Something Fishy

by Shane Maloney

  Above the roar of the departing bike, I heard a crack as her head hit the stonework of the gatepost.

  I dropped to my knees at her side, just in time to see the light go out of her eyes.

  On the day the coroner’s report was due to be released, I woke in darkness.

  But not, it gradually came to me, total darkness. A faint, blood-tinged glow hovered at the edge of my consciousness. After a while, I rolled onto my side and turned my eyes towards it, the digital display on the clock-radio by my bed. For exactly eighteen minutes I stared at the numbers, counting them off. One minute for every month since the events in East Melbourne.

  At 5 a.m., I threw back the bedclothes, planted my feet on the floor and cancelled the alarm just as the sting sounded for the news. The news could wait. As far as I was concerned, the whole world could fucking wait.

  The house was cold and I cursed myself for having forgotten, yet again, to pre-set the timer on the central heating. Truth be told, the house was too big for just the two of us, much bigger than our old place in Fitzroy. But a member of parliament should live in his constituency and Fitzroy did not fall within the boundaries of Melbourne Upper, so a move was inevitable from the moment I was endorsed for the seat. Anyway, there were three of us when I bought the place. With more to come, I’d hoped.

  I padded down the hall in slippers and bathrobe, straight into the kitchen without knocking on Red’s door. Another ten minutes wasn’t going to make any difference. And a growing lad needs all the sleep he can get. Thirty-six hours a day, minimum, if Red was any indication. I lit the gas, opened the blinds and stood at the window while I waited for the kettle to boil. Not that I could see anything. The October dawn was still an hour away.

  In daylight, I would have seen a rectangle of dewy lawn, slightly overgrown and bordered with clumps of daffodils. Garden furniture, still sheathed in winter plastic. Drifts of japonica blossoms, turning to mush. My personal low-maintenance Gethsemane. And beyond the back fence, the rooftops of Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

  For more than thirty years, off and on, I’d lived and worked in this part of town, breathed its vapours, taken its temperature, counted its heads. I was a kid when my father took the licence on the Carter’s Arms in Northcote. After university and a stint as a union official, I returned to run the office of the area’s representative in the state legislature. A job which I now held in my own right, thanks to 69.52 per cent of its voters on a two-party preferred basis. It was my Province, to use the terminology, from the Ford factory in Broadmeadows to the Greek senior citizens home at Thornbury, in all its brick-veneer, blue-collar splendour.

  Unfortunately, my election had coincided with the utter defeat of the Labor Party after a decade in office. The worm had turned and, for the past three years, my constituents had been punished for their traditional adherence to the party of social democracy. Their schools and hospitals had been closed, municipal councils abolished, a poll tax imposed.

  About which, at that particular moment, I could not have given a tinker’s. What did the voters of Melbourne Upper, asleep in their beds, know of loss?

  Most days, I managed to keep a lid on my self-pity and heartache. But that particular morning, I felt entitled to the consolations of blame.

  The kettle began to whistle. I poured boiling water over a tea-bag and carried the brew towards the bathroom. As I passed, I thumped on Red’s door with a balled fist, threw it open and flicked the switch.

  ‘Yes or no?’ After a silent count of ten, I repeated the question. ‘Yes or no?’

  The lump on the bed shifted. Sock-clad feet emerged from the quilt accompanied by a compliant moan. ‘Okay, okay.’

  Exactly twenty-seven minutes later, we crossed the Yarra at the Punt Road bridge. The streets were almost deserted. As usual, Red hibernated the whole way, his school uniform stuffed into the backpack between his feet. He was fifteen now. His voice had deepened, fluff was sprouting on his upper lip and he would soon be taller than his father. But although no longer a cub, he was not yet the full grizzly. He was still my baby boy.

  Over the river, I followed Alexandra Avenue along the bank, the ribbon of water veiled in a thinning mist. The sky was high and clear and the last of the stars were fading fast. A fair spring day was predicted. As we approached the boathouse, I shoved the William Tell Overture into the tape deck and cranked up the volume.

