The Big Ask (6 page)

Male number three was a stocky, cocky, corn-fed Steve McQueen. Whenever Audrey Hepburn potted a ball, he grabbed her hand and hoisted it aloft, referee-style. If she bent to take a shot, he draped himself across her, the better to deliver a coaching tip. Any excuse to touch her. She didn't like it and kept skipping free. Bullitt persisted, convinced of his irresistibility.

The others were too busy pairing off to notice. Lover boy caught me watching and tried to stare me out. I let my eyes drift elsewhere. The last thing I needed was amateur aggravation. One more drink, I decided, then bye-byes for Murray boy.

The crowd was thickening by the minute. I found myself doing the arithmetic. Fifteen hundred people, say. Five bars, all working flat out. Three drinks per person per hour, absolute minimum. Spirits at six bucks a pop, champagne at five a glass, imported beers at top dollar.

For three generations, Whelans had owned and operated licensed premises. Nothing in this league, of course. Country and suburban pubs, no smoke machines or six-foot door-blondes. Fifteen years since my father sold up, retired to Stradbroke Island, the last of the publican line. Hard to guess the margins, joint like this. Any way you figured it, somebody was doing nicely.

Unlike Steve McQueen. The more Audrey eluded him, the more he drank. And the more he drank, the more pissedoff he got. You could read his growing frustration in the curl of his lips and the way he held his bottle by the neck when he drank. His mates were well on the way to scoring. He was starting to look like a loser. What was wrong with this bitch?

An ugly drunk is an arid source of amusement, even if he's playing pool with a goddess. When he caught me looking again, I held his hostile stare. Same to you, I thought. Not my problem if you flunked out of charm school.

Madonna vogued across the video wall, dividing and multiplying like some collagenic amoeba. Seamlessly the music segued into a track by the artist then still known as Prince. Doof, doof. Wang, wang. Time to hit the frog.

As I skirted the dance floor, I felt my tail-feathers begin to twitch. Weakened by alcohol, my body was succumbing to the all-pervasive beat. Some of these women are here to find a man, my libido wheedled. Perhaps one of them will show a little pity. ‘You should be so lucky,' warbled Kylie Minogue.

What the hell. I shuffled into the fray. The dance floor was sardine-tight with bodies, a roiling cauldron of halfglimpsed faces and lurching torsos. As I sashayed deeper into the throng, Audrey bopped into frame, dancing by herself, flushed and radiant, a picture of pulchritude.

Sweet dreams were of this, and who was I to disagree? I hove-off at a respectable distance, took in the view and gave myself over to a little gentle grooving.

Then Stevie-boy appeared, hot on Audrey's delectable tail. He sidled up close and proceeded to get as grabby as ever. But the bits he was trying to grab were strictly off limits, at least in a public place and without prior permission.

Audrey's expression made her annoyance apparent. Girls just wanna have fun, not be mauled by monomaniacal morons. She removed his hand and mouthed something succinct and unmistakeable.

Clearly, Audrey was a girl who knew how to take care of herself. Gallantry, on the other hand, did not permit me to stand there, swaying on the spot, waggling my buttocks. When McQueen lunged again, I shoulder-shimmied into the breach and wang-dang-doodled him aside. He tried a flanking manoeuvre but I headed him off with a series of rapid-fire John Travolta arm-thrusts. Then I blocked all further attempts at advance with a space-invading frug-jerk combo enhanced with Elvis-inspired pelvic thrusts and I-Dream-ofJeannie neck wobbles.

Hep, I hoped, to my chivalrous intent, Audrey took the opportunity to vanish backwards into the crowd. Her foiled suitor scowled and gave me the finger. I flexed my groin in his general direction. Steam appeared to come out of his ears, but it was just artificial fog. Then he, too, melded into the crowd and disappeared.

My innovative terpsichorean technique had attracted a certain amount of attention. Beautiful people of every sex, gender and lifestyle orientation began backing away at a rapid pace. My career as a babe magnet was in tatters.

Hip-hop melded into rap. I collected my jacket and headed for the exit, pausing only to visit the men's room. The original urinals were still intact and fully operational. I gave one of them the traditional greeting, then turned to the hand basins.

