching the back pocket of Ayisha’s jeans disappear through the open door and telling myself to get real when two plain-clothed coppers blew in with the breeze. What with the Hardcase Hilton across the road, dicks weren’t an unusual sight in the neighbourhood. The major crime squad guys tended to the handy, all-weather look of well-off tradesmen and you had to be sharp to spot them. But these two were local CIB in three-piece suits that might as well have been uniforms.

  They looked me over like I wasn’t there and swaggered down the back to the two green baize tables where the same dozen old paesani sat day after day drinking coffee and shouting at each other over hands of cards. I had never seen any money on the tables and there was none there now, just a sudden, un-Italian silence and the hissing of the espresso machine. The coppers looked. The old men looked back. Something half-forgotten surfaced in my memory, a blue sleeve with sergeant’s stripes, the taste of blood.

  Then as suddenly as they had arrived, the forces of law and order were gone, trailing the knuckles of their authority. Ciccio said something that sent a ripple of quiet laughter running through the card players. The cards swished again. I washed my mouth out with cold coffee dregs and went next door to the office.

  Adam F. Ant was still lounging around my cubicle like he owned the joint, his head buried in a copy of Labor Star. Who did he think he was kidding? Not even its own editors pretended to read the Labor Star. I shoved his feet off the desk and rang Bernice Kaufman, an industrial officer on the top floor at the Trades Hall. Bernice had done me the big favour once, just the once, back at university. Ever since she could be relied on to never pass up an opportunity to patronise me.

  ‘It’s about that thing in this morning’s paper,’ I said. ‘The bloke dead at the meatworks.’

  True to form, Bernice launched straight into a rave about how only a halfwit would believe what he read in the Sun. The halfwit I took to be me. Shorn of its sarcasm, the rest of what she said merely confirmed that there was no truth at all to the alleged interest of the Trades Hall executive in the matter. As soon as I could get a word in edgeways, I told her that, since the death had happened in the electorate, it might be appropriate for Charlene to send her condolences to the dead bloke’s workmates. Did she know anyone who could put me onto the shop steward at the meatworks?

  Bernice made her snooty exasperated noise and the phone started playing a particularly frenzied arrangement of ‘Für Elise’. While I was waiting for her to come back on, I punched the phone’s hands-free button and sprayed transistorised Beethoven all over Ant, hoping art might succeed where reason had failed. Three minutes later when Bernice came back on the line, he was humming along.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ve been talking to the Meaties. They reckon your best bet is to contact the shop steward out there. Name of Herb Gardiner. And by the way, they reckon that if there’d been any union issues involved in the death, Gardiner would have been onto them like a shot. Real stickler for the award, apparently. Hasn’t said boo.’

  In a world of ceaseless change, I found something gratifyingly predictable about being patronised by Bernice. I scribbled the shop steward’s name on a sheet of office stationery and shoved it in a manilla folder along with the coroner’s envelope. While I was writing, Trish came in and handed Ant a phone message slip. He glanced at it and laid it on the desk in front of me. If he made himself any more at home, he’d be on the payroll by the end of the week.

  The message slip said Agnelli had rung, wanting me to call back ASAP. It was always like this. Now that I had agreed to buy into this Lollicato thing, Agnelli would be on my back every five minutes. Having to write a spurious bloody report was enough of a waste of time without ceaseless fireside chats. I stuffed the message slip into my jacket pocket and stuck my head around the partition.

  Ant had ambled out into the reception area and was flashing his stomach at a pair of Coptic monks. Trish was juggling two phones, relaying something about Supporting Mothers’ Benefits to a bedraggled teenage mum in a ‘Miami Vice’ sweatshirt. A toddler in a wet disposable was pulling a Wilderness Society poster off the wall.

  Without the slightest tinge of guilt, I stuck the Pacific Pastoral file under my arm and nicked out the back door. The wretched of the earth could wait, at least until tomorrow.

