Winter Traffic

by Stephen Greenall

  ‘Thank you,’ says Karen.

  ‘What for.’

  ‘You know what for.’

  Yeah. For no question, no smartarse remarks.

  —

  Beth wouldn’t like it, this other woman inspiring parallel impulses. Brendan hasn’t told her: Beth thinks Millar is a bloke. He’s properly for it when it outs.

  Fuck. Not looking forward to that.

  —

  The car parked in Victoria Street. Beautiful Street. Brendan watches a couple of backpackers kicking through leaves, the aquiline loveliness of Nordic girls. Fierce hawks far from home. Safe?

  Adventuring, learning a thing or two, teaching a thing or two, making it out unscathed a majority of the time. Brendan lives for the remnant, for the minority of the time.

  Never worked a backpacker. Not yet.

  —

  She summoned him to the twenty-fourth floor of the InterCont, told him Bring a ram. He didn’t, thought it was a piss-take despite her voice of flint. Arrival, realisation, the door to the room kaput, like very seriously fucked. Someone jammed the card in upside down then welded back the handle.

  Welded? Did something: the metal looked like modern art, stretched to obscene angles, tied in knots like a dachshund balloon. What the frig happened here said maintenance when he hit; had never seen nothing like it. Brendan showed his credentials and told him to Get the bloody thing open.

  Karen inside, a damsel with gin on her breath, far from right, incensed beyond speech.

  —

  In the hotel basement they mounted up and he oriented through town, thinking to take her home. She’d been mixed up in something, personal or professional, all its residues clingy / a night without sleep.

  Personal is his theory. Bust-up with somebody, Karen dressed in black but not for work.

  ‘Darlinghurst.’

  The only word she said the whole twenty minutes. Between the sharp nod of greeting in 2419 and the Thank you just now, the sole and single word. That’s how it goes when they pair you with a meteor, a protégé, a woman. That weird vapour you’re only supposed to get in home life, that thing you join Death Squad with a mind to escape.

  —

  A ranger taps on the window. They’re parked illegal. Brendan yawns and goes the badgeflash again. Vermin be gone.

  Karen oblivious to the transaction, brooding behind glasses built for fashion, for giant eyes. Looks glamorous; Brendan imagines her up in the air with a ranking member, a minister or Liberal Party President.

  The Other Woman. Fanciful? Could be her go. The Prem’s mistress, dumped over a cordial G&T. Thanked for her services / quietly let go.

  ‘Rawson’s place. You know it?’

  Ah, Pay and Display. That old chestnut. ‘Sure,’ says Brendan. ‘Cockroach farm, two minutes down the road.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘He there?’

  ‘Stealth.’

  The car has dark windows, dark occupants. They cruise.

  —

  The warning light on the Pintara dash has been warning forever. Rawson fills up at the Mobil on Oxford, the one next to a bookshop and across from a bookshop and when the car is full to the goog he drives up Cannibal Street in reverse. It feels like completion of the drive he made in the morning, long ago in the dream-time / the dawn-time / it feels like going home.

  The sensation compounds when he passes the block, How you goin Mrs Hirst. He proceeds down Ithaca as it takes a sharp right and opens to self-revealing harbour. In that diamond oasis lives a song of return, a flasher in a trench coat that you actually want to see.

  —

  The carpark is a terminal. Its stone causeway suggests the hands of convicts, a meniscus brimming with their olden pain. Beyond this hard lip is a brief park, apartment buildings needle-thin and rocket-ship tall. Rawson passes the boathouse to stroll the deserted mole, appraising the magnificent boats that moor upon the living opaque. The slow grind of himself against the world in incremental heartbeats.

  Inside his body a strata of pain, cells encoded and stored like Gore Street archives, like agonies catalogued with librarian dispassion and actuary care. Decades from now they will slice his corpse and find the jewels of hardened humours: the emerald that was his bile of wrath, the onyx that was her.

  —

  He is early but has work to do, popping the bonnet while careful not to smear his hard-won finery. Later when the work is acquitted—when he is sure no worship of grease monkeys could do better—he will sit inside and listen to dirges. A pronounced descent through broken octaves; prolonged absorption from the Bushmills bottle that has lived beneath the seat. It will prime his battered chestpump and give fuel to fitful dreams—the tickets and logistics of the last flight out tonight.

