by Kim Westwood
At the beginning of my shift I’d been informed by Snarl that 5 pm is drinks at the pub in Scots Alley, just up the street. I would have begged off, but it’s been organised to welcome me into the fold — Crusher slapping me playfully around the chops and adding, ‘Don’t make us come find you.’ (I heard afterwards from another courier that her real name is Sandy, while Snarl’s is Merlyn. I couldn’t hide my incredulity at the latter. ‘Don’t say her name like that,’ he’d replied, looking around nervously. ‘She’s sensitive.’)
My bike left in the rack, I set off, crossing beneath the broad arches of the viaduct to Scots Alley, a history-imbued passage linking Pilgrim Street to Pilgrim Lane. Once, its row of warehouses sat harbourside, and it was a busy trading area for goods carried by the steamers, including hessian sacking, French champagne and gold. I look for the entrance to the Rob Roy pub. An unmarked door in a scummy recess, it takes careful notice not to miss.
Inside, the pub is the adamantly unrenovated kind: years of drinkers spilling their food and drink on the carpet and wearing deep concavities in the ancient upholstery, and proud of it. The bartender looks as worn as the décor, gravity doing its heavy work on him.
I find Crusher and Snarl — Sandy and Merlyn — tipping back beers in a wood-panelled booth. I look for the others I thought would be here too. No joy.
They welcome me in their individual ways: Sandy with a robust backslap, and Merlyn with a thin smile dragged from the gloomy depths.
I slide in, the smell of the booth making my nostrils twitch. I’m afraid that if I sneeze, it’ll raise the dust of some old soak who carked it in my seat. Sandy goes off to get the next round while Merlyn and I stare at each other across the way. I want to ask about the other workers, but don’t dare.
Sandy is back mercifully fast, setting down two schooners of dark ale and the lemonade I requested. Not that I’d tell them, but I’m still recovering from the poor-me session in St Kilda.
‘To the newbie.’ Sandy raises her glass.
‘Aw, shucks,’ I say as they swig. Could be that Meg’s minders are just desperate for other company. It must get lonely — boring, even — the two of them against the world.
Another round is called for far too soon. My turn, I go to the bar and try to meet the eye of the bartender. He moves away to serve someone else. I lean in, wondering what will help my chances, and see that below the counter he’s wearing a kilt. I’m no tartan expert, but this one I happen to know because of my father’s father. A die-hard Scot from Dundee, he’d weathered the parochial Aussie suspicion of blokes in skirts to don his tartan every day. This one — his regimental — he’d worn on special occasions, including at his funeral.
‘Did you serve with the Black Watch?’ I ask in my best nice voice, and the barman turns to me, surprised.
‘That’s right,’ he replies in an unmissable Scots brogue, which makes me nostalgic for my grandad. ‘Forty years wi’ the regiment: Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan … More flippin’ theatres than the West End.’
‘Here’s a long way from there,’ I say.
‘Married an Australian, didn’t I. We ran a youth hostel in Warburton till the fires took it. She hied off wi’ an English backpacker half her age and I ended up in this place.’ He wipes the bar with an ancient tea towel then cocks his head at our booth. ‘Same again?’
‘Thanks.’ I feel like a boy scout who’s just earned his first merit badge.
‘Salisbury Forth,’ I say, reaching across a hand.
He takes it in his big, surprisingly soft one. ‘Cam MacLeod.’
Another round on, Sandy and Merlyn have loosened up and so I get bold.
‘Meg thinks there’s someone working for Gail who wants to take her down,’ I say, trying to keep it casual.
‘A greasy pole-climber,’ Sandy replies.
‘Any suggestions who?’
‘Well, it can’t be you, that’s for sure.’ Sandy laughs loudly at her own joke.
Merlyn surprises me by coming out of her mollusc-like shell. ‘I’d be taking a good hard squiz at her 2IC,’ she says darkly.
Fancy Merlyn using military lingo. Gail’s second-in-command is Anwar. I stare at my lemonade. There’s no way on Pan’s sweet earth it’s him.
