‘So when will you whack these up?’
‘Tonight, probably.’
‘Want a hand?’
Emily chuckled. ‘Sorry Jack, but we’ve got kids doing that — so if they get caught, they won’t get charged with anything. Can’t have a respectable taxi-driver breaking the law, can we?’
‘Aha. Makes sense.’
Promising to call her within the next couple of days, Jack said his goodbyes to a much calmer and less crowded office. As light drizzle fell, he walked to the tram stop, wondering where this connection with Emily might be heading.
3.
Although he knew that cheap sausages and frozen vegetables mightn’t be much for most people, Jack was looking forward to his dinner. But as he approached the stairs at the back of the block, he noticed a man standing there, with an expectant look on his face. He looked about fiftyish, with dark, receding hair and a prominent nose.
‘You at number seven? Mister van Doyne?’
‘Yeah. It’s van Duyn, as in spoon. What’s up?’
‘I’m from Worksafe. Got a Section 9 for you.’ He handed Jack an A4 envelope.
‘What’s that?’
‘Notice to give evidence, provide documents …’
‘What’n the … documents? Got the wrong bloke, mate. Don’t know what you’re on about.’
‘We’re investigating the accident next door. You’re a witness.’
Oh. At least he didn’t say ‘suspect’.
‘You mean the bloke who fell off the ladder?’
‘That’s right. We’ll probably be prosecuting the contractor, and you’ll be a witness.’
‘What do you mean? I didn’t see much …’
‘You were there, weren’t you?’
‘Yeah, but …’
‘Means you’re involved. Sorry, mate.’
‘Christ. So what’s that mean?’
‘Have to give evidence in court, maybe.’
‘When?’
‘Don’t know. Might want to get some legal advice.’
‘What? You got to be fucking kidding! What makes you think I can afford lawyers?’ His indignation rising, Jack took a step closer to the man.
‘Your problem, mate. Sorry, just doing my job.’
Jack cursed his own curiosity as he opened the door of his flat. Why did I have to go poking my nose into the joint next door? How come every time something good happens to me, I cop a kick in the nuts?
With a groan, he collapsed onto the couch and tried to think about this new problem. How had they worked out where he lived? He recalled telling Dan his name and the number of his flat. So he must have told the union, and they’d told Worksafe. Or maybe he’d been interviewed by Worksafe and told them himself.
Still, it wasn’t that big a deal, surely? It was all pretty obvious. A bloke fell off a ladder and broke his neck. What more evidence did they need?
The summons he’d just been given appeared to be written in English, but Jack couldn’t make head nor tail of it. He obviously didn’t have any documents, and it wasn’t clear how he was supposed to respond, so he decided to ignore the summons for the rest of the evening and lumbered across to the kitchen to make dinner.
It was raining hard when he set off in the cab a little after seven the following morning, making it hard to concentrate on anything other than staying on the road.
Jack had been driving taxis for quite a long time. He didn’t know how many more years of doing this he had left in him. His curly, unkempt dark hair was thinning on top, and his rounded shoulders exaggerated his expanding paunch. There were fraying epaulettes on his shirt, and his trousers were shiny and ill-fitting, but he still had some pride in his craft. While he was very conscious of the fact that most of his fellow citizens looked down on taxi-drivers, he took comfort in the fact that his work required genuine skill and judgment. Being seriously underpaid and routinely abused was just life — not proof of limited worth.
In Jack’s world, his biggest challenges usually involved acquiring illicit supplies of the anti-hay fever drug Teludene. A few beers at the pub with mates and an occasional day at the football sufficed for entertainment. His only living relative, his social-climbing sister, Caroline, regarded him with contempt, and the feeling was mutual. And having long since passed the age when most people paired off and got married, Jack’s only source of sexual and emotional satisfaction these days came from the internet.
