The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  I reached for my wine glass and realised I’d left it sitting on the kitchen bench and said ‘Damn’ softly to myself. It was such a simple thing, but just then I couldn’t get up off my chair and fetch it.

  Peter said, still with that odd expression, part disdain, part stoic dignity, ‘I’m going to get the juice.’ He came back with my wine as well.

  While we ate, we talked about everything but cheating. I finished my wine, and Peter picked up the dirty plates without being asked, and carried them out to the kitchen.

  I washed our few dishes and he dried them. We never ordinarily bothered to dry things, but picking up a tea-towel and helping me in the kitchen was part of the change in my son that evening. I realised that we’d passed the point where I’d insist that he tell me the truth, but that in the morning he might be prepared to let me help him.

  . . .

  I missed Derek that night. I rang his work number. I still had to calculate the time difference whenever I phoned Philadelphia. Derek was in a meeting at some government office, I was told. No-one could tell me when he was expected back.

  I got ready for bed, knowing I’d have trouble sleeping.

  Derek had been as surprised as I was when I got the job at DIR. ‘Maybe it’s like rats and a sinking ship,’ I’d said to him shortly before he left. ‘If everyone knows the ship’s sinking, who cares if the odd stray rat climbs aboard?’

  I’d laughed and gone red.

  Derek had looked dour and displeased, as he often did when I tried to joke about something that mattered to me. Of course I’d wondered why they’d picked me for the job. With unemployment nudging eleven per cent—sinking ship or no sinking ship—they must have had plenty of applicants.

  But then I thought about it—I’d published quite a bit on outwork. Home-based work. All its names were ugly. A few years ago I’d done some research for the clothing union that had been quoted and used all over the place. I was pretty proud of that. More recently I’d written a paper for DEET on the move to outwork in white-collar industries. When I put together a list of publications, it didn’t looked so bad.

  Some time after my conversation with Derek, when I thought he’d forgotten about it, he said, ‘We’re assuming the election result’s a foregone conclusion, but it mightn’t be.’ He didn’t sound very pleased about the prospect that I might have a job past the end of the year.

  He was sorting through his papers, deciding what to take. I left him to it and escaped into the kitchen, whispering crossly to myself that maybe, just maybe, I’d been the best person for the job.

  Now I lay in bed and thought about my shaky and confusing start at DIR, and about Peter, going back over the interview with his teacher.

  I recalled an evening when Peter was six, an age when print should be beginning to make sense. But Peter had stared blankly at a page, then thrown the book at the wall so that the spine broke and loose, broken pages fluttered down.

  ‘You stupid child!’ I’d screamed. Peter shook his head from side to side, faster and faster, his whole body a trembling pendulum, and I was scared to go to him, to touch, in case I hit.

  John can run. Betty can jump. My first reader was pink, orange-pink. Who could fail to understand that run was run, and jump was jump, with Betty showing them, splay-legged over a puddle? So that ever afterwards these words had their places, and there was no clammy hole to fall into, no gap of forgetting, no need to claw my way back to that picture of Betty with her knickers showing that had first told me what the letters meant.

  So what was the big mystery? Why was it impossible for my son to do as I had?

  Letters for Peter were little sightless birds that might as well go up the page as down. Fly right to left, as badly or as well. Why hadn’t I had someone to talk to back then? Who had there been but Derek, who’d blamed me for failing to teach Peter to read, who’d made our failure worse?

  Peter and I were so anxious to get through the hated task that if a word looked like ‘there’ or ‘three’, or ‘they’, what did it matter?

  That night Peter had made his stab and missed, in a low, murmuring voice, hoping I wouldn’t notice. But I had, and I’d shouted at him, and then he’d thrown the book, to break its spine, to kill it on the bedroom wall.

  Framed Pictures on a Grey Screen

  My office phone rang late one afternoon.

  ‘Sandy. Hi.’ It was an old Melbourne University friend, Gail Trembath, now working at the Canberra Times.

