Sucked In (15 page)

‘The cat drank the milk,' I translated for my own benefit. Bloody wet cat, this morning.

On Sunday mornings, an informal gathering of my classmates from the Greek course met for coffee, cakes and conversation practice at the Archeon Cafe in Lonsdale Street. My participation was intermittent at best, but I'd missed the last three lessons, so it would be a way of getting back into the linguistic swing. That's what I told myself anyway, as I sloshed along the riverbank, sweating into my slicker and performing unnatural acts with the fleshy folds of my maxillary tuberosity.

By the time I'd showered, downed my cereal, read the papers and made my leisurely way into town, Lonsdale Street was parked out by the first-sitting yum cha crowd streaming into Chinatown. I wasted twenty minutes cruising for a vacant space, then put the Magna in the carpark under the Daimaru cookware department and walked the two blocks to the Archeon. At the hoardings surrounding the Queen Victoria Hospital site, I couldn't resist looking through one of the viewing windows into the massive hole which had once been the maternity wing. Eventually, an international hotel would arise in the spot where Red had first drawn breath. Or a shopping complex, or an office tower, or some indispensable combination of all three. For the moment, it was just an empty, puddle-dotted crater and the prospect of a year's work for a thousand construction workers.

Finally, fully half an hour late, I reached the intermittent string of tavernas, pastry shops, worry-bead emporia and travel agencies that constitute Melbourne's official Greek precinct. In fine weather, we had our practice chit-chats at one of the tables on the footpath outside the Archeon. But the rain-specked tables were deserted. Even by hardy Melburnian standards, this was no day to go alfresco.

I peered through the window and scanned the interior, a tasteful combination of chrome-frame chairs, ripple-glass tabletops and mirror-tiled walls. Wogarama Deluxe. The Archeon was a popular Sunday brunch spot and business was brisk. The place was chockers. Women with brass hair, men in expensive tracksuits, their fat kids and people who couldn't get into yum cha.

I spotted our little
kafeneon
-klatsch at its usual table in the back corner, away from the worst of the bustle and shielded from the turbo-pop blare of the ceiling-mounted television. There were six of them, a good turn-out.

I could make out Terri, a children's book illustrator who claimed to have picked up a smattering of Greek on Mykonos during her hippy days. Her smatter was long scattered but she was doing her best to round it up again. As she spoke, she rotated her wrist in the air, as if uncoiling the tentative thread of her thoughts. The others were leaning forward, the better to catch her drift. I recognised one as Simon, a palliative-care nurse in his early thirties with plans to explore the Peloponnese. And some of the Peloponnesians, too, I assumed. The others, three females and one male, had their backs to me.

Lanie, I registered immediately, was not among them. My shoulders sagged and I mouthed a silent curse.
Malaka
.

I shouldn't have come. I'd been bullshitting myself. Truth be told, it wasn't the prospect of refreshing my feeble, faltering Greek that had lured me to the Archeon. It was the dumb, wistful hope that Lanie would be there.

My gaze dropped to the display of pastries. The syrup-drenched
kataifi
cocoons, deep-fried
loukoumades
and sugar-dusted
kouranbiethes
. The moist walnut cake and flaking
bougatsa
. The oozing babas and sticky halva. The suppurating
galaktoboureko
.

Butterflies danced a lead-footed Zorba in my stomach. I started to turn away, back the way I'd come.

Jesus, Murray. Behave yourself. Get a grip. So what if she's not here? You hardly know the woman, for Christ's sake.

But I did know some things. She had a wide, confident mouth and heavy-lidded sensual eyes. She was pleasingly full-figured and her thick mane of chestnut hair went down to her shoulders. She didn't get impatient when other students slowed down the class because they hadn't done their homework, even though she always did hers.

I knew she was a piano teacher. In the first lesson, she'd told us so, fluttering her fingers across an imaginary keyboard. From our practice dialogues, I knew she lived in Abbotsford in an apartment near the river. So I didn't know nothing.

