by Peter Corris
‘I don’t think you’re taking this seriously.’
‘I have trouble taking politicians seriously, it’s true. If January’s such a maverick how come he’s as high in the government councils as he is? What is he, a junior Minister?’
‘Without portfolio. It’s complicated. I think they needed someone to look like a genuine leftie somewhere along the line and Peter fitted the bill. They probably planned to dump him when things cooled off but he got attention, made these causes his…’
‘Turf?’
‘I was going to say fief.’
‘Ah, so your name is really Gertrude.’
‘No! I was never a Gertrude! Never! Stop joking.’
‘I’m sorry. I can’t take the political game seriously but the death of that kid’s a different matter. And I don’t like bombing. Don’t like it at all, not in Sydney.’
‘I think I begin to see what you’re on about. You want to keep Sydney the way it was?’
‘Is, no, was. Shit, I don’t know. I’d like to catch the bomber and show everyone what a miserable human being he is…’
‘Or she. You should see the mail.’
‘Him or her. We need a good example to show bombing isn’t glamorous.’
‘Mm, I think Peter would agree with that.’
‘I don’t care whether he does or not. Now, we know what he’s anti. What’s he pro?’
There was a crash behind us in the corridor as a load of timber hit the ground. A bald head came around the scorched door jamb. ‘January?’
‘Right,’ Trudi said.
A stocky man in khaki shirt and pants came into the office and looked around. ‘Jeez, this is a mess. Is he here, Mr January?’
Trudi shook her head and the man looked disappointed. ‘Pity. I wanted to shake his hand. Seen his picture in the paper. Bloody hero, that man. Got any drop sheets?’
Gary had come back into the office with a sandwich bag in his hand. ‘What?’ he said.
‘Drop sheets to cover all this stuff while we work. You’ll get dust in everything, otherwise.’
‘We’ll move what matters into the passage.’
‘No way. We’ll be tripping all over…’
Trudi touched my arm. ‘Let’s leave them to it and get something to eat. We’ll eat in the park-Peter’s pro parks and sunshine.’
****
3
January’s office was on the corner of the main road and a broad, tree-lined street that looked as if it was just waking up from a 50 year sleep. The houses that had been green and fawn were becoming white and mission brown. The straggly oleanders in the front yards were being rooted out in favour of ground covers and slender-trunked gums. There was a parking problem-the street was crammed with cars even in the early afternoon and a couple sat out from the kerb in a highly illegal two-abreast. The terrace houses didn’t run to parkable driveways, otherwise the middle class wasn’t having too much trouble adapting.
Trudi and I blinked in the strong sunlight and we put on dark glasses simultaneously.
‘What about the pub?’ I said. The Duke of Wellington was right across the road. I knew it had a snack bar. Unfortunately, it also had pinball machines.
‘No,’ Trudi said firmly. ‘Along here you can get the best health food sandwiches in Sydney and the park’s just a bit further.’
‘Sounds like a mineral water situation.’
‘Right.’
The main road was busy and smelly with trucks and cars jostling for position on the bitumen and the pedestrians ducking between them from delis to bottle shops. I remembered this place in the early 60s; it had been a slummy four-ways with dusty shop windows and more chemists and butcher shops than the area needed. There were casualties after that and the shopfronts went blank until the revival started. Now there were restaurants of every ethnic flavour, a patisserie, trendy second-hand shops and a glossy supermarket that stocked 38 varieties of pasta. I’d counted.
Trudi steered me to the health food shop that was shady and cool despite the heat in the street. ‘Hi, Charles,’ she said, ‘ ‘lo Madga.’
Charles was a sour-looking type with a pale, blotched face and stringy hair. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans with muscles-the white apron didn’t diminish him a bit. He was scooping something white from a tin into a jar and just raised the scoop a little to acknowledge Trudi.
‘Prick,’ Trudi murmured. ‘Let’s have two big ones, Madga.’