  —

  Brendan says, ‘Is this important? You seem a bit off.’

  ‘Showing strain, am I. In need of sectioning.’

  ‘I went by yours this morning. No Karen. Not like you.’

  ‘Spent last night with friends.’

  ‘Right. It’s just if I don’t hear from you—’

  ‘Sorry. And yes, Tav, it’s important.’

  ‘Fair enough. Get a van maybe.’

  ‘We go through no one.’

  ‘As usual. Bercovitch—’

  ‘You don’t have to stay. But I’ve got the world’s biggest fucken bone to pick with this bloke and it’s gonna get done.’

  ‘With Rawse?’

  ‘At large. So if you are one of those persons with an abiding love for the bloke—’

  ‘Easy, Kaz—I’ve got your back. But jeez you make it hard.’

  ‘Really? Why.’

  The question is a question, not a challenge: Kaz wants genuinely to know. He rubs his chins and stretches to his philosophical limit. ‘You’ve got everything you need to get along except for this: people don’t know what they’re getting with you. And that makes them uncomfortable.’

  She stares at the apartment block. Hydrangeas with their heads down, not meeting anyone’s eye, just hoping to get through to spring. Caron said Rawson cleared out days ago. Cleared out, fine—but severed all ties? When the pressure is on you go to where you know. Even the old hands, the guns who should know better.

  ‘Give us a lend of your phone.’

  He hands it across. A new intimacy; she never borrowed it before. Karen sniffs, first symptom of the coming cold, the tip of her nose in faint blush as it rings. Just her luck / the woman answers.

  ‘Holly—hi, it’s Karen. You alone? Okay…Listen, about that thing I looked into. I lied. Rob’s sleeping with a girl from HR. Regular thing, I’ve got dates and pictures. I’m sorry I wasn’t honest the first time round.’

  Brendan Tavish listens aghast. What the fuck? He wants to get out, give privacy, disassociate from the cold disassociation in her voice. But he can’t do that / they’re on stakeout, apparently.

  The person on the other end crying. Holly. Not taking it well, calling Millar names.

  ‘You’re right,’ Karen says eventually into the handset. ‘I am a bitch. I could sit here and say it’s more honourable this way, some bullshit like that, but I’m not coming clean for you. You’re worse off now and I hear that. It isn’t honour / it’s just truth. When you want the evidence, give me a call.’

  ‘Fark,’ breathes Brendan Tavish as she hands it back. ‘I’m glad you’re in the mood for it.’

  ‘For what.’

  ‘Hard tidings. Rawson’s got this registered CI, a bloke called Bopper Dean.’

  ‘Yeah, what about him.’

  ‘Turned up dead. Robbers briefed Temple this morning, expedited given the yesterday shitstorm. Dean turned up in a Silverwater motel with four hundred grand worth of TCs on his person.’

  ‘TCs?’

  ‘These friends you spent last night with must be interesting people. Didn’t see the news? Artarmon stick-up, Caron Daley with his pretty mug all over the late bully. Treasury Certificates.’

  ‘Four hundred g
rand. Punching above his weight.’

  ‘That’s just the half of it. Literally. And when I said on his person, I mean pinned to his chest with a hunting knife. Poor old Keithy Dean, lying there on a rented queen-size in nothing but his jocks and socks, astonished look on his dial.’

  ‘Trouble with colleagues?’

  ‘Who what—then leave behind his share of the profits?’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘No. Doesn’t.’

  She tries to factor it in. Fails. Thinks about a panel van in Paddington, Mr Fuck emblazoned. What does it signify? Rawson was packed for a trip, walked like an outbound man. Karen looks up and out to skies above the water, reflecting in the face of an ocean unsullied. What is Sydney? A town where a man with a hunting knife doesn’t know what a Treasure Certificate is? Or one where he does know and thinks four hundred grand is hilarious, crime-scene joke, a note that sends a different kind of message.

