Stiff (6 page)

‘Not them, you dickhead. Canberra. The Minister for Foreign Affairs. We want something done about the consulate.’ She signalled Ciccio for a coffee. He pretended not to see her. Women were not encouraged at the Cafe Sportivo, especially not a houri in jeans and half a ton of kohl.

The idea that the generals in Ankara kept a close eye on Turkish migrants and refugees in Australia was one of Ayisha’s big bugbears. Even allowing for Sivan’s emigre paranoia and Ayisha’s marked list to the left, I assumed there was an element of truth in it. Dictatorships can be funny that way.

I’d heard other rumours, too. For years there’d been talk that neo-fascist groups with names like the Grey Wolves or the Black Ghosts or the Pink Panthers were active in the area. One time you used to hear the same thing about the Lebanese Tigers. They must have been related to the Tasmanian Tigers, because nobody had ever seen a real one.

The spooks in one of the intelligence outfits probably knew what was going on, or should have, if they were doing what they got paid for, but I couldn’t see them losing any sleep over the civil liberties of a bunch of left-wing Arab types. The only time that lot ever came out of the woodwork was when some demented Armenian lobbed a bomb at the Turkish ambassador.

I ran my eye down Ayisha’s petition, recognising names from the Community Health Centre and the council depot. No too many of the blokes at the depot had said no to Ayisha. I borrowed her pen and added my name to the list. As far as I was concerned all Australian residents were equally entitled to freedom of association and assembly. This was Coburg, not Queensland.

Mainly, however, I signed because of Ayisha. Frankly, if she’d invited me to stick my bum in the boiler of Ciccio’s cappuccino machine I’d just as happily have agreed.

That probably sounds fairly wet, but you’ve got to keep in mind that at that point my conjugals hadn’t had an airing in six months. If truth be known, they were beginning to develop a somewhat strident attitude. In fact, from here on in, you might as well take it for granted that my loins were pretty well in the driver’s seat, although I wasn’t necessarily aware of the fact except when they were shouting in my ear.

‘The Kurds are getting the worst of it,’ Ayisha was saying. ‘Sivan’s a Kurd, y’know.’ She had a full head of steam up by now, which went well with the full head of raven black hair. ‘Torture. Murder. Makes
Midnight Express
look like Club Med. Y’can’t imagine.’

I probably could, but it didn’t bear dwelling on. ‘Petitions aren’t going to do much good,’ I said.

‘Maybe not,’ she conceded, stepping down off the high moral ground. ‘You got any better ideas? Some fascist bastards are going around spying on us. Either we convince the government to put a stop to it, or we take measures to defend ourselves.’ She made a pistol with her fingers and cocked one eye. ‘We can’t just take it lying down, can we?’

Come the revolution I would flee with her to the mountains, impress her with my ardour. She would lie down with me in a cave on a bed of sheepskins. Then either Wendy or some swarthy Abdul would cut my nuts off with a blunt scimitar. Both of them. Both Wendy and Abdul. Both nuts.

Until then, putting my name on her useless petition looked like it was as close as I’d get. International intrigue was not yet on my agenda. As we spoke she pulled out a pouch of Drum and rolled herself a cigarette. When she lit it, a tiny strand of tobacco stuck to her bottom lip. Only the greatest effort of will stopped me reaching over and pinching it away. I could ask her out, I thought. I could get a babysitter for Red and the two of us could go to one of those places where they put a piece of fruit down the neck of your beer bottle. Perhaps not.

She put the petition back under her arm. ‘Doesn’t look like I’m gunna get any coffee round here, does it?’

‘Before you go,’ I said quickly, grasping the first available conversational gambit. ‘Ever hear of someone called Bayraktar?’

Either my pronunciation was appalling or she hadn’t. She shook her head.

‘Turkish name, though, isn’t it?’

‘Thousands of people in this city have Turkish names,’ she said archly. ‘In case you haven’t noticed.’

‘No need to get snaky,’ I said. ‘I just thought maybe he was one of your clients at the League.’

‘Could be,’ she shrugged. ‘We get so many people through the doors it’s hard to keep track. Especially considering how little help we get from the government.’ Ayisha was never one to pass up a chance for a bit of lobbying. ‘So who is he?’

It was my turn to shrug. I could have told her, I suppose, but the last thing I needed was a diatribe about downtrodden workers being sweated to an early grave by the heartless bourgeoisie. ‘Just a name in some paperwork I’ve been lumbered with,’ I said.

Playing the beleaguered bureaucrat was no way to Ayisha’s heart. She stuffed her tobacco in her bag and eyed the door.

‘Tell you what,’ I suggested, like it was the best idea since the withering away of the state. ‘Why don’t I drop into the League tomorrow. I can ask Sivan. Then the two of us can get our heads together on some funding ideas. There’re some Commonwealth job creation dollars coming down the pipeline you might be eligible for.’

She put her hand on my arm. ‘Murray,’ she said. ‘You’re a brick.’

Pathetic, I told myself. Trying to buy the woman’s affections with taxpayers’ dollars. Even if I could get her interested, the last thing I needed right now was an entanglement. Not that I stood a chance. And even if I did, I could already hear Wendy.
Murray’s got himself a nice Turkish girl. Bit of a Maoist, but he likes them old-fashioned. Sings the ‘Internationale’ while she does the dishes.

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.