The Big Ask (10 page)

By the time I'd met her parents, posed for photos in front of the mantelpiece, bundled her into my Zephyr and driven to the town hall, I'd learned that Heather preferred the Kinks to the Rolling Stones and could hardly wait to start secretarial college.

She could hardly wait for other things, too, but I didn't find that out until later, after we'd ascended the red-carpeted steps of the town hall stage and she'd curtsied before the mayor and the lady mayoress. After she'd got giggly on Brandivino and lemonade and suggested we stop off on the way home and take in the view of Coburg Lake in the moonlight.

‘That's not moonlight,' I told her as we parked under the trees. ‘It's the glow from the searchlights at Pentridge prison.'

‘I'm not stupid, you know,' she said, slipping off her shoulder straps. ‘Let's get in the back seat.'

Compared with the pimply adolescents who'd squired her peers, I was probably a bit of a catch. Or so I fancied. ‘Don't worry,' she breathed. ‘I'm not in love with you or anything.' Then she said something that no other girl had ever said to me, certainly none of those stand-offish snobs at uni. A phrase which every red-blooded male of my generation longed to hear. ‘It's okay,' she assured me. ‘I'm on the pill.'

All this flashed through my mind in a nanosecond, sending a rush of heat to my face. ‘Heather Dunstable,' I blurted. ‘Of course I remember. You haven't changed at all.'

‘And you're still a smooth talker.' She smirked, enjoying my discomfort. ‘I was only sixteen, you know.'

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘But advanced for your age.' More than I was, still a virgin at nineteen.

She pulled up a chair, moved closer, got chatty. ‘You were doing law, weren't you?'

‘Politics,' I said.

Donny was observing Heather's moves with ill-concealed amusement. ‘Murray works for the transport minister,' he said. ‘He's been telling me how he managed to get this tonnage levy quashed. And I've been telling him about our campaign.'

‘Your crackpot crusade, you mean,' she said. ‘If you spent as much time behind the wheel as you do plotting to take over the union, we could almost afford to go broke.'

Jacinta paused in the middle of packing up the remains of the food. ‘Choo have to stand up for what choo believe,' she flared.

This was clearly a well-gnawed bone of family contention. ‘Murray's coming to the market in the morning,' Donny told Heather, as though the matter was settled. ‘He's thinking of getting behind the campaign.'

The reedy wail of snake-charming music came from the stage. Heather put her bosom against my shoulder and leaned into my ear. ‘So tell me,' she purred. ‘Is there a Mrs Murray?'

According to the calendar, spring was only a few weeks away. But spring in Melbourne is an elusive phenomenon, a largely theoretical construct. It finds expression less in the behaviour of the elements than in the expectations of the population. It arrives because, having endured winter, we deserve it.

But we didn't deserve it yet. Not by a long chalk. Battalions of black clouds were rapidly advancing from the south-west horizon. By the time the Felafel Quartet went into their big finish, blasts of wind were sending litter flying and up-ending the plastic tables. In the sudden rush of activity to pack up before the rain arrived, I slipped away.

By the time I got home it was pushing 7.30, and rain was drumming on the iron roof. Running into Donny had been a stroke of luck. What with one thing and another, I was due for a win. And what could be better than a win-win deal with an old friend? As I thawed myself in front of the wall furnace and scanned the television guide, the phone rang. I let the machine answer and cocked an ear.

‘For God's sake, Murray,' a woman's voice pleaded. ‘If you're there, pick up the phone. Please, please, please.'

It sounded a lot like my ex-wife, although pleading had never been part of Wendy's repertoire. The snarl was Wendy's customary mode of address where I was concerned.

Curious, I answered. ‘Hello, Wendy? Is that you?'

‘At last,' she said. ‘At last.' A more familiar, hectoring tone came down the line. ‘Why didn't you answer my calls? I've been trying to reach you all day.'

‘What is it, Wendy?' I sighed, resigned to a lecture on my evasion of financial duty, cursing my better nature for suckering me into taking her call.

‘It's Red,' she blurted, her voice quivering at the name. ‘Our little boy. He's gone.'

‘Gone?' I said. ‘Gone where?'

She didn't know. And that was only part of it. She didn't know when, either. ‘It must have been some time on Friday night. The school didn't realise he was missing at first.'

