Inconsolable

by Ainslie Paton

  “Which no long—”

  “Foley.” The warning in Hugh’s tone went up a notch.

  “It’s called astroturfing. It’s where—”

  “You ethically compromise council and everything our Homeless Charter stands for.”

  The slow loris blinked her big brown eyes. “Hugh, it’s very clear Foley is upset. Perhaps it would be better if she waited outside.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  Hugh frowned at her. “You’re not?”

  Foley gripped the perspex. “I’m fucking furious. This council is behind Neighbours for Resident Safety. This council set up the petition. Roger is going to have to meet with an action committee his own council got going.”

  “Gab, tell me that’s not what you’re saying,” said Hugh.

  “Of course I’m not saying that. The committee is legitimate, entirely independent. I may have suggested to—”

  “May have?” Foley shouted. Hugh gave her a narrow-eyed, chin jutting, not helping look.

  The slow loris changed branches, revised her position. “I suggested to the dog walk club and the paint in the park group they might want to start a petition, just in case.”

  Foley weighted the perspex in one hand. “In case of what?”

  Gabriella smiled, fangs bared. “In case you failed, and in preference to Geraldo going public about council’s incompetence.”

  You could beat a slow loris to a slow death with a hunk of perspex. “Hugh.” It wasn’t warning in her tone so much as intention.

  Hugh’s hand went to his head. “Foley.” Another warning. “Gab, when you say you suggested this petition …”

  “This is a legitimate tactic to—”

  “To manipulate an agenda,” Foley said.

  She had no idea what sound a slow loris made when it was riled up, but Gabriella made a tsk sound. “No, to solve difficult issues where council’s reputation and community standing is at risk. With the state government considering more amalgamations, this is not the time for something as simple as a homeless man to put an unfortunate spotlight on the mayor’s ability to manage community concerns.”

  She was outrageous. No time spent disliking, being suspicious of Gabriella, had been wasted. “Hugh.”

  Hugh put a stop sign hand in her face. “Foley. Gab, I don’t know how best to say this, but we don’t do things like that here. Roger might not be the most politically aware politician, but he’s honest and that’s why he keeps getting elected and this is, this is—”

  “Evil.”

  “Foley.” Hugh glared at her then flicked his eyes to Gabriella. “This is underhand and not worthy of us.”

  The slow loris moved from Hugh’s side, looking for another branch to cling to. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  Hugh sat so hard he made his chair bounce. “How do we stop it?”

  “Why would we stop it?” The slow loris appeared to be genuinely confused.

  “Because it’s underhanded and dishonest and unnecessary,” said Hugh and even if he never smirked at her ever again and wrote her a bad reference, Foley loved him with all her heart.

  When Gabriella claimed credit for The Courier’s lead story, Foley had smelled something rotten and pounced and now that rotten was all up in Hugh’s nose and he was gagging, she felt vindicated.

  “Gab, there’s no way I will recommend Roger meets with the group. I don’t want council having anything to do with it.”

  “That’s a little too late now, don’t you think?” the poison one said, leaning over Hugh’s desk and tapping the newspaper. “The way these things play out, there’s a little fuss, the right decisions get made and the whole thing goes away.”

  Foley looked at the lump of perspex, her fingerprints were so embedded they’d never polish off. “They have a website, and on it they say they’re going to confront Drum and help him in unspecified ways to move to a safer place. You do know how dangerous that idea is. He’s not homeless because he’s perfectly balanced and reasonable.” The depth to which she’d underestimated that had given her a sleepless night.

  Gabriella shrugged. “So they got a little enthusiastic. All the more reason for the caveman to move on now. As soon as he does, this whole thing will go away.”

  “He’s not a caveman and we have a deal with him.”

  The slow loris tsked again. “It’s not perfect, Foley. We wanted him gone for good, not two weeks. You said you understood that and you could handle it.”