  Red lunged for the eject button, swearing like a stevedore at a joke that was even more tired than he was. He fumbled for his bag as I nosed into the kerb. ‘I’ve got play rehearsal after school, don’t forget, and we’re working on the maths challenge at Simon’s place. Won’t be home until eight-thirty.’

  ‘Got everything you need?’ I dug out a twenty. ‘Rake the path and mow the lawn, I’ll double it.’

  ‘Weekend,’ he yawned, feeding a tangle of limbs though the car door.

  He was long and lanky, taller and thinner than I had been at fifteen. His teeth were straighter than mine, too, thanks to an orthodontic bill that would have financed a moon shot. But the similarities outweighed the differences. In the ways that mattered we were very alike.

  As he closed the door, Red paused. ‘That inquest thing,’ he said. ‘It’s today, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Fucking coppers,’ he said. ‘Covering their arses.’

  Other lads were already lowering sculls into the water and sorting equipment. Hoisting his backpack, Red shut the door and loped down the incline. When he reached the bottom, he looked back and raised his arm in farewell. He made his open palm into a clenched-fist salute. Venceremos, Comrade Dad.

  I drove towards the city centre, following the course of the river.

  I turned on the radio for the six o’clock bulletin. The announcer’s voice droned. Jury still out on O. J. Simpson. Federal election tipped for early in new year.

  A butterscotch smudge was creeping upwards from the eastern horizon. Over the mist-shrouded river, beyond the tubular metal canopy of the tennis centre, lights were appearing in the office towers. A pod of joggers powered along the path beneath the newly mantled elms. This was the postcard view of Melbourne, the garden city on a river of bridges. It was a pretty sight at dawn, one that I enjoyed three times a week, thanks to Red. But the pleasure was qualified. My home town was changing fast. Not just the shape of the skyline but the spirit of the place.

  Further downstream, a vast new casino was taking shape beside the Yarra. The plutocrats were at the helm and a veil of secrecy had descended over the processes of government. A cult of personality surrounded the Premier. The smirking bully was king and Fuck You was the official ideology. The public interest was a bankrupt notion in the heads of fools.

  I switched off the radio, made an illegal U-turn and parked. Sculls began to appear from upstream. A quad, then a coxless four, their hulls half-concealed in mist, oars dipping rhythmically. Girls, I realised, their coach on a bicycle. Ducks rose as they skimmed past, flapped and settled. Then, a few minutes later, came an eight. Red’s crew. Year Ten boys, C division, all knees and elbows, still settling into their stroke.

  I stood beside the car and watched the boat glide past. Focused on his task, pumping away between Max Kline and Danny Chang, Red was oblivious to my presence. That was fine by me. Rowing was his thing, unprecedented in our branch of the Whelan family. But that’s what you get when you send your son to a private school. Not that I had much choice. Not after they closed the local high school. Not with the senior bureaucrat in the education department being paid a cash bounty for every government school teacher fired or strong-armed into redundancy. Four thousand of them in two years.

  So it was either have Red commute to an overcrowded classroom with a leaking roof and a demoralised teacher or bow to force majeure and go private. And it wasn’t as if I was the only Labor politician to take his kid out of the public system. After all, it’s only natural to want your child to enjoy the same privileges that you had. All the more if you never had them. And, Ch
rist knows, it kept the boy’s mother off my back, hectoring me long-distance about my paternal shortcomings.

  Red had adjusted well to the change of schools. Some of his mates from Fitzroy High had also made the shift, which eased the transition. And he’d discovered rowing, an activity more benign than others available to his age group.

  ‘Builds up the shoulders,’ he argued, beefy delts being a self-evident good to the contemporary teenage male.

  As I watched him pass, tending his oar, I suspected that the allure of the sport lay in the opportunity it provided for him to be both alone and part of a team. That, and a sort of aristocratic élan behind which a boy can conceal his adolescent uncertainties.

  Flash motors were beginning to whoosh down the hill from the thicketed heights of Toorak. When Red’s eight slid under the Swan Street bridge, I got back into my Magna Executive and joined the flow.

  By six-thirty, I was pacing the treadmill in the gym at the City Baths, a towel around my neck, a newspaper draped across the console. I did my usual ten kilometres, going nowhere, reading as I went. The Age, the Australian, the Herald Sun, a summary of pending amendments to the Gaming and Betting Act, agenda papers for the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee. Anything to keep from thinking.

