Iraqi Icicle

by Bernie Dowling

  ‘What’s the big deal, anyway?’ I asked. ‘You and your trainer have a horse in Saturday’s Brisbane Handicap. Smith and his owner have a starter in the same race. It’s far from the biggest event on the Brisbane racing calendar. Chances are both of you will lose. Bart Wood’s gelding is going great guns.’

  Mecklam’s eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened. He looked most keen to win on Saturday, and my talk of possible defeat irritated him. ‘You just find out what’s going on. Phone me on this number.’

  He hit a button on a device that looked like a portable pocket radio, only bigger. I figured it was one of those new mobile phones that business people had adopted as status symbols. A panel on the dog and bone lit up, and Mecklam wrote a funny-looking number down on a slip of paper and handed to me.

  ‘Make sure you’ve got a few dollar coins with you. Phoning this mobile from a public phone is a lot dearer than a local call.’

  The hide of the bloke, thinking I did not have one of those fancy mobile dog-and-bones myself. Of course, he was right – I’d heard they cost upwards of a grand. This gave me added incentive to dislike him.

  Mecklam winked at me. ‘There could be a sling in it for you on Saturday night. Have a cup of coffee.’

  I poured the brew into the spare mug and added milk. Taking a hearty gulp, I found it was colder than lukewarm, just the way I hate it. I raised my mug in Mecklam’s direction.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, gulping the repulsive mixture in one go.

  28

  THINKING UP SCENARIOS in which Mecklam came a cropper from Saturday’s race, I drove. The lawyer’s bluster hid only panic, I decided. Hooking up with losers like George and Phil was evidence of that.

  Night would be the best time to check out the East Brisbane address on the business card, but I decided to take a quick peek.

  East Brisbane is an inner-city suburb, busy compared to what we denizens of remoter northside haunts are used to. North and south refer to banks of the Brisbane River which roughly runs east to west. To be more exact, I guess it runs west-east as Brisbane is on the east coast. East Brisbane is south of the river. If you can’t follow all that, you had better come for a visit. I recommend it. It’s pretty safe. Australians mainly kill and maim their own.

  I steered the EH through the middle lane across the Story Bridge, a magnificent structure I would buy from a convincing hustler. I would set up walk-through cafés halfway across the pedestrian overpasses, to supplement the tollways I’d need to put at either end of the bridge to recoup my investment. I believe sentimentality about objects and people close to you can be a cover for doing the unspeakable to strangers. Still, I forgive anyone with a soft spot for the Story Bridge.

  The East Brisbane address was an old, two-storey house. All its windows were shut and the two garage doors were apparently locked. I wound my driver’s window down and could hear no sound from the house, though the ambient traffic noise meant I couldn’t rely on that. I was tempted to park the car and knock on the front door. Instead I drove to the end of the street, did a U-turn, parked across the road from the house and pretended to look up my street directory.

  Seeing no action for the next 10 minutes, I drove to the nearest TAB, where I whiled away a couple of hours, betting on gallopers, dogs and pacers. I went home broke, but with the names of certain future winners circled in my form guide.

  I put a white rose against the door of My Cucumber, Natalie’s flat. I always carry a pair of scissors in the glove box, in case I see a beautiful flower in the front garden of an apparently empty house. It shows, in the correct light, that I am a thoughtful boyfriend and, of course, it is a compliment to the gardener whose floral showpiece I select for snipping. Out of respect, I never snip the Iraqi Icicles at the front of our flats unless I am invited to do so. Except when I am sure the roses’ owner, Amelia Barnes, is asleep and I can’t offend her by taking a few Iraqi Icicles.

  I retired to my own flat below Nat’s and turned on the television to reassure myself that mind-numbing American soap operas could still educate and edify the Australian masses. That didn’t work for me, so I settled for my much-preferred children’s TV, in which adolescent hosts try so hard to be witty and clever that you could only forgive them for their perpetual failure. Every once in a while, a beautiful and sexy teenage hostess appears and becomes a regular on a children’s TV show. This gives unemployed young men and jobless middle-aged male dopeheads incentive to set their alarms for 4 p.m. turning a program they would watch anyway into a cult experience. I settled down in my favourite and only armchair to enjoy the company of the sexy teenager with close-cropped blonde hair. She wore a tight-fitting T-shirt I had never seen her in before.