  Foley flashed a quick look at Hugh, then armed herself again. “I know, but it’s a start. It gets us over the immediate problem of the sculpture walk and gives me time to come up with a more long-term solution.”

  The slow loris folded her paws. “We have the better solution right here.”

  “No we don’t, you made this whole thing so much bigger than it needs to be.”

  “You’re blowing it all out of proportion, Foley.”

  “I’m blowing it out of proportion. Me! Hugh!”

  Hugh put both hands to his head. “Foley,” he warned, again. “Gab, there’s to be no more, absolutely no more, contact between you and the dog walkers or the painters in the park or anyone else you might have thought to mention this idea to. We don’t astroturf here, ever.” He brought his hands down. “That needs to be clear. Is it clear?”

  Gabriella lifted one shoulder. The slow loris secreted its toxin from glands in its elbows, then turned it into poison with saliva. “I think it’s a mistake, but it’s clear. It should be noted I only acted when it became obvious Foley couldn’t deliver the solution we needed.”

  “Huuugh!”

  “Foleeey.” Hugh did a brief double hand header. “Gab, you and I need to talk about this again, in detail. For the moment, get Donna to take any meeting with this mob out of Roger’s diary and get it in mine. They’ll have to make do with me instead of the mayor.”

  The slow loris did a slow blink, no doubt put out about being asked to do a secretarial job. She said, “Of course,” and then, passing by Foley, added, “You might want to put that down. Hugh doesn’t like it when you touch his things.”

  Bugger maturity. What this called for was something incredibly juvenile. Foley couldn’t help herself. She mimicked silently to Gabriella’s departing back, Hugh doesn’t like it when you touch his things.

  “I don’t,” said Hugh. He likely meant more than a few dusty doodads on a bookshelf. Council’s integrity was dear to him and Gab had mucked with it. “Find out what Nat knows. If it’s all dog walkers and painters I can sleep tonight, if there’s any hint of our involvement…” he pushed back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “Shit, I must have holiday leave owing.” He righted himself. “And do what you can to get Drum off that fucking cliff. We now have a couple of hundred dog walkers and paint by numbers seniors inspired to do something stupid for his welfare, and Nat ready to make them famous for it.”

  Foley rubbed a corner of her shirt across the perspex in a vague attempt at placating Hugh, and put it back carefully where she’d got it from. It was an entirely different strategy to the one she was going to need for Drum. He simply couldn’t stay in the cave now. Someone would get hurt.

  She went back to her desk in the mood to punish herself or anyone else who looked sideways at her. She opened the Beeton house file. She’d been avoiding it. But it struck her that the problem of the heritage house was the reverse of her problem with Drum. Council wanted the abandoned house saved, but Drum to move on. If she could solve one problem, maybe she could fix the other too.

  The Beeton house was the first home ever built on the coastal strip. It was constructed in 1922 for Archibald Beeton on a point of the cliff face that provided expansive views up and down the coast. Beeton was an entrepreneur, but Foley pegged him for a crook, a local gangster who made his money from racehorses and dodgy property deals. Archie had boasted his house, Sereno, which meant Clear Skies in Latin, would never be built out, never have its views compromised, and he was right. For generatio
ns Sereno stayed in the Beeton family with little changing, except the addition of modern services, a wrought-iron fence and plants in the garden.

  Meanwhile, every available scrap of land around the house was built on and rebuilt on until the small strip of a dozen homes fronting the sea became the city’s most valuable real estate. Each home was a design showpiece worth many millions.

  Sereno still had its prime position but was no longer isolated and no longer handsome. It’d been empty for nearly ten years. It was in a hellish limbo stuck between the council imposed heritage order and the desires of the trust that’d taken ownership of it after the last Beeton popped off.

  Council wanted the house repaired and maintained with its original facade as a place of historical significance. The trust simply wanted to sell the house and land and to pass the money on to charity. They’d hired a slick real estate agent who wore sunglasses inside, who had competing buyers for the land, but not a single buyer interested in the house. The agent lobbied council to have the heritage order lifted, so whoever bought the house could pull it down and start again, building a modern steel and glass structure like the neighbours.