  Lyndal had weaned me off cigarettes and making the effort to stay healthy had become a way of honouring her memory. But trudging along a rubber belt was never more than a chore and I still kept a packet of smokes in the glove-box of the car for moments of maximum stress. I finished my session with a couple of laps of the pool and a bowl of fibre in the chlorine-scented snack-bar, then crawled through the swell of rush-hour to Parliament House.

  For all its neo-classical splendour, its colonnaded portico and gilded chambers, the House was feeling its age. A haughty Victorian dowager, it was inadequate to the demands of the late twentieth century. Behind the brass and marble, beyond the pedimented portals and wood-panelled halls, it was a rabbit warren of file-filled crannies and windowless cubicles. Only the biggest of the big chiefs warranted a private office and for opposition backbenchers like me, the lowest of the low, it offered a desk in a shared office in a permanently temporary outbuilding abutting the carpark.

  The Henhouse, we called it. But despite its clapboard construction and nylon carpet, it met its obligations to protocol. The name-plate beside the plywood door listed me as ‘The Honourable M. E. Whelan’.

  The first to arrive, I turned on the lights as I walked along the corridor to my office. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift. I transferred the contents of my briefcase to the desk and hung up my overcoat. Aquascutum, a fortieth birthday present to myself, a bit the worse for wear. Like its owner.

  Get a grip, I warned myself. Today would be hard, but there had been harder days. Much harder. Keep it in perspective, don’t let them get to you. Lyndal’s death was part of a big news story, a major episode in an unfinished saga. And with the cops keen to generate optimum coverage, it was inevitable the media would come after me when the report became public.

  And what would I say? That I felt some sort of closure?

  Pig’s arse I did.

  Problem was, I couldn’t say what I wanted to say. It wasn’t just that it was impossible to express my feelings about Lyndal’s death in a neat, five-second sound bite. If that was all they wanted, the platitudes could be found. I was a politician, after all. But what if I was quizzed about the subsequent events? If that happened, and if I didn’t keep a tight rein on myself, the shit would really start to fly.

  I sat down at my standard-issue, formica-veneer desk. Keep it moving, that was my watchword. Head down, tail up. In-tray to out-tray. The first item was a reminder letter from the state secretariat regarding the deadline for submissions to the party reorganisation review process. I stared down at it and yawned. The phone rang.

  ‘Saw the light,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘Thought it was you. Wondering how you’re set today. Any chance of a favour?’

  It was Della McLeish, administrative assistant to Jim Constantinides, leader of the opposition in the upper house, calling from Jim’s office in the main building. Jim was the closest thing I had to a boss, so a request from Della carried a certain amount of weight. ‘It’s a last-minute stand-in job,’ she explained. ‘Out-of-town sitting of the Coastal Management Advisory Panel. Comes under Natural Resources, Moira Henley’s brief. Moira’s gone down with the flu and Jim feels we should show the flag.’

  ‘It’ll mean missing a day in parliament,’ I said. ‘And you know how much I enjoy sitting on the backbench with my thumb up my quoit. So what’s the pay-off ?’

  ‘A chance to observe the democratic process,’ said Della. ‘And a free seafood lunch in beautiful San Remo.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about coastal management.’

  ‘What’s to know? The tide comes in, the tide goes out. Session starts at eleven, finishes at four. I’ll send over the agenda papers, okay?’

  ‘Might as well,’ I said. ‘And thanks, Del.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘As if you don’t know.’

  San Remo was a hundred kilometres away. Good old Della had cooked up a reason to send me somewhere beyond the reach of journalists. Somewhere I wouldn’t get my nose rubbed in it.

  I was touched by the gesture. It reminded me that the Labor Party was a kind of family. Dysfunctional, certainly, but one to which I had belonged, man and boy, for almost thirty years.

  I spent the next forty-five minutes drafting a speech opposing a forthcoming amendment to the Government Audit Act, a measure requiring that the Auditor-General carry out his duties with a bucket over his head. You do what you can. By the time I’d roughed up an outline, other MPs and staffers had begun to arrive for the day.

