Something Fishy (3 page)

Further downstream, a vast new casino was taking shape beside the Yarra. The plutocrats were at the helm and a veil of secrecy had descended over the processes of government. A cult of personality surrounded the Premier. The smirking bully was king and Fuck You was the official ideology. The public interest was a bankrupt notion in the heads of fools.

I switched off the radio, made an illegal U-turn and parked. Sculls began to appear from upstream. A quad, then a coxless four, their hulls half-concealed in mist, oars dipping rhythmically. Girls, I realised, their coach on a bicycle. Ducks rose as they skimmed past, flapped and settled. Then, a few minutes later, came an eight. Red's crew. Year Ten boys, C division, all knees and elbows, still settling into their stroke.

I stood beside the car and watched the boat glide past. Focused on his task, pumping away between Max Kline and Danny Chang, Red was oblivious to my presence. That was fine by me. Rowing was his thing, unprecedented in our branch of the Whelan family. But that's what you get when you send your son to a private school. Not that I had much choice. Not after they closed the local high school. Not with the senior bureaucrat in the education department being paid a cash bounty for every government school teacher fired or strong-armed into redundancy. Four thousand of them in two years.

So it was either have Red commute to an overcrowded classroom with a leaking roof and a demoralised teacher or bow to
force majeure
and go private. And it wasn't as if I was the only Labor politician to take his kid out of the public system. After all, it's only natural to want your child to enjoy the same privileges that you had. All the more if you never had them. And, Christ knows, it kept the boy's mother off my back, hectoring me long-distance about my paternal shortcomings.

Red had adjusted well to the change of schools. Some of his mates from Fitzroy High had also made the shift, which eased the transition. And he'd discovered rowing, an activity more benign than others available to his age group.

‘Builds up the shoulders,' he argued, beefy delts being a self-evident good to the contemporary teenage male.

As I watched him pass, tending his oar, I suspected that the allure of the sport lay in the opportunity it provided for him to be both alone and part of a team. That, and a sort of aristocratic élan behind which a boy can conceal his adolescent uncertainties.

Flash motors were beginning to whoosh down the hill from the thicketed heights of Toorak. When Red's eight slid under the Swan Street bridge, I got back into my Magna Executive and joined the flow.

By six-thirty, I was pacing the treadmill in the gym at the City Baths, a towel around my neck, a newspaper draped across the console. I did my usual ten kilometres, going nowhere, reading as I went. The
Age
, the
Australian
, the
Herald
Sun
, a summary of pending amendments to the Gaming and Betting Act, agenda papers for the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee. Anything to keep from thinking.

Lyndal had weaned me off cigarettes and making the effort to stay healthy had become a way of honouring her memory. But trudging along a rubber belt was never more than a chore and I still kept a packet of smokes in the glove-box of the car for moments of maximum stress. I finished my session with a couple of laps of the pool and a bowl of fibre in the chlorine-scented snack-bar, then crawled through the swell of rush-hour to Parliament House.

For all its neo-classical splendour, its colonnaded portico and gilded chambers, the House was feeling its age. A haughty Victorian dowager, it was inadequate to the demands of the late twentieth century. Behind the brass and marble, beyond the pedimented portals and wood-panelled halls, it was a rabbit warren of file-filled crannies and windowless cubicles. Only the biggest of the big chiefs warranted a private office and for opposition backbenchers like me, the lowest of the low, it offered a desk in a shared office in a permanently temporary outbuilding abutting the carpark.

The Henhouse, we called it. But despite its clapboard construction and nylon carpet, it met its obligations to protocol. The name-plate beside the plywood door listed me as ‘The Honourable M. E. Whelan'.

The first to arrive, I turned on the lights as I walked along the corridor to my office. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift. I transferred the contents of my briefcase to the desk and hung up my overcoat. Aquascutum, a fortieth birthday present to myself, a bit the worse for wear. Like its owner.