After Charles, Madga was like a lantern in the dark. She was small with a huge mass of glossy black hair and eyes to match. Her teeth were startlingly white in her smooth, olive-skinned face. ‘With onion, Trudi?’ she said. Her voice and accent were soft.
‘What about onion, Cliff?’ Trudi said. ‘Peter comes in here a lot and politicians can’t eat onion. Did you know that?’
‘Onion,’ I said. ‘Lots of onion.’
We got the sandwiches, which were thick enough to stand on and look over heads at the football, and two bottles of mineral water. I pretended to stagger under the load. ‘How far to the park?’
‘Half a kilometre.’
Oh, Christ, I thought. Someone who really lives in the 80s. That set me speculating on her age as we walked along the footpath beside the trucks and cars to the park. She came about four inches above my shoulder in her low heel boots, call it five foot four, or whatever the hell that is in centimetres. She walked nicely with a bit of a roll to her strong body.
She had a bruise on the left side of her face which I took to be a result of the bomb. No make-up except around the eyes. Some good lines there suggesting experience and sense of humour. Thirty-five?
‘Thirty-eight,’ she said, ‘and we cross here.’
‘Eh?’
‘When men look at women that way they’re totting up years and wondering…well, that varies.’
‘You got me.’ We steered each other across the road, judging the speed of the on-coming Kombi van exactly right. ‘What varies?’
‘Smart men wonder if the woman has read a book in the last ten years and if she liked Manhattan; dumb ones wonder if her tits flop and how tight her cunt is.’
‘Uuhh,’ I cleared my throat against the fumes and the confusion. We went through an archway that celebrated the fallen into a decent-sized park that had too much grass and not enough trees but was otherwise okay.
‘Which are you?’ Trudi said.
‘Bit of both I suppose. Bench or grass?’
‘Bench.’
We sat on a bench close to a rose garden. The bushes were stubby and bare and I only knew it was a rose garden because a sign said so. We munched on the sandwiches, swigged the mineral water and didn’t speak for a full minute.
‘Did you like Manhattan?’ I said.
‘Loved it, and I read Lonesome Dove last month.’
‘You’re doing better than me. I had this eye operation last year and got side-lined from reading a bit. I read some Ken Follett and I watched Ustinov on Russia on TV.’
‘I don’t get the time for TV. Peter keeps me haring after one thing and another.’
I brushed away the crumbs and capped the mineral water. ‘So, let’s talk about Peter the Great.’
Trudi was a slower eater. She still had a mouthful and she motioned for me to wait until she’d finished. It was the sort of moment that a smoker would fill in with a cigarette and an ex-smoker filled in with the memory of a cigarette. Even my light cotton jacket was too warm for the spring sun. I took it off and rolled up my sleeves. My arms were pale and the skin looked old; there were grey hairs on my forearms.
Trudi decided she didn’t need the last third of her sandwich. I probably hadn’t needed mine either. She re-wrapped it and put it back in the bag. ‘Peter is a maverick,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t fit into any of the categories, not even into the factions and Christ knows they’re flexible enough.’
‘So how does he get to be anybody? Why isn’t he on the outer?’
‘He is, more or less. He can’t make any real no
ise in Cabinet or the party meetings. He’s got as far as he has on charm.’
‘Come on.’
‘Plus hard work, plus good staff, plus not stepping on toes. And he’s shrewd. He was in the front line on abortion when uranium was the big issue and… vice versa.’
‘You make him sound like an opportunistic shit.’
‘He’s a politician. You have to understand the breed. They don’t come in black and white like puppies, they come in shades of grey.’
‘I’m sorry, Trudi, all this just makes me impatient. Can we get to the hate mail? I want a lead on a mad bomber.’
‘Impatient is right. You need the broad picture or you’ll be wasting your time. I could be wrong, Peter could’ve been targeted by some right-to-lifer or some Middle European who lost out in the Family Court, but I think think the stakes are bigger than that.’
‘Meat exports?’
She didn’t want to laugh and she almost didn’t. ‘You’re an idiot. Is this how you tackle everything? How do you make a living?’