  Off Sydney Road the traffic was quieter. The streets were lined with weatherboard bungalows, single-storey terraces and, here and there, the saw-toothed roofs of small factories. This was Labor heartland, the safest seats in the country— Calwell, Batman, Lalor, Coburg, Brunswick. Electorates whose names resonated with certainty in the ears of backroom psephologists from Spring Street to Canberra. In some booths here we outpolled the Libs three to one. Made you wonder who the one was.

  Red’s school lay halfway between the office and home, a slate-roofed state primary. For its first hundred years it had specialised in producing ruckmen, armed robbers and apprentices to the hairdressing trade. Now it had a library wing and ran programs in two community languages. I found Redmond in after-school care with the other dozen or so second and third graders, Matildas, Dylans and Toulas left behind when the proper parents swooped at three-thirty. They were cutting the heads off models in K-Mart catalogues. Red flung his schoolbag on top of the insulation batts and we drove home.

  Home was a sixty-year-old weatherboard still in its first coat of paint, one of a spec tract built cheaply in the twenties. Wendy and I had bought it soon after Red came along. The sign had read ‘Promises Ample Renovation Opportunity for Imaginative First Home Buyer’, meaning it was all we could afford. We were both at the Labor Resource Centre at that point, getting paid a pittance to crank out discussion papers. Workforce segmentation in the footwear sector. Industrial democracy in the electricity generation industry. Not the most lucrative of postings.

  So far, Ample Renovation had consisted of Wendy planting a native garden and spending a small fortune on House and Garden while I did as much as a man can do using only hand tools and y-chromosomes. All up, the Opportunity had been greater than either of us was capable of rising to. The set of architect’s plans pinned to the kitchen wall, token of our future there together, had long since turned yellow and begun curling at the corners.

  Still, Red and I were making a pretty good fist of domesticity. Not that this was immediately apparent to the untrained eye. On the superficial indices of good housekeeping we probably rated fairly low. But we were comfortable and basic hygiene was maintained. And I doggedly persisted in addressing some of the more ongoing infrastructure issues. My objective that afternoon was to maximise our energy efficiency. First I dredged a knife out of the scrap heap in the sink and made two peanut butter sandwiches, folded not cut. ‘Now do your homework,’ I growled.

  The kid rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t have homework, Dad. I’m only in Grade Two.’

  ‘‘Then you can watch TV, as long as it’s something educational.’

  We repeated this corny dialogue word-for-word every afternoon. It was as much a part of our routine as tinned tomato soup on Sunday nights and always being late for school. Red was the best accident I had ever had. He was clever, biddable, undemanding company, and more mature than his baby face and mop of angelic curls suggested. He had missed Wendy a lot at first and still stacked on the occasional turn, but all in all he had adapted pretty well to our bachelor-boy existence.

  He took his sandwiches into the lounge room and turned on the television. I use the term lounge room in its generic sense. It might be better described as a cave with floorboards. It had long come to terms with the fact that it would never be a sunny, north-facing, energy-efficient, entertainment/ kitchen area with stylish black and white checkerboard titles.

  While Red watched the Road Runner, I changed into overalls, ran a ladder up to the ceiling trapdoor in the hall and plugged the lamp from Wendy’s side of the bed into an extension lead. Then I spent half an hour hauling the bulky mattresses of fibreglass out of the car and up into the roof cavity. From
outside, the roof looked sound enough. But in the confined gloom of the cavity, the sheets of corrugated iron revealed themselves to be a filigree of rust held tenuously in place by inertia and ancient cobwebs.

  Squatting low on the dusty rafters, I began sidling along, cutting sections of the insulation and stuffing them into place in the irregular gaps between the timbers as I went. Working at a constant crouch was harder and slower work than I had anticipated, and I soon had a sweat up. Minute particles of fibreglass worked themselves up my sleeves and under my collar, sticking to my skin. In case they were carcinogenic I breathed through my nose. Little fragments of pink lodged in my nostril hairs.

  That’s the problem with working for yourself. The pay is lousy, the conditions suck, and the boss couldn’t give a flying continental about safety. The job should only have taken an hour but with all the fiddling around I must have lost track of the time. Down below the television droned on, constant and indistinct.