  ‘Got something strange here,’ Gail said in her rough contralto voice. ‘Hoping you can throw some light on it. This story turned up on my computer. Hour or so ago. About someone called Rae Evans.’

  ‘Yes?’ I said. I hadn’t seen Gail for years. How did she know where I was working?

  ‘It just appeared,’ Gail said. ‘Actually, it’s weird.’

  She began to tell me the gist of the story, which was that Rae had been siphoning off DIR funds in the guise of a grant to a company called Access Computing. ‘Some dinky self-help women’s outfit.’

  Gail sounded as though she was quoting from her screen. ‘I should ask your department’s accountant if he’s missing nine hundred thousand bucks.’

  ‘Who sent you this?’

  ‘Didn’t leave his calling card. Or hers. Any ideas?’

  ‘It’s bullshit.’

  ‘Look, this thing I’ve got’s quite long.’ Gail said. ‘Three pages printed out. There’s even a copy of the payment notification.’

  ‘How can a story just turn up?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s weird.’

  ‘I’ll get back to you. Rae Evans is out of town at a conference. Don’t do anything till I call back.’

  ‘Normally I mistrust anonymous tips, you know? Like, we get them all the time.’

  I remembered Gail’s habit of simply not hearing questions she didn’t want to answer. ‘Spooky,’ she said. ‘The way it lit itself up on my screen. I almost expected it to talk.’

  For a few years—studying, looking for our first jobs—Gail and I had been friends. We’d lost touch, met up again in Canberra. But Gail had been on the fast track for young female reporters, while I stayed at home with Peter, writing articles and research papers, struggling to keep my hand in.

  When I went to see Rae, her personal assistant, Deirdre, said primly that she wasn’t expected back that day. For a moment I thought my spur-of-the-moment lie to Gail about the conference might turn out to be correct.

  Deirdre wouldn’t tell me where Rae was.

  She looked like Rae, in the way young women used to look like Princess Diana. Getting the resemblance almost right. In Deirdre’s case she’d got Rae’s straight grey hair, her tailored skirts and jackets, without the dignity, or the sudden warmth.

  Deirdre was flushed. She hadn’t had time to refresh her makeup.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, and turned to answer it.

  I guessed it was Gail Trembath.

  Gail wasn’t answering her phone when I rang her back from my office. I shuffled papers into my briefcase, and made an excuse to Di and Bambi, who looked at me with identical expressions of sly mistrust.

  I had Rae’s home number, but before I picked up the phone I knew that there would be no answer. I had half a mind to go around there. But what good would I do sitting on her doorstep?

  Every half-hour or so that night, between serving dinner and helping Peter with his homework, I tried Gail, and Ivan, who hadn’t been at work that day, and Rae. I left messages on Gail’s answering machine, but it was clear she had no intention of getting back to me.

  Next morning’s Canberra Times story carried Gail Trembath’s by-line, and the news editor’s as well.

  SANITISED CORRUPTION

  Fraud, or sleight of hand?

  A spokeswoman for Access Computing, a computer group for women based in Brisbane, said, ‘Access Computing prides itself on having no directors.’ Yet a Ms Angela Carlishaw is named as director of the company on
an application for a grant from the Department of Industrial Relations. Access Computing was awarded a $100,000 grant, but information received by the Canberra Times suggest that they were instead paid $1 million. When asked to explain Ms Carlishaw’s absence, the spokeswoman said she was currently on holiday in a remote part of Scotland. Who is Angela Carlishaw? And who is really behind Access Computing?

  I said to Ivan, ‘There’s got to be someone who can contact this place in Scotland. No phone, nothing—what sort of an outfit are they? How do they do business?’

  ‘Maybe by carrier pitheon.’ Ivan’s cheeks were swollen. His voice was oddly slurred, his pronunciation clumsy.

  I stared at him and demanded, ‘Where were you yesterday?’

  ‘Denthisth’s,’ Ivan mumbled.

  ‘Till eleven at night? I tried to ring you.’

