Stiff (7 page)

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.

Some time later a refrigeration mechanic by the name of Herbert Gardiner entered the freezer to check the thermostat and found Bayraktar’s body. Herbert Gardiner? Where had I heard that name before? I shuffled the papers until I found the sheet of Upper House notepaper I had used to take down the name of Bernice’s shop steward. Yep, that was him.

Oh Herb, I mused out loud, whatever were your parents thinking when they planted that botanical name on you? Basil and Rosemary Gardiner and their little boy Herb. Hardly a sage choice. I shook my head in wonder and turned back to the subject at hand.

The cause of death was a heart attack, the exact time of which was subject to some speculation on account of the low temperature. Precision in this matter did not appear to be an issue, nor was any negligence or malfeasance on the company’s part suggested. All in all it was pretty much an open and shut case. Bayraktar was just another of the three-hundred-odd Victorians who died in industrial incidents every year. The only unanswered question was what the deceased had been doing wandering about in a giant deep freeze full of boxes of boned beef.

No bureaucrat in his right mind would have speculated on that topic in an official document. Ever since the Freedom of Information Act had been gazetted, candour was not advisable in paperwork forming part of the permanent public record. Even the most innocuous remark made in dispatches could eventually be ferreted out by some snooping journalist or tireless special interest group, and end up splashed across the front page. Let that happen and you could kiss your preferment goodbye.

Not that there aren’t ways around these things. I found what I was looking for scribbled on a yellow Post-It sticker stuck inside the back cover of the file. The handwriting matched the signature on the preliminary report of the coroner’s chief investigator. ‘Police et al. concur most likely pilfering,’ it read. The boys on the scene, it appeared, had gone into a huddle, put two and two together and concluded that the deceased had been in the process of stuffing a piece of prime porterhouse up his jumper when the grim reaper tapped him on the shoulder.

Here at last was something. Not official, mark you, but potentially useful. If Lollicato and the
Sun
decided they wanted a martyr, they might try painting this Bayraktar joker as another Mother Teresa. But if I could get one of his coworkers inside the place to confirm his reputation as a tea leaf, I would be morally one up on Lollicato. Relatively speaking.

Much more to the point was how much mileage Lolly & Co. thought they could extract from the situation. That would depend on the attitude of the dead bloke’s workmates. That, and whether there was someone inside to do their stirring for them. And I wasn’t going to find that out by burying my nose in a pile of papers. I shuffled the pages together, downed the last dribble of whiskey, scratched my head, yawned, and got up for a pee.

How had Agnelli ever convinced me that the government might stand or fall on this particular piece of nonsense? Now I’d have to drive these useless papers back into town, go out and prowl around some butchery in the backblocks of Coolaroo, and waste an afternoon cooking up some bodgie report. The best part of a couple of days down the tubes. And for what? As if I didn’t have better things to do with my time.

Red’s feet were sticking out from underneath the covers, cold as iceblocks. As I tucked the quilt back in, he rolled suddenly, sat bolt upright, scratched his head fiercely and slumped back into unconsciousness.

By that stage bed was looking like as good a place as any. I climbed into the matrimonial cot with
Understanding Family Law, A Practical Guide to Financial Planning and Court Procedure
. Ten pages of legal prose later, I succumbed to the elemental drone of the rain on the tin roof above me and slipped into the dreamless sleep of the innocent.

Well, maybe not completely dreamless, or completely innocent. About 4 a.m. there was this cave and this sheepskin.

The Ministry for Industry was fourteen floors up an octagonal guano-textured megalith a block west of Parliament. I bunged the Renault into a basement slot stencilled Strictly Deputy Director, hit the fourteenth floor at a jog, and slapped the envelope on Charlene’s private secretary’s desk. I was back inside the lift, standing beside an anorexic youth in orange dreadlocks and green lycra shorts, when the half-closed doors gave a shudder and parted.