  A knock at the door awoke me from my involuntary late-afternoon nap. Natalie held the white rose in her hand. A red drop on her thumb told how she had pricked herself. Her slight wound reminded me that I hadn’t seen her since Saturday night, when I was too tired to go to the Beat nightclub as we had planned. She was almost forgiving, so the splendid pair of scissors had done its job again.

  ‘Steele, I got the job,’ she said excitedly. ‘I’m trainee assistant manager in fruit and vegetables.’

  ‘Go, Natalie,’ I said, to let her know I shared her joy, though her new and daunting title had more work and same money reverberating through it.

  ‘Let’s celebrate, I’ll get my wallet,’ I said, without reaching for the empty leather container in my back pocket.

  Nat, to her credit, declared that it was her shout. We would seek out the nearest pizza palace. Nat loved pizza, and the principle of the bill payer being the restaurant selector was well established in our relationship. Pizza was a culinary format I could take or leave, but my only rider was to try to find an Italian restaurant with snails.

  I love snails. Not so much the sight of them as the taste. I reckon even vegetarians should eat snails. Buddha, they travel so slowly, it is their destiny to be caught for supper. Besides, they consume every fruit, every vegetable, they can put their mouths around. With vegetarians and snails, it is case of eat or be eaten by proxy, as the molluscs devour all sources of people’s non-walking food.

  Over dinner and a bottle of Chianti, Natalie asked what I’d been up to over the previous two days. I gave my stock answer, ‘Very little.’ She pressed me further, and I avoided a reprimand for my lack of communication with her. I gave an abbreviated account of my visits to Mick’s place, leaving out minor details such as the mushrooms, the race fixing, the kidnapping and the threats from Mecklam. I talked about Mick, but I doubt she believed me when I explained how an eighteen-year-old mathematical genius could win reliably at the races. I couldn’t blame her. I would never have credited it myself had I not met Mick Clarence.

  Nat would have seen Mick’s success as another of my excuses not to get out of the racing game to make a living in a decent job, whatever that is. She had worked at the supermarket for three years, since she was fifteen. She started full-time when she had finished senior the previous year. I decided that she was putting off going to uni by keeping her frightening job.

  I was probably not the best judge, as the prospect of most regular jobs frightened the wits out of me. I was content to mix with the colourful, disparate and humorous characters among the racing crowd. The hours were good, and even the pay was all right, though I usually worked as a bookie’s clerk only two days a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I got other bits and pieces, which were usually legal, though, by some quirk of fate, quite a few quickly became illegal when the authorities woke up to what we were doing.

  Work, I guess, is a big part of all our lives, though what most of us end up doing is beyond our control. For most of my adult life, many Australians who wanted a job were, for whatever reasons, unable to get one. That was pretty tough, especially considering that even more Australians were in jobs they hated. Those whose task it was to knead and prod, shape and raise the economy were doing a lousy job. So it was a bit rich to single out a happy little bookie�
��s clerk as lacking direction in his career.

  Over coffee, I told Nat that I had to go out later that night. To her credit, she didn’t complain. When I awoke in her bed at 5 a.m. I wondered if she was psychic and had known that red wine and sex after a hectic weekend would induce a night’s sleep rather than a trip to East Brisbane.

  We had an early breakfast of scrambled eggs on that balmy Tuesday morning and Natalie asked how important the appointment I’d missed was. By the tone in her voice, I reckon she presumed it was a card game or going to a nightclub where she couldn’t go because of work the next day. I became lost in pondering how serious the plight of Flick Sailor was.

  Maybe I should go to the East Brisbane house as soon as possible. Perhaps I should give the police the address? No, that would be dumb, until I found out what was in the house.

