The Big Ask (8 page)

Faye hitched up her glasses and took a closer look. ‘You're kidding?'

‘I wish I was.'

As I reprised the Metro massacre, Faye rolled her eyes and shook her head reproachfully. Trouble, she firmly believed, didn't just happen.

Leo, however, was impressed. ‘Brawling in a nightclub,' he grinned through his beard. ‘There's life in the old dog yet.'

When I got to the bit about the dentist bill, Faye leaned close and scrutinised my temporary prosthetics. ‘They're very white,' she said. ‘But apart from the fact that they glow in the dark, they almost look better than the originals.'

I tried them out on her gourmet experiment, a
tagine
d'agneau a la Morocco.
It melted in the mouth, for which I was grateful. Apart from the thrashing it had copped in the Metro toilet, my cavity had taken a fair buffeting from Dr Freycinet's tubby fingers and shiny appliances.

‘How come this stew's got apricots in it, Mum?' said Tarquin.

After dinner, the children watched television while the adults sat around the kitchen table, chewing the cabernet sauvignon. Faye, cat on her lap, took up a recurrent theme. ‘You know what you need, Murray?' she said. ‘A woman.'

The next morning I got a call from one.

Her name was Lyndal Luscombe and she was my successor as Angelo's electorate officer. She had a husky voice, a throaty laugh and she gave great telephone.

I was lingering over breakfast in the pale sunshine that was filtering through my kitchen window when she rang. I'd slept late and woken to a succession of minor miracles. My head was clear. My mouth felt almost normal. There was nothing in the papers about the tonnage levy. The sun was shining and I was considering how I might fritter away the rest of the day, make the most of the unseasonably fine weather.

‘Hello Murray,' she said. ‘It's Lyndal.'

‘Murray's not here,' I said. ‘He died of a broken heart. The woman he loves left him for another.'

‘Really?' she said. ‘The way I understand it, he dithered around, never declared his intentions, left his play too late. She had no idea about his true feelings.'

‘He didn't think it was right to make a pass at a professional colleague,' I said. ‘He's a very proper person.'

‘As well as being dead?'

‘Only from the waist down,' I said. ‘And the sound of your voice has fixed that. To what do I owe the pleasure, Lyndal?'

‘The usual,' she said. ‘Our lord and master.'

Lyndal had been running Agnelli's constituency office in Melbourne Upper for the previous three years, the reward for some highly effective voter-profiling work for the state secretariat. She was a psychology graduate, a one-time crisis counsellor whose experience with the depressed and suicidal amply qualified her to run a local Labor Party office. And, usually, to deal with our boss.

‘He's cutting the ribbon at the opening of our new community cultural centre today,' she said. ‘When I rang this morning to brief him, he interrogated me about threats to his preselection. Went right off the deep end, reckoned somebody was plotting against him, wanted me to draw up a list of potential traitors. I think he's flipping out, Murray, and I'd really like your advice. Any chance you can come out to this wing-ding today?'

It seemed I'd found a place to do my frittering. And I couldn't think of anybody I'd rather fritter with. ‘Can you hold on a moment?' I said.

I put the phone down and went to the bathroom mirror. My lips were still a little crusty and my frontal fangs glowed several shades brighter than their next-door neighbours, but I was not unsuitable for general exhibition. I picked up the phone again. ‘Will Nick be there?' I said.

Nick Simons was Lyndal's designated other, the man who'd snaffled her, struck first while I had hesitated.

‘That's for you to find out,' she said.

Half an hour later, I was dolled up in my best Country Road casuals, boarding the Number 11 tram to Preston.

Out I rode, out beyond the cafes and terraces of Fitzroy. Out across the Merri Creek, dredged now of its industrial effluent, home again to the migrating eel, green with young eucalypts and threaded with bike paths. Out past the Greek Orthodox monastery, its bell tolling noonday prayers across the heathen roofs of weatherboard bungalows and brickveneer dream homes. Out past discount clothing stores and fried chicken franchises and the temples of gimcrack Protestantism with their couch-grass lawns and peeling facades. Out past second-hand office furniture showrooms and the wire-meshed windows of licensed grocers. Out into the heartland of the party of the proletariat, to the electorate of Melbourne Upper.