As his day trickled on from passenger to cab rank and back to passenger, he couldn’t help dwelling on the Worksafe summons. Jack generally didn’t go in for breaking serious laws, but he was instinctively wary of anyone in authority. They usually approached people like him with the assumption that if they looked hard enough, they would find some breach of the rules somewhere. And given they were often right in his case, that made giving them a wide berth the sensible option.
Sitting well back in the queue at a William Street rank gave him a chance to toss these things around in his mind. A small cluster of drivers stood on the kerb chatting and smoking. They all looked to be Indian, so maybe he wouldn’t be welcome. Anyway, he had other things to worry about. He tried to ignore the random clatter of cars, trams, and roadworks.
As he mulled over building sites, Worksafe, and tribunals, and thought about his conversation with the bloke who’d fallen off the ladder, a flash of inspiration hit him. The union logo on his shirt reminded him of an article he’d seen in the Herald Sun a while back about John Franklin.
Franklin was an official of the building workers’ union, the CFMEU. More importantly, Jack knew him — or, at least, had known him a few decades ago when they were at La Trobe University. Franklin had been a leading Maoist in the early 1970s, always at the centre of every demonstration. He’d eventually abandoned his studies to work on building sites. It hadn’t taken him long to work his way into the union hierarchy.
Jack had only ever been on the fringes of student radicalism at La Trobe, and he hadn’t even managed two years of study before he dropped out, but he had got to know Franklin a little. He had bumped into him occasionally as the years floated by — even driving him in his cab on one occasion — but it had been almost ten years since their paths had crossed. He wasn’t sure if Franklin would remember him, but it was certainly worth finding out. Franklin would know how to deal with Worksafe, that was for sure.
The sudden arrival of a passenger — an overweight, middle-aged man who looked like the kind of jaded public servant that Jack despised — startled him into action.
‘Other end of Flinders Street, thanks. Around the Lindrum.’
Jack nodded, cursing his luck. Short fares were the bane of the cabbie’s existence. You could queue for an hour, get a $7 fare, then end up back at the wrong end of another queue.
Suppressing an impulse to tell him to catch a tram, Jack thumped the Falcon into ‘Drive’ and lurched out of the rank into the William Street traffic. Professional pride precluded him from refusing short trips, but he knew many other drivers did.
Within less than ten minutes he was propped in a very congested Flinders Street. It wasn’t peak hour, but that didn’t seem to matter these days, particularly in Flinders Street, where there were always roadworks or building sites spilling out onto the roadway.
As he handed his passenger a receipt, exaggerating the motion with a flourish as if mocking him for asking for one, a volley of tooting and yelling emerged from behind Jack.
‘What do you think this is, fuckwit? Get a fucking move on …’
The public servant beat a fast retreat, no doubt anxious to avoid any involvement in confrontation.
Jack couldn’t help himself. He leapt out of the cab, and walked back to the bright-purple ute behind him.
‘What do you want me to do — chuck him out of a moving car or something?’ he snarled at the battered face under a Richmond beanie t
hat glared out at him from inside the ute. ‘Calm down, I’ll be out of here in a flash if you stop carrying on …’
‘Fucking taxi-drivers, think you own the bloody road …’ the other driver grumbled back at him, his tone a bit softer, as if he was weighing up whether to escalate the dispute. Jack’s impressive height and bulk might have dampened his anger.
Sensing that it was time to walk away before he had to put his honour at risk, Jack replied, ‘Yeah, we’ve all got our problems.’
The other man shook his head and rolled his eyes, but his response made it clear that a resolution had been reached. Taking care not to walk too fast, which would indicate fear, or too slowly, which would suggest contempt, Jack returned to the cab and drove off. He was used to confrontations like this. His usual approach was to stand up for himself while making sure that actual violence didn’t break out. He had to defend the sacred right of taxi-drivers to pull over wherever and whenever they wanted to.
As the afternoon crawled towards changeover time, Jack decided he would try to call John Franklin once he had handed the cab over to Ajit.
After several minutes of confusion with Directory Assistance — it appeared that the CFMEU had several branches, as well as state and national offices — he was eventually put through to the right number.
