by JH Fletcher
Since becoming a minister Roberta had spent less time in her constituency than she should, was well aware of it but had had little choice. All the same, she prided herself on knowing her people. And had never been frightened of an audience, however rowdy. She wasn’t frightened now. Angry, yes, but that she kept to herself.
‘Anything in particular?’ As though she didn’t know.
‘Maltby’s never been popular.’
Bloody Maltby. The stink over him had not gone away. On the contrary, during the two weeks since she’d first heard about it the situation had grown steadily worse. The Premier’s tactic of getting Roberta to stand up for his embattled minister, to declare publicly that nothing was wrong, in other words to lie her head off for the good of the Party and Gavin Cornish, had backfired.
A small-time builder, cornered in a tax fraud, had told investigators that sums shown in his books as payments to sub-contractors had in fact been handouts to members of Don Maltby’s staff. The confession had been leaked and the resulting media blitz had uncovered other catastrophes. Bribes for favours — awarding contracts, bending financial regulations, in one case using a wilfully perverse interpretation of the rules to drive a competitor to the edge of bankruptcy — had been commonplace.
Don’s Protection Racket was how the media billed it.
Officials had been suspended, Don Maltby had appeared on television to swear on his mother’s soul that the whole thing was an opposition plot. The voters had not believed a word of it and Roberta, who’d had nothing to do with it except obey instructions and speak out on Maltby’s behalf, now found that she was fighting not only for the Treasurer’s survival but her own.
So far Cornish had stood by his ministers, no doubt fearing the fallout if he did not, but there were limits to his loyalty, as Roberta knew better than most. With an election coming he would drop the pair of them if they could not claw themselves back into favour.
‘No more horror stories?’
Roberta had not had time to look at the papers, knew that another scandal could mean the end of her career.
‘Not yet.’
Which was probably the best she could hope for.
The car turned off the main street. The hall where the meeting was being held was a hundred yards away. A cop, gesticulating, brought the car to a halt. Roberta wound down the window, stared at the policeman’s worried face.
‘There’s quite a mob,’ he said. ‘Placards, media vans, the lot. The Inspector thought you might prefer to use the side door.’
Roberta turned her stare on Jane Garland. ‘Something’s up.’
Stubbornly the agent shook her head. ‘I’d have heard —’
‘You don’t get a mob because people have been taking bribes,’ Roberta told her impatiently. ‘Something’s fired them up.’
Whatever it was, she wasn’t going to let it drive her into using side doors.
‘Thank you,’ she told the policeman through the window, ‘but please tell your Inspector we’ll be using the main entrance.’
The man scurried away. Roberta sat back in her seat. ‘We’ll give them a couple of minutes to get things organised,’ she said, ‘then we’ll go in.’
The crowd saw the car when it was still twenty metres from the entrance, came surging to meet them. A forest of placards waved.
Jane stared through the window. ‘KIDS’ LIVES, NOT DOLLARS,’ she read. ‘SAY NO TO CHEMICAL DEATHS.’ She shook her head. ‘What’s all this about?’
The car drew up before the entrance. There were police, party officials, a tossing sea of banners and placards.
Roberta grinned wryly. ‘I’ve a hunch we’re about to find out.’
She opened the car door, got out into a tempest of yells and boos.
A microphone was thrust in her face. ‘Any comments, Minister?’
She could hardly hear the reporter through the din, for once felt no urge to hog the limelight. ‘Later …’
She stepped away from the car. The mob surged, shoving, but the police wall held firm. Head high, Roberta walked up the steps and through the entrance.
Shaken more than she would admit by her rowdy reception, Roberta nevertheless managed a smile as she entered the lobby. The constituency chairman, flanked by a couple of flunkeys, was waiting just inside the door. His eyes, frightened by the din outside, hunted about the room. He licked his lips, his face twitched. He looked like a terrified mouse.
‘Any more of them inside?’ Roberta asked.
‘The hall’s full.’
‘Let’s go, then.’
Roberta had never been one for the high dais, the distance between speaker and audience. It was how the Gavin Cornishes of the world did it but she had always felt that kind of set-up made a genuine exchange of views impossible. Instead she preferred a horseshoe of seats with herself in the centre, but as she walked into the auditorium saw that, for tonight at least, that would be impossible.
The room was jammed with people, every seat taken, dozens more standing at the back and around the walls.
I hope we’ve got a bunch of muscly stewards, she thought.
They were certainly going to need something. As she came through the door the crowd erupted, yelling and whistling, placards waving threateningly. More of the same. NO TO CHEMICAL DEATHS.
Maybe someone will tell me what it’s supposed to mean.
Roberta shooed the chairman ahead of her through the mob and on to the dais.
She turned to face them. More boos, shaking fists.
If this is orchestrated I’d like to know how they do it. Could be a useful trick at cabinet meetings.
She could see at once that the chairman would not be able to handle things. Maybe she couldn’t either but she’d give it a go, too right she would.
Give it a go she did. She spoke politely, cheerfully, making a joke out of the demonstration. She called for a spokesperson to tell her what it was all about. She tried shouting back at them, meeting curse with curse. She tried to wait them out, smiling good-naturedly. Nothing did any good. The din continued unabated. It was impossible to be heard. And all the time she was conscious of the media recording it all.