  I found a half-dozen of them in the lunchroom, clustered around the coffee plunger, chewing the fat. The Honourable Kaye Clegg, Member for Melbourne West, had just returned from Sydney. She was talking about an event that happened there a year earlier, the murder of a Labor MP as he arrived home after a party branch meeting. The case was still unsolved.

  ‘Word is, it was a professional hit by Vietnamese heavies,’ she said, dunking a shortbread.

  ‘At least somebody thought he was important enough to kill,’ said Dennis ‘Ivor’ Biggun, the Member for Ballarat. ‘Here in Victoria a Labor MP can’t even get run over. People cross the street when they see us coming. What do you reckon, Murray?’

  ‘I’m thinking of having a whip-around, see if I can raise enough for a contract on you-know-who.’ I cocked my head in the direction of the Premier’s office.

  Ivor tossed a coin onto the table. ‘Count me in.’

  ‘Pay to have him whacked? I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction,’ said our deputy spokesperson on health.

  Most of the others dredged change from purses and pockets, adding it to Ivor’s ten cents. The total came to ninety-five cents.

  ‘That’s this party’s problem in a nutshell,’ sighed Kaye Clegg.

  We drifted in a group to Parliament House for the weekly caucus meeting. A new leader had recently been installed, a thin-lipped automaton with television hair and the voter appeal of diphtheria. He gave us a half-hour lecture on the need to shake off our image as big spenders. I sat at the back and rested my eyes.

  When I got back to the Henhouse, the agenda papers for the coastal management whatsit had arrived. I tossed them into my briefcase and rang my constituency office in Melbourne Upper. It had just gone nine-thirty, opening time. Ayisha, my eyeball on the ground, answered the phone.

  ‘That cop, Detective Sergeant Meakes,’ she reported. ‘He rang a few minutes ago. Said to tell you that the coroner’s findings’ll be handed down mid-afternoon and the police media unit will issue a statement immediately afterwards. Said if you’ve got any questions, don’t hesitate to call him.’

  ‘Very thoughtful,’ I said. ‘Considering what the cops think about my questions. Anything else?’

  ‘
Three media calls, so far. “Today Tonight”, the Herald Sun and ABC radio. You going to talk to them?’

  ‘Think I should?’

  ‘It might help,’ she said.

  ‘Do you really think I should allow myself to be made an object of pity because the cops can’t do their job? Act like a politician who can’t resist the chance to get his face on the news?’

  ‘Maybe there’s a chance it’ll help, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘If only that was true, mate. But it’s all bullshit. Call them back and tell them I’m not available.’

  ‘That won’t stop them looking for you.’

  ‘They’ll search in vain,’ I said. ‘I’ll be in San Remo for the rest of the day.’

  ‘San Remo? What’s happening in San Remo?’

  ‘Very little,’ I said. ‘I hope.’

  An hour down the South-Eastern got me to the Bass Highway turn-off at Lang Lang, where the suburban sprawl finally gives way to the lush green of dairy farms, market gardens and wetlands. The forecast was holding and the only clouds in the powder-blue sky were thin shreds on the southern horizon. The highway forked again and Westernport Bay came into view, a verdigris slab fringed with mud-flats and tidal shoals.

  Just before the bridge across the narrows to Phillip Island, I took the turn into San Remo. The venue for the day’s meeting was a function room in a motel at the jetty end of Marine Parade. I found the place, parked out front and stood for a few minutes, breathing the ozone and contemplating the view.

  At the public fish-cleaning benches on the foreshore reserve, a flock of seagulls squabbled over the innards of somebody’s catch. Down at the jetty, commercial fishing boats were unloading tubs of whiting and school shark, fodder for the fish’n’chip shops of Melbourne. Near the war memorial, an elderly couple was sharing a thermos at a picnic table, squinting out at the water.

  According to the paperwork from Della, the Coastal Management Advisory Panel had been established to provide input into government management of the state’s coastline. A seaside location was chosen for its inaugural public meeting to facilitate the participation of what were called ‘coastal resource user groups’.