  The trill of her phone, surprising Brendan: he thought she borrowed his because hers was out of commission. Stolen, broken, thrown at lover’s head. She slips and answers.

  ‘Am I whispering in the right ear?’

  Caron. ‘I was just talking about you.’

  It feels like fate. Maybe he is The One. Stop fighting it, girl—stop seeing him as just some total dick. Open your mind / he’s so pretty and well connected, making a name among the Robbers. He’s keen enough, wants kids, good provider, probably years before he strays.

  Yeah. Two. ‘Small world,’ he says.

  ‘What do you want.’

  ‘To feed you, via Myrmidon. Loving spoonful.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Slane’s office got buzzed this morning. One E. M. Rawson calling to tee up a meet. Consider this your yellow-flag advisory.’

  ‘When. Where.’

  ‘What’s your twenny?’

  ‘Ithaca Road,’ she says. ‘Lizzy Bay.’

  ‘Well that’s a coincidence.’

  Is it? ‘Powerful force,’ says Karen.

  ‘You need backup?’

  Backup from Fuckbucket, the Silver Wobbler. ‘Don’t need anything from you, Narcissus.’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘I see you sniffing round here, I shoot you my fucking self.’

  —

  ‘What are you doing.’

  Rawson looks up with a ravaged grin. ‘Gary Pterodactyl.’

  The biker is an ink stain, vivid and psychotic against the backdrop Sydney dusk. Rawson looks down at the bonnet where he has scratched a trio of words.

  ‘Keying your own car, is it.’

  ‘Where’s the boss?’

  ‘Comin.’

  Comin soon to a Pintara near you. The Big Ship nods, close to pissed, zero food since the croissant; Gary stares at Rawson and then at the vehicle he has defaced. He broadens to take in the cityscape, assessing the world for ambush. No danger, just eccentricity. Carving your own bonnet…He always knew that Rawson was crazy, was nutbar, a slowly ascendant looseness in the world.

  Pterodactyl motions that he intends to go the frisk; Bobby Cobra raises arms and consents. In the instant they come eye-to-eye, the animal state feels very pressing: very eradicate, very sow the loser’s field with salt. When the search is done and zero weapons found the copper tells him to get in. Newly stern, his dopiness shed, a police of the early seventies. Rawson practises what he preaches and jumps behind the wheel.

  Joined in silence for long minutes, together benighted. Eventually Slane walks up from an unseen angle and opens the back left door, the rear-view filling with his divine and madcap eyes.

  Rawson lights a cigarette and scratches his top lip. A rich communion in reflection, himself and the gangster. Slane waits / he always was a disciple to patience. Rawson begins it.

  ‘A despicable thing.’

  ‘What thing.’

  ‘Fucknut here didn’t tell you?’

  ‘What is he talking about.’

  ‘Sutton’s dog,’ says Gary. ‘Came to grief.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No,’ says Rawson, ‘you do not see. Until you see what was done, you do not see.’

  ‘Not how I would have handled it,’ says Slane, sounding detached. ‘But Gary is his own man. You can’t say there hasn’t been provocation.’

  Rawson smiles fakely. ‘Backing him. Wise.’

  ‘Fuck it,’ says Gary. ‘A dog is just a dog.’

  ‘True. And a god is just a god. But a man is just an ape.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Sutton took it well.’

  ‘You can’t imagine correct, Christopher. You perhaps know what a dog, to a man like Sutton, is worth.’

  Rawson unscrews the cap and takes the second-last hit of whiskey that the bottle has to give. ‘Dry spot on the back of your throat, about half the size of a postage stamp. Personal drought centre, expert tissue when it comes to thirst. That sensation when the big wet hits / I call that feeling Kristy.’

  ‘Is that what this is about?’

  ‘I have come to think that everything is about everything. Can it be otherwise? When I was a little bloke my dad took me to the beach and showed me how to bodysurf. He said the important thing when it comes to the breakers is you don’t go in half-speed. If you go in half-speed you get hurt. A year or two later it was football / same rule.’

  ‘Fucken memoir,’ says Gary Pterodactyl.

