The Ambulance Chaser

by Richard Beasley

  ‘What you’ve just said to me. Have an off-the-record discussion with him. See what he thinks. Ask him what your options might be – hypothetically.’

  ‘You still keep in touch with him?’ I said. Almost an accusation.

  ‘He’s a good bloke now, actually,’ Harry said. Yeah, right. Eliot Ness, I’m sure. ‘Our dads still have a few beers together at the Labor Club. Bill Doyle drinks with them too sometimes, if he’s not at the RSL.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll do it, mate. I’ll ring him tomorrow. Meanwhile, you’re staying here tonight. Gabby, if you’d like to . . .’

  ‘I’ve actually been thinking about that,’ she said. ‘I was going to ask Chris to stay at my place tonight. Maybe for a few nights . . . until he’s spoken to this Dixon.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Harry said. ‘That way you can keep an eye on him for me.’

  I tried not to look too pleased. I was meant to be in fear for my own life and for the safety of others. I had just seen the dead body of a loyal servant to Australian public life. The lateral movement of the lips in response to amusement or pleasure is instinctive, though. The corners of my mouth were curling upwards towards my ear tips before I knew where the hell I was.

  ‘Just for a few nights,’ Gabby said dryly, reading my look.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘Not entirely,’ she said, smiling faintly, ‘but let’s do it anyway. You need to pick up some stuff?’

  I did. We said goodbye to Harry and the others. He told me he’d ring once he’d spoken to Dixon.

  Gabby drove me to my flat and I raced up to pack some gear. I shoved some casuals, work wear and toiletries into a suitcase. A huge Samsonite Silhouette upright that I once used for court documents and unwilling witnesses. I thought about leaving my libido behind, but couldn’t work out how to do it. I shrugged and shoved that into the case too, grabbed a suit, and raced back downstairs.

  ‘I said a few days, not a year,’ Gabby remarked after I’d put the case in the boot and got back into the car.

  ‘Work stuff, casual stuff,’ I said. ‘It adds up.’ I declined to tell her my libido was taking up all the room.

  ‘So,’ I said as we headed towards her flat, ‘you have a sofa bed? A second bedroom?’

  ‘There’s a bed in the spare room,’ she said. ‘I’ll need a moment or two to tidy up when we get home. Some of Jacquie’s stuff is still in there.’

  ‘Jacquie?’

  ‘Médecins Sans Frontières, Chris? We’ve discussed her at least three times.’

  Ah, the Female Dr Carter. The competition. Jacquie, is it?

  ‘She . . . Jacquie, that is. She won’t mind?’

  Gabby shook her head. ‘It’s not her flat anymore,’ she said. ‘It’s mine. I’ve just let her store some things for a while.’

  Well, that was good news. But why was she letting her store these things? And what were these things? Leather and whips, I said to myself. Which I shouldn’t have said to myself, but did. And which I shouldn’t have said out loud, but also did. Because I’m an idiot. Gabby didn’t think it was amusing and, thinking about it, I’m was buggered if I could find a single reason to blame her.

  ‘Don’t be a smart-arse, Chris. I can’t stand smart-arsed men. We just found a dead body, for Christ’s sake.’ I nodded vigorously, shamed. ‘Let’s just play this straight, okay?’

  Which was exactly what I’d been wanting to say to Gabrielle Shepherd for weeks, but this time I held my tongue. With both hands.

  Twenty-Five

  She lived in Bronte, not far from the beach. A two-bedroom apartment in a redbrick, art-deco block of eight. She was on the top floor, and had ocean glimpses out of the lounge room window. The place had been renovated in the last five years. New kitchen, new bathroom – white and jade tiles. Repolished floorboards, over which, in the living room, lay a blue-grey carpet with a hypnotic swirl pattern. It looked freshly painted too. Neutrals and off-whites. Honey-cream and hummus if I was being specific. This is what I noticed in the first sixty seconds or so. I’m quick with these things. Shit, I can’t find a TV was the next thing I was quick with, but I let that pass.

  ‘This is nice,’ I said. ‘You own it?’

  ‘Hell, no,’ she said, laughing and throwing her keys into a bowl. ‘I couldn’t afford a mortgage in this suburb. As it is, I need to get a new flatmate soon for the rent.’

  I nodded. ‘This city,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well, my salary too,’ she said. ‘I know people I graduated with who at big firms earn four times what I do.’

  ‘Regrets?’

  ‘None. Hungry?’

  I was starving. Seeing a dead politician had really sharpened my appetite. We considered Chinese home delivery, but Clarrie’s last meal ended the debate on that one. Pizza won the vote 2:0. The place Gabby suggested didn’t deliver, so she told me to make myself at home, unpack my case.

  I had a look around the open plan lounge–dining area when she left. A look around specifically at the area on the side table which contained some framed photos of what I assumed were Gabby and the Female Dr Carter. The first looked like it had been taken at an RSLC staff barbecue. Arms around each other. The next photo looked like it was taken on a trip to Nepal. Gabby, Jacquie, and a smiling Sherpa. The third photo was taken at a dinner party. Around the dining table in this very flat. Holding up glasses, smiling for the camera. Toasting the downfall of both major political parties and the coming of