‘Thank you for calling the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union. For membership inquiries, press one. For accounts and contractors …’
‘Shit!’ Jack cursed as he sat at the tram stop, watching the cab disappear down Swanston Street with Ajit at the wheel. Even unions have this crap now.
Eventually, an option that sounded like it would do came up, so he pressed the number with a grimace, suspecting that it was probably pointless.
To his surprise, a pleasant female voice responded: ‘CFMEU. How can I help you?’
‘Er …’ Jack was tongue-tied for a moment. ‘Um, John Franklin, he around?’
‘Sorry, I think he’s still out at a site in Port Melbourne. Can I take a message?’
‘Ah, yeah, can you tell him it’s Jack van Duyn, spelt d-u-y-n, pronounced like “spoon”. He knows me. The number is …’
‘Hang on, he’s just walking back in.’ She paused briefly, and Jack could just make out her speaking to someone in the office: ‘Hey, John, call for you. Some bloke called Doon or something.’
The line went quiet for a few moments, then Jack heard a loud ‘Franklin’. The voice was deep, confident, and curt. It said, I’m important, I’m in a hurry, but because I’m such a good bloke I’ll give you a few seconds of my time.
‘Er, hi, mate — it’s Jack van Duyn. You remember, from La Trobe? Had you in my cab a while back …’
‘Yeah, shit. How’re they hanging, Jack? Still doing the cabbie shit?’ Franklin’s tone had softened, changing from bass to baritone. Evidently, the fact that Jack was neither a stroppy member nor a nasty employer allowed him to relax.
‘Yeah, still at it. Look, sorry to hassle you, but I’ve got a problem with Worksafe. There was an accident on a building site next door, a bloke fell off a ladder, and they’ve given me a summons ’cause I’m a witness. Think he’s a union member, don’t know what to do …’
‘Whereabouts?’ The guarded, menacing tone was back.
‘Brunswick. Balmoral Avenue. Couple of days ago.’
‘Yeah, know it. Bloke died. Where are you?’
‘What, you mean now?’
‘No, fucking next year. Of course I mean now.’
‘Ah, Swanston Street, down near Victoria Street.’
‘You know the Lincoln?’
‘Queensberry Street? Yeah.’
‘Front bar, around five o’clock. See you there.’
Franklin hung up before Jack had a chance to agree.
The Lincoln Hotel was a notorious Carlton pub that had fallen on good times. For many years its customers had been dominated by officials and hangers-on of the numerous unions located nearby, including the CFMEU. Now the good old days of sticky carpets and political conspiracies were long gone. All that was left was a couple of small bars attached to a very expensive up-market restaurant. Jack suspected a fair bit of union members’ money was spent in the restaurant. The front bar was one of the last remaining outposts of the old Carlton — rough, grungy, and definitely unfashionable, the kind of place where John Franklin would drink to make a point.
Jack pushed his way through the fading green doors of the pub and into the front bar. Franklin was there, holding court with a couple of young blokes in grubby fluoro vests. The smell of fresh paint suggested that even the down-market end of the Lincoln had succumbed to a bit of tarting up.
‘Hi, mate, grab yourself a beer.’ Franklin hailed Jack as he advanced towards the group. He passed a $10 note to the young barman, grabbed his pot and change, and propped himself on a rickety stool next to Franklin. He was also on a stool, leaning back with his elbow on the bar.
‘This is Mick and Starchy. Jack.’ He leered at Jack and took a slurp of his beer, then added: ‘Not members of ours, of course. Mick’s a sparkie, Starchy’s a truckie — least he was this morning.’ After sorting the introductions, Franklin got straight down to business.
‘So, mate, what happened?’
Jack looked across at Franklin’s handsome, battered face, and rattled off a garbled description of the accident.
‘Got the summons with you?’
‘No. Just says produce documents, give evidence, some other stuff.’
