4
On the way home, sense of achievement gone, I went via a place in St George’s Road for some takeaway Chinese comfort food. They know me there. I don’t have to order. As I come in, Lester barks, ‘How many?’ Until recently, the answer was Two. These days, it’s One.
Opening the front door at home, I surveyed the scene with distaste. The minimally converted stable where I live was cold and untidy and unclean, battered leather furniture buried under newspapers, books and items of clothing put down, temporarily.
Friday night is the second-worst night for being on your own. Saturday night is the big one. By Sunday night, you think you’re getting the hang of it.
The answer lies in action. I switched on lights, checked the answering machine, got the heating going, went outside for firewood, started a blaze.
Looking for red wine in the unpacked boxes, I found the surviving bottle of ’89 Maglieri shiraz. It had been in an unopened carton not two metres from the explosive device that almost removed the top floor of my previous dwelling, an old boot factory in North Fitzroy. Eleven bottles fragmented, glass splinters travelling ten metres, a dark purple spray covering everything. The first people on the scene thought it was blood, enough for at least two. But one bottle was mysteriously spared, a small abrasion on the label. A memento of the end of another bit of my life.
Linda’s absence on the answering machine signalled the closing of yet another piece.
This wasn’t the moment for the Maglieri. That called for something to celebrate. The start of something new, perhaps. Now I was at the fag-end of something old. At the back of a cupboard, I found a bottle of Penfolds 128. About right. I put on a Charlie Parker CD.
Home. It means something when you have to do economy class time in planes, sit for hours in small hired cars, sleep in cardboard-walled hotel rooms sprayed with chemicals to mask the smell of other chemicals.
I cleared an armchair and sat down to eat in front of the fire, just in time to watch a weather report. It was delivered by a person who wanted to be a witty weatherperson, not a wise ambition for someone without wit. Still, he clearly relished what he did: waved a pointer vaguely while reading off placenames and temperatures from an electronic prompter. An idiot could do it and an idiot was doing it, a rare example of intellectual capacity and occupation dovetailing.
I fully intended to ring my sister but she beat me to it.
‘Jack,’ she said. ‘I’m in contact with the living Jack Irish? This is he? Him? Don’t tell me. I’m going to faint.’ She paused. ‘Don’t flesh and blood mean anything to you?’
‘A piece of prime sirloin, well hung, it has meaning to me, yes.’
‘Well hung,’ she said. ‘Well hung’s just a memory. I’m lucky to meet badly hung. Hung at all is a blessing.’
‘The incredible shrinking men. You may be inside some kind of zone of contracting genitals. A beam from space. The aliens are clearing a landing ground in Toorak. First they shrink the dicks of the rich, then…’
‘They send in the alien shocktroops, humanoids hung like Danehill, to be ecstatically welcomed by the rich women. Speaking of rich women, how’s Linda?’
It wasn’t a question I wanted to be asked. I slid down the sofa, put my right foot out and moved a log closer to the core of the fire. ‘That’s not a question I wanted to be asked,’ I said.
‘You’ve answered it anyway. A friend of mine saw her with Rod Pringle at a television thing.’
Rod Pringle was the hottest thing in commercial television current affairs.
‘Just business,’ I said.
‘He kissed her ear.’
‘They’re like that in television. Kiss your ear, kiss your arse, kiss any part of you. Means nothing. Like size.’ I drank some red wine. It seemed to have gone sour.
‘Jack? You there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that.’ A pause. ‘Here’s a number I’ve been looking for. Madame Corniche.’
‘Please God,’ I said, ‘not seances. Recovered memories before seances.’
‘Cranial massage. Did you know the plates in your skull can be moved?’
‘Rosa,’ I said, ‘if the Good Lord wanted us to pay people to move our skull plates, he wouldn’t have given us the front bar of the Royal in Footscray. You want to eat one day? Lunch?’
‘You’re inviting me to eat? Soon you could be introducing me to your friends. Male friends.’
‘I don’t know any men I’d like to be related to by intercourse,’ I replied.
‘Don’t worry about it. I’d rather be introduced to men by a warder at Pentridge. Or wherever they put the crims now. Lingalonga Social Adjustment Facility Pty Ltd.’
‘They’ll be the same people I know,’ I said. ‘Former clients.’
‘Funny thing with lawyers,’ Rosa said. ‘The respectable ones I know don’t have former clients. They have clients. It’s only the ones like you who have former clients. Former because someone shot them dead or because you couldn’t keep them out of jail.’
‘Respectable?’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you knew respectable lawyers. Name one.’
‘I can name one. One of many. I was at the races with one two weeks ago, in fact.’
‘Laurie Phelan. I saw you at Flemington with Laurie Phelan.’
‘Exactly. A commercial lawyer. Why didn’t you show yourself?’
‘Trying to avoid guilt by association. Know what they call Laurie? They call him Mr Omo. Why is that?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’
‘Because he washes whiter than white. He launders money for drug dealers.’
There was a long silence.
‘Well,’ Rosa said, ‘he’s got nice hands.’
‘Must be using a kind soap powder. Donelli’s in Smith Street, Collingwood. Sunday, twelve-thirty. In the courtyard.’
‘Courtyard? A courtyard in Collingwood? I don’t think you’ve got a full grasp of the courtyard concept. They don’t have courtyards in Collingwood. Courtyards don’t have Hills hoists in the middle. With big old underpants and bloomers and bras like jockstraps for elephants hanging on them.’
‘Don’t bring Laurie Phelan.’
‘You bastard.’
I caught the last ten minutes of ‘On This Day’. Rod Pringle’s dense and shining hair kept sliding over his quizzical right eyebrow as he tried to get the Premier of New South Wales to concede that you could buy planning permission in Sydney’s western suburbs.
The Premier was confident, serious and convincing. Then an overhead camera zoomed in on his sweating scalp, showing the transplanted hair plugs, like an enhanced CIA satellite picture of a failing crop in Afghanistan. After that, he didn’t seem quite so convincing.
After a commercial, Linda came on, fetching in dark blue, standing in front of a flashy Sydney building. She pointed over her shoulder.
This building, called Cumulus, is Sydney’s newest and most dramatic. It belongs to a private company owned by one of the most private millionaires in Australia, Steven Levesque. We hear little about him from year to year. Yesterday, he came into the spotlight as the buyer of a forty per cent shareholding in Sanctum Corporation, the country’s fastest-growing property development company. But Mr Levesque is more than a businessman. He is also said to speak directly into ears at the highest levels of politics.
The camera cut to a vast minimalist office, dwelt for a moment upon a large Storrier canvas, then went to a man sitting behind a glowing slab of 300-year-old jarrah, a handsome man in his forties, perfect navy suit, blue shirt, red tie, lean and tanned face, squared-off chin.
Linda opened with a fast inswinger.
Mr Levesque, people say that you have far too much influence over both the Prime Minister and the Premier of Victoria. Why is that?
Levesque smiled, put his head to one side in a puzzled way. His straight fair hair was naughtily unwilling to stay in place and he disciplined it with long fingers.