Get a grip, I warned myself. Today would be hard, but there had been harder days. Much harder. Keep it in perspective, don't let them get to you. Lyndal's death was part of a big news story, a major episode in an unfinished saga. And with the cops keen to generate optimum coverage, it was inevitable the media would come after me when the report became public.

And what would I say? That I felt some sort of closure?

Pig's arse I did.

Problem was, I couldn't say what I wanted to say. It wasn't just that it was impossible to express my feelings about Lyndal's death in a neat, five-second sound bite. If that was all they wanted, the platitudes could be found. I was a politician, after all. But what if I was quizzed about the subsequent events? If that happened, and if I didn't keep a tight rein on myself, the shit would really start to fly.

I sat down at my standard-issue, formica-veneer desk. Keep it moving, that was my watchword. Head down, tail up. In-tray to out-tray. The first item was a reminder letter from the state secretariat regarding the deadline for submissions to the party reorganisation review process. I stared down at it and yawned. The phone rang.

‘Saw the light,' said a woman's voice. ‘Thought it was you. Wondering how you're set today. Any chance of a favour?'

It was Della McLeish, administrative assistant to Jim Constantinides, leader of the opposition in the upper house, calling from Jim's office in the main building. Jim was the closest thing I had to a boss, so a request from Della carried a certain amount of weight. ‘It's a last-minute stand-in job,' she explained. ‘Out-of-town sitting of the Coastal Management Advisory Panel. Comes under Natural Resources, Moira Henley's brief. Moira's gone down with the flu and Jim feels we should show the flag.'

‘It'll mean missing a day in parliament,' I said. ‘And you know how much I enjoy sitting on the backbench with my thumb up my quoit. So what's the pay-off ?'

‘A chance to observe the democratic process,' said Della. ‘And a free seafood lunch in beautiful San Remo.'

‘I don't know anything about coastal management.'

‘What's to know? The tide comes in, the tide goes out. Session starts at eleven, finishes at four. I'll send over the agenda papers, okay?'

‘Might as well,' I said. ‘And thanks, Del.'

‘For what?'

‘As if you don't know.'

San Remo was a hundred kilometres away. Good old Della had cooked up a reason to send me somewhere beyond the reach of journalists. Somewhere I wouldn't get my nose rubbed in it.

I was touched by the gesture. It reminded me that the Labor Party was a kind of family. Dysfunctional, certainly, but one to which I had belonged, man and boy, for almost thirty years.

I spent the next forty-five minutes drafting a speech opposing a forthcoming amendment to the Government Audit Act, a measure requiring that the Auditor-General carry out his duties with a bucket over his head. You do what you can. By the time I'd roughed up an outline, other MPs and staffers had begun to arrive for the day.

I found a half-dozen of them in the lunchroom, clustered around the coffee plunger, chewing the fat. The Honourable Kaye Clegg, Member for Melbourne West, had just returned from Sydney. She was talking about an event that happened there a year earlier, the murder of a Labor MP as he arrived home after a party branch meeting. The case was still unsolved.

‘Word is, it was a professional hit by Vietnamese heavies,' she said, dunking a shortbread.

‘At least somebody thought he was important enough to kill,' said Dennis ‘Ivor' Biggun, the Member for Ballarat. ‘Here in Victoria a Labor MP can't even get run over. People cross the street when they see us coming. What do you reckon, Murray?'

‘I'm thinking of having a whip-around, see if I can raise enough for a contract on you-know-who.' I cocked my head in the direction of the Premier's office.

Ivor tossed a coin onto the table. ‘Count me in.'

‘Pay to have him whacked? I wouldn't give him the satisfaction,' said our deputy spokesperson on health.

Most of the others dredged change from purses and pockets, adding it to Ivor's ten cents. The total came to ninety-five cents.

‘That's this party's problem in a nutshell,' sighed Kaye Clegg.

We drifted in a group to Parliament House for the weekly caucus meeting. A new leader had recently been installed, a thin-lipped automaton with television hair and the voter appeal of diphtheria. He gave us a half-hour lecture on the need to shake off our image as big spenders. I sat at the back and rested my eyes.