‘Barely. I’m sorry. I like one joke per hour, minimum. Tell me about the high stakes.’
‘Peter thinks in terms of the Pacific south of the equator and between latitudes…shit, I forget. It’s a sort of grid. No bases, no nuclear ships, no arms sales and lots of swapping-fish for pharmaceuticals. ‘
‘God, no wonder he’s got enemies. What’re his ideas on the bases?’
‘Charge rent. Top dollar and back-dated to Day One.’
‘None of our parties would even look at it.’
‘The Yanks don’t know that. Peter’s thinking…sort of globally. Everybody knows about the missiles but what about the sensors on the sea bed that trace all the ships for every second of every year. Costs trillions and does nothing. Has to go, says our Peter.’
I swallowed and looked out across the grass, over the road and up over the roof tops to the west. A lot of humanity out there, most of the races and languages of the world would be represented within a few miles of this park, but somehow, January’s ideas seemed too big for the setting.
‘Biggish notion, isn’t it?’ Trudi said. ‘What he says is that you have to start somewhere, like…’ She cast around for a hook to hang the idea on. Across the road some workmen were tearing at the front of a terrace house. She pointed. ‘Like getting the render off that place. It’s a big job, but you have to start somewhere.’
I nodded. ‘There’s nothing more dangerous than trying to stop people making money unless it’s trying to stop them making love. Tell me what you think about the mail. Then we’ll go and photocopy it. Then we’ll have a cup of coffee at the Bar Napoli’.
She was suddenly very business-like. ‘The photo-copying’s a good idea. At least you’ll be one up on the police.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘They’ve only got photocopies-haven’t seen the originals.’
‘Were they happy about that?’
She shrugged. ‘Didn’t seem to care. I think a lot of people only expect to see photocopies these days. Pretty soon it’ll be screens-birth, marriage and death certificates-all on screen.’
‘Your cynicism distresses me. Coffee?’
‘I’ll skip the coffee thanks, Cliff. I have to go back to work.’
****
We copied practically the whole of Trudi’s hate mail file at a quick printing place a few doors from the health food store. I made some notes on her view of things-how the fringe conservationists who threatened to bury politicians in the middle of a rainforest stacked up against the anti-nukes who claimed to have some yellowcake they were going to feed to the enemy, literally. She was cool which puzzled me after the good time we’d had. Her goodbye was a nod and I watched her walk away, head up and striding almost, a solid purposeful figure in white. I shook my head and went to the Bar Napoli.
The file made me feel sick, angry, disappointed, a whole range of negative feelings. I went through it slowly while I drank coffee in the sun in the leafy courtyard behind the cafe. It was mid-afternoon and I had the place to myself apart from a few butterflies. Most of the stuff could be discarded straight away as sheer lunacy-religious ravings about second comings; outright Nazi propaganda quoting from Mein Kampf, racist diatribes of one kind or another. There was a lot of sick sex material -from pedophiliacs who’d raided the Greek and Roman classics for support, to lesbian separatists advocating the castration of everything from the Prime Minister to Michelangelo’s ‘David’.
The anti-smoking brigade was getting pretty wild too. They called nicotine a ‘deadly poison’ and likened passive smoking to the death camps of Belsen and Auschwitz. The pro-pot people were the only ones to display and humour: ‘the Huxley-Hash Society’ had some Riverina heads guaranteed to make anyone laugh within 10 minutes of inhaling; they said they had special blends that would treat constipation and diarrhoea. A ‘90% effective’ impotency-correcting hash oil was available from ‘Mary John Mountain Pty Ltd’ as well as a Thai grass that would help you to increase your reading speed.
‘Another coffee?’ The son or nephew or nephew’s son of the proprietor was at my elbow. He was wearing shorts for the springtime and when he grinned his two chins turned into three. His grin sold a lot of coffee. He looked healthy and happy which was welcome after the file.
‘Sure. Why not.’
