Saving Billie (6 page)

I came into the business as the no-fault divorce laws were taking away work from private investigators. One or two of what were called ‘Brownie and bedsheets' cases and it was all over. As a beneficiary of no-fault divorce myself I wasn't sorry, but it took some zip out of the profession, like the end of the Cold War did out of spying. This was about the closest I'd been to it since those days.

I was still there at 8 pm with no sign of Lou or a likely candidate for her lover. The few men who'd arrived had either been in the company of other men or women or, in the cases of the two who arrived alone, and whom I photographed, they left again within a few minutes, barely time to have given Lou a peck on the cheek.

At about eight thirty a silver BMW circled the block searching for a park. The driver made two circuits before a space opened up and he slid the car into it. He got out and approached the apartment building, passing within thirty metres of me. The camera could cope with the dim light and I got a good shot of him in profile. For a nasty split second I thought something had alerted him to my presence because he turned full face towards me, but he was only looking at a skateboarder who'd jumped a gutter with a clatter and a bang and was whizzing along the footpath. I didn't need another picture because I'd seen him before. He was the man at the party who'd been cynical about the pro-Americanism and speaking style of Jonas Clement.

He went into the building. I got out of my car and walked past his, noting the registration number. I was back behind the wheel when Lou and the BMW driver came out. She was dressed pretty much the way she had been at the party. He was in a business suit, no tie. Probably passed for casual with him. Out of the tailored dinner suit, with his jacket open, he looked less impressive than he had at the party. He was tall and spindly, but carrying ten kilos he didn't need, mostly around the middle, also around his face and neck. He had thin, dark hair slicked down and a bustling walk. Lou held on to his arm as if he might get away. They stood on the footpath for a few minutes until a taxi pulled up. He handed her gallantly into the passenger side back seat, then went around and got in beside her. I started my engine, waited, U-turned and followed the taxi.

The cab cruised down Devonshire Street, negotiated the lights at Eddy Avenue and took George until it turned off towards Darling Harbour. It was a slow run through heavy traffic and easy to keep it in sight. It pulled up outside the Malaya restaurant at King Street Wharf and the happy couple went inside. Must have had a reservation because the place is packed most of the time and especially for dinner on Friday night. I could've gone a prawn sambal myself but I wouldn't have got a seat and there was nowhere to park. How the other half lives.

I drove back and found a semi-legal parking place in Chinatown. A short walk and I was at my favourite Sydney restaurant—the Superbowl in Goulburn Street. No problem for a single diner here as long as he's ready to share a table. I was and got a seat at a table with a Chinese couple who ignored me. As always, the clientele was ninety-five per cent Asian which, to my mind, is the best indication that the food is good. The service is lightning fast as the object is to move people through as quickly as possible and that's always fine by me if I'm on my own.

I had what I always have—shredded chicken with salty fish in fried rice and a big glass of the house white. I ate as much as I could manage of the perfectly cooked and blended meal and left the rest reluctantly. In and out in just under an hour and twenty dollars. I eat there as often as I can, perhaps twice a month. The waiters must know me but they never acknowledge that they've seen me before. I like that.

Anticipating that Lou and Mr X would take longer over their meal, I wandered up George Street, checked out what was on at the movies, had a coffee. Still, I was back in Surry Hills too early and had to kick my heels for a while until the taxi pulled up. Lou and her date stood outside the apartment building for a few minutes. She gesticulated; he shook his head. He leaned down to kiss her and she stepped back, then relented and they kissed briefly. She turned away quickly and headed for the security buttons. He heaved a theatrical sigh, crossed the street and used his remote to unlock the Beemer.

Very interesting, I thought, but what it meant I had no idea. I considered following him to wherever he was going, but decided against it. A light rain was falling and I wouldn't have been able to keep pace with the BMW if he decided to open it up. Besides, a bit of voyeurism goes a long way with me and I had enough on him. By office hours on Monday I'd know who he was and where he lived.