  ‘Indulge me. My dad was not the advice-giving type so I accorded inordinate weight to the principle: the harder you go, the better you are. But what is true for the tackle and the bodysurf is not always true of the life. Life never comes off second best, Gary—only you do. If I could do it all again, as myself or as some other, I would try and pass through just a little more gentle.’

  Slane is more gentle: ‘You told Li you wanted to talk about a truce.’

  ‘All in good time. I know you are busy, but you are not too busy to be present. The fact of the thing supplies its own proof.’ Rawson hits the button and Kelly arrives in their presence like a fourth conversationalist. From St Kilda to—

  ‘I enjoy the rival,’ says Rawson. ‘I honestly do. Not my town, but I can see why some would swear by it. It lacks the cock factor, Gary.’

  ‘Cock factor. You mean the gays.’

  ‘No, you dog-killing mongrel prick, I do not mean the gays. I mean that cities cast off like snakeskin the soul of previous times yet there is always a moment cast in amber that cannot ever slough. Some pasts you don’t get past.’

  ‘What the fuck are you on abou—’

  ‘Melbourne. It cannot escape its Victorian self.’

  ‘But it’s in Victoria,’ says Gary. ‘That’s where it is.’

  ‘You’re right, Pterodactyl. And you’re wrong. I have ridden the overheating tram between Flinders and the G and found it easy to picture when cricket was young. I have even wandered illicit through Old Melbourne Gaol, whispering to Ned in every blackstone corner I know you are still with us.’

  ‘I’ll sit down with him,’ says Slane. ‘If Sutton names the time and place, I will sit down.’

  ‘Sydney took longer to find its iron version. Stare at Wynyard girders and know what built the bridge—what hands, what hearts. Everything before is lost and everything after has failed to eclipse Lang’s premiership, the sight of Bradman taking guard for his state of flaming origin.’

  ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘I’m not looking at you, you fucken grease stain. I’m looking at Phar Lap.’

  ‘You’re looking at trouble.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Gaz. Why’s he so cool? I know he wants to go me bout the dog. The answer is this: I am comfortable.’

  ‘Comfortable.’

  ‘I have you in hand, Terry Sackville.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Would you like to know the difference between a woman and a man?’

  ‘You just said the difference. Cock factor.’

  ‘The difference is that a woman looks to be
in love. Takes pride in the state. Not so a man / he disavows it if he can. But his proof is always findable where alpha meets omega.’

  ‘Fuck this. We got better fucken things to do than—’

  ‘Under the desert lives a terrible machine. The Americans use it to smash particles of light, to see what light is made of. Only two at a time are allowed inside, and although they cannot glimpse each other / they can glimpse the face of God.’

  ‘God, eh.’

  ‘They are seeking for a constant that can unify their branches, but three times out of a hundred the contraption goes awry. Shall I tell you the reason?’

  ‘Why not.’

  ‘The reason, Gary Pterodactyl, is that a pair of the scientists are secretly in love. They are separated by two feet of Kevlar / by walls of conscious ignorance. But the cells in their bodies are speaking to each other, distorting fabric, meeting like the two essential species of light. An impulse in my particular GUT says the male will one day leave her, tell himself / the world that he never truly loved, and so commit revisionist sin.’

  ‘And what the fuck might that be.’

  ‘The turning of the present like a weapon against the past, a lie you tell yourself and make the fantastical error of believing. As actions go, Gary Pterodactyl, it is almost as low as the torture of a dog. Fiat iustitia pereat mundus.’

  ‘Fiat?’

  ‘Let justice be done, though the whole world perish.’

  ‘This cunt’s bent,’ says Terry Sackville.

  ‘Maybe,’ says Slane. Rawson smiles to hear his sudden fright.

  ‘I am not bent,’ the Incremental says cryptically. ‘But I am something.’ ‘What?’ says Slane.

  ‘About to tell you a story. At its heart stands a woman. Naturally—a foxy redhead named Deanna. I have often remarked that she taught me a thing or two. People hear this claim and snigger; blokes in pubs, et cetera, et cetera. They assume I speak of the bedroom arts.’ Rawson’s reach for key, his pious leer as the song concludes and merges with his longing to dissolve. ‘A heart steeped in poison is proof against flame.’