Sucked In Read online

  Introduced at the pre-dinner booze-and-schmooze, we’d let our eyes do the talking across the floral centrepiece during the leek tartlets, given our dates the slip half-way through the pan-seared spatchcock, and found ourselves going the slam against a concrete wall in the emergency exit somewhere between the Most Outstanding Contribution to Obesity Awareness and the Best Jingle in a Cough Suppressant Commercial. Fifteen minutes later, she was stepping onto the stage to accept her trophy, not a hair out of place.

  No visible hair, at least. Several of her short and curlies were stuck to the roof of my mouth, a piquant textural counterpoint to the passionfruit panacotta.

  Ours was a no-strings, no-promises, no-assumptions arrangement. It suited us both. She was married, I was amenable. If Kelly Cusack needed attention, I was happy to provide it, even at short notice and close quarters. We hardly ever talked politics. Or much else, for that matter. Too busy with the wham-bam.

  Although she was fastidious about her appearance and circumspect in regard to our assignations, Kelly had a taste for quickies. What stoked her fire were knee-tremblers in risky locales, situations with a high prospect of having our coitus interrupted in flagrante. Since the episode in the hotel stairwell, we’d abandoned caution in the kitchenette of a corporate box at the tennis centre during the mixed doubles final of the Australian Open, in a fitting cubicle in the Myer menswear department, in the back of an ABC outside-broadcast van and between the buttress roots of a Moreton Bay fig in the Fitzroy Gardens. On the solitary occasion we’d taken a hotel room, she’d unpacked my lunch in the lift on the way upstairs.

  But going the goat on the despatch table in the Legislative Council really did redefine the parameters of parliamentary privilege. My heart was thumping. My loins were pumping. My pulse was ringing in my ears. Ring-ring, ring-ring, ring-ring.

  Not my pulse. A mobile phone. Close. Very close. Kelly abruptly jack-knifed upright, bucking me off at the exact moment my honourable member reached the climax of his oration.

  She dived for her carry-all and tore it open. ‘Helloo,’ she warbled, chest heaving. ‘Oh hi, darling.’ She rose from the carpet, Eriksson pressed to her baize-burnished cheek. ‘What? No, fine, just run up some stairs, that’s all.’ She mouthed her husband’s name, as if I needed telling. ‘What, right now?’

  I teetered unsteadily, my legs jelly, my lap a swamp, my standard at half-mast, and plonked myself down in the President’s chair. Kelly continued her conversation, domestic and therefore private, simultaneously wiggling back into her hosiery, counting her earrings, fluffing her cashmere and otherwise repairing her dishabille.

  By the time I’d reclaimed my wetlands, zipped my fly and run my tie back up the flagpole, she’d finished her call and traded the phone for a vanity purse. She reapplied her lippy, checked herself in the mirror, then turned to me for confirmation that she didn’t look like she’d just been schtupped in the consistory.

  ‘You’re a true professional,’ I said. ‘Best interview technique in the business. Pumping while you’re humping.’

  ‘I didn’t get much out of you.’ She patted her hair and smoothed her skirt.

  ‘More than you realise,’ I said. ‘Miss Lewinsky.’

  She reached for her rump, then jerked her hand back. ‘Ick!’

  I crouched behind her and sponged away my memorandum with a spit-wetted handkerchief, copping a feel while I was at it. ‘Now what’s this about Thorsen?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll call you later.’ She scooped up her kit. ‘Must rush.’

  I surveyed the corridor and gave her the all-clear. She sidled past, giving my bum a squeeze and my cheek a parting peck, then glided away, not a backward look, poised and purposeful. I plopped down in the place customarily occupied by the government whip, heaved a sigh and waited for my blood to settle. Seven minutes twenty-nine seconds had elapsed since we entered the chamber, a zipless PB.

  As the coital fog ebbed, I contemplated Kelly’s crack. The one about putting my hand up. What did she mean about Thorsen and the numbers? Was she working up a story? Was the cat already out of the bag, or was she just fishing?

  I’d have no answer until she called me back. Even then, I’d be lucky to get anything out of her.

  I consulted my watch. One o’clock. No wonder I was feeling peckish. Time for a smidge of the fast and easy.

