that hot little item with Wendy.
‘I daresay the place won’t fall down if you’re not there for a day,’ said Wendy. Telecom, of course, ceased to function every time Wendy stepped out of the room. ‘And don’t forget to see that he wears a hat in the sun. He nearly got burned at Noosa. Richard had to keep reminding him to put one on.’
Just like Wendy had to keep reminding me that she had successfully recoupled and I had not. And that her salary allowed her to take Red to fashionable resorts for his holidays, when the best I seemed to be able to do was take him to the cricket or the movies. And the cricket wasn’t even on this weekend. ‘Two o’clock,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there to meet him. Tell him I’m looking forward to it.’
‘Two o’clock is the departure time, Murray,’ she said. ‘The plane doesn’t arrive down there until 3.20.’ Her maths were top-notch. ‘It’s an eighty-minute flight.’
I knew that. ‘Three, then,’ I said cheerfully and hung up. I know when I’m licked. I went back down the stairs, past travel posters of old women with faces like hacksaws standing beside piles of picturesque rubble.
The air in Mavramoustakides’ office, what there was of it, was thicker than ever. And not just with cigarette smoke. Sophie came out the door blowing her nose into a tissue, looking like she’d just been betrothed to a donkey. She flounced back upstairs.
‘Okay,’ I announced. I hadn’t driven all that way in the heat to trade pleasantries. ‘This is the deal. You report the government in a more balanced way and Nea Hellas gets a regular advertising contract with a major government campaign.’
Mavramoustakides looked like he’d never for one moment doubted his newspaper’s capacity to strike fear into my heart. Papas wanted details. ‘What campaign?’
I’d brought a bone with me, hidden up my sweaty sleeve. I pulled it out and tossed it. ‘Keep Australia Beautiful,’ I said.
Leo and Jimmy lit up with a mixture of avarice and incomprehension. As far as I was concerned, Australia the Beautiful could look after itself. I was more interested in keeping my job. That, and a three o’clock appointment at Tullamarine airport the next afternoon.
We sealed the deal with a handshake beneath a poster of Mount Olympus. The gods, if I had bothered to look, were laughing.
Melbourne’s weather teeters forever on the brink of imminence. If it is warm, a cool change is expected. A day of rain bisects a month of shine. Spring vanishes for weeks on end. Summer arrives unseasonably early, inexplicably late, not at all. Winter is wet but not cold, cold but not wet.
So far, that summer, all we’d had was heat. Through a city limp and surly beneath its oppressive demands, I steered my butter-yellow 1979 Daihatsu Charade towards my waiting fate. Past the airless bungalows of Northcote and the tight-packed terraces of Collingwood, through the reek of molten asphalt and the baked biscuit aroma of the brewery malting works, I drove to Victoria Parade, a boulevard of canopied elms marking the northern boundary of the central business district.
Laid out by city fathers with Parisian fantasies and strategic interests, Victoria Parade was where the young gentlemen of the Royal Victorian Mounted Volunteers would have drawn their sabres if ever the working-class mob had come storming up the hill from its blighted shacks on the flat below. As it turned out, the tide of history had run the other way. It was the slums that had fallen, captured by the gentry. And me, for my sins, rapidly becoming one of them.
The Ministry for Ethnic Affairs occupied the top three floors of a brick-clad early-seventies office building overlooking the elms. I drove around the block and parked on an all-day meter beside the Fitzroy Gardens. The Charade was a step in the direction of anonymity I’d taken after a demented constituent ran my previous vehicle into a lake one dark and stormy night several years before. It was less conspicuous than my old Renault, but it didn’t do a thing for my image.
Short of walking around the block in the blazing sun, the quickest way into the Ethnic Affairs building was via its basement carpark. Suit jacket hooked over my shoulder, I advanced down the ramp into the half-darkness. The carpark was small, its twenty-odd spaces reserved for the building’s more important tenants. Agnelli parked there on the odd occasion he drove himself to work. The Director of the Ministry. The Commissioners of the Liquor Licensing Board. Senior managers from the private companies which occupied the building’s middle levels.
