The Big Ask (12 page)

‘Up to you,' he shrugged. ‘I know what I'd be doing. His lawyers'll make mincemeat of you.'

He was probably right. I was in no fit state to think about it. Four-thirty. Time to be making tracks. I nodded at Farrell's phone, wondering again why he was here. ‘Darren bites again?'

‘Not this time. Minor irritation. Nothing we can't handle.'

‘Especially with Darren on the team,' I said. ‘And all tooled up, too.'

‘That thing?' said Farrell dismissively. ‘Rich kid's toy. Darren's got himself a gun club licence, not supposed to take it anywhere but the firing range. I've warned him before about toting it around like some sort of fashion accessory. Might go off and blow his tiny dick away.' He shook his head with weary exasperation. ‘The things a man has to deal with'.

We both stood to leave. ‘You didn't say why you're here,' said Farrell.

‘I came for the colour and movement. Got more than I bargained for.'

‘If you change your mind, send me your bill. Bob can be a very reasonable man. And go home to bed. You look fucked.'

Good advice. I should've taken it.

I went to the counter to ask the whereabouts of the nearest public phone. The chief sandwich toaster was flat out filling orders. While I was trying to get his attention, Donny Maitland arrived. He breezed through the door with his handbills in his pocket and greeted me as though there'd never been an iota of doubt in his mind that I'd be there waiting.

So I ordered more coffee and told him about my run-in with Darren Stuhl. Then I warned him about Frank Farrell's lurking presence and accepted his offer of a free ride after the campaign rally. Half an hour later, I was pinned against the back window of the Kenworth with Heather's lipstick on my dipstick.

Through the mist-smeared glass, I witnessed Donny's campaign rally descend into a wild affray when Darren Stuhl decided to start waving around his artillery. Then came the frenzied burst of activity as I quit the truck and went hunting for Donny.

And then I was jogging through the rain, not looking back, thinking only that I'd barely have time to swing past the house and throw some duds into an overnight bag before zooming to the airport. I trotted through the exit gate, past the clog of departing vehicles, and made for the Mobil roadhouse on the other side of Footscray Road. A mustard-coloured smudge was beginning to stain the sky beyond the office towers of the city centre. Maybe Red had turned up. It occurred to me that I'd forgotten to turn on the answering machine when I went out to buy cigarettes. Shit, shit, shit.

Footscray Road was a death trap, eight lanes of speeding trucks. I sprinted across, nearly getting skittled in the process. Drying my face on a paper towel at the pumps, I went into the roadhouse, found the payphone and called the cab company. Fifteen minutes, I was told. My watch said 5.42. By the time I'd finished waiting in line for a doughnut and bought a copy of the
Sun
, it was saying 5.55.

On the dot of six o'clock, a police car came screaming down the road, lights flashing, and turned into the market. Shortly after, an ambulance did the same.

Had the squished tomato incident gone ballistic, I wondered? I hoped Donny was okay but I figured he could look after himself. Was he not the victorious general who had just swept his foe from the field of battle?

I sipped what Mobil called coffee and thumbed through the paper, looking up every time a car pulled into the forecourt, frantic for the roof-light of an arriving taxi. MOSCOW COUP SHOCK, read the
Sun
's front-page headline. Hard-liners had seized power in Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev was missing, location uncertain.

Fuck Gorbachev. It was my son's whereabouts that concerned me. Was it raining in Sydney? Was Red sleeping rough? Five past six came and went. Another cop car turned into the service road leading to the market. What the hell was going on over there? Had some mafioso greengrocer decided to get antsy about a few dollars worth of hothouse tomatoes? Had hot-blooded Heather decided to take the situation in hand? She'd handled me so well that I was still sticky with her transmission fluid. I wished I could get Lyndal's motor racing like that.

The news from Moscow was late-breaking, too recent for the
Sun
's cartoonist. He'd found a more parochial topic. Angelo was depicted as an uncomprehending wombat, caught in the headlights of an oncoming semitrailer. Bob Stuhl was behind the wheel and the grille bore the words ‘Tonnage Levy'.

Fucking Stuhl family, I thought. They're out to get me. I'd have to ring Angelo as soon as I got to Sydney, explain my absence, try to smooth his feathers. At least I'd found him a stalking horse to back against the Haulers.