She turned to the chairman. ‘This is hopeless. Might as well call it a day.’
She had to scream in his ear for him to hear her; it was out of the question that anyone in the hall could have heard, yet at once there was a bellow louder than ever and the crowd surged forward as though intending to climb the dais and attack them all. The stewards were doing as good a job as possible but the only way to shut this mob up would be to chuck them into the street and that was impossible.
A scuffle developed below the dais. Two faces, rage-red and bellowing, one round and beefy, the other with a thin scrag of beard screeching about murder. A steward tried to stop them, they went to swarm over him, fists flailing. His own fists swung, once and then again, like a tree feller swinging an axe, and the two faces were gone. Another face, young and bony, wearing a peaked cap, tried its luck and the steward flattened this one, too, the cap flying one way and the youth the other.
There were whistles and shouts from outside the hall and the police came in at a run to sort things out.
And all the time the cameras filming what was happening and Roberta standing there, impotent, before a raging sea of fighting men.
Not only men. Later that evening in her Beaumont apartment, after a boiling bath to take the stress-knives out of her body, Roberta watched the late news and saw two or three women, faces covered in blood, in tears for the camera, being helped from the meeting.
‘Where the Minister,’ the commentator said, ‘had been guarded by her goon squad, especially recruited for the purpose.’
‘All we wanted was to talk,’ one of the women wept. ‘Everything was peaceful until those blokes got stuck in.’
There was footage of the free-for-all, some tame lawyer droned about civil liberties and grounds for legal action, the whole circus orchestrated to do Roberta as much electoral
damage as possible.
By then she had discovered what it had all been about. The Premier had known about the meeting; he always insisted on knowing what his ministers were up to. An hour before the scheduled start he had issued a press release announcing the government’s choice of site for the toxic waste disposal plant that had been the subject of major controversy for the past two years.
No way such a demonstration could have been mounted in an hour, Roberta thought. The Premier had phoned her half an hour ago, expressing anxiety for her safety, relief that she was unharmed, promising full support. Before the meeting she had heard nothing. Others had, but not Roberta. In whose constituency, she now learned, the toxic waste plant was to be located.
She had been set up.
Gavin Cornish could hardly have sent her — or the media’s political analysts — a clearer message. Win or lose the forthcoming election, Roberta was dead meat.
She stood, walked to the drinks cabinet, freshened her glass. She put a CD on the player, returned to her chair. The astringent sounds of Sibelius’s violin concerto peopled the room.
She would fight. Damn right she would. But realistically, after tonight, the prospects were not good. Time for contingency plans. Her mother had refused to help. A pity but there were other options.
She checked her watch. Even with the time difference it should be all right. She consulted her list of telephone numbers, dialled long-distance. At the other end a phone rang. Was lifted.
‘Mr Donald Guthrie,’ Roberta said.
Dome lights cast revolving beams of light, red, amber, blue. A group of figures, illuminated by an overhead beacon, worked frantically.
The car had been flung through a cyclone fence and twenty feet into a paddock where it now lay upside down. The doors had been buckled by the impact and the fire crew was using the jaws of life to prise them open. Inside the car the two figures did not move. A hundred metres down the road, connected to the site of the accident by corkscrewed lines of black rubber, the semi-trailer stood parked, its nearside wing and headlamps smashed by the impact. Beside the cab the shocked driver sat in a heap, back against the big driving wheel, while a nurse fussed.
The jaws began to bite. The jammed door groaned.
‘What you reckon?’ one of the men asked.
The crew leader hated stupid questions. ‘Give us five minutes, I’ll tell you.’
A telephone ringing in the darkness.
‘Hullo?’
‘Boyd Armstrong, please.’ A man’s voice, subdued, heavy.
A premonition of disaster lifted hair on his neck. ‘Boyd speaking.’
‘It’s Harry Dark, Boyd. Bad news, mate.’
Boyd heard him out, replaced the receiver with a shaking hand.
Sally put the light on. Tension screeched in the sudden brilliance. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s Andrew.’
He told her, old-seeming with shock, while she threw her clothes on.
‘You think we should phone Mother?’
She was exasperated anew by this instinct that in twenty-two years of marriage she had never been able to shake. ‘What do you want to trouble her for? It’s five o’clock in the morning.’
She pulled on her shoes, grabbed her purse. Boyd was still in his pyjamas.
She had no time to waste on hand-holding. ‘You coming or not?’
He looked up at her, startled. ‘Of course I am.’
‘Then get dressed, for heaven’s sake.’
At least they were both still alive. Something of a miracle, given what had happened.
They’d taken them to the Kapunda hospital. Andrew was still out cold but the doctor said there was no fracture. He suspected concussion but was confident that eventually all would be well. Jenni was a different matter. Her arm was badly crushed, she might lose it altogether. There was talk of air-lifting her to Adelaide. Her parents were there, too. Four middle-aged people whose lives had been assailed by tragedy, they eyed each other in the waiting room. Lowered voices expressed sympathy but behind the voices the minds apportioned blame.
