Stiff

by Shane Maloney

  I mumbled thanks and began to strip off on the spot. The driver looked modestly away, told me I could keep the stuff, and sauntered back to his mates. The pants were a good three sizes too big, and there was no belt. Breakdown gear. Not that I was ungrateful. I stuck my head through the windcheater, hitched up the daks and waddled across the road. The carpark was deserted. I started the Falcon and headed for the highway. A line of squad cars was coming in the other direction, spraying gravel and flashing their lights.

  I steered one-handed, my left palm stripped back to a nasty little stigmata by the super-frozen metal of the hatch handle. I’d never killed anyone before. I wondered what I should be feeling. I rolled down my window and let the cool air buffet my face. The day was turning out to be a bobby-dazzler. The night’s storm and everything that had happened in it was already receding into ancient history. On the far horizon the towers of the city were just visible. The highway was an arrow pointed straight at the tallest and most dazzling of them, the Amalfi, shiny and freshly washed.

  Some of the picture was clearer now, but the picture itself kept getting bigger, the canvas widening and widening. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to see it all, let alone make sense of it. Merricks, according to Gardiner, was behind all this. ‘Fix it, he told me.’ So said the dead man. And dead men tell no tales, do they? But what had he meant? That was a question, I decided, best put to Merricks in person.

  But not now. Not like this. Not arriving in a stolen car with a rubbish-tip mongrel farting away on the seat beside me. Not in a fat man’s dungarees held up with a bleeding hand. Not in a cast-off jumper, not even one with ‘Police Co-Operative Credit Union’ printed on the front. Not with a three-day growth and wet shoes and compost in my hair. If this keeps up, I thought, I’ll end up looking like Jimmy Barnes.

  Merricks was not a man I could see making an impromptu confession. My ill-considered phone call to him had not only very nearly got me killed, it had put him on the defensive. Merricks had more resources at his command than I could possibly imagine, someone to be approached only with the greatest care and planning. Assuming I was in a position to do anything of the sort. Assuming I was not in police custody myself. From now on, spontaneity was out. No more bull-at-a-gate stuff. Aside from which, I had more immediate worries.

  I punched the radio on, got the time, punched it back off. I was in no mood for breakfast cheer. It had just gone seven. Ayisha, I prayed, would still be asleep. I could be back on the couch before she woke. I parked a few blocks short of the house and left the keys in the car. There was a high school nearby, and with luck the Falcon would be three suburbs away by the end of morning recess. The mutt got out and followed, her nails pitter-pattering along the footpath behind me. They needed clipping. She’d need a decent wash, too. And a worming. And a distemper shot. I’d have to knock up a kennel for her, too, or Red would have her sleeping in the house. A name would be useful as well. I was still alive, so Cerberus was definitely out. Red would want to do the choosing. Voltron, or something like that, no doubt.

  Up ahead I could hear a banging noise, hollow and reverberating. As I turned into my street, Ayisha came out of the house in her big quilted overcoat and crossed the road to her Laser. I picked up pace, shuffling towards her as fast as I could, both hands hoisting the waistband of my pants. She opened her bag, fishing for keys, and saw me coming. The noise was getting louder, a demonic bashing and crashing, and I realised it was coming from my house. Ayisha found her keys, got the door open, and slid behind the wheel.

  Just as I got to her, the banging reached a frenzied pitch. The whole of my roof was rearing and pitching and seemed about to break up into its constituent parts. Abruptly the noise ceased. The sheets seemed to settle. A low metallic screech began. One by one, the iron sheets started to slide downwards, gathering momentum, catching and dragging each other, until the entire skin of the roof was an avalanche pitching towards the yard below. There was a moment of near silence. Then, with a great crash, the whole lot tipped over the guttering and landed in the garden, burying the prostrate boobialla under an ugly midden of twisted, rusting iron sheets.

  Ant appeared on the ridge beam above. He gave a lunatic whoop and waved a pinch-bar triumphantly in the air. He was wearing a blue singlet, tattered jeans, heavy work boots and wrap-around sunglasses. He looked like the original speed-crazed bikie from hell. When he saw me, he waved, pulled his top lip back to display his new choppers, and gave me the thumbs-up. By then, old Mrs Bagio had come out her front door and was standing at her gate with a broom in her hand. Other neighbours were coming outside for a look, too.