‘What do you mean, the school? Was he at a camp or something?' I imagined some character-building three-day adventure in hutments on the edge of a national park. Obstacle courses and nature walks, possum-spotting by torchlight and dishwashing duty in the communal kitchen. Then a wrong turn taken on a hike. Search parties thrashing through impenetrable bush, police helicopters, rescue crews abseiling down cliff-faces, an injured child shivering all night in some wombat hole.

‘Oh, yes,' said Wendy, like she'd just remembered. ‘I've been meaning to tell you. We enrolled him as a boarder at Richard's old school. It's very hard to get into.'

But not, apparently, out of.

‘You put Red in a private boarding school?' I could hardly believe what I was hearing.

‘He wasn't being challenged in a government school.' For once, Wendy was on the defensive.

‘Or thrashed or sodomised.'

‘That's terribly unfair,' she snapped, back in familiar form. ‘Brookside isn't like that at all. We were just doing what we thought was best. I've got my hands pretty full, you know, with the new babies and work. And Richard's job is very demanding. We both have to travel a lot. We felt that Red would benefit from the experience. Anyway, he comes home most weekends.'

‘But not this one? A fact that somehow managed to escape your attention, what with your busy lifestyle and all.'

That really got the acrimony going. When it abated a little, I managed to learn the little that Wendy knew. It seemed that Red had vanished some time after lights-out on Friday night. His absence was noted on Saturday morning yet, due to some crossing of the procedural wires, it was assumed that he'd simply gone home for the weekend. Wendy spent Saturday and most of Sunday oblivious to this misunderstanding. ‘He left a message at my office on Friday, said he'd be staying at school for the weekend,' she sniffed.

‘Bonding with the chaps?' I said.

Lashing out at Wendy gave cold comfort. There would be time for recriminations later. In the meantime, our thirteenyear-old boy had been missing for forty-eight hours and nobody had the slightest idea where he was. The police had been notified, inquiries made, bulletins posted, potential accomplices interrogated. It looked like he'd done a bunk. Emptied his bank account, packed a bag, gone over the wall.

‘We're looking everywhere, all the usual places runaways go.'

Wendy didn't need to specify what that meant. My bushland visions were replaced by urban images: street-kids, gutter crawlers, used syringes. It was a nightmare so precise, an apprehension so specific, that it even had a name. Kings Cross, sleaze capital of a nation.

This wouldn't have happened if I'd been more concerned about Red, I told myself, and less preoccupied with exchanging long-distance artillery salvos with Wendy. ‘How could you let this happen?' I demanded. ‘I'll be on the next plane up there.'

‘What earthly good will that do?'

I had no idea. But I knew for sure that I couldn't just sit on my backside in Melbourne and await further bulletins. If necessary, I'd turn Sydney upside down. First I had to get there. I rang off and called the airlines, couldn't get a seat for at least twelve hours. The next available flight was eight the next morning. I booked the ticket and stood beside the phone, flexing and unflexing, my guts churning. What now?

An accident would have been easier to cope with. An illness. At least Red would be there, visible, tangible. With a jolt of dismay, I remembered the mysterious hang-ups on my answering machine, those pregnant silences. It was him, no doubt about it. He'd reached out, time and time again, and found me wanting.

I checked the machine in case he'd called again. There was only the rebuking hiss of erased tape. Clutching at straws, I rang Telecom, hoping my phone records might identify the source of incoming calls and provide some clues about Red's movements. Call back during office hours, I was told. I rang Wendy instead, urged her to use her insider clout, pull whatever strings she could wrap her senior executive hands around. ‘I'll be up there by eleven tomorrow morning,' I told her.

‘I really don't see the point.'

‘I'm coming anyway,' I insisted, teeth clenched. ‘In the meantime, ring me the moment you hear anything. Anything at all.'

I felt powerless. There was so much I couldn't even guess at. I'd never met Red's Sydney friends, didn't even know their names. Not to mention this shit with the boarding school. My derelictions reared before me, full of reproach. I went into Red's room, paced among his boxes of comics, chastised myself, fingered his clothing as though I might conjure him up out of sheer willpower. His clothes seemed so small. He was still just a baby. Now he was somewhere out there in the jungle, fresh meat for the wolves.