Despite the heavy bar traffic, there was only one other customer. It was Steve McQueen. He must have followed me in. I could see at once that he wasn't there to relieve the pressure on his bladder. ‘Reckon you're clever, don't you?' he slurred.

For a drunk, he was very fast. He swung wide and his fist connected with the side of my head before I saw it coming. I stumbled backwards, skidded on something slippery and landed flat on my backside on the floor.

Vicious Steve said something in Anglo-Saxon and cocked his foot for a kick. I rolled sideways and started scrambling to my feet. He grabbed the back of my collar and propelled me into a toilet stall. My fingers grabbed for the frame but found no purchase. A white ellipse rose to meet me. Pressure bore down on the back of my head, shoving my face into the toilet bowl. A flushing sound thundered in my ears. Niagara Falls descended.

I fought it hard, gripping the rim of the bowl and arching my back, legs flailing and kicking, my mouth and eyes screwed shut against the torrent of water. The grip on my neck was relentless.

I'm drowning, I thought. What a way to go. Ducked to death in a dunny. I thrashed and heaved and jerked, gasping for air, spluttering and retching. My head banged against the bowl like the clapper in a bell. My mouth collided with the hard enamel and I tasted salty blood.

‘Jesus,' declared a distant voice. ‘Not again.'

Feet scuffled in the cubicle. Abruptly, the downward pressure ceased. The cavalry had arrived. My head flew backwards and I sucked at the air, triggering a coughing jag. Stars exploded in my eyes. Wrenching myself upright, I spun around. The men's room was empty. I rushed towards the door. Angry. Dizzy. Intent on revenge. Justice. Something. Anything. A towel would've been good.

The doors swung inwards and my path was blocked by a pair of pretty boys in knit tops and bell bottoms. They stopped dead in their tracks and exchanged scandalised looks. Beyond them, the Metro was a seething mass of bodies, an inferno of swirling lights and deafening noise. My assailant was nowhere in sight. My hair was dripping, my shirt soaked. ‘Are you all right?' inquired one of the tweenies.

Not according to the mirror above the wash basins. My lips were a pulpy red mass. My fingers went into my mouth and confirmed what my tongue had just discovered. My two front teeth were gone, sheared off just below the gum line. The canines jutted down on either side of the yawning gap, giving me the countenance of a drenched vampire. Dracula meets the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

A ponytailed punter brushed past me, entered the stall and commenced to decant. I jerked him aside, narrowly avoiding a hosing. Down beyond the lip of red-smeared white porcelain, way down in the yellowy murk, lay something that might have been a pair of shirt buttons.

As I stared down in disbelief, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe they could be re-attached, restored by the miracle of modern dentistry. Averting my eyes, I thrust my hand into the liquid.

‘You pervert,' gasped the evicted pisser.

Just as my fingers touched their target, he slammed down the lever and a torrent of water flushed my fangs from my grasp.

‘Security!' yelled a voice.

Security was a brace of gorillas in black polyester James Brown tour jackets.

‘Walk into a door, didja?' insinuated the one trained to speak.

The other one thrust a wad of cocktail napkins into my hand, something to stop me bleeding all over the floor. My white linen-blend shirt was a write-off. Only worn twice. Sixty bucks at Henry Buck's winter sale.

‘I've been athaulted,' I complained, spraying pink saliva. ‘He'th about twenty-thicth, medium height, brown thuede jacket.'

Grudgingly, they escorted me around the premises in search of my assailant. He appeared to have absconded. Nor was there any sign of the rest of the cast, Montgomery and Ali, Jean-Paul and Maria. Audrey, too, had made the great escape.

‘Call the copth,' I demanded.

This got me nowhere but the front door. One of the blondes indicated a payphone across the street, slammed the velvet rope behind me and turned her pretty face to stone. The phone had been trashed, the handpiece torn off. I toyed with finding another, but not for long. The result was all too easy to predict. An extended wait on a freezing-cold street corner. The eventual arrival of a couple of teenage coppers. Unsubstantiatable allegations against an absent and unknown perpetrator. The pointless taking of details. Polite inquiries as to whether sir had been drinking at all this evening. The inevitable suggestion regarding a taxi and a good night's sleep.

Might as well cut out the middle-man, I figured. Save myself the forty cents. Flag down a cab and get myself home, take a proper look at the damage in the privacy of my own bathroom. At every breath, frigid air whistled thorough the gap in my pearly whites. After a couple of failed attempts to hail a taxi, I turned my face north.