‘Yeah. Look, mate, good you’ve got in touch. This outfit’s a bunch of arseholes — been chasing them for years. They usually do bigger stuff, but things are quiet. Financial crisis, all that shit. Got to nail them on this. Paul had kids, you know. Got to look after them. Good unionist.’
‘But I didn’t see much …’
‘You saw what matters, mate. No harness, no scaffolding, dodgy ladder — you name it. Arseholes cutting corners on a pissant little job. Other bloke’s done a runner, think he was an illegal, using a false name — all that shit. So you’re it, mate.’ Franklin burped loudly, sending a waft of rotten-sweet beer smell through Jack’s nostrils. Something told him this wasn’t Franklin’s first beer of the day.
‘Yeah, no worries. So what happens now?’
‘Let you know. What’s your mobile?’
Jack gave Franklin a battered card, one of a handful that lived in his left trouser pocket. Franklin leaned over and stuffed one of his own cards into Jack’s shirt pocket.
‘Thanks. Good man, Jack. Give us a call if anything happens. Be seeing you.’
Taken aback by this abrupt dismissal, Jack wobbled on his stool, drained the rest of his beer, and stood up slowly.
‘Yeah, see you.’ He glanced at Mick and Starchy, who mumbled their goodbyes, and walked back out onto Queensberry Street, feeling like he had just had an audience with a medieval prince.
He stared blankly out of the window as the tram passed the ugly red-brick buildings of Melbourne University. The old Carlton’s disappearing, Jack mused as the tram started turning into Lygon Street. What had happened to all the weirdos and desperadoes — the drunken lecturers, drug-crazed hippies, and shady characters? Sometimes Jack felt like a foreigner in his own land. They might be okay as customers, but he resented the flood of smug professionals taking over the old inner suburbs.
Emily sprang back into his thoughts as the tram dawdled past the high-rise flats. He could hardly take her to the movies again, but he wasn’t sure what should come next. Or even if he wanted a ‘next’: it could turn into a complete disaster.
He spied one of the posters he’d helped create, and realised he at least had an innocent opportunity to catch up with her again. The public meeting about the future of the flats was in two days’ time. She was bound to be there.
As the dreary ride home came to an end, Jack felt the dreaded ti
ckling in his sinuses that signalled the onset of hay fever. This time of year was always bad, and his supplies of Teludene — a drug that was very expensive because it hadn’t been listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme — were running low. Jack was always unsure whether his illicit supplies would continue. Hay fever was hell: without effective medication, it was torture. What would he do if Harry’s brother stopped providing him with discount supplies from the pharmaceutical company warehouse where he worked? Jack thought about breaking in himself and stealing a few boxes. Surely that wouldn’t be too hard? These days, the courts were so soft, if he got caught he’d probably only get a community service order.
Emily would be unlikely to be keen on associating with a convicted criminal, though. She seemed to regard him as a man of integrity, someone who would always do the right thing. It certainly wasn’t his good looks she was interested in. Maybe he would just have to live with the hay fever.
4.
Two days later, the descending sun cast a pleasant haze over Lygon Street as Jack shuffled off the almost-empty tram after finishing his shift. It was unseasonably warm, but there was no sign of any hay fever symptoms. He was on edge, but in a nice way. Going to the meeting had a touch of adventure to it. He was in good spirits.
With an eye to ensuring he could sit with Emily, he arrived a fraction early. It felt like he was behaving like a teenager, but he laughed off the embarrassing thought.
A tingle of last-minute panic hit him as he realised he’d forgotten which tower block the meeting room was in. Then he remembered that the details were on the posters, so all he had to do was find one. It didn’t take long.
His concerns about finding the right door were soon allayed: a group of people were milling around outside.
Wriggling his way through the small crowd, he squeezed into the meeting room. It was quite large, but already crowded. A dozen-or-so rows of plastic chairs filled up the main part of the room, and at the far end there was a head table and chairs, flanked by a whiteboard covered in colourful scrawls.
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