  But the Beeton house was genuinely a beautiful home—a unique, yet classic, example of Federation architecture, graceful and quietly grand, and a significant part of the area’s history—so council was sticking to the plan to save it.

  The trust, however, had every reason to let it rot. If it became structurally unsound it would void the heritage order and the new owner could pull it down. And without regular maintenance, the sea, the wind, the sun and random acts of vandalism were destroying Sereno, because despite issuing the heritage order, council had no funds for maintenance.

  The whole mess got shuffled around until it landed on Hugh’s desk and Foley picked it up. She loved that house. Even derelict it was grand. She’d been prepared to bribe local tradesmen to do minor jobs on Sereno but the trust had barred her efforts, insisting it would be trespassing on private property. Even then she’d snuck her dad in to board up a few windows to make it harder for the vandals. And one time she and Hugh broke in to repair a hole in the slate roof.

  She couldn’t keep doing that though, and a month ago someone had lit a fire in the overgrown garden. It might’ve taken the whole house but for the quick action of a neighbour.

  It was hard to know if the fire had been kids, an accident, or deliberately started. The police had been called and fire investigators hadn’t been able to reach a particular conclusion.

  Foley looked at the latest letter from the agent. It said the same as all the other letters, just with the words shuffled about. The house was in a serious state of disrepair, was a blight on the property values, a danger to residents and council was remiss in their duties not to remove the heritage order and allow a sale of the land to take place.

  She wanted to save Sereno and save Drum, but one needed to stay and one needed to go. She replied to the latest correspondence, with the same words shuffled about she’d used to reply every other time. It was no solution. And the longer this went on, the more the house fell apart and the closer the trust got to making their millions, and once Sereno was gone, it was gone forever.

  She was the last to leave the department. She drove to the beach and parked. She walked along the cliff path to the Beeton house and stood outside the cyclone fence council had insisted on erecting around it. The garden was a charred wasteland, all the windows were broken. A piece of the guttering had detached from the roof and lay across the wide veranda like a lopsided smile. There was an enormous wasps’ nest attached to the front door, and one of the chimneys had dive-bombed off the roof, scattering bricks around the side of the house.

  Apart from the charred garden, was it any worse than last time she looked? She snapped off a few photos for the file and then walked back the way she’d come to the bent tree to meet Drum.

  If she couldn’t save Sereno, she needed to save him.

  He wasn’t there. She stood about feeling out of place in her work clothes as joggers and dog walkers did their thing around her. Over the next four days the spot she was standing on would be transformed into the centre of an outdoor sculpture gallery.

  She should’ve told Hugh what’d happened yesterday. How threatened she’d felt, how out of control Drum had been, but she knew he’d want Drum detained and hospitalised or at least insist she never meet him alone again. She would’ve told him, but then the whole astroturfing thing had blown up and Hugh was already furious and it seemed smarter, in the light of Gabriella’s insistence she’d failed, to simply get on with not failing.

  But right now, cooling her high heels, she was almost grateful Drum had done a runner. It wasn’t smart to meet him again alone. She had a sleepless night to reinforce the insanity of that. He’d scared her witless with his rage then turned her inside out with that stunt on the cliff edge, right when she’d started to believe the only thing wrong with him was garden variety eccentricity.

  It was so bad, she could smell fear on herself when she finally faked enough calm to tell Drum about the petition. And when she made it back to her car, she’d sat shaking for a good ten minutes before she felt okay to drive.

  Still, Drum not showing was making her anxious. She wanted to see his big body, his shaggy hair, get a wave, any kind of expression that passed for alive and unharmed, and she could go home and drown this awful day in pasta, wine, and too many potato chips.

  She glanced at her watch. He didn’t have one, after all, so she’d give him five more minutes. When she looked up he was standing in front of her.