When I got back to the Henhouse, the agenda papers for the coastal management whatsit had arrived. I tossed them into my briefcase and rang my constituency office in Melbourne Upper. It had just gone nine-thirty, opening time. Ayisha, my eyeball on the ground, answered the phone.

‘That cop, Detective Sergeant Meakes,' she reported. ‘He rang a few minutes ago. Said to tell you that the coroner's findings'll be handed down mid-afternoon and the police media unit will issue a statement immediately afterwards. Said if you've got any questions, don't hesitate to call him.'

‘Very thoughtful,' I said. ‘Considering what the cops think about my questions. Anything else?'

‘Three media calls, so far. “Today Tonight”, the
Herald Sun
and ABC radio. You going to talk to them?'

‘Think I should?'

‘It might help,' she said.

‘Do you really think I should allow myself to be made an object of pity because the cops can't do their job? Act like a politician who can't resist the chance to get his face on the news?'

‘Maybe there's a chance it'll help, that's all I'm saying.'

‘If only that was true, mate. But it's all bullshit. Call them back and tell them I'm not available.'

‘That won't stop them looking for you.'

‘They'll search in vain,' I said. ‘I'll be in San Remo for the rest of the day.'

‘San Remo? What's happening in San Remo?'

‘Very little,' I said. ‘I hope.'

An hour down the South-Eastern got me to the Bass Highway turn-off at Lang Lang, where the suburban sprawl finally gives way to the lush green of dairy farms, market gardens and wetlands. The forecast was holding and the only clouds in the powder-blue sky were thin shreds on the southern horizon. The highway forked again and Westernport Bay came into view, a verdigris slab fringed with mud-flats and tidal shoals.

Just before the bridge across the narrows to Phillip Island, I took the turn into San Remo. The venue for the day's meeting was a function room in a motel at the jetty end of Marine Parade. I found the place, parked out front and stood for a few minutes, breathing the ozone and contemplating the view.

At the public fish-cleaning benches on the foreshore reserve, a flock of seagulls squabbled over the innards of somebody's catch. Down at the jetty, commercial fishing boats were unloading tubs of whiting and school shark, fodder for the fish'n'chip shops of Melbourne. Near the war memorial, an elderly couple was sharing a thermos at a picnic table, squinting out at the water.

According to the paperwork from Della, the Coastal Management Advisory Panel had been established to provide input into government management of the state's coastline. A seaside location was chosen for its inaugural public meeting to facilitate the participation of what were called ‘coastal resource user groups'.

It was just past eleven. I went into the motel lobby and followed the signs to the Cormorant Room. It had salmon-pink acrylic carpet, stackable furniture and wide windows that overlooked the Phillip Island bridge. The five-member panel was presiding from behind a long table on a platform facing a couple of dozen chairs, less than half of which were occupied.

I recognised one of the panel members as Alan Bunting, the National Party member for the Mallee, semi-desert country a long way from the wave-lapped littoral. A genial, slightly tubby thirty-year-old, he owed his seat in parliament to the depth of his father's pockets. The Nats were the junior partner in the ruling coalition, and Alan was very much a junior Nat.

The other familiar face belonged to the chairman, Dudley Wilson, a big bluff fellow in his sixties with bulldog jowls and tragic blow-dried hair. Wilson was the leading light of GoVic, a cabal of business identities and civic worthies that served as a kind of kitchen cabinet to the Premier. Slash-and-burn free-market ideologues to a man.

I wondered why a high-flyer like Wilson was chairing such a low-key advisory committee. Dudley Wilson didn't waste his attention on anything that didn't have a dollar in it.

The only other face I recognised belonged to the civil servant taking minutes. Her name was Gillian Zarek. During Labor's time in office, I'd worked with her briefly at Planning and Regional Development. Behind her butterball exterior, Gillian was sharp as a tack. She saw me at the door, gave me a wry smile and used her chins to indicate where I should sit.