  Ivan opened his big mouth wide. At the back of his lower jaw were two red clammy holes.

  ‘Took two Mogadon at eighth. Knocked me outh. Must’ve schlep right through the phone.’

  I felt cross, as though Ivan had deliberately misled me. ‘What the hell are you doing at work then? I thought it took at least a week to get over having your wisdom teeth out.’

  Ivan tried to smile. His bruised, hairy cheeks squished in and out. ‘I’m a’right,’ he muttered through them, ‘s’long’s I don’t eath or laugh or swallow anything.’

  I looked out the window. A man was walking along Northbourne Avenue with his head hunched forward, neck and shoulders bent. He wore a green felt hat, a baggy coat with long sagging pockets that came down past his knees. He looked like a caricature of an ageing crim, a man who’d had something to hide for so long it had become irrelevant.

  I turned to Ivan and said, ‘For Christ’s sake, why don’t you just go home?’

  Then I felt contrite. There was a lonely awkwardness in Ivan. That day I was feeling lonely myself, anxious about Rae and disappointed that she hadn’t tried to contact me.

  I put out my hand to Ivan, hesitating, conscious of a raw feeling, the lack of an adult person to go home to, an empty space ahead of and below me like a lift well yawning in a twenty-storey building.

  ‘Whatever it is Rae Evans is supposed to have done,’ I said, ‘she didn’t do it.’

  . . .

  Rae was expected on a mid-morning flight, but no, Deirdre said with the expression of a flustered princess, I wouldn’t be able to see her.

  If Rae did show up at work that day, she didn’t come anywhere near me. I caught no sign of her, though I prowled the first floor and pestered Deirdre. I thought how, when you broke a thermometer, the mercury balled, rolled along the tilted surface of a table and dropped to the floor, a jewel in a bed of broken glass.

  On that night’s news, a representative of Access Computing—a woman with the romantic-sounding name of Isobel Merewether—repeated her assertion that her company had done nothing wrong. Isobel was a name that stuck in my throat along with Angela—Angela Carlishaw, Access Computing’s putative director, whom the press had not been able to track down. The reporter tried to trip Isobel up, and clever cutting made her look deceitful as well as ignorant. Physically, she seemed a ruffled, slightly darker version of Claire Disraeli, the young woman who shared an office with Ivan and Guy Harmer—a little shorter than Claire maybe, a little less classically correct.

  I changed channels. ‘So you don’t believe this—Angela Carlishaw exists?’ a smirking reporter asked the shadow Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations.

  ‘Whoever invented her should have invented a more plausible-sounding name,’ the shadow Minister replied, trading pompous smirks with the interviewer.

  ‘What’s up, Mum?’ Peter asked.

  ‘It looks like a friend of mine’s in trouble.’

  ‘Has he been stealing gold watches?’

  I glanced across at Peter and smiled. ‘No way.’

  ‘Has he been arrested?’

  ‘She,’ I said. ‘I hope it’s not that bad.’

  ‘Mum? When Dad comes home we might get a dog.’

  ‘You know Dad doesn’t like dogs.’

  Peter nodded, unconvinced.

  ‘You see,’ I said a few minutes later, ‘I don’t believe my friend’s done anything wrong.’

  Peter frowned, wanting to change the subject—well, he’d tried doing that.

  He started making what he called a thunderbird with his Lego, waiting for the news to finish, his hands moving now calmly, deliberately, now in a fidgety, impatient way.

  I turned back to the television. Was it libellous to say of a person that you did not believe in them, that they were a figment of someone else’s criminal imagination? Maybe when Angela Carlishaw appeared she’d sue the tits off that smart reporter. On the other hand, the coalition and the journalists were only making use of a goldplate opportunity.

  I tried to comfort myself with the thought that there were a thousand ways of forcing a person to behave as though they were guilty, but ­relatively few ways of proving it. It was all so vague. No-one had ­produced a thing, apart from the Times’s anonymous tipster. I didn’t even know if a grant had been paid to Access Computing.