Late night news on TV. The election campaign was in its fourth week of six, but it was hard to get excited about it. The ALP had long ago put Karl Marx in mothballs and embraced Milton Friedman or one of his disciples. The conservatives were continually reassuring us that we were safe and secure, meaning that our houses and investments were—that is, as long as you had a house and investments. If you didn't
you
were insecure and it was probably your fault. It certainly wasn't theirs.

Pollies in suits, men and women, went around the supermarkets and malls and appeared on television pretending to be ordinary people, when they probably couldn't tell you the price of a litre of milk or what it cost to register a Toyota Corolla. Not within a bull's roar.

Time was when I followed politics and listened to what the players had to say to see who made the most sense. Now, it all sounded scripted and rehearsed and came out no better than white noise. Both sides made wild promises about what they'd do with our taxes; the side that lost wouldn't have to honour them and the side that won would find ways to renege. I'd voted left all my life, and this time I was considering trying something witty as an informal vote—that's if I was free on the Saturday.

It's fifty kilometres south-west from Sydney to Campbell-town and a few more north of that to Liston. I made the drive through light traffic on a warm Saturday morning. On a non-holiday weekend, with the football season finished and no other major sporting events on, the traffic is local in all directions and I made good time. It wasn't an area I was very familiar with. The web search had told me there were 150 000 people in Campbelltown and the number was going up all the time. I knew that some of those people went south over the escarpment down to the Illawarra coast for their holidays and that many of them had never been to Sydney. There were pockets of affluence and stretches of poverty, ‘aspirational' voters and battlers, a university and the ‘legend of Fisher's ghost'—the story from colonial days of the ghost of a murdered man named Fisher manifesting itself and pointing the way to where the body had been deposited. That led to the murderer who was convicted and necked. It was about time I got better acquainted with the place.

I drove the Hume Highway to St Andrews and worked my way to Liston via secondary roads. There was still a lot of open land around Glenfield and the Ingleburn military establishment, but all the area to the south was filling up fast.

At first glance, Liston didn't look too bad. For one thing the land rose and fell so that the dreary flatness that characterises a lot of the outer suburbs didn't apply. As Terri had said, there was a big open parkland and recreational space in the centre of the area and although the schools featured mainly demountable buildings, that isn't uncommon from Bermagui to Byron Bay. I drove around for a while to get the feel of the place and some of the realities became clear. The houses were clustered close together and their construction had been made with economy chiefly in mind. The early settlers knew how to build for this climate— overhanging eaves, wide verandahs. But such things are expensive and Liston's planners had cut shade and outdoor living area to the bone.

A good many of the residents had tried their best by planting trees and contriving add-ons of one kind or another but the trees mostly hadn't flourished, and the addons had been pressed into service as carports and storage areas. There were unroadworthy cars gathering weeds in a good many of the minuscule front yards and some examples of that distinctive feature of disadvantage—broken furniture left out in the open.

The picture wasn't altogether grim though. Some of the closely packed houses had small but well-tended gardens and what looked to my ignorant eye to be vegetable and herb plots. I drove the perimeter and noted the signs of a major up-market development named ‘Shetland Hills' taking shape to the west of Liston. A major road separated the development from Liston and all the residents of Shetland Hills would be able to see of their neighbours were faded colourbond fences. A few towering Shetland structures were up already and I drove back to the centre of Liston with a new perspective. A lot of the houses looked okay, but how many people lived in them?

The bus shelters were heavily graffitied and a good few of the graffitists were hanging about—loose clothes, big sneakers, caps reversed. Many of them had dark faces and some had the big, bulky Polynesian build. There were a lot of young children in the streets and a lot of women pushing prams. Another sign of disadvantage—almost half of the women and children were fat.

Nobody paid me much attention as I wandered around: too occupied with their own concerns. I strolled across some scruffy parkland to a low brick building where there seemed to be some activity and sound. As I got closer I could hear the singing. It had that tuneful, plaintive note I'd heard in Fiji and New Caledonia in my few Pacific sojourns.