‘Got proof of that?’ I ask.
Sandy taps her nose. ‘Not for us to say, is it.’
These two know nothing. How could I have thought they would? I feel a sinking despondency as I glance along the patrons lining the bar. This subsection of the city’s underworld is different to that of the Glory Hole. Here the atmosphere is brooding, angrier. Some would likely belong with the speakeasy crowd if they weren’t too repressed to know it. Unfortunately, it’s these all transgressives have learnt to watch for, being the most likely to lash out at a suspected ‘perv’. It makes me a teeny bit glad I’m with Sandy and Merlyn, who are matching each other schooner for schooner and show no need for a toilet break. They must both have industrial-strength bladders.
My stomach gassy and acidic from lack of food, I give up on lemonade and go to the bar to check the blackboard menu. All the meals are dead animals with breadcrumbs or brown sauce, so I opt for peanuts and crisps. As I’m heading back to the booth, Meg arrives through the door. No one but me seems surprised. I realise the other two knew she was coming.
Cam calls me back to get the generously poured whisky sitting on the bar. ‘For the boss,’ he says.
His boss too? Makes sense she owns the place.
‘Sandy and Merlyn helping you settle in?’ she asks as I pass across her drink and lay the nut and crisp packets on the table.
‘Yes, thanks.’
I don’t feel talkative. I’ve been pushed one too many times off my balance beam today. At least I don’t have to wait long for her to get down to business.
‘EHg won’t survive this smear campaign, run as it is from the inside,’ she says in a flat, uncompromising tone.
My heart thuds unpleasantly. The worm in the apple … She’s saying someone close to Gail is capable of that?
‘It’ll collapse, and there’ll be a smack-down brawl for Gail’s territory. You’ll be glad to be out of it.’
I say nothing.
She takes a delicate sip from her glass. ‘Anyone made C&C a buy-out offer yet?’ she asks casually.
It’s impossible to tell whether she knows already and wants confirmation or is on a fishing trip. The joke’s on me joining her ‘gang’ to glean information, because I’m sitting opposite a master.
‘Not my business,’ I reply gruffly.
‘Don’t seem to know much about anything, do you?’ Meg sips again. ‘I like that about you, Salisbury. You’re charmingly incurious.’
Before I have time to react, she floors me with another announcement.
‘Tomorrow I’m starting you on some knock & drops.’
The Sabbath has no meaning to Meg any more than Gail — but trusting me with her prize clients so soon? While I’m digesting that news, she lays down her trump card.
‘Prestige Couriers is in the happy position of being able to take on C&C’s distribution area and service its client list,’ she says. ‘And so my question to you is, would you rather Gail’s reputation be destroyed and her territory fought over by the pack, or a genuine competitor step in early in a friendly, bloodless takeover?’
Bloodless … heartless … Beyond the protective umbrella of C&C, hormone distribution is a murky business open to bullying tactics and blackmail. Welcome to Meg’s world.
‘You’re her star performer,’ she presses. ‘You’ve worked for her for several years — am I right? Even if you’ve spent all that time with your ears politely closed, you’d have a mental list of her buyers, past and present. I’d wager you could mark on a map every address you’ve delivered to.’
Her predator’s eye is on me. I’m too afraid to look up, lest she see the truth of a kinaesthetically wired brain written on my face.
She presses harder. ‘Under the auspices of BioPharm and P
restige Couriers you could continue on as you have — for top dollar and with top protection.’
She tilts her head at Sandy and Merlyn. Sandy blinks owlishly and I almost laugh.
So this is my true value to Meg. I’m to hand over the company secrets — Gail’s buyers list — to give her the advantage in the grab for territory; and in return her minders buy me drinks instead of breaking my arms.
I’ve been naive. Now I feel vulnerable. What if it’s been her all along, steering the ship into the iceberg?
I picture her, flanked by Snarl and Crusher, explaining to Gail’s regulars the sudden change of supplier; the coldly persuasive nucleus of a company whose many tentacles are about to be inserted like cancer into the bones of the Red Quarter.