Which didn't excuse the fact that I was pining after her like some smitten teen. I slapped some sense into myself and turned back towards the door.

But my appetite had gone. For cakes, for company, for coffee. This whole conversation thing was a waste of time. I'd be better off alone, working on my vocabulary or taking dictation from a tape.

So, was I staying or leaving? A wispy drizzle began, not quite heavy enough to qualify as rain. Even the weather couldn't make up its mind.

A Daihatsu hatch-back pulled up, double-parking in the inside lane. The passenger door flew open and a woman jumped out, a flurry of seasonal browns and burgundies. A chunky adolescent girl clambered from the back and took the empty seat. Hasty goodbyes were exchanged, and the car drove away.

Lanie Lane, looking a little cross, flung her scarf back over her shoulder and marched towards the coffee shop.

‘
Ti kanis
?' I said brightly. ‘
Kala
?'

‘
Kala
.' She twitched her mouth, erasing the frown.

‘Better late than never, eh?' I said.

She grimaced and tossed her chin in the direction the car had taken. ‘My bloody ex. You'd think an IT expert could tell the time, not turn up an hour late.'

‘I've just arrived myself,' I said.

Her ex! Things were looking up. Potentially.

I held the door open, then followed her into the filo-and-cinnamon scented fug of the coffee shop.

' ‘Latte,
parakalo
,' she smiled, ‘as they say on Santorini.'

We joined the others. Space was made, greetings exchanged. ‘
Kalimera, kalimera. Kala
?'

Everybody was
poly kala
. Simon, the palliative-care nurse, was explaining that he had been to the
kinimatografos
. Was it
enhromo
asked Julie, the florist, or an
aspromavro
? It was a
komodhia
. Yesterday, I informed them, I had visited
exohi
. I had not gone by train. I went there by
aftokinito
. Lanie had been to a
sinavlia
. Her friend played the
klarino
. Friend, masculine. Just who was this tootler, I wondered?

After half an hour of mangling our generatives and spraying our fricatives, slipping in and out of English to encourage and correct each other, our number began to dwindle. Other customers were impatient for tables and the waitress confiscated our chairs as fast as they were vacated. Eventually, it was down to me and the object of my desire. We dawdled, guarding our cups, neither of us in a hurry.

A waitress started clearing the table. I scooped up the book illustrator's leftover baklava as the plate was whisked away. Nothing wrong with my appetite now.

‘Abbotsford, eh?' I said.

She nodded. ‘Bought if off the plan. Saved a fortune in stamp duty.'

There are places in the world where conversation revolves around subjects other than real estate. Melbourne is not one of them. Lanie told me about her place. I told her about mine. In the process, we sketched the bones of our personal histories.

She'd bought her apartment, she told me, with her payout from the Education Department. A high school music teacher, she was one of the thousands made redundant in the wave of school closures initiated by the incoming Liberals. As well as her job, she'd lost her husband. Given him the flick for fooling around. He was now shacked up with a marketing consultant. No great loss, she said, and the divorce had left her with half their house in Balwyn.

‘Fifteen years of capital gain, tax free,' she said, scraping the bottom of her coffee cup and licking the spoon.

She'd bought the Abbotsford place because she liked the location and it had enough room for her grand piano.

‘It's leased. But nothing impresses the customers like a grand. Means I can charge twenty dollars an hour above market rates to teach little Griselda her scales.'

Talk came easy to us. We got and gave in equal measure, and Lanie learned at least as much about me. From real estate and work, we moved to children and education. Her daughter, Nicole, was in year seven at McRob Girls' High. She had the second bedroom in Abbotsford, plus a room at her father's place in Prahran. I reciprocated with the potted history of Red and Wendy.

The only subject I deliberately elided was Lyndal, but I read in Lanie's eyes that she had an inkling. Many people did. The murder had generated a fair amount of press.