Andrew had been driving. Andrew, with his reputation. What had they been up to at such an hour? And he looked like getting off unscathed. Whereas Jenni …
What kind of girl was she, letting herself be taken to such a place? At such an hour? How had she distracted him when he was driving?
Hatred, breeding in silence.
When she got up on Sunday morning Ruth began by tidying the house. She plumped cushions, flailed a duster, sprayed polish here and there. That chore out of the way, she started to prepare lunch. Chilled tarragon soup from a recipe she had picked up years before in South Africa. Coq au vin to follow and a choice of desserts, apfel Strudel with cream, fresh fruit, cheese and coffee. As for wine … She decided she would wait until Hannah arrived before choosing but there were a couple of bottles of a good chardonnay in the fridge and shiraz if she preferred it.
She put a Telemann trumpet concerto on the CD player and got stuck in, singing along with the music as she did so. The purists would be shocked. To hell with them. She liked the music and liked to sing. As for the cooking … It was fun.
Lunch out of the way, she had a shower and went naked into her bedroom. She tried to make up her mind what to wear. As if it mattered what people used to cover themselves. Perhaps I should meet them with nothing on at all, she thought. That would give them something to think about. I wonder what the Getz would make of that. She settled for pale blue linen slacks and simple white blouse. Too bad if it made her look like a granny; it was what she was, after all.
She sat on the verandah while she ate her breakfast — freshly-squeezed orange juice, toast, coffee — and watched the symmetry of the sea. The same yet never the same. Endless variety. Life.
Today Hannah was coming to see her, bringing the celebrated Barbara Getz. Ruth decided she wasn’t looking forward to it. Hannah had claimed that Stockholm took note of what Barbara Getz had to say but at Ruth’s age was there really any possibility of a Nobel? True, Naguib Mahfouz had been seventy-seven when he won it but he’d been Egyptian and the Nobel committee, more politically correct than most, was said to be extremely alive to the claims of the Third World.
If you think that why do you care if you win it or not? If you want to be logical about it? It’s only a symbol and a corrupted one at that. It’s the work that matters.
She knew that logic had nothing to do with it. The Nobel might be only a symbol but it was the top symbol. She wanted it, all right. Every writer wanted it.
At least there would be no dramas from Hannah herself; she’d been friends with her editor for years. And the project Hannah wanted to discuss, Patterns Of Heroism, might be interesting. As long as it wasn’t too much of a coffee table production and depending on the characters she intended to include. Perhaps we should make room for some unsung heroes, Ruth thought. And heroines. The everyday people whose names never got in the paper but whose courage served as an example to the world. That was what a project like this needed, a different slant. It was what any project needed.
Ruth drank a last cup of coffee. Told herself that later that day Franz, too, would be there.
Hard to believe.
After forty-three years. What would he be like? Would she recognise him, even? He was an old man as she, too, was old. They’d had their lives, followed different paths. Had their share of tragedies but they’d been different tragedies, their lives moulded and separated by circumstance. By politics, of all things. About which Ruth for one had always found it impossible to care.
I should, she told herself. It’s too important to ignore. Politics is the power to change lives. Franz, of all men, is proof of that. Politics took him away from Australia, politics brought him home again.
And his daughter. What had he called her? Louise. There was unreality, if you liked. Ruth still thought of Franz as a young man yet here he was with a daughter only a little younger than Ruth herself had been that last summer when Franz had c
ome back from Germany. A daughter? she told herself now, shaking her head. Your grandson is older than she is.
The phone rang.
‘Hullo?’
‘Ruth? Sally.’
Something in her daughter-in-law’s voice wiped the smile from her face. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s Andrew …’
Ruth listened without interrupting. When Sally had finished she said, ‘I’ve people coming to lunch …’
‘There’s no need for you to come. Andrew’s not in any danger, thank God. They’re keeping him in until tomorrow, just in case, but the doctors think he’ll be ready to come home then.’
‘And the girl?’
‘They’ve taken her to Adelaide. Her arm was crushed but they’re hopeful they can save it.’
‘Crushed?’ Ruth was horrified. ‘How terrible for her.’
‘I just wonder what she was doing in a car with my son at that hour of the morning.’
To hell with the girl. Sally had not spoken the words or needed to. Her tone of voice said it all.
‘How did it happen?’
The tiniest hesitation. ‘The police are looking into it.’
‘And the car?’
‘A write-off. It’s a miracle they weren’t both killed.’
‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?’
‘Nothing. I wanted to tell you, that’s all.’
‘I’m glad you did. I’ll drive over in a day or two to see you all. I’ve got to, anyway, about that other business.’
She put down the phone and walked back to the verandah, pondering this latest mess in her grandson’s life. She remembered what she had said to Sally. That other business. She would certainly have to deal with that. She would not allow Mindowie to go out of the family but simply putting up the money wouldn’t make the farm secure. What would happen to it after she died? She would have to make a plan. She had no intention of chucking a large sum of money at the problem just to have it re-emerge later.
She had made that mistake once, had gone ahead with something she had known was not only flawed but wrong, hoping against hope that somehow, miraculously, things would work out. And look what had happened.