White Dog (5 page)

‘Did she want you to see her?’

‘No, it wasn’t stalking. The first time she was leaning against a car talking to the person inside, then she was on a mobile, the other time she was in a car across from the gym. She never looked at me.’

My position in the chair was causing pain in the lower back. Could Swedish melancholy be chair-related?

‘St Kilda,’ I said. ‘I’m told it’s like a village. Friendly street prostitutes always ready to lend a hand, the milkman carries emergency coke. You’d expect to see the same people, wouldn’t you?’

She smiled, not a complete smile. ‘I’ve even got a friendly neighbourhood peeping Tom. Anyway, I didn’t see her again.’

‘After you told Mickey about her?’

‘What?’

Cold was rising from the concrete slab. It had reached my flabby calves, less flabby than before the morning running, perhaps, but not the calves of a young tennis player.

‘You didn’t see her again after you told Mickey?’

‘I didn’t tell Mickey,’ she said. ‘Sophie told him. She was with me the third time. She actually took a photograph of the woman.’

‘She happened to have a camera?’

‘She always has a camera.’

‘Has Sophie been questioned?’

‘She was at a party. She has about fifty alibi witnesses.’

‘Tell me about the break-in.’

Sarah put out a hand and picked up a watch, a cheap digital item on a plastic strap. ‘Jesus,’ she said. She stood up fluidly without using her arms. ‘Can we carry on tomorrow? I’ve got to get home and clean up, I’m meeting my father at six.’

I got up too, not fluidly, I didn’t know how to exit a 1950s Swedish Modern chair with grace. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow night,’ I said. ‘We can find a time that suits you.’

I gave her my card and said goodbye, walked back the way I had come, around the downed knight in his pool of harsh light, around the steel scrapheap, between the execution and the crawling, panting pack of dog-humans. Finally, I passed by the witches preparing to cook a small creature and came to the sliding door and opened it to the dripping world beyond.

Upstairs at the old boot factory, home, I put on lights, heating, walked around, drew in the dust on the mantelpiece. I looked out of the window at the pencil lines of rain across the streetlight, moved books from one pile to another, washed the breakfast things, turned on the radio, the television, switched them off, got Schubert going:
Winterreise
.

The music soothed places in the mind. I poured a whisky and soda, sank into an old leather armchair, the repaired survivor of a bomb blast that disintegrated its two companions and a sofa, bought long ago at the Old Colonists’ Club dispersal. Isabel had done the bidding, she had the ability to wait, to move in the smallest increments, to reveal nothing. That was the side of her that made her good at the law, at poker. Her other side cared nothing for calculation, for economy. Without reserve, that side gave away money, time, attention, love. She ministered to her clients, to her untidy siblings, to total strangers. Once a week, she drove across the city to take a steak and onion pie to an old man met at a tramstop who had trouble remembering her name.

This wasn’t the time to think about Isabel. Food, I would think about food. I got up and went to the kitchen to study Linda’s donation. Meat, vegetables, cheese. At the Victoria Market, she always bought indiscriminately and extravagantly. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ she once said. ‘The vegie man says he loves me, I’m radio spunk number one, bugger the Italian woman on ABC drivetime. Do I say, Thanks, Giorgio, all I want is a big red pepper?’

‘A big red pepper, no,’ I’d said. ‘You don’t want to inflame them further. Better to buy a dozen flaccid cabbages.’

Thinking about Linda, I lost interest in cooking and went back to the sitting room. The phone rang.

‘Ah, for once found without twenty attempts.’

Cyril Wootton, the plummy tones, made plummier at this hour by his refreshment stop at the Windsor Hotel.

‘Is this a business call?’ I said. ‘My office hours are nine to five.’

‘Hah hah,’ said Wootton, unamused. ‘You’re easier to find at that scungepit pub you frequent than you are at the hole you call your office.’

‘That’s pretty comprehensive, Cyril,’ I said. ‘In one sentence, you’ve insulted two of the things I hold most dear.’

‘Moving on,’ said Wootton, ‘I gather Greer’s coached you on the project’s parameters.’

I sighed. ‘Cyril, the management seminars in Mount Eliza. You promised to stop.’

In the background, I heard Mrs Wootton shouting something, not the dulcet tones of a loving spouse calling her partner to the candlelit dinner table. I thought I heard the words ‘little prick’.

Cyril coughed. ‘Prelim scan in forty-eight, that’s from twelve today,’ he said. ‘Updates every twenty-four. Face-to-face. We have a high confidentiality threshold.’

‘You have something,’ I said. ‘Something worrying. Hearing voices? Often feel dizzy, feel that the floor slopes away from you?’