  Resolved to start thinking seriously about doing something pretty soon, I went down to collect the paper. I had it delivered daily for its form guide, as horse racing was evolving from a two-day-a-week sport to daily betting propositions. I went back up to Nat’s flat to enjoy more coffee and the form guide. My Cucumber was bustling about, preparing for her first day with the auspicious title of Trainee Assistant Manager Fruit and Vegetables, which also involved looking after such exotic items as nuts and mueslis.

  The main picture story on the racing page announced that trainer Bill Smith and jockey Gregory Sailor had linked up to try to win their first major race together in ten years. A cute picture featured a smiling trainer and a grimacing jockey holding on to either side of the bridle of a nodding Who Loves Yer Baby. The grimace on Sailor’s face looked positively sublime compared with the one he would wear when he next met Jim Mecklam. I had to give Bill Smith credit. He must have given the story to the press so that the whole world would know why Sailor rode Smith’s horse in track work.

  Mecklam would have been suspicious when he learned yesterday about Gregory Sailor’s potential track work aboard Who Loves Yer Baby. He had called me in to find out more details. Now on Tuesday morning, most of the racing world was laughing at Mecklam or scratching their heads wondering what was going on.

  The first edition of the paper came out early, so Mecklam would have got the story in time to go down to the track and give Sailor a big serve for disloyalty. It would be the classic: ‘You’ll never work for a big stable in this town again.’

  I was most disappointed to have missed such an altercation by sleeping in at Natalie’s. But, somehow, I suspected Mecklam was too shrewd to go down to the track. His blood would be boiling at the insult, but he would not let it show in public. The racing crowd have a cynical and uncaring sense of humour: Mecklam ticking off Sailor in public would make them both the subjects of jests for weeks. Mecklam struck me as a particularly nasty piece of work. He would have a much more vindictive plan in mind for Sailor, and perhaps for Bill Smith too. I hoped Bill’s crazy plan wouldn’t wind up with anyone suffering serious physical harm.

  The article carried the snappy headline “Baby love races into family affair”. It told how Bill Smith had seen a dramatic improvement in his four-year-old gelding Who Loves Yer Baby over the past fortnight. His daughter Felicity was pregnant, and it would be fitting if his son-in-law, a top jockey, rode the horse to victory in a big race. Sailor said that he was surprised to be asked, but had accepted eagerly. Some people were expecting him to ride All The Favours in Saturday’s race, he admitted, and he had not severed ties with that horse’s stable. He would not be riding other mounts trained by Bill Smith, as taking such limited opportunities at the expense of much bigger stables would be unfair to their owners.

  Waggish Bill Smith was quoted in the article as saying that, after the pair won on Saturday, some of those owners might be transferring their top gallopers to his stables. Smith had stuck the knife deeper into Sailor, even as the jockey was trying to downplay the significance of his new ride and stress his loyalty to his old owners and trainers. How this would play out in the long term was anyone’s guess. Trainers like to sack jockeys every so often after what they see as one or more bad rides, but they detest a jockey sacking the stable without warning.

  If Smith’s horse won, most trainers and many owners would think the main loser was Mecklam, a martinet who didn’t pay his way. As I said, the biggest worry would be Mecklam employing someone to hurt people who he saw as offending him. Whether I was one of these people, the lawyer would still be deciding.

  I walked out to a public phone box, dropped two one-dollar coins into the slot and rang him on the mobile phone number he’d given me.

  ‘Mecklam,’ he answered.

  ‘Mr Mecklam, it’s Steele Hill here. I’m ringing to tell you that Sailor won’t be riding your horse on Saturday. He’s riding for another stable.’

  ‘And where did you find that out?’ Mecklam asked.

  ‘You told me to sniff around, and I did.’

  ‘Well, you’re an idiot,’ Mecklam yelled at me. ‘It’s all over the front bloody page of the newspaper, so there’s no point in your ringing me late with the news.’

  That was harsh. It wasn’t all over the front page of the paper, just the front page of the sports section. And this was Tuesday’s paper, so there were no big weekend sports stories to bump it off that prime spot. And he did ask me to ring, and I had.