At 6.07:14, a taxi pulled up and tooted its horn. For once, the driver was the silent type, a pockmarked Somali with skin like a chocolate-coated biscuit. I slumped low in the back seat, my fingers beating a fretful tattoo on the vinyl. Shrouds of cloud were swirling around the city office towers, lights beginning to appear in house windows, traffic building. To what kind of dawn was my baby boy waking, eight hundred kilometres away? Where and how and with whom had he passed this night? This one, and the one before it?

We reached the house and I told the driver to wait while I bolted inside. There was no time for personal hygiene or even a change of clothes. Wendy would have to take me as she found me. I rushed into the bedroom, pulled out an overnight bag and was feverishly ransacking my laundry basket, sniffing for packable jocks, when I heard a voice from the living room.

‘You wascally wabbit,' it said.

A gangly prepubescent boy was standing in my living room, shovelling cereal into his mouth and watching Elmer Fudd chase Bugs Bunny around a tree with a blunderbuss. ‘Hi, Dad.' He spoke through a mouthful of Weeties, taking his eyes off the screen just long enough to acknowledge my presence. ‘Where have you been?'

A wave of relief buckled my knees. ‘Don't you fuckingwell “Hi, Dad” me,' I said. ‘And never mind where I've been. Where the hell have
you
been? Your mother and I have been worried sick.'

‘I took da wrong toin at Alba-koiky,' said Bugs.

‘And switch that fucking TV off,' I said, moderating my tone. ‘You're lucky I don't put you over my knee.' I would've had my hands full if I tried. Red had shot up a good three inches in the months since I'd last seen him and his knees and elbows bulged in his baggy clothes like a handful of coat-hangers in a sock. If he was a girl, it suddenly struck me, he'd be sprouting tits and getting his period. In Angola, he'd be in the army.

‘Sorry, Dad,' he said sheepishly. ‘I didn't know what else to do. You won't make me go back, will you?'

‘That depends,' I said.

‘On what?'

I widened my arms. ‘On whether you're too big to give your father a hug, for a start.'

His expression said he thought he was, but his better judgment prevailed and he submitted to a long paternal embrace. I added a light cuff around the ears for good measure. ‘Now tell me what's going on. No, wait.' I dashed out the front. The meter said fifteen dollars. I gave the cabby twenty and told him to keep the change. He was lucky I didn't hug him as well. ‘Okay, start talking,' I told Red. ‘And this had better be good.'

Red sat on the couch with his knees tucked under his chin and poured out his plaint in a continuous, meandering stream. It boiled down to this. His situation sucked. Big time. The reasons were numerous and well-rehearsed. For a start, there was his new school. Everything about it was stupid. The teachers were stupid, the rules were stupid, the uniform was stupid. ‘We have to wear a straw hat,' he said. ‘It's called a boater. How stupid is that?'

Pretty stupid, I had to admit.

He'd been enrolled in the middle of the year, filling a vacancy created when the son of a Singapore businessman was required to leave because his father had lost his fortune gambling and could no longer afford the fees. He didn't have any friends and he didn't like all the rules and regulations. Red, that is. Not the lad with the bankrupt dad. When he complained to Wendy and Richard, they insisted he'd soon settle down and learn to like it, that many new boys underwent a similar adjustment period.

‘Richard said he cried for months when his parents first sent him there and it hadn't done him any harm. And Mum, all she thinks about is Nicola and Alexandra.'

Wendy's choice of names for her twin daughters never failed to bring a smile to my lips.

‘They cry all the time. And I mean all the time. Totally. They've been through four nannies already.'

‘So you decided to run away?' I said, doing my best to sound stern.

‘I told Mum I wanted to come down here,' he said. ‘Live with you, go to Fitzroy High with Tarquin. But she said that was out of the question. That you weren't responsible enough.'

That was Wendy, all right. ‘If you were so unhappy, you should've called me,' I said. ‘We could've talked.'

‘I rang and rang, but you were never here.'

The reproach struck home. ‘You can't just disappear because things aren't going your way.' But that was exactly what he had done. He'd fled to Melbourne to front me in person. Crack of dawn Saturday morning, he walked out of Brookside, used a teller machine to empty his bank account, then went to the Greyhound terminal. He'd done his research. The bus was cheaper than the train. Thirty-nine dollars, student price.