  Ayisha wound down her window. Her hair was dishevelled and wide black smudges of mascara circled her tired eyes. She looked like a bad-tempered panda. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I guess.’

  She turned on her engine. ‘From now on,’ she said, ‘I think we should keep everything on a strictly professional basis, don’t you?’ She was looking right through me.

  ‘I, um,’ I said. Across the road, the front door opened and Wendy appeared. She was got up in her corporate amazon outfit—full war paint, shoulders that would scare the shit out of a rugby forward, and, of all things, a double string of pearls. Considering she looked like her mother, she’d never looked better. She appeared pleased to see me too. But only in the sense that a tiger might be pleased to see a tethered goat.

  Ayisha was waiting for me to finish. Wendy came out onto the porch. She had Red by one hand and was carrying his overnight bag in the other. A taxi turned into the street and cruised slowly towards us. ‘I, um,’ I said again. It seemed the best I could do. Wendy began clomping across the pile of corrugated iron with Red in tow. She waved to the taxi. The Laser began to move. ‘See you later,’ said Ayisha. I doubted it. Wendy was on the footpath by then. ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I see you got here nice and early.’

  Wendy went straight for the throat. ‘Don’t bother trying to talk your way out of this one, Murray.’ She brushed past me, wrested open the taxi door and hurled the overnight bag inside. ‘I get the early flight down especially so I can take Red to school myself. And what do I find?’

  Ant came around the side of the house, took one look at what was happening and ducked back out of sight. Wendy let go of Red’s hand, grabbed hold of her own little finger and shook it. My crimes were about to be enumerated. ‘For a start, you’re not here. You’ve left Red in his bed and disappeared. And where you’ve gone is anyone’s guess. Nobody knows, including’—she moved on to the next finger—‘the strange woman I find sleeping in my bed.’

  Poor Ayisha. Talk about Wake in Fright. And I thought the emphasis on the ‘my’ was a bit unfair considering Wendy hadn’t slept there more than six nights in the previous six months.

  ‘Ayisha,’ said Red, exasperatedly. ‘I told you her name is Ayisha.’

  ‘Yes, sweetheart.’ She laid a proprietary hand on the child’s head, then snatched it back to tug a third finger. ‘Banned from school with nits, he tells me. And what do you do? You get him butchered.’ Red, the little traitor, made no attempt to contradict her. Worse, he went all waifish, averted his eyes and fiddled with a plastic model he was holding, something halfway between a stegosaurus and an armoured personnel carrier. I remembered the dog and looked around. It was nowhere to be seen.

  This lack of attentiveness compounded my dereliction of parental duty. For a moment Wendy looked like she was about to rip my arms off with her bare teeth and beat me to death with them. Then her expression turned to one of genuine hurt. ‘And my beautiful rug. I carried that thing all the way back from Srinagar.’

  ‘The roof was leaking,’ I pleaded lamely.

  That just made things worse. She let go her finger long enough to jerk her thumb back over her shoulder. ‘If you think I’m paying for any of this you’ve got another think coming. No expenditure without consultation.’ Then, having run out of fingers, she propelled Red into the cab, got in beside him, and fiddled with his se
at belt. She pulled the door shut decisively and wound the window down. ‘Haven’t you heard of passive smoking?’ she said. ‘There are cigarette butts from one end of the house to the other.’ Then she touched the driver on the shoulder and they were gone. She hadn’t even asked about my face.

  I stood on the footpath and watched them drive away. Wendy was right, of course. Leaving Red like that had not been a good idea. Things did not augur well for the tussle to come. Ant slunk out of his hiding place and stood close beside me. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What a fucking dragon.’ Up close his teeth looked like he’d gone to the wrong address and ended up at the veterinary college.

  ‘I’ll thank you not to speak that way of the mother of my child,’ I said.