  Outside on the front steps, a photographer was posing a wedding party at one of the antique light stanchions, the bride’s gown billowing. Nearby, a pair of teenage constables were keeping a bored eye on a cluster of subversive geriatrics, a thermos-fuelled vigil against the Formula One circuit in Albert Park.

  I joined the lunchtime throng on the Bourke Street footpath, and spotted an empty stool at the window-bench of Tojo Bento.

  Equipped with a plastic tray of yakitori nori and a squishy-fishy soy-sauce sachet, I parked myself at the bench and pried open a pair of disposable rainforest-timber chopsticks. As I sank my fangs into the seaweed, I unfolded Inky Donnelly’s slim collection of photocopied newspaper clippings and began to read.

  Alert and purposeful, Merv Cutlett stared into the middle distance, his jaw clenched in unwavering resolve, steely determination glinting in his gimlet eyes. His hair, thin but tenacious, was slicked back over his scalp and deep lines were etched into his sentinel face. He looked like a cross between a fox terrier and a sack of hacksaw blades.

  The photograph was Merv’s personal favourite. His Great Leader shot. He also liked Merv at Work, which showed him at his desk, staring out importantly from behind a redoubt of papers, important files weighed down by a hefty ring of keys, his emblem of office. For lighter stories, he favoured Merv Shares a Laugh, in which he appeared surrounded by a mob of admiring garbologists at the annual union picnic.

  All three were regular features of the FUME News during my stint as editor. I’d not been at the Municipals long when the incident at Lake Nillahcootie occurred. Six months or so. Thinking back, I had no firm recollection of hearing the news about Merv’s disappearance. No JFK moment. Many concerns occupy a man in his twenties, and the office is sometimes the least of them. Cutlett’s drowning was a notable event, of course, but all I could recall with any certainty was the almost palpable sense of relief it brought to the Queensberry Street office.

  As I studied Merv’s photograph, tears flooded my eyes. Bloody wasabi. Honking into a paper napkin, I turned to the next photocopy.

  It was a page from the Herald, Melbourne’s long-defunct evening broadsheet. The date was written in the margin in Inky’s shorthand scrawl. Saturday 27 July 1978. Refugee Influx Raises Fears, I read. Terrorist Bombing Shakes London. Record Profit for Qantas. Unionist Feared Drowned.

  A search has failed to find any trace of prominent union official Mervyn Cutlett, 58, who disappeared this morning while fishing on Lake Nillahcootie north of Alexandra.

  According to police, Mr Cutlett was reported to have fallen overboard in rough weather conditions. Despite repeated attempts, his companions were unable to pull him from the water. Police said that heavy rain at the scene has hampered the efforts of emergency services to locate Mr Cutlett, who is head of the Federated Union of Municipal Employees. The alarm was raised by fellow union officials Barry Quinlan and Charles Talbot. Mr Talbot was treated at the scene for hypothermia.

  The story concluded with a statement from the officer in charge about the police being short-handed due to a call-out to assist victims of flooding in other parts of the district.

  I’d forgotten about the weather, I realised. Even by Merv’s standards, it was particularly perverse to drag a pair of reluctant fishing companions out onto a lake in what must have been miserable winter conditions. No wonder Charlie had copped a dose of hypothermia. The water must have been freezing.

  The next report was lifted from the Herald’s stable-mate, the Sun. It was dated two days later, the Monday morning edition. It described a more extensive search, including the use of divers and a line search of the shore, but the headline summe
d it up. Hunt fails to find unionist’s body.

  A similar story appeared in the next day’s Age. It was slightly better written but contained no fresh information.

  Out on the street, the lunch crowd was thinning, scurrying back to the grind, shoulders hunched against the breeze. A young woman of the Oriental persuasion materialised at my elbow, washcloth in hand. A Chinese student, probably; about as Japanese as a California roll.

  ‘Jew finish?’ she said, whisking away my plastic tray and giving the benchtop a perfunctory swipe. ‘July a trink?’

  I ordered green tea. When it comes to coffee, the Nips are the pits. While I waited, I pondered the newspaper reports. Although they told me nothing I didn’t know already, they’d begun to prime the pump of my memory.