I went as close as I could without intruding and saw that the hall inside was packed with Islanders, men, women and children, being led in song by one of their own. Unlike them, he was wearing smart clothes that didn't conceal that he was enormously fat. Sweat glistened on his bald head, and when he raised his arms I could see dark patches. At this rate his suit was going to need dry-cleaning after every singsong.

When you hear the singing in the islands, you seem to be able to catch the sound of the sea on the reef and the wind in the palm trees. Not here. All the cadences were of the Pacific, but the words were from a militant Christian hymn, promising salvation for the faithful and misery for sinners. It reminded me of the Methodist Sunday school my father had vainly tried to make me attend. I went once, and every time thereafter nicked off to the beach and spent the collection plate money on lollies.

The commercial hub of Liston was a long, low-slung building on the edge of the open space fronted by a car park that wouldn't have held fifty cars. I parked and walked down steps to the building that resembled an extra long and wide Nissan hut partitioned to form shops. There was a liquor outlet at the east end but it was shut and heavily padlocked. A sign warned that alcohol was not permitted to be consumed on the premises or in the adjacent area. At the other end was a health centre where about twenty people were congregated. I could hear coughing and babies crying.

The shopping precinct boasted a takeaway food shop, a video store, a newsagent, a supermarket and a couple of small shops that looked like Pacific island trade stores with goods piled up and hanging as if there was no real expectation of them being sold. I could smell cooking going on at the back of one of these shops. None of the shops were doing much business. There was a lot of litter and a carpet of cigarette butts on the cement surrounds.

The community protection office was next to the supermarket. The window was covered with notices— appointment times for a JP, Crime Stoppers and Neighbourhood Watch stickers, advertisements for alternative medicines, whacko therapies of different kinds and religious attractions. The glass in the window was clean and the area in front of the office had recently been thoroughly swept. Looking through the open door I saw two desks with people behind them and someone on a chair in front of each. There were a few more people in the room waiting their turn. I went in and leaned against the wall. There were noticeboards carrying flyers for community meetings, garage sales and work wanted. On one board three familiar documents jumped out at me—the standard police notice with a photograph of a missing person. Two females, one male, ages from twelve to fifteen. The notices weren't new.

Both people behind the desk were Islanders, a woman and a man. The man fitted the description of John Manuma that Terri Boxall had given me. He was talking in a low voice to another Islander. I couldn't hear what he was saying but it didn't matter because he wasn't speaking English. The woman was dealing with a white woman and they appeared to be discussing the advisability or otherwise of an AVO. Of the three other people waiting in the room, two were dark; I made it an even split. With my olive skin darkened by the sun, my nose flattened by boxing and professional hazards and my scarred eyebrows, I'd often been taken for Aboriginal. Not by Kooris, though.

The woman became free after dealing with three clients quickly, and beckoned to me.

‘Thanks,' I said. ‘But if that's Mr Manuma I have business specifically with him.'

The big man glanced up quickly but went on with what he was saying.

‘Okay,' the woman said and waved a man who'd come in after me forward.

Raised voices and the sound of a scuffle brought Manuma to his feet. He was a giant, over 200 centimetres and heavy in the upper body and legs. He strode through the door and I moved after him to watch. Two men, one white, one black, were shouting abuse at each other while a dark woman with two clinging children stood by looking anxious. A white woman was egging the black man on.

‘Fuckin' do 'im, Archie,' she yelled. ‘Fuckin' cunt.'

Archie lurched forward, clearly not sober, and threw a punch the other man easily avoided. Manuma shouted something and an Islander woman emerged from one of the shops, clapped her hand over the white woman's mouth and wrestled her away. Manuma grabbed both men by their long hair, lifted them from the ground and brought their heads together. It's not something you see very often, if ever. The effect on both of being treated so contemptuously was more shocking than painful. The fight went out of them and they stumbled away in different directions.