  A flat-bed truck pulled up, driven by a dopey-looking teenager in a Collingwood beanie. ‘This is Trevor,’ said Ant. ‘My offsider.’ By the look of him, Trevor was on day-release from a youth-training institution. But as far as I could tell he didn’t have a single tattoo. Considering I was paying him twenty-five dollars an hour, cash, I took that as a reassuring sign. He and Ant began slinging the old iron onto the back of the truck and I went inside.

  Ayisha must have been nervously lighting cigarettes while waiting for me to return from the branch meeting. Lots of her butts were only half smoked. I squeezed one back into shape and fired it up. The smoke hit the pit of my stomach and instantaneously I was ravenous. I poured myself a bowl of Weeties and ate as I smoked. Then I ate another two bowls. Pretty soon I would have to report the Renault running into the lake. There must have been quite a few accidents during that storm. Talk about lucky.

  I turned the shower on full-bore and used the last of the nit shampoo to wash the mud and grass out of my hair. The blood on my hands was mostly metaphorical, so I couldn’t do much about that. But I kept scrubbing anyway. The real dirt was what Gezen had on me. I wondered how much he had seen, and decided not much. Not that I could imagine him rushing to the police. If he was nervous before, he’d be shitting himself now. Aside from which, we were even. We knew each other’s secrets.

  Shaving hurt like hell and a couple of scabs came away and started bleeding. I offered it up as a penance for my own stupidity. Ant and his offsider were back on the roof somewhere above me, stripping the last of the guttering away and pitching it to the ground. They were working to the sound of a radio tuned to some God-awful top forty station. The nine o’clock news came on, and the fire was the lead story. The blaze had taken three quarters of an hour to bring under control. Damage was estimated at more than a million dollars. But that information came later. First up was a police statement to the effect that an unnamed man was dead. Traffic on the Tullamarine, Eastern and South-Eastern freeways was smooth. Nothing about Charlene. We were heading for a top of twenty. Wake me up before you go-go.

  My ninety-nine-dollar del Monaco special was a write-off. I found a pair of tan cords, a white shirt and a clean jumper. Just as well nobody had ever been run out of the Labor Party for being badly dressed. At least I wouldn’t be stalking the corridors looking like a werewolf. The plan, if you could call it that, was to discover as soon as possible what was happening with Charlene. Then I would pin Agnelli down for a full and frank exchange of views. I assumed that Charlene’s bad turn would put a temporary dampener on Agnelli’s little scheme. And if he hadn’t already worked out that stabbing a sick woman in the back might not be good for his image, it would be my pleasure to draw his attention to the fact.

  The soggy bills in my suit pocket would just cover a taxi into town. I rang one and went out the front to survey the damage. The roof had been stripped as bare as a departmental budget the night before the end of the financial year. Ant, Trevor and the supply-yard driver were unloading new sheets of iron off the back of the truck. The garden was fucked, but that was the least of my troubles. The dog had reappeared and attached herself to Trevor like a limpet. I whistled and she ignored me. A car pulled up behind the truck, some sort of public service fleet vehicle. Agnelli got out, smoothed his lapels and waited for me to come over. He looked decidedly unhappy.

  ‘You’ve really fucking fucked it this time, you fucking little fuck,’ he said. With a command of language like that it was a wonder he wasn’t in the federal Cabinet. ‘Get in. Charlene wants to see you.’ As he drove away, Agnelli tooted. His idea of solidarity with the working class. I closed my eyes and slumped down in the seat. Agnelli had woken up the octopus. It had gone and now it was back. It put its suckers on my eyeballs and started dragging them backwards into my cranium.

  As Agnelli drove he reached into his inside jacket pocket. ‘You seem to have forgotten just how close to the bottom end of the political food chain you are, sport. Talk about Whelan the Wrecker. A trained chimpanzee could have done a better job.’ He had a piece of paper in his hand. My report to MACWAM. ‘No immediate cause for concern…Press reports having no basis in fact.’ He quoted my concluding paragraphs snidely and flapped the page in my face and changed lanes. ‘You’re deliberately trying to make me look like an idiot in front of the committee, aren’t you? “No cause for concern.” Shit, yesterday there was only one dead body, now there’s two and for all I know the count is still climbing.’