Meg brushes an errant speck of dust off her tailored lapel, and gets up. Her bodyguards follow suit.
‘Think about it,’ she says again, and then I’m alone in the lumpy leather-and-horsehair booth, staring morosely at empty glasses on sodden cardboard coasters.
When I’m really anxious, or really angry, I get on my bike. Tonight I’m both, riding through the streets of Fitzroy and Abbotsford to my favourite circuit at Yarra Bend Park.
I’ve let off steam this way since I was six years old and given my first two-wheeler: a Dragstar with shiny pink tassels sticking out the ends of the handlebars. I took to the tassels immediately with scissors, much to my parents’ dismay, that being another of their attempts to colonise me as a girl. I can remember feeling, even back then, if I didn’t do something with my pent-up energy, I would explode from it. So I’d hop on my bicycle and ride as hard as my young body could manage. The revelation was discovering my strength, my capacity to go fast. I’d power up the hills then freewheel down, every corpuscle chorusing YEEESSSS! That bike — which I eventually stacked in a ditch at the bottom of a very big hill — was my joy, and my lifeline. But I made sure the next one wasn’t pink.
I exit the street and judder across the warped boards of the footbridge over the river, then am leaning through the curves of the Yarra Park track, the lamplit edges of the parkland swishing by like a fast-forward movie.
I’ve never been someone who gets calm by being still. Riding is my meditation. Eventually, the motion unsticks my thoughts and they begin to flow like wind through a leaky building.
Meg’s earlier observation of me as ‘charmingly incurious’ flurries through. For me, couriering is about getting the deliveries to their destinations at speed and unnoticed. That’s where the pleasure has always lain. In all the years I’ve worked for Gail I’ve never wanted to know who the addressees are or what the packages contain. Why would I?
After three-quarters of an hour, my hands and cheeks are prickly with cold while the rest of me sweats under the layers; but the ride has done its calming work. I swig from the bike’s water bottle, and head for the hospital.
Food moved to the top of my needs list, I swing by the Tum-Tum Tree café for a bowl of congealed vegies and pasta. It’s passable fare, but in truth I have no interest in it other than as fuel for my body, the mush bypassing my tastebuds en route to my stomach.
The lift is stifling and I strip off a few more layers. As I’m let through to the ICU, those on duty behind the desk glance up briefly. I make for the right-hand isolation door.
The sign is gone.
Wondering, I enter the anteroom. No biohazards bins, no personal protective equipment. I look through the porthole: an empty bed frame.
Panic hits. Terrified, I turn to exit and bump into the nurse coming in.
‘Sorry,’ she says, seeing my agonised face. ‘We thought you knew. He’s out of iso now.’
Albee pronounced non-contaminative at last, his room has been cleaned and all the bedding and disposables, even the mattress, sent to the incinerator.
As I follow the nurse around the central station to the other side of the ward, I wonder about the patient in the other isolation room, and how many others there’ve been. If this were the rash of poisonings we’d feared, Albee’s room would already have a new occupant. EHg’s scouts must be doing a good job of snatching the dirty kit from the streets as it lands.
I’m led to a section containing six beds, Ellie greeting me at the first. I look down at Albee’s still form. ‘He’s made good progress, right?’
‘You bet,’ she replies. ‘They’re going to start lightening up on the sedatives to see if he’s ready to breathe on his own. If he shows the right signs, they’ll take the tube out.’
I reach for the outline of an arm under the covers as together we watch our friend, neither of us verbalising the lurking fear: what if he comes to consciousness and isn’t the same old Albee?
My wristwatch says 10 pm. I’m sitting in a vinyl armchair procured by Sarah, the nurse I angered on my first visit, and holding Albee’s hand as I talk low-tone to him, when I feel the muscles flicker in his fingers. It’s a tiny twitch, his fingers closing slightly on mine, and could be some autonomic response — but I’m not so sure. Was it something I said? I’ve been telling him about Inez, and just described her storming out of the speakeasy.
I wait for another message. That there’s nothing more doesn’t dampen my hopes. He’s shucked the OP residues from his body, and now he’s as good as squeezed my hand. Well, nearly.