  Now that I thought about it, I seemed to remember that there were others up at the Shack that day. Colin Bishop? Someone else, too, but it eluded me for the moment.

  In any case, the incident had faded into the background pretty quickly. With Merv out of the picture, the amalgamation proceeded apace. By the end of the year, FUME had been absorbed into the PEF. The Municipals’ staff being surplus to requirements, jobs were slated for slashing and mine was high on the hit list. Charlie saw me right, though. Found me a full-time spot at the Labor Resource Centre, a policy think-tank tasked with cooking up a strategic vision to be enacted in the event that Labor ever got itself elected into government.

  Which, in due course, it did. By then, both Charlie and Barry Quinlan had seats in federal parliament, Charlie in the Reps, Quinlan in the Senate. Our glory days were upon us. I was married to Wendy and Red was on the way. And Mervyn Cutlett, like the stegosaurus, had receded into prehistoric oblivion.

  My green tea arrived, pallid but piping. While it was cooling down, I sucked air over my scalded tongue and ran my eye over the last of Inky’s pages. An obituary from the Labor Star, official organ of the ALP, it summarised the salient features of Merv’s biography.

  Born 1920, youngest son and third child of a slaughterman. Apprenticed as a motor mechanic, then worked at Footscray Council maintenance dept before volunteering for the AIF in 1940. Service in North Africa, repatriated, rejoined the council. Shop steward, then elected to union executive in 1948. Sailed close to the communist wind but never carried a card. Emerged from the splits and ructions of the fifties as national secretary, a position he continued to hold for the next two decades. One of the longest-serving union officials in Australia, survived by wife and daughter, to whom the labour movement extends its sincere condolences.

  As intimate and revealing as your average obit, it revealed nothing about his personality, such as it was. On that subject, the Great Leader photo offered more clues.

  In line with Charlie Talbot’s advice, I’d kept my contact with Cutlett to the bare minimum. But once a month, I was compelled to enter his office in the Trades Hall to get his approval for the layout sheets of the FUME News.

  ‘Look out,’ he’d say. ‘It’s Scoop Whelan, our very own Jimmy Olsen.’

  That’d get a big guffaw from Sid Gilpin, his spivvy sidekick. ‘Charlie Talbot’s bum boy,’ he’d chorus.

  Low-grade monstering, it might have got a rise out of a first-year apprentice. But it was like water off Merv’s Brylcreemed comb-over to me. I wasn’t there to bat the breeze. I was there to get the national secretary’s sign-off so I could send the union newsletter to press.

  Merv would put on his thick, big-framed reading glasses and carefully study the layout boards, all the while eyeballing me as if I was trying to pull a swiftie on him. Once he’d confirmed that his photograph did indeed appear on every second page, he’d grunt grudgingly and reach for his signing pen.

  The pen was part of a brass desk-set fashioned from an expended shell casing. Merv’s desk was a repository of such items. An ashtray on bullet legs. A cartridge cigarette lighter. A letter-opener with an anti-tank round for a handle.

  At first I’d assumed Merv’s cherished collection of museumquality trenchware was a souvenir of his war service, a reminder of his front-line participation in the global conflict against fascism. But not according to Col Bishop.

  ‘Merv never heard a shot fired in anger,’ Col once told me. ‘He was in the sanitation corps. The Royal Australian Shitshovellers. Got clapped up in Cairo then invalided home after the provos beat him to a pulp in a street brawl. But that’s not something Merv cares to advertise. He just happens to like that sort of crap. And if people want to jump to the wrong conclusion, that’s hardly Merv’s fault, is it?’

  Nor, contrary to the suggestion in his obituary, was Cutlett much of a family man. The wife might have survived him, but she was long gone. Gave him the flick some time back in the fifties, according to office rumour. The daughter—her name escaped me, perhaps I’d never known it—was sighted in his office occasionally, a listless lump of ageless frump whose resigned demeanour reinforced the assumption that old Merv was not worth breeding off.

  He was definitely a dinosaur in his general attitude to women, for all his leftist posturing. The office ‘girls’, Margot and Prue, clearly did not relish their frequent trips to the Trades Hall to fetch or deliver documents. It was not for nothing, apparently, that they called him Merv the Perv.