Lulled by the swaying of the tram, I thought about Lyndal. About how I should've made my move when I had the chance. How we met during the '88 election campaign and more than once exchanged the kind of signals that give rise to a man's hopes. How I'd held back, justifying my timidity with spurious reservations about getting involved with a workmate. How I'd let her be snatched away by Nick Simons, a organiser with the Amusement, Entertainment and Theatrical Employees Federation. A ticket seller to the ticket sellers. How Nick was a nice enough bloke, but that didn't mean I wasn't entitled to try to rectify my mistake. Lyndal didn't have children and, by definition, a childless woman is always fair game. She has not yet mated for life.

When the tram reached the terminus depot, I got out and walked. At the Doug Nichols reserve, a little-league football game was in progress, half-pint ruckmen contesting the slippery pigskin across a trampled patch of mud, parents howling encouragement from the sidelines. The kids were younger than Red, eight or nine, but I could imagine my son, socks around his ankles, dashing for the goal posts, a look of fixed determination on his face, trying to hide his disappointment when the kick went wide. I turned away and hurried on.

A hundred metres up the road I reached the Northern Region Performing Arts Centre, a post-modern assemblage of corrugated steel and tinted cement that rose from a car park between a railway line and an arterial road. ‘Official Opening Today', proclaimed a banner suspended above the entrance, ‘Join the Fun'.

The fun was already well advanced. Lambs were being spit-roasted and sausages sizzled in a row of open-faced rent-a-tent pavilions. Boys in bum-fluff moustaches, embroidered waistcoats and Nike runners tuned fretted instruments beside the stage door. Girls with coin-fringed headscarves rehearsed dance steps between parked minibuses. Community groups had set up stands in the foyer. The Nursing Mothers' Association and the Movement against Uranium Mining. The Local History Society and the Committee for a Free East Timor. Beside the face-painting stall, an environmental Leninist tried to sell me a copy of
Green Left Weekly
.

Slipping into the auditorium, I found a vantage point against the side wall. Formalities were in full progress, the mayor presiding, a former butcher with a face like a slice of corned beef. On the stage behind him sat a row of dignitaries, including the federal and state members of parliament. Agnelli's wife, Stephanie, was seated beside him, the very figure of wifely rectitude in a russet-toned, knee-length suit and sensible shoes.

The crowd was doing its best to keep the chatter down to a roar. ‘We are here to salivate the pre-forming arts,' the mayor proclaimed, testing the new acoustics to the limit.

I scanned the audience. Nick Simons was nowhere in sight. I found Lyndal in the second row. She was wearing a cable-knit sweater and stretch slacks, leaning forward in her seat, compact and muscular, her chin pointed forward like the figurehead of a sailing ship. Her face was a mask of dutiful attention but the edges of her lips were curling slightly in wry amusement at His Worship's malapropisms.

A country girl, six years younger than me, Lyndal had been drawn to the Labor side of politics by a temperamental disposition towards social justice and an intellectual disdain for the self-serving nostrums of the Liberals. She modestly concealed these attributes behind a flip manner and a technocratic fascination with the intricacies of bureaucratic procedure. She had full, luscious lips and tight curly hair.

How I longed to federate with her, to capture her preferences, to scrutinise her affiliations. To man her booth, to poll her quorum, to table her amendments, to join her in congress, to have her sit on my administrative committee.

She swivelled in her seat to survey the room. Her green, cat-like eyes caught mine and she tipped me a conspiratorial wink. I replied with a little salute and we turned our faces back to the microphone. To Angelo, our boss and our cross.

He wore a sports coat and striped tie, neither too formal nor too casual. Just one of the folks, if a slightly more important one. His speech was mercifully brief. He praised the creativity of the local community, referred modestly to his own role in getting the centre funded, thanked all the right people. He read from cue cards, doubtless prepared by Lyndal.

Ange's address concluded the formalities. Lyndal swooped, escorting the distinguished couple to the door, whispering names in his ear as Angelo pressed the flesh. People stood, stretched, hailed friends. A choir filed onto the stage. I nodded to some familiar faces and drifted outside.

Lyndal was standing on the auditorium steps, observing Agnelli as he mingled with the punters, handing out the howdy-doodies. I propped beside her, shoulder-to-shoulder. Our heights were almost equal and it was all I could do not to step behind her, wrap my arms around her waist and scratch my itch on the small of her back.