I sipped the second cup and tried to think analytically. What the material had in common was threat. Even the mildest of the organisations, the most pacific, had an element of threat in their approach. The real threateners were nasty: there were a couple of pro-Palestinian bombers, an IRA sniper and an East Timor nationalist who threatened kidnap. Two letters from private citizens made reference to their wives and punches on January’s nose. A note, crudely printed on a square of rough paper, could have been in the same category. It read: ‘Do not speak to her again or I will kill you.’
I doodled, circling the references to bombs. I made separate piles of the stuff that had an international flavour-threat of world communism, domination by inferior races-and the purely local. I wished I had the envelopes with the postmarks. I wished I had some better ideas. A shadow fell across the table and I looked up to see Sam Weiss looming over me. Weiss is a freelance journalist; his lance is free because he’s been sacked from every paper in the eastern states.
‘Gidday, Cliff,’ he said. ‘It’s my lucky day.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Buy you a coffee?’
‘No thanks. What’s the story?’
‘A ripper. Happened to be in the neighbourhood and saw you in deep conversation with the luscious Ms Bell, and now I find you pouring over Peter January’s hate mail.’
I closed the folder and laid my hand over it. Weiss laughed.
‘Too late, mate, you were deeply engrossed and I saw all. I can see the headlines- “Bombed Minister hires PI to catch child slayer”.’
****
4
I must have built up some aggression from reading the crazy mail because I over-reacted to Sam Weiss’s statement. I came up from my chair fast and straight-armed him, hitting him on the chest and thrusting him back. He had to kick plastic chairs and pot plants aside to stay on his feet as I drove him back to the ivy-covered wall. He hit it hard; the wind went out of him in a rush and I held him there, pinned and wriggling even though he was nearly as tall as me and quite a bit heavier. My anger had made me strong.
‘Easy, Cliff, easy. What’s got into you?’
‘You won’t write anything about this, Sam. Nothing-got it!’
‘I have to make a living.’ He was sweating freely and I didn’t want to touch him anymore. I took my hand away and he relaxed against the wall. The sweat broke out on his forehead below the few dark strands across his bald head and a patch spread across his chest, under the cotton shirt spread tight by his belly.
‘You were making a good living,’ I said, ‘until you started to piss it up against a wall.’
His thin, tight voice went into a whin
e. ‘I’m off the grog, Cliff. Whaddya think I’m doing hanging around coffee bars?’
‘That’s a point.’ I went back to my seat and squared the folder which had got a little disarranged when I’d got up quickly. I felt a bit ashamed; Weiss had been a good investigative journalist once but he’d taken too much money from the wrong papers and lost his edge. We all make mistakes and I shouldn’t have strong-armed him.
He was game-he couldn’t have broken some of the stories he had otherwise. ‘C’n I sit down?’ He pulled one of the chairs he’d knocked over upright and sat. ‘Let’s talk. More coffee?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m full of the stuff. What d’we talk about, Sam? The weather? Jolly good for the time of year.’
‘Give it a rest, Cliff. I’m rehabilitating myself. You’d be all for that, wouldn’t you?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I need a story. A good one. With a really good one up maybe you could put in a word with Harry Tickener at The News.’
‘You’ve got a fair way to go, Sam. You have to live down that “Dead model left love diary” shit.’ This was a scandal story that had appeared under Weiss’s by-line in one of the tabloids. Everybody denied everything and everybody sued everybody else. Word was the paper had settled out of court for big money.
‘I got conned,’ Weiss said. ‘I was trying too hard, over-anxious. I need a solid story. Research in depth, take time to follow things up. You know what I mean.’
‘The last thing a man in my business needs is his name in the paper. I’m working for January on the bombing…’
‘Bullshit. You’ve signed on as a minder.’
‘You’re getting up my nose, Sam. Piss off!’
‘I can help you.’
‘Yeah, get me in the headlines. People come to me to stay out of the bloody headlines. D’you think I want the sort of people I have to talk to, you know, drop in on and ask if the hubby’s at home or when do you expect your son back, Mrs Kefoops, to recognise me? Be your age.’