  I had no idea how his daughter felt about his disappearance, let alone the prospect that his remains had been resurrected from the mud at the bottom of Lake Nillahcootie. If identification of the remains involved DNA tests, she’d probably already had a visit from the police.

  I pocketed the clippings and downed the dregs of my tea. Like I’d told Inky, Merv Cutlett’s disappearance was a non-story. Even the most imaginative journalist would be hard put to suggest otherwise. If and when the ownership of the remains was confirmed, the whole business wouldn’t be worth more than a couple of paragraphs, a historical postscript.

  Vic Valentine, crime beat specialist, was probably just giving the trees a passing shake, see if anything interesting fell out. I’d be telling him not to waste his time.

  As I was standing at the register, paying for lunch, my mobile rang. It was Inky.

  ‘Re that drink with Valentine,’ he rasped. ‘He suggested somewhere in Fitzroy, a place called the Toilers Retreat. You know it?’

  Valentine obviously had a sense of humour. The Toilers Retreat was a watering hole in Brunswick Street, a former milk bar that had been refurbished in the faux proletarian style. The name was part of the design. At least it wasn’t the Hammer and Tongs or the Rack and Pinion.

  ‘I used to live around the corner,’ I said. ‘What time?’

  ‘Six-thirty,’ he said. ‘If your car’s at the House, I’ll cadge a lift with you. See you at six in Strangers Corridor, okay? Oh, and by the way, the odds have shortened on the deceased being Merv. Nothing official yet but I’ve just picked up an interesting bit of static from a mate at the Peaheads.’ The Peaheads were the PEA, the Public Employees Association, the government sector super-union. Originally the Public Service Association, it had become the PEA after absorbing the Public Employees Federation subsequent to the PEF’s amalgamation with the FUME.

  ‘Couple of days ago, they had a call from the constabulary wanting to know if they’ve still got the Municipals’ old records.’

  ‘Something in particular?’

  ‘Membership rolls, payroll, financial accounts, that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘Circa 1978.’

  ‘You reckon it’s got anything to do with Merv Cutlett’s bones turning up?’

  ‘No names mentioned. A routine enquiry, whatever that means. Nobody at the Peaheads seems to have joined the dots. The Municipals were three amalgamations ago and corporate memory doesn’t exactly run deep at the PEA. Lucky if they can remember as far back as breakfast.’

  ‘They give the cops the records?’ I said.

  ‘In my experience, unions are reluctant to hand over their internal documents,’ said Inky. ‘But being a helpful lot, the Peaheads said they’d have a poke around, see what they can find.
Which will be exactly zip. The old FUME records were definitely BC. Before Computers. Nobody’s got the faintest idea where they ended up. Long gone, probably.’

  ‘How can twenty-year-old financial records help identify an old skeleton?’ I said.

  ‘You tell me, Murray,’ said Inky. ‘You tell me.’

  Not much was happening in the Parliament House library.

  A pair of dust motes were dancing a slow waltz in the air beneath the crystal chandelier. A century of Hansard was snoozing on the shelves, silent in its calf-leather covers. A scatter of documents and a writing pad lay unattended on the big octagonal reading table beneath the cupola.

  The duty librarian, a studious-looking, carrot-haired young man in a boxy suit and tiny diamond ear-stud, was languidly staring into a monitor, occasionally tapping a key.

  ‘G’day, Pat,’ I said. ‘Busy?’

  ‘Frantic,’ he said, deadpan, then tore his attention away from the screen. ‘How may I assist you today, Mr Whelan?’

  The parliamentary library prided itself on its ability to hunt down and capture almost any publication in the global vastness of the public domain. And do so with absolute confidentiality. I could have asked for the Olympia first edition of Swedish Stewardesses on Heat and Pat wouldn’t have batted a pale-pink eyelid.

  ‘I’m after the findings of a coronial inquest,’ I said.

  ‘That shouldn’t be a problem.’ He was clearly disappointed that it was not something more professionally challenging. ‘Recent?’

  ‘1978,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  On my way back from lunch, it’d occurred to me that I might be able to rustle up a tad more information on the circumstances of Merv Cutlett’s drowning than the sketchy outline provided by the newspaper reports.