  ‘I haven’t seen today’s paper,’ I lied to Mecklam, trying to convey how much his insensitive remarks had offended me. ‘You don’t want me to find out anything more, Mr Mecklam?’

  ‘You just keep your ear to the ground, and report back to me with anything else you get. That horse of Smith’s couldn’t win the Brisbane Handicap if it started now. So what’s he up to? If those bastards think they’re going to get my horse beat, they are in for a rude awakening. And so are you, if I find out you are in bed with them, Hill.’

  As a trader of non-specific threats, Mecklam was the best I had come across. He was the antithesis of the dog-owning police officer I had once annoyed. If I did it again, the cop said, he would hit me on the head with a lump of wood, ground me into mince, and feed me to his greyhounds. With that sort of clarity in a threat, I knew how to take the copper and that was seriously. With Mecklam, it could all be bluff and bullshit, or it could end up in my being maimed or murdered. I have noticed that people with undue reverence for money sometimes disrespect human life. I was beginning to hope I would discover Flick safe, and that Mecklam’s horse would win on Saturday. We little people would have done our best to take the spoils, but the unscrupulous toffs would prevail again. That unhappy ending I could live with; my main emphasis was on living.

  At 9 a.m. I drove back to the East Brisbane address. The house and surroundings were still lifeless. This time, I parked a hundred metres from the house, walked down the street fifty metres and had a good look around. The whole street was quiet; the workers and the students were at their various tasks in their workplaces and schools.

  Taking a gamble, and knowing that few letterboxes were ever locked, I walked up to the front yard of the property which interested me, flipped up the lid with one hand and dived in for the mail with the other. I put the letters casually into my pocket and, at the same time, pushed down the top of the letterbox with my free hand. It all took a few seconds. When I looked up and down the street again, there was still no one in sight.

  Three letters were addressed to people with the last name of Calder, a moniker that sounded familiar to me for some reason. I slipped the mail back into the letterbox without opening it. Mail can mean everything to the correct receiver, and yet nothing to someone like me who is not meant to see it.

  Maybe my honesty in returning the mail gave me sufficient peace of mind to remember where I knew the name Calder from. Down at the Wharfies’ Cub, there were lunchtime raffles, and winners’ names were written on a blackboard. The name Calder was often written down and, after watching many raffle results, I knew it belonged to a firefighter who regularly downed a few lunchtime beers at the club.

&n
bsp; I drove the EH ute through South Brisbane and across the William Jolly Bridge, towards Spring Hill, a suburb where single men’s hostels had been ground into rubble to make way for expensive townhouses and motels, as the rich and anonymous discovered the joys of inner-city living. I knew somebody who would be home. I drove straight past the unit when I saw Bill Smith’s V8 parked outside.

  I headed towards a flash new coffee shop nearby. It was going to be one of those coffee days, where I’d end up with a jangling brain and a queasy stomach, unable to tolerate food. A headache would likely follow and, if I didn’t ease back, a night of insomnia. A steaming espresso can be a really bad idea, especially when it is followed by two more in quick succession.

  By the time I got back to Mick’s unit, caffeine was short-circuiting the electricity in my brain. I had to search the Spring Hill street for a minute or two before I was confident that Bill Smith’s station wagon was gone.

  29

  I KNOCKED ON MICK CLARENCE’S DOOR even though it was ajar, all the invite I needed to enter.

  Headphones gave Mick the look of a high-tech, and male, Princess Leia. He was reading a mathematics textbook. As you do for a bit of light entertainment.

  Mick ground a new cigarette butt into one of his two ever-bulging ashtrays. I presume he emptied them sometimes. Perhaps the contents were simply composting under their own weight, constantly making room for more fag ends. Mick indicated the inferior chair with his elbow as he removed the headphones.

  ‘What news?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing much, apart from what’s in the paper, which I imagine you’ve read.’

  ‘Yes, our Russian friend is turning out to be one very cagey bee. You know he just left?’

  I looked suitably surprised. ‘No, I didn’t. What did he want?’

  ‘Have a look around,’ Mick said. ‘Our fungi have fled.’