Angelo had stopped to chat at one of the food stalls. Somebody handed him a sausage in a bread roll. Mustard squirted onto his tie when he bit into it, and he jumped backwards like the victim of an unwelcome practical joke.

‘He's never been very comfortable with his constituents,' said Lyndal. ‘But I've never seen him this edgy. Any idea what's spooking him?'

‘He's had a recent visit from the Haulers,' I said. ‘They threatened to jeopardise his preselection.'

‘The Haulers are a very spooky outfit,' she said, ‘but they don't have any influence out here. Angelo should know that.'

Choral keening erupted inside the auditorium in an unfamiliar language. English, probably.

‘I'm sure he does,' I said. ‘But I'm beginning to suspect that our employer has finally been promoted beyond the level of his incompetence. He could barely handle the burden of his minor portfolios. Transport's a major nightmare and he may not be able to cope.'

Lyndal considered this information for a while. It seemed to reassure her. ‘So it's just general anxiety, then? He doesn't have some specific suspicion?'

‘All I know is that he needs a lot of hand-holding at the moment,' I said. ‘Although I'd prefer if it was my hand being held. By you. Where's Nick, by the way?'

‘On the road as usual,' she said. ‘Warracknabeal, Ararat, Horsham. Doing a membership sweep of the country racetracks.'

If this woman was mine, I'd be superglued to her, not chasing turnstile attendants in the boondocks. ‘Great,' I said. ‘Then there's nothing to stop you flirting outrageously with me.'

‘Nothing but that man down there,' she said, nodding towards Angelo.

A cluster of constituents had captured their representative and were getting into his ear. A problem with domiciliary nursing-care benefits, possibly, or a wrangle with the office of Consumer Affairs, the Liquor Licensing Commission or the land valuation board of review. A matter, in any case, either beneath Angelo's dignity or beyond his capacity. He put his hand up and started waving in our direction like a drowning man signalling a lifeguard.

We started down the steps. ‘You've got it cushy out here in the electorate,' I said. ‘The worst Angelo can do is alienate a few pensioners. Back at the ministry, he's at war with the entire trucking industry.'

‘What do you mean, cushy? she huffed. ‘Some of these pensioners can be savage. The worst that can happen to you is an overdose of country and western.' As she dived into the scrum surrounding Angelo, the lambent twang of a steel guitar wafted from the far end of the car park.

The music was neither country nor western. It was rockabilly, and its source was a band on an outdoor stage beyond the blow-up jumping castle, the flat-bed of a truck trailer. Figuring I'd continue to pitch my woo at Lyndal when she finished bailing out Angelo, I bought myself a can of beer and joined the meagre gaggle of toe-tapping onlookers in the watery winter sunshine.

They called themselves ‘Over the Limit'. Two guitars, a slap bass, a vocalist and drums. Middle-aged amateurs, paunches over their belt buckles, they laid with cheerful abandon into a repertoire of Hank Williams and Carl Perkins standards. Jambalaya Joe and his Blue Suede Shoes
.

The drummer's name was Donny Maitland. I never knew he played the drums, but it didn't surprise me. Nothing Donny did could ever surprise me.

I was sixteen when I met Donny Maitland. One hot summer afternoon, he sprung me reading a novel in the cellar of my father's hotel, the Carters Arms, shirking my chores in the cool of the stainless steel beer barrels. He threw back the pavement doors and stared down at me, nimbus-headed in the furnace of the afternoon, bare-legged in his work shorts, the sleeves of his brewery-issue shirt rolled to the shoulders.

‘What have we here?' he declared, eyeing my Penguin paperback. ‘An intellectual?' He must have been in his late twenties then. A man to my boy. A man unlike any other I'd met, and you meet a lot when your father owns a hotel.

I slipped
The Plague
into my back pocket and helped him unload his consignment, taking the strain as he rolled the eighteen-gallon kegs down the ramp. Not that he needed much help. Donny was solid muscle, strong as an ox.

Afterwards, he went into the public bar to get the delivery docket signed and have a beer. They always had a drink, the brewery drivers. I tagged along, drawn as if by gravitational force. Raising a silent toast to our comradeship of labour, he lowered the entire contents of his glass down his throat in one smooth swallow. ‘You ought to be careful,' he warned, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘That existentialism shit, it'll rot your brain. Start reading Camus, you'll end up on Kafka.'