  It was just as I was reaching over to jam the last batt into place in the tight angle beneath the eaves that something cold and hard struck me on the back of the head. A wave of nauseating giddiness roared in my ears and I toppled forwards, arms scrabbling uselessly in the air. A vice of jagged metal clamped hard around my neck, pinning me so I could neither sit nor stand. Everything went black.

  The next thing I knew, a cool clamminess was washing over my face. I blinked rapidly and opened my eyes. Everything was still black. I felt panic surge, then abate as I realised what had happened. I had lost my balance and punched my head clear through the metal roof, jamming my neck in the hole. The darkness was the night which had fallen unnoticed around me. From the shoulders down I was locked in a painful crouch. From the chin up I was John the Baptist on a platter. By twisting my neck against my rough iron collar, I could just make out the street below, deserted but for a handful of parked cars. Far off on the horizon, the illuminated cranes and rising tower blocks of the city winked and glistened, mocking me.

  ‘Red,’ I screamed at the top of my lungs. At exactly that moment a lashing torrent of rain descended, a pitiless wintry surf. Water cascaded down the corrugations of the iron and ran down the imperfect seal formed by my neck. I crouched helpless, feeling it gushing into my overalls. Over the pounding din I could just hear the ‘Dr Who’ theme seeping upwards, and above that a higher, more insistent sound, the impatient ringing of the telephone.

  The choice was between drowning and cutting my own throat. I took the second option. Screwing my eyes shut and gripping a timber cross-piece, I jerked downwards with all my might, nearly ripping my ears off and wincing as I felt my cheeks raked with sharp edges of metal.

  The minor haemorrhage that resulted was nothing, however, compared with the cataract that descended onto the newly laid insulation once my head was no longer plugging the hole in the roof. I quickly stripped of my overalls, rolled them into a makeshift plug and stuffed up the hole.

  Stuffed up being the operative expression.

  When eventually I had staunched the flow of water I climbed down the ladder, bleeding, goose-pimpled and draped with cobwebs. Red glanced up from the idiot box for the merest second, then turned his eyes back to the screen. He had seen his father Do It Yourself before.

  ‘Who was that on the phone?’ I shouted above the rain pummelling the windows.

  Red shrugged and flipped channels. ‘When’s tea?’ he said, crescent moons of sandwich crusts on his lap. ‘I’m starving.’

  The refrigerator yielded up a carton of milk, five fish fingers, two potatoes, a carrot and half a tray of ice cubes. I put the fish things in the oven, stuck the vegetables on the gas to boil and dropped the ice into a glass on top of an antiseptic dose of Jamesons.

  The whiskey was more warming than the tepid trickle that issued from the antique water heater on the bathroom wall. I lathered up and listened to the whining of the pipes. The whole room joined in, crying out to be transformed into an airy atrium lined with glass bricks and filled with moisture-loving plants. I finished my drink slowly, waiting for the water to run cold and wondering where I could get hold of a cheap roofer. This was one of the few times I ever wished I had friends in the building industry unions.

  At the back of the bathroom cupboard behind a lonesome franger, its use-by date long expired, I found a bottle of mercurochrome and daubed red lines down the scratches on my ears, neck and face. As an omen of the pitfalls that were to confront me over the following three days, I can think of nothing more eloquent than the bedraggled zebra that resulted, staring back at me from my fog-misted bathroom mirror. Tetanus, cancer, involuntary celibacy, a hole in the roof. You name it, chances were I had it.

  A couple of fish fingers, and Red’s memory came back. ‘Oh year, Mum said to tell you she’s been ringing everywhere but you’re never there. She said she’ll try again tomorrow. And guess what she’s bought me. A Dino-Rider. The one with laser weapons.’

  Weapons? Apparently Canberra was doing nothing for Wendy’s ideological rigour. After dinner, a little convivial family viewing and the customary buggerising around, I finally managed to badger Red into bed. The week before he’d been content to read himself to sleep, but that night he wanted to be babied. Hard day at the office, I guessed.