Slouched sideways in the chair, one leg over the armrest, I doze, entering a disturbed half-dream. Images play on the screen of my sleep: Helen looking out at me through the barred windows of her house; the street seller shaking bloody hands over the Shangri-La’s sink; Geeta being pelted with rocks by an angry prayer group. I come back to awareness with a start, Mojo Meg’s last words, Think about it, ringing ominously in my head.
Paul arrives from his chef’s shift to take up vigil. I lean over Albee and kiss him softly on the cheek.
I’ve decided I need to let Gail know Meg is convinced it’s sabotage from the inside, and that I’m being pressured for the details of her buyers list. It means breaking the pact of no contact, but I have to go see her tonight.
22
At Checkpoint Charlie something is badly wrong: my ID won’t verify, but the SOS guard waves me distractedly through anyway. I ride into Gail’s cul-de-sac and pass police cars leaving. Her gates are wide open.
Dread settles on me like a lead weight. I lean the bike inside the hedge and walk slowly along the driveway between terracotta urns, up the steps to the unlatched entrance.
‘And you are?’
Coated and casual, the speaker blocks the threshold. Something about him is vaguely familiar.
‘Sal Forth.’ I reach out my right hand.
‘Sal …’ He looks me up and down. ‘That short for Salvatore or Sally?’
‘Salisbury, actually. After the cathedral.’
He blinks once, thrown briefly. A hand emerges like an eel from his shirtsleeve. Shaking it is like squeezing a bladder of air.
‘Doug Smeg, Neighbourly Watch. The good detectives were kind enough to give me a tingle and bring me in as community observer. You know how the Local Incident Committee likes to have its t’s dotted and i’s crossed.’
He waits for me to appreciate his wit. I don’t.
I peer past him through Gail’s glass-enclosed portico and open front door into the living area. These days Neighbourly Watch gives everyone permission to stick their noses in other people’s business.
‘I live nearby,’ I say, and wave my hand non-directionally, although I’m sure this won’t wash with Doug, who probably has the NW dossiers on everyone and their aunts and uncles for blocks around. ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’
‘Overdose.’
His words register like a slap.
‘Seems the kit was laced with something else. The ambos could do nothing for her. Damn shame — fine-looking woman. Morgue’s admiring her now.’ His nuggety eyes are fixed on mine.
No! Pain slams into me like a wrecking ball. My eyes burn, the shock stoppered in my chest. I will not cry out. Not with this smug basta
rd watching.
I set my foot on the next step to get past, but he moves swiftly to prevent me.
‘LIC investigation scene. Sorry,’ he says, slick and mean.
Still blocking my way, he reaches past a potted cycad to slide open a drawer in the roll-top bureau beside it, and calmly picks through the contents.
This can’t be happening.
Everything in me wants to pummel him aside to find out for myself that it isn’t true, but I see the regulation-issue taser at his belt and know he has the power to make an arrest for any violation he cares to think up.
‘They confiscated a dispenser and some contraband, but not enough to constitute dealing, as such …’
He lifts out a blister strip of Courier’s Friend — its telltale electric blue a brief flash before it disappears into his pocket — then assumes a disinterested air, as if his mind has already turned to other things.
I hold down the stab of rage. No way would Gail keep kit or equipment at her house. Someone must have planted it.
I force my expression blank. I want to rip his throat out.
‘Where did they take her?’
‘You’ll have to ask the constabulary that, I’m afraid.’ His lips stretch into a smile. The cops are gone. ‘How coincidental,’ he says mildly, ‘you turning up like this in the unfriendly hours. I’m assuming we’re both on the same page, Ms…ter Forth?’
I look at the menace in his flat, pasty face and know exactly which page. The one that, if all Doug Smeg’s clothes were to be removed, would reveal the injection marks of a long-time steroids user.
Call me Ms or Mister, I don’t care, but keep your evil hands off Gail’s things.
‘I have no idea what page you’re on, Doug,’ I say, low and even, ‘but I doubt it’ll ever be the same one as me.’