Damp and shivering, I trudged past the now-dark Princess Theatre.
Les Misérables
, I reflected, had nothing on me. Compared with the nightclubs of Melbourne, the sewers of Paris were the fields of Elysium. This was going to cost me a small fortune. Already I could feel the pressure on my hip-pocket nerve.

This sort of thing doesn't happen in Melbourne, I told myself. Ours is not a violent city. We have our share of bank robberies, to be sure. The odd terrorist outrage, for ours is an international city, even if it happens to be located at the far end of nowhere. From time to time, a psychopath goes berserk, opens up on the passing public with an automatic weapon. The police training manual was written by Dirty Harry. But things like this, a vicious attack in a public place, don't happen to people like us. Men in suits. Respectable citizens.

Almost respectable, anyway. No member of the Australian Labor Party is entirely respectable. Not to himself, at least.

The late-night streets had a ghostly air, misty at the edges as though viewed through a vaseline-smeared lens. Traffic was minimal and the office buildings had the abandoned, monochromatic feel of some 1950s science-fiction movie.
The Day the Secretariat Stood Still
or
Attack of the Killer Memorandum
. Here and there, cleaners could be seen silhouetted in windows, vacuums strapped to their backs like the lifesupport systems of a visiting race of anally retentive aliens.

Other windows showed To Let signs, a reminder that we were in the midst of a recession. The recession we had to have, according to the federal treasurer. We deserved it. It would cut the national flab, make men of us. Lean and mean and competitive men. Men like that arsehole known to me only as Steve McQueen.

God, I hated him. A gutless wonder, groper of women and cold-cocker of innocent ministerial advisers. My tongue kept worrying the stumps of my departed dentition, probing the sharp edges of the fractured enamel, reminding me of my victimhood. Perhaps I should vandalise a public telephone, I thought. That'd show him.

But I passed no phone. Even if I did, I wouldn't have had the energy to attack it. Exhaustion was replacing outrage. I soldiered onwards, past St Vincent's Hospital and the Academy of Mary Immaculate, its walls topped with broken glass. Perhaps the nuns knew something, after all. Perhaps there was more to be feared in this world than the chastening hand of Sister Mary Ursula.

‘Why did God make me?' she'd demand.

‘To know Him, to love Him and to be with Him forever in heaven,' I'd recite.

Fat lot of good the catechism had done me. God's protecting hand obviously didn't extend to the men's toilets of cutting-edge dance clubs.

Abandoned by the Almighty, a mouth like steak tartare, I entered the narrow residential streets of Fitzroy. The tight-packed terrace houses of my neighbours were dark, shut up against the night. Their occupants were already abed, dreaming of childhood in some Calabrian village. Or bonged into oblivion. Or out the back in the new renovations, sipping a Sambuca at the conclusion of another successful inner-city dinner party.

No light burned in the window of my humble singlestorey abode, no fire in the hearth. The framed Spooner caricatures on my hallway wall and the kilim runner on the floor had a reassuring familiarity but they emitted no welcoming warmth. Shit, I didn't even have a cat.

Nor did I bother to look inside as I passed the open doorway of my bedroom. Nobody, I knew for a certain fact, was waiting for me in the bed. The same nobody who'd failed to straighten the covers and clear last weekend's newspapers from the floor. I continued down the hall past Red's room. No point in looking there, either. I knew what I would see. His skateboard, his Spiderman posters, his boxes of dogeared comics. All untouched in the five months since he last slept there.

Sometimes, occasionally, I'd come home at night, flick on the light, and stand there in the doorway, trying to visualise the outline of his body beneath the covers. Trying to frame the shape of his face in my mind. Imagining that my son was living here with me, not an hour's flying time away, sleeping beneath another man's roof, carried thence by his witch of a mother, Wendy.

Wendy wore the big banana's trousers in the public affairs department at Telecom, a busy career woman with a busy career husband and a house with a view of Sydney Harbour. According to the terms of our no-fault divorce, I was entitled to regular access visits from Red. For practical reasons, this usually meant he came down for the school holidays. But a sporting obligation had nixed the May stay and the upcoming September break had become a victim of Wendy's new maternal status.