  He dragged a big picture book out of a batch that Wendy had brought home from a sale at the Equal Opportunity Resource Centre, earnest stuff with titles like Miranda Has Two Mummies and Yes, Raoul Is Different. Fortunately, that night’s choice was one of the less pedagogically strident. Folk Wisdom of the World’s Peoples was its eagerly redundant title. Red snuggled deeper under the quilt and I opened the book at random: ‘Of all of the wise men of Turkey none is more famous than Nasreddin Hoca...’

  Above the text was a pen and wash picture of a tubby old man with a bushy white beard, curly slippers and a turban the size of a load of washing. Red nodded his approval and I read on.

  One day Nasreddin Hoca was invited to give the sermon at the mosque in his village. He mounted the pulpit and asked, ‘O True Believers, do you know what I am going to say to you today?’ The congregation looked at each other in confusion and shook their heads. ‘We have no idea,’ they said. ‘If you have no idea,’ said Nasreddin Hoca, ‘what is the use of my talking to you?’ With that he descended from the pulpit and went home.

  As I read, I glanced furtively down at the child’s face, seeking out hopeful signs of sleep’s imminent arrival.

  The following week he entered the mosque, mounted the pulpit and again asked the congregation, ‘O True Believers, do you know what I am going to talk to you about today?’ ‘Yes,’ said the wily ones. ‘Well, if you already know,’ said Nasreddin Hoca, ‘what is the use of my telling you?’ And again he descended from the pulpit and went home. The next week he mounted the pulpit and asked the very same question. ‘O True Believers, do you know what I am going to talk to you about today?’ The people of the congregation had considered their reply. ‘Some of us do and some of us do not,’ they cried. ‘In that case,’ said Nasreddin Hoca, ‘let those of you who know tell those who do not.’

  Christ only knew what a child was supposed to make of this drivel. It sounded like a Treasury position paper. Fortunately it also produced a similar effect. A muddy glaze was settling over Red’s eyes. I droned on, my tone deliberately monotonous. Halfway through the parable of the walnut and the watermelon, bye-byes arrived and slipped Red silently across the border into the Land of Nod. As I laid the book down and tiptoed out of the room, he stirred a little, scratched his head and began quietly to snore.

  The deluge outside had dropped to a steady patter. I climbed the ladder and checked the roof. So far so good. My impromptu engineering was holding up remarkably well. The plug of rolled-up overalls was a sodden mass, but it had swelled to a tight fit and very little water was leaking through. Just to be on the safe side, I sat a bucket underneath, balanced on a plank running across two of the rafters.

  Then I screwed the top off the Jamesons and sat down with
the Pacific Pastoral file. I looked at the photos first, spilling them across the kitchen table. The corpse had a face only a mother could love, a sentimental Hittite mother with cataracts. Apart from that, all you could tell was that he could have done with a course at Weight Watchers and that he was dead. I turned to the papers.

  No wonder Charlene had made a point of telling Agnelli to get them back on her desk pronto. Many strings had been jerked and much red tape scissored to get this little collection of paper together. Preliminary reports of the Department of Labour Accident Investigations Division, photocopies of internal police incident sheets, and draft summaries from the coroner’s office did not spontaneously aggregate in the privacy of some filing cabinet and decide to throw themselves across the desk of the first available minister. The regrettable demise of Ekrem Bayraktar three days before had set the hidden hand of some dedicated paper chaser into motion.

  But as far as I could tell, it had hardly been worth the bother. This was about as prosaic a stack of forms as death ever filled out. If there had ever been any drama here, it had quickly been reduced to a homogeneous grey soup of bureaucratese, lacking even the frisson of an interdepartmental difference of opinion. The medicos, the police, the coronial and departmental investigators were all in furious agreement.

  The bare facts outlined were these. Bayraktar was Turkish. That much I had been right about. He had been in Australia three years, status permanent resident. His address was in Blyth Street, Brunswick, a flat I assumed. No next of kin was listed. He had been with Pacific Pastoral for a little over two years and as a leading-hand storeman had regular access to the plant’s storage freezers. Some time during Friday afternoon he had let himself into Number 3 chiller. He did this on his own initiative, without informing anyone and for reasons not apparent. Everyone was very clear on that point.