‘Security consultant. A line of work I often wish I’d pursued. Studying the security needs of large corporations, designing security strategies, advising on equipment…’
‘Selling information to the opposition, taking kickbacks. You’d be a natural.’
Wootton sighed, drank. ‘Dear me, your discount on this information just shrank to nothing. And the surcharge for gratuitous offensiveness has just cut in. Are you buying the chips? Salt and vinegar, please.’
I bought the chips, then transferred the printout in Wootton’s briefcase to a white plastic shopping bag supplied by his formidable woman friend behind the bar. We had another drink and parted. Wootton strolled off to his parking garage. I rattled home on a tram-me, a blind man with a guide dog, four tired-looking Vietnamese women travelling together, and a large, florid drunk who talked and sang to his reflection in the window.
Plastic bag in hand, I hiked along the narrow streets to my stable.
No Linda on the answering machine. Only Andrew Greer, Brendan O’Grady’s new lawyer. He didn’t identify himself:
Nice little hand of statements there. Pair is good but threes? Other side folded, gave up the game. Bren wants to have your babies. I’m out getting drunk with whores tonight but give me a call tomorrow.
I put on water to boil for pasta, stuck frozen sauce in the microwave to defrost, lit a fire on the ashes of at least ten old fires.
The chairs in my parlour seem empty and bare.
That was a compelling message to leave. Guaranteed to strike a chord in Linda. E. A. Presley’s silliest number. Never heard together.
I ate my meal without relish and settled down with the history of duelling. In the course of learning about how painful the consequences of giving offence once could be, I fell asleep, missing the appearance of the thirty- something spunk and the man who kissed her ear. Waking to a dry mouth and audible eyeballs, I made tea and watched an ABC documentary on Ulster. There was clearly something rubefacient in the water or the air of Ireland. More evidence for this came in the person of the presenter of the current affairs program that followed, a man of Irish descent possessing a distinctly russet hue. I went outside to fetch another log and when I got back the host was jousting with a bald man displaying the sad and silken demeanour of an undertaker.
I didn’t care about current affairs. I switched off. I wanted to ring Linda, hear her laugh, hear her suggest that loving me and missing me were not out of the question. I wanted to go to sleep in the sound knowledge that impressions to the contrary were paranoid. But the sensible part of my intellect, now only marginally more than vestigial, said No.
I went to bed to confront The Mountain from Afar: Men and their fathers. Before I could approach the mountain, however, I had to make the bed, turn down, tuck and tauten the twisted sheets.
It seemed so pointless.
It was so pointless.
11
I was in Meaker’s eating a sandwich of grilled ham with lettuce, tomato and gherkins and reading the Sportsman when the floor moved and I lost a lot of my light.
Kelvin McCoy, reformed smack freak, unreformed drunk, gifted poseur in the plastic arts, former client, lowered his bulk into the chair across the table. McCoy had taken over the lease on the sweatshop across the road from my office and was using it as a studio/residence. If people didn’t believe he had any talent as an artist, they generally kept it to themselves: McCoy was built like a street-cleaning machine. He had a shaven head, stoved-in nose, small eyes the colour of candlewax, and he kept himself formidably dirty. About fifteen huge canvases a year came out of his studio under such titles as Patriarchy’s Dialectic and Rituals of Hegemony. A man who taught something called cultural studies at Melbourne University provided the names. Inexplicably, rich people rushed to buy McCoy’s dark and sinister messes of paint and hair and toenail clippings and unidentifiable but worrying substances. His gallery shark allowed him a small portion of the proceeds, which he made speed to redistribute.
‘Good day,’ I said. ‘You’ll find something to read in the basket next to the door. In your case, look at.’
‘I see your customer’s here,’ McCoy said, putting a hand into his armpit to scratch. I’d as soon put my hand into a used-syringe bin.
‘What?’ I kept my eyes on the paper. You didn’t want to encourage McCoy at this time of day. At most times of the day.
‘Miss Clean Living over there.’ He flicked his eyes. ‘Looking for you. Knocking on your door. Invited her over to look at my work but she wasn’t keen.’
‘That’s showing aesthetic judgment,’ I said. ‘Which one?’
‘Jesus, Irish, take a guess.’
I looked around. McCoy appeared to be suggesting that it would be unusual to call anyone in full bike leathers with three-tone hair and noserings Miss Clean Living. That left the woman in the left-hand corner reading the Age. She was in her thirties, dark hair pulled back to show her ears, lightly tanned, tweed sportscoat with a soft leather collar.
‘That is probably a serious person in need of the services of a professional,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t know much about that, McCoy.’
McCoy smiled. It involved his lips moving sideways and three deep creases appearing in his cheek. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I remember being in need of the services of a professional. And all I got was the service.’
I took a sip of my coffee. ‘That’s wounding, Kelvin. You do know that whenever two or three lawyers get together, they still talk about the defence I mounted for you.’
‘That so?’ he said. ‘When your old clients get together, in the exercise yard, they still talk about how they got mounted.’
I looked at the huge charlatan with respect. Nicotine, dope, hash, barbiturates, speed, acid, smack, Colombian marching powder, ecstasy, alcohol in every form, all had entered the massive frame by some route and in quantities guaranteed to lay waste to the collected brains of three Melbourne universities or eight in Queensland. In theory, a scan of this man’s skull should reveal a place as grey and still as Kerguelen Island in winter. Yet from time to time there were clear signs of electrical activity.
‘Client loyalty,’ I said thoughtfully, studying a hand- written advertisement on the wall for a play called The Penis Knife. ‘What do you have to do to earn it? Offer to fellate magistrates?’
‘Fell eight, fell nine,’ McCoy said. ‘Whatever it bloody takes. Now here’s something more my speed.’
He left me for the company of the large manager of the tapas bar up the street on her coffee break.
The woman in the corner had to pass my table to get to the cash register. ‘Simone Bendsten?’ I said.
She nodded, wary, bringing a square brown leather briefcase around to protect her pelvis.
‘I’m Jack Irish. I gather I missed you at the office. Didn’t realise you’d be this quick. I’ll be back there in five minutes.’
I’d been in Meaker’s earlier, in the cold, dark early day, black rain bouncing off the tarmac outside, sitting in the window reading the Tax Office’s report on Gary Connors’ income. Stale cornflakes at home and black coffee in the cafe, the place empty except for two young men, not together, both badly on the nod, scratching and snuffling.
In my office, I’d remembered the letter and business card, found them in the righthand drawer: Bendsten Research. At 8.30 a.m., I rang. A woman answered, a person with the calm and rested voice of someone who’d had extensive experience of good, demonless sleep. I told her what I wanted.
‘Public companies obviously aren’t a problem,’ she said. ‘Private ones can be difficult. How much detail do you want?’ She had a faint accent, hard to place.
‘What, where, owners if it’s private, that sort of thing.’
‘The report will be delivered,’ she had said in a formal way.
We left Meaker’s together.
‘I’ll see you there,’ she said.
I watched her go. She had long legs for someone so small.
At the office, I’d just sat down when she knocked. There isn’t a receptionist, a reception area. You open the door, look left and there I am, behind the table on which the tailor who had worked here for fifty years sat