The waitress came back, a bottle-blonde dragon with a cat's-bum mouth. She stared at our empty cups and flicked her towel. We were getting the heave-ho. But there was still one subject yet to be broached.

‘Stop me if I'm speaking out of turn or making a fool of myself,' I said. ‘But I wonder if you'd be in a position to accompany me to a sort of semi-official, semi-social event thingo on Thursday evening?'

Lanie smiled at the construction. ‘A semi-official semi-social event thingo?'

I made a sheepish face. ‘The casino opening, actually.'

‘I thought the Labor Party didn't approve of the casino?' Her tone was teasing.

‘It's a reconnaissance mission,' I said.

We stood up and made for the cashier, my eyes on the sway of her hips. She looked back over her shoulder. ‘So a hand of blackjack and a spin of the roulette wheel would be out of the question?'

‘Fan tan, craps, two-up, you name it,' I said. ‘We can even pull some slots with the hoi polloi if you like.'

I tried to pay for her coffees. She wouldn't let me.

‘Is this a dress-up event?'

‘Whatever you like. Long as you're not wearing a balaclava and carrying a sawn-off shotgun.'

She chewed her lip, hesitant. ‘Thursday evening, right?'

‘I could ask them to change it,' I said. ‘But Mick and Keef might get shitty.'

‘Could take a bit of juggling,' she said. ‘Can I let you know in a day or two?'

I nodded, a little too eagerly, and borrowed the cashier's pen to write my home number on the back of a business card. Lanie glanced at the number, then read the other side. ‘Parliament of Victoria.' She shook her head dolefully.

‘
Malaka
.'

Broadmeadows Town Hall was a vision of drear in the afternoon rain, a brick monolith distinguished only by its lack of distinction. As the venue for a wake, it was hard to imagine anywhere more depressingly institutional.

I directed the cab to the agglomeration of buildings between the K-Mart and the municipal library, hoping that Mike Kyriakis had at least laid on an adequate supply of grog. A wake is not a wake without booze. It was basic multicultural courtesy. The rites were over. The tomb was sealed. It was time to get ragged and maudlin.

When I was a teenager, Broady was the very end of the earth. Beyond lay only factories and thistle-infested paddocks. Its residents were blue-collar workers, their feet tentatively planted on the first rung of the ladder to affluence. Many were recent migrants whose oily-rag thrift had allowed them to scrape together the deposit on a stake in the Australian Dream.

Community facilities were basic. The opera rarely performed there. Ballet classes were few and far between. Childbirth often preceded wedlock. The mullet ruled supreme. Sheepskin moccasins were high fashion. Broady boys were generally not a calming presence.

In the following decades, however, the frontier of suburbia galloped further north. Target and K-Mart colonised the council carpark, school retention rates had risen and a tertiary campus sprang up. It had got to the point now where real estate agents were describing the place as a ‘desirable location' without the faintest hint of irony or even deception.

Pity there wasn't a decent pub in the area. Still, there's a limit to what social engineering can achieve.

I paid my chauffeur and followed the hand-lettered signs up the Prussian-blue polypropylene pile to the council chamber, the locus of the gathering.

The chamber had recently been decommissioned following a forced rationalisation of local government by the state Liberals. While the surrounding offices continued to operate as an administrative centre, decision-making had moved elsewhere. It was now a general function room and storage area for municipal artifacts. Honour rolls of mayors previous. Mementoes from sister cities. Winning bushscapes from the annual acquisitive art award.

About fifty people had turned up. They were milling around the room, drinks in hand, chatting and raising a gratifyingly loud hubbub.

Somebody had taped old campaign posters and press photos to the walls. Serious-faced Charlie in front of the party colours. Dark-suited Charlie opening the Community Health Centre. Hard-hatted Charlie inspecting progress on the Meadow Heights adventure playground. Just-folks Charlie living large at the Upfield Senior Cits dinner dance.