Taking up two spaces at the bottom of the ramp was a huge silver Mercedes, top of the range, an interloper among the familiar collection of managerial Magnas and executive Audis. At the far end of the garage, next to the lift, was a luminous white blob, Agnelli’s official Fairlane. Beside it, wiping the windscreen, was Agnelli’s driver, Alan.
Not Alan, I realised, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom. Alan was in his mid-fifties, a fastidious ex-corporal who spent his off-road moments burnishing the Fairlane’s duco and picking dead insects out of its chrome work. But, apart from sharing his general height and build, this guy bore no resemblance whatsoever to Alan. Nor was he cleaning the Fairlane’s window. Palm cupped, he was scrutinising the car’s interior with what I instinctively took to be no good intent.
He was somewhere around my age, mid-thirties, and he affected the style of a spiv. His dark hair was sleekly combed, his trousers and tie black and too narrow. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled to mid-forearm. He carried himself with the loose-limbed posture of a man who wants it understood that he is handy at close quarters. The only thing missing was the jemmy in his hand. As I drew near, he leaned insolently against the Fairlane’s door and tracked my approach through the twin mirrors of aviator sunglasses with an air of casual menace.
I had neither reason nor inclination to respond to the implicit challenge of his stance. Carpark monitor wasn’t my job-if I still had a job. The security of Agnelli’s vehicle was Alan’s responsibility, not mine. Unfortunately, the stranger was between me and the lift, making no effort to move aside. To get past, I’d virtually have to brush against him.
As I closed the last few paces between us, the man’s features became more distinct. I realised, with dismay, that I knew him. Nearly twenty years had passed, but it was impossible not to recognise Spider Webb. Mr and Mrs Webb may have called their little boy Noel, but at school he was always the Spider.
Despite his nickname, there was nothing arachnoid about Spider. No spindly limbs or jutting canines. On the contrary. He had an athletic build, high cheekbones and fleshy, petulant lips. He would almost have been handsome if not for his ears. You only had to look at Noel Webb to know why they called them jug ears. Chrome-plated, his head wouldn’t have looked out of place in a trophy cabinet. Wing-nut would have been a better nickname. But Spider, despite Noel’s dislike for it, was the one that stuck. It suited him. There was something predatory about Spider, cold-blooded, self-serving. He’d been like that at sixteen, and he was still like that. You could read it in his pose. We’d been friends once, or so I thought. Then things had happened, violent things that gave me no reason whatsoever to want to renew our boyhood acquaintance. Especially since Spider had clearly fulfilled the criminal promise of his youth. I hoped to Jesus he didn’t recognise me.
As I approached, he massaged a piece of chewing gum loose from its pack, tossed it into his mouth and rolled his head like a prize-fighter readying himself for a bout. I resigned myself to our reunion, waiting for him to speak.
But Spider said nothing, gave no explicit sign of recognition. It had been a long time. With luck, he might not remember me. If he didn’t speak, I decided, neither would I.
Back to the wall, I sidled past, head up, eyes straight ahead. We were almost exactly the same height and so close that my own face stared back at me from the mercury pools of Spider’s sunglasses. Stereoscopic reflections, I thought, of a man not quite succeeding in mastering his loathing.
Spider straightened a little to allow me passage but still he said nothing. His face had slackened into a sphinx-like inscrutability. Only the muscles of his jaw moved, flexing almost imperceptibly around his gum, a gesture of contemptuous amusement at the discomfort of a stranger. Still an arsehole after all these years.
I pressed on. As I crossed the final few paces to the lift, I heard a dismissive, barely audible grunt and felt hidden eyes boring into my back. Then the lift doors yawned before me and out stepped Alan, a polystyrene cup in his hand, his gaze darting towards the Fairlane. Nodding, I stepped into the lift. As the doors whoomphed closed behind me, I felt a shudder of what could have been either relief or foreboding.
If ever there was a bird of ill omen, it was Spider Webb. Loosen up, I told myself, pushing the button for the top floor. It’s only a job. It’s not the measure of your worth as a human being. There’s always the slow descent into alcoholism and penury to look forward to.
The door slid open to a re-enactment of the evacuation of Saigon. Boxes of documents littered the corridors.