  He stuffed the paper back in his pocket. I took it that I was supposed to be impressed by all of this. The car was overheated and stuffy and I’d had a hell of a night. I closed my eyes, let a gentle torpor settle over me, and concentrated on getting the octopus to go back to sleep. I guess I must have yawned. This did not go down well.

  ‘You think it’s a joke, don’t you?’ Agnelli screamed. ‘I’ve got Merricks on the phone at the crack of fucking dawn screaming government incompetence at the top of his tits, and you think it’s a joke. Half the fucking joint burned down and the other half is out of commission indefinitely. If you had one iota of decency, you’d resign on the spot. You’d order me to stop the car, right here and now, and get out. You’d resign and spare Charlene, and the rest of us any further embarrassment.’ He slowed down, as if I might take him up on the suggestion and throw myself out of the moving vehicle. ‘You, mate, are in more shit than a Bondi surfer.’

  A sticker on the front of the glovebox thanked me for not smoking. I reached over and tried to peel it off. The sticker was made out of some sort of paper that tore when I pulled it. Thank You for Not, it now read. ‘One thing I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘The story in the Sun on Monday. How did you do that part?’

  Agnelli did not miss a beat, I’ll say that for him. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘It’s all been bullshit, hasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Lollicato was never planning a challenge at all. You’ve been feeding me crap from the word go, keeping me busy chasing my own tail.’

  Agnelli was suddenly deeply intent on the traffic. He seemed to find it hard to speak while getting his mouth back down below melting point. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘Because you’re lining yourself up to challenge Charlene.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, a long, upwardly-inflected exhale. It was, I knew, as close as he would come to an admission.

  ‘And Charlene?’ I said.

  ‘Charlene?’

  ‘Yeah, the woman you’re busy trying to shaft. How is she?’

  He shrugged. ‘Ask her yourself,’ he said.

  We were in Royal Parade by then, going down the long tunnel of shade cast by the avenue of big trees. I closed my eyes, feigning sleep. After a while the silence got to Agnelli. He snapped on the radio. It was the ABC. Crap, crap. Blah, blah. Then we got the ten o’clock news. The Reagan reelection campaign was entering its final phase. The word Armageddon was mentioned. Marcos had ordered the trial of suspects in the Benigno Aquino killing. I couldn’t see much coming of that. The Maralinga Royal Commission had commenced. The British High Commissioner was bitching that Britain’s name was being dragged through the mud. So not all the news was bad, then.

  After five minutes of this, I had almost fallen asleep for real.
Then the local bulletin came on. The fire had already been overtaken by more current stories. In a joint state–commonwealth police operation, illegal gambling equipment had been seized from an address in Brunswick overnight. It was believed that charges relating to immigration offences would be laid in the near future. After that I must have dozed off properly, because the next thing I knew Agnelli had pulled into a vacant space outside the Peter MacCallum Institute. That woke me up quick smart. Peter Mac is a cancer hospital. ‘What are we doing here?’

  ‘Talking to Charlene.’ That was as much as I could get out of him.

  ‘She’s okay though, isn’t she?’

  ‘You’re so fucking smart,’ he said. ‘You tell me.’ He led the way along halls that smelled like the 1930s, all wax and boracic soap. Outside her room he softened a little. ‘She wants to tell you herself,’ he said.

  Charlene was in a private room, in a bed with too many pillows, a view of the back end of the Titles Office, and ominous plumbing fixtures. She was propped up with a tube sticking into her arm and another coming out her nose. It was the first time I had ever seen her without make-up. Her complexion was parchment, as if her face had ceded priority to more demanding parts of her metabolism. Her customary rigid helmet of a perm had flopped into a lifeless mat. She looked a hundred. Whatever was happening to her was happening fast.

  She was studying a document. Her reading glasses had slipped down to the end of her nose and she looked over the top of them. A major display of gladioli had been shoved to the back of the bedside table to make way for dispatch boxes. Arthur, her driver, was standing at the foot of the bed scrutinising his shoes.