  Rae was saying nothing, and neither was anybody else in the department. The whole thing would blow over in a few days. Reputations might be dented, but they could be repaired. Television viewers would recognise the coalition’s tactics as at best opportunistic.

  Without warning I was back there, in the spring of 1975. Men with big pasty jowly faces filled the TV screen. Tents of dark suits made their angry faces paler. My mother and I were watching the dismissal of the Prime Minister.

  That night I’d been afraid that Mum would throw something at the screen, or throw the TV through the window. I think I might have moved a few heavy books out of her reach. We watched scene after scene of the drama, while my mother screamed abuse at Malcolm Fraser and the Governor-General.

  Gough Whitlam’s angry face had reminded me of a play my English class had been to, where all the characters had worn huge white face-masks half as tall as I was. My mother’s face, her tears as she shouted, waved her fists, the sacked Labor ministers, the new, triumphant ­caretaker Prime Minister, had all seemed like those masks to me. I’d been mesmerised by the play while I watched it. The teacher had to lean over and shake my arm to make me move when the curtain fell for the last time.

  I held the two of them together in my mind, my mother and Rae Evans, while Peter said, ‘Mum? Can I watch a video?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I answered him. ‘When the news is over.’

  The memory of my mother made me still inside. There was a flat, full space that had to be kept steady, or else it would overflow. I didn’t want to face another night of grubby, flooding memories.

  That was the thing about my mother. She was loyal. She simply assumed I would be too, in the way I realised, looking at Peter, parents assume some characteristics will just automatically be passed on, with the simplicity of drinking water, breathing air. I realised for the first time, and it seemed incredible that it had never occurred to me before, that my mother might not have liked the person I’d become.

  Why does it so often happen that a physical memory, the stopping of the heart in place, is unpleasant, an itch, an indigestive twinge?

  One of those nights I was itching to be out. I’d planned to meet my girlfriend Jess in Lygon Street. There was a bar with coloured lights. I was already dressed. That’s where I wanted to be, walking through that rainbow doorway, the dark both outside and in, the inside dark rich with the smells of smoke and coffee, forbidden and compelling.

  I’d stayed with Mum and watched the news and sulked.

  The next night, I stuck a curt, uninformative note on the fridge and left the house before she got home from work. No phone number, nothing she could trace. I knew exactly how to hurt her most, exactly where, on that sleeping donkey of betrayal, to pin my daughter’s tail.

  I started to tell Peter what I was thinking, what I’d been rem
inded of, then stopped—not with the futility of it, or because it was too hard, but because of the framing, the picture I’d already made for my dead mother in her grandson’s mind.

  Winter Discontent

  On a morning of minus eight degrees, I walked with Peter across a crackling oval to the primary school, then to the bus stop. My car battery had died in the night. Rubbish from the high school was frozen and frosted into weird shapes. A Raiders milk container, tossed aside while not yet empty, had grown frozen lips of brownish yellow. In the drain a boy was bashing iced-up leaves and plastic bottles with a long black stick.

  There was a morning interview with the Opposition leader on 2CN. I borrowed the tea lady’s radio and listened hunched over while he talked about public service wastage and corruption. After the first five minutes I’d had enough, but I couldn’t bring myself to switch it off.

  The Age had a piece on Access Computing that made them look as though they were a phoney organization, existing only on paper, a repository for stolen money.

  Our Deputy Secretary made a brief appearance to tell us that all press inquiries were to be referred to him.

  ‘Wonderful facility for repetition,’ commented Ivan with a grimace. ‘What does the fucker think we’ve been doing for the last twenty-four hours?’

  Jim Wilcox, Rae Evans’s division head, gathered all of his division into the large conference room on the first floor. It was like a school assembly when something unthinkable had been done, something ­meriting instant expulsion for the culprit, who was surely within an inch of being caught. In the mean time everyone, from the most senior student to the youngest, felt the tingle of unavoidable guilt by ­association, rats’ feet up and down the spine.