‘In case you had to be sixteen or something, I asked this older kid to buy the ticket for me. Except he ripped me off. Took my money and never came back. I only had twenty dollars left and it wasn't enough.'

He spent the rest of Saturday trying to hustle small change. ‘I said I'd lost my bus fare, which was true, so I wasn't lying or anything.'

But panhandling is hungry work for a growing boy and food purchases ate into his takings. When night arrived, he was still twelve dollars short. He rang me again but got no answer. I thought back and worked out that I must have been at the Curnow's place. He snuck into some bughouse screening a midnight-to-dawn Star Trek marathon and dozed off during
The Search for Spock.
‘I'd seen it before,' he said. ‘So I knew where he was.'

The next morning, figuring he was in too deep to change his plans, he shook down a couple of Klingons for the balance of the fare. This time, he braved the counter himself, bought a ticket on the next bus to Melbourne, the overnighter.

‘That reminds me.' I interrupted his saga for long enough to ring the airline and cancel my booking. ‘I was flying to Sydney to look for you,' I told him.

‘You were?' He swelled with momentary gratification, then realised that remorse was the more appropriate response. ‘Sorry, Dad.'

The story continued. Ticket in hand, he lashed out on an Egg McMuffin, killed Sunday in a succession of video arcades, then spent fourteen hours beside a fat lady who snored all the way from Gundagai to Tallarook. Arriving on my doorstep at six o'clock, he retrieved the spare key from its hiding place, let himself in and proceeded to eat every flake of cereal he could lay his hands on. At which point, I arrived.

‘Have you got a girlfriend?' he said.

‘Several. That's why I look exhausted.'

Jesus, the kid could've got a job writing low-budget travel tips for Lonely Planet. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. But I did know two things for sure. Never again would my son be forced to wear a straw boater. And never again would he spend an entire night in a darkened room full of Trekkies. Not unless I was there, too. ‘So what do you think we should do now?' I asked, a leading question.

‘Ring Mum?' he ventured. ‘Tell her not to worry any more.'

Correct. I placed the call, told Wendy that I wouldn't be coming to Sydney, after all. She was right, I could do nothing useful up there. ‘Red's here with me. And he'll be staying here until we get a few things sorted out.'

‘What things?'

‘Stupid things.' For once I was holding the trump card in the access game. ‘Things that suck.'

Red took over then, faced the maternal music like a man. ‘I
do
love you, Mum,' he insisted. ‘It's just that…'

Respectful of his privacy, I withdrew into the bathroom and splashed water on my face. All things considered, I didn't feel too bad. In fact, I felt great. Not only was Red safe and well, he'd flown to me for sanctuary, forgiven me my negligence, offered me the opportunity of fatherhood once again.

On top of which, I now knew the identity of the shithead who clobbered me in the kisser at the Metro, marring my haunting good looks. Okay, so I'd embarrassed myself with a pathetic attempt to even the score. But an offer of compensation now lay on the table. I'd taken the high moral ground with Frank Farrell, blathering on about having Darren Stuhl locked up. In the cold light of my bathroom mirror, though, I was more inclined to take the money. Darren's delinquency, I decided, was going to cost Bob Stuhl plenty.

I'd even had my wing-wang wiggled for the first time in living memory, although not in a manner with which I was completely comfortable.

Red, his contrite conversation with mama completed, appeared at the bathroom door. ‘We're out of cereal,' he announced.

I scrambled us some toast and we ate in silence, content with full mouths and each other's company. In the middle of his fourth slice Red nodded at my plate. ‘You going to finish that?'

‘Keep this up,' I told him, ‘and I may not be able to afford you.'

Thanks to the snores of his travelling companion, the runaway had got little sleep on the Greyhound red-eye. He readily accepted my proposal of a few hours kip. Within minutes, he was unconscious. For a long while I stood in the doorway of his room, gazing at the lump beneath the covers.

That's when it came to me, fully formed and with dazzling clarity, as if it had been waiting in the wings for the right instant to step forth and declare itself. For too long I'd been content to drift, to let other people set my agenda. The time had come to take the bullshit by the horns. Red's arrival was a sign that it wasn't too late for a second chance in the lottery of life.