There was nothing I could do until the morning. A headache ticked at my temples. Alert for the jangle of the phone, I went across the back lane, tapped on the Curnows' kitchen door and beckoned Faye into the yard. Tarquin stared goggle-eyed through the glass as his mother wrapped her arms around me and rocked me side-to-side. ‘Wow,' he said, when he heard the news. ‘Unreal.'

Faye and Leo sat with me into the night, watching me smoke far too many cigarettes. Faye rang Wendy, made clucking noises, learned there were no new developments. Around midnight I convinced the Curnows that there was nothing else they could do, chased them off home.

A mantra echoed in my head.
A child is always better off with
its mother.
For years, my whole relationship with Red had been predicated on that single assumption, the reason I had not contested custody. Now it sounded like a hollow rationalisation for abdicating my responsibilities. A child needs its mother, certainly. But a boy needs his father, too. Whether either of them fully realise it.

Occupying myself with mindless and repetitive tasks, I cleaned and tidied, willing the phone to ring, the news to be good. Eventually, I put myself to bed. I'd be no use to anybody if I arrived in Sydney ragged as a rat's arse.

At 3.15 I was still wide awake, lying on my back, staring at the pattern on the ceiling where the streetlight seeped through a chink in the curtains. I was out of cigarettes, out of ideas, out of things to tell myself.

I pulled on a waterproof and walked the empty streets. Past the silent tower blocks of the Housing Commission high-rise, down Gertrude Street, on and on, washed by squally little showers that ended almost as soon as they started. At the all-night 7-11 on Victoria Parade, I bought cigarettes, put one between my lips and walked another three blocks before I realised I didn't have a light. Went back for matches, wet hair plastered to my forehead. ‘You all right, mate?' said the Lebanese kid behind the counter.

A taxi came up the hill, the only car on the road. I put my arm out. Where do you go at four in the morning, killing time? ‘Wholesale fruit and vegetable market,' I told the driver.

I hunched in the back seat, staring out the window, fending off the cabbie's attempts at conversation. I was all talked out, exhausted from futile speculation, from picking at the balled knot in the pit of my stomach. Silence was better. To contain was to control. To forestall, somehow, the worst possibilities. That Red had been lured away, enticed, entrapped. In fifteen minutes we were on Footscray Road, an industrial artery running between the docks and the railway yards, a hard-edged world bathed in a space-port glow. The road margins were a pulverised wasteland of busted-up concrete, broken glass and shredded tyres. Trucks appeared out of the night, throwing slush onto the taxi windscreen. We joined their flow, converging on a boom gate in a chain-mesh fence. I paid the cabby, sucked damp air into my lungs and tramped up the access road.

The market was somewhere up ahead, beyond a parking apron crowded with manoeuvring trucks, big refrigerator rigs, bug-splattered eighteen-wheelers, minivans, the runabouts of suburban fruit shops. A motorised cart stacked with boxes darted from between two semitrailers, missing me by inches. ‘You wanna die?' yelled the driver.

I headed for safer ground, scanning the scene for Donny's truck, half grateful for the distraction, half wondering what the hell I was doing there. Open-fronted buildings bordered the parking apron, the depots of major freight companies. A small cluster of men loitered in front of the Stuhl Holdings shed, hands in the pockets of their work jackets. One of them detached himself from the group and advanced to meet me, a mobile phone in his hand. It was Frank Farrell, the Haulers' welfare officer. Up to some skulduggery, no doubt.

‘Morning, Murray,' he declared cheerfully. ‘Or is it still last night?'

‘Bit of both,' I said, nodding towards the group of men. ‘Attending to your members' welfare, are you?'

A figure emerged from the building. He was wearing a stylish woollen overcoat and the splash of a too-bright tie showed against the white of his shirt. His features were indistinct in the murky half-light but there was something familiar about them.

‘Who's that?' I asked.

Farrell followed my gaze. ‘Him? That's Bob Stuhl's son, Darren.'

As I narrowed my eyes, straining for a clearer view, headlights swept the man's face. No doubt about it. It was Steve McQueen, the truculent party-boy who'd rammed my head down the toilet at the Metro.