  “I didn’t think you were coming.” That came out cranky, dripping in disapproval.

  “I thought you might show up with the cops,” he said.

  “You were watching me?” As if that wasn’t creepy.

  He nodded, pushed hair out of his face. “There were people on the walkway above the cave for most of the day. I could hear them talking, looking for me, they had cameras, but no one came under the railing.”

  Tomorrow they might come under the railing. Drum wasn’t meeting her eyes. He was standing stiffly, as if braced for an attack, and in truth he was being attacked. He looked so unhappy, her resolve to be angry with him frittered away. She was left with the fear. He was a powerful man, and he was unstable, and though there were a dozen people in the park, he could hit her before anyone had a chance to intervene, even assuming they would.

  She felt gut sick to remember she’d had him in her car and he knew where she lived.

  The thought stapled her jaw closed. The words she’d been rehearsing to say to convince him to leave the cave died in her throat.

  He hung his head. It drooped off his massive shoulders so all she could see was the swirls of sun turned colour in his hair. “What I did yesterday to you. I’m embarrassed. I’m appalled.” His words ground out like broken glass and sprinkled on the grass at their feet in cutting fragments. “I would never intentionally hurt you, Foley, but I know I did.” He wouldn’t look up, but she wanted him to, needed to see his face. “There’s something wrong with me and I can’t fix it.”

  She said his name; to comfort him or to steady herself, who knew?

  He lifted his chin and met her eyes. “I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.”

  “You will?”

  “I saw the paper.” He shook his head. “It can’t be that way.”

  It was an unexpected victory, but defeat was written in every muscle of his body and Foley’s fear became sympathy, empathy, she wasn’t sure what to call the feeling he stirred, but she ached for him. She wrapped her arms around her middle. “Can I take you to a shelter tonight?”

  “You shouldn’t be alone with me. I told you it wasn’t safe.”

  “My mother was right, I never listen.”

  She hoped he might smile at that, but he nodded slowly, and the sadness on his lips, in his eyes, was an awful thing to see.

  “I can have someone come and get you. Or I can call and—” />
  “I have a place I can go. It’s safe. No one will find me.”

  She’d touched his hand before she realised it was a stupid thing to do, the briefest contact, and he took a step back as if it’d burned him, his eyes widening, his breath catching in his throat with a glottal thump. But his last sentence scared her. She didn’t want him lost forever. She was hopelessly bound to him in some way she couldn’t shake off, more than duty, more than beating Gabriella; his madness had stormed inside her heart and lodged there.

  “Tell me where you’re going.”

  He looked back out to sea. “You don’t need to know. I’ll be gone from here until this nonsense stops and I can come back.”

  “Is your new place … is it …? Drum, tell me about your new place.” She didn’t like to think of him as just out there somewhere, unnoticed, unattended, unloved. His face was turned away. “If it’s safe, you should stay there, not come back.”

  His head whipped around, his expression anguished.

  She pressed the only advantage she had. “You said you’d do whatever I told you. I’m telling you not to come back.”

  He pushed hair away from his face. “You don’t understand. I need to be here.”

  She sighed. Drum’s need to be at the cave had to be a symptom of his sickness. She needed professional help with this now. Her amateur hour caretaking, her protection of him as her own project, had gone on too long. He wasn’t an item on a to do list, his removal from the cave wasn’t a triple point score against Gabriella. But for now, one day at a time was a reasonable outcome.

  She raised her hand and as quickly lowered it, in case he thought she intended to touch him again. “All right, all right. Just for now, until after the sculpture walk, you’ll stay away from the cave.”

  He shook his head, not a no gesture, more a shiver of displeasure. And she could see how much making that promise cost him in the way his body gave up the fight. He shrank in on himself, like that first day they’d met.

  “Will you be okay? Can I do anything for you?” Another head shake. He turned to walk away. “Drum.”