‘Terminating contact,’ said Wootton.

‘Before you slip back into domestic bliss,’ I said, ‘the recorded income needs a look.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. Goodbye.’

I replaced the receiver. The telephone rang.

‘This number does not accept frivolous calls,’ I said.

‘Talk to the person?’ said Drew.

‘I did.’

‘And?’

‘Well. Seen the works of art?’

‘No. Why?’

‘You should. Open a window into the mind of your client.’

Drew made a noise of acceptance. ‘She’s an artist. They don’t have the normal circuit board. Take the cunt from Eltham who stole my wife.’

‘I see she’s a painter now.’

‘Well, it’s the mimic thing. Budgie behaviour. These artistic charlatans trigger mimicry in their conquests. Doomed, of course.’

‘She’s having an exhibition.’

‘Why are you telling me this? I don’t give a fuck whether she exhibits herself at Flinders Street station at peak hour.’

‘The mother of your children, I thought you’d be interested.’

‘The children yes, an interest not often reciprocated. Ms Longmore. Tell me.’

‘Just a preliminary conversation. She gave me a German beer.’

‘And the feeling?’

‘Unease. With tinges of lust.’

‘Any chance of you approaching this in a professional manner?’

‘Pass,’ I said. ‘I’m seeing her again. Today, she had to break off for an engagement with her father. Lord Longmore. Baron Longmore.’

‘Made another date?’

‘Drew,’ I said, ‘it’s me, not your plumber. I’m tied up tomorrow, then it’s total focus on Franklin, dawn to dusk and beyond, deep into the night.’

‘You’ll tell me directly?’

‘The prelim scan result, yes.’

‘The what?’

‘You really need to speak to Cyril about management courses.’

‘Cyril,’ said Drew. ‘Jesus. We might eat out tomorrow. I’m sick of in.’

‘I stand at the onset of sick of in. I’ll ring.’

Thoughts of food again. I got out a sheet of frozen puff pastry and put it on an oven tray. I unsheathed the Japanese knife, too heavy, bevelled only on one side, soft steel blade taking a vicious edge but prone to chipping. It also rusted in hours if not oiled after washing. In all, a dangerous and temperamental implement. I liked it very much. I used it to chop three cloves of garlic to insignificance, sushi slice a Spanish onion, and cut strips of red pepper. Then I samuraied a dozen mushrooms, put them in a pot on low heat with a big piece of butter, the garlic, half-a-dozen pitted olives, torn up, and three anchovy fillets. I put the glass lid on and left the stuff to sauna for a minute while I poured a glass of the night before’s red wine.

Put on oven. Tomato paste? A search turned up a small tin of double concentrated, the best. I spread a thin layer on half the thawing pastry. Time to stir the mushroom pot.

Making something is always good for the soul. There is a therapy in making anything that is little remarked upon, probably because the world cares mostly about planning and results. The bit in between, the making, that doesn’t rate much mention.

Cheese? No shortage. Linda was out of control at a cheese counter. I grated parmesan, crumbled a little fetta, cut two slices of mozzarella. Smash time. I emptied the contents of the pot into the machine and gave it the chop. Then I scraped out the mixture and spread it over the tomato paste, tastefully arranged strips of prosciutto and the onion and red pepper slices on top, added the cheeses. Last steps. Fold over pastry, trim edges, pinch over, slash top, dot with olive oil and spread with finger, slide the tray into the oven.

Ten to fifteen minutes would do it. I poured wine and went back to the sitting room to listen to Schubert and to think positive thoughts about my life. The second part was not easy but I made the effort, soon aided by the wine and the cheering smell of the pie thing.

I ate, read, watched the late news on television. To bed, sliding between clean sheets, laid that day, heavy cotton sheets, survivors of the blast, unironed, stiff as the linen napkins at the Society restaurant long ago. I sipped Milo, the warm drink that passeth all understanding, and returned to the new book. Marcel, the French protagonist, was in hiding in Istanbul, hunted by four intelligence agencies because he knew too much. I read some pages, not concentrating, and I lapsed into the half-world, thinking that knowing too much was not a condition with which I was familiar. Knowing barely enough, yes, I could be hunted down for that. Too little, yes, but you’d be safe knowing too little. Except that it presented its own problems. My fingers lost their purchase on the book, it fell away from me.

I put the book on the table and switched off the light. There was music playing downstairs, I hadn’t noticed it or it had just begun. Too low to identify, just a soothing undertone. Bluesy. The new tenant, not yet seen, driver of the BMW Mini. Promising. I drifted. On the edge of sleep, Sarah Longmore’s metal horror came into my mind, the humanoid hunting pack. I pushed the thought away; the world dissolved.

‘The breedin,’ said Harry Strang. ‘People talk like they know what they’re gettin. Breedin’s a lottery, thank the Lord.’

‘Better than pulling the parents out of a hat,’ I said. ‘I suppose.’

‘Dunno,’ said Harry. ‘That can work. Take Steel Orchid. He comes of a mistake, sendin the wrong mare to the stud, ends up winnin a couple of big ones. Could’ve been much more, broke down at Rosehill. When was that?’

‘Seventy-four,’ said Cameron Delray.

‘Right. Knew it was around when Whitlam got the arse.’

We were in deepest Gippsland, on a road climbing the front slope of the Dividing Range, a wet morning, trees dripping, the world green, a feeling of being under water. Cam was driving the four-wheel-drive, a machine designed to encourage men’s fantasies of power and domination. So what if I was once Vernon the School Weed, pinned beneath the buttocks of bigger boys in the playground, crushed and starved of air, farted upon? When you look up at me now from your lowly conveyance, you will know that I am Vernon the Omnipotent, the Breaker of Worlds aka Vernon the Hammer. I am also a brilliant financial analyst, married to my former secretary, Wendy, who sits beside me: Wendy the Earthmother, upon whose rippling thighs even Vernon the Hammer is tossed like a keelless dhow in a storm. Behind us, you see Princess Emily …

A buffer stop for this train of thought.

‘This creature,’ I said. ‘Seven years old, I understood Cam to say. Two wins, two places from sixteen outings.’

‘Blood’s excellent,’ said Harry. ‘Can’t fault it.’

‘Fault its attitude without doing scientific tests. You’re thinking of buying it?’

‘Well,’ said Harry, ‘someone’s thinkin of buyin him.’

We rounded a bend, Cam slowing the brute machine, he was looking for something. This was country without signs. We had left behind the side roads with their small encampments of mailboxes made from oil drums, milk cans, hollowed-out tree stumps, welded up from bits of rusty scrap metal. Sarah Longmore could do an interesting mailbox, something the rural postie would approach with trepidation, use a spade to insert the mail.

‘Like horses,’ said Harry, looking out of the window. ‘Always did, from a young fella. Never saw a jock any good didn’t like horses. Well, with notable bloody exception. That prick Crombie, he hated em, loved givin em the stick. Ride though, the little bastard. Glue on his boots. Always had the balance. Why’d the Lord give him that? Makes no sense.’

‘An imponderable for many believers, I’m sure,’ I said. ‘This horse.’

‘Next one,’ said Cam. ‘Must be.’ He was rough trade today – unshaven, old corduroys, scuffed boots, a quilted jerkin. His usual out-of-town wear was a dark suit worn with a waistcoat.

We slowed, rounded another tight bend, didn’t pick up speed. Cam was looking right, found what he was seeking. We turned right, no mailboxes to mark this intersection, took a downhill track, grass on the hump, grass growing in the ruts, weeds invading from both sides.

A few hundred metres from the road, the track reached a gate, an agricultural affair made of gum saplings in a bolted frame. I got out, the cold a shock, raw in the nose and mouth. The gate had a homemade latch, a sensible one, not the usual rural skinbreaker.

‘Good with a farm gate, Jack,’ said Harry when I was back in the warmth. ‘Never touch the bloody things myself.’

‘Damn right,’ said Cam, expressionless. ‘Got somebody does gates.’

It was a long way to the farmhouse, a steep, winding descent through dense bush and then, suddenly, you were on level cleared land, a broad terrace, two or three small paddocks hacked from the forest. The homestead you saw from afar: a slab hut with a lean-to, a big corrugated-iron shed, half open. Closer, you saw the split firewood stacked to the shed roof, five or six years of firewood, a horse yard with a rabbit-fenced enclosure beside it, possibly a vegetable garden. They also grew more exotic things in these misty hills.

In the near paddock, two rugged-up horses had heard the vehicle from a long way away and were waiting to greet us. With them – a friend but standing apart – was a patrician Anglo-Nubian goat. Cam parked outside the shed, beside an old Dodge horse truck, red once, now the colour of rust, dents inside bigger dents. Apart from the firewood and half-a-dozen galvanised feed bins, the open shed had a rack with four saddles riding single file. They were as old as the truck but gleaming. Horse tackle and coiled ropes hung from wire strung across the space above head height, and against the side wall stood a rugged workbench with a blacksmith’s leg vice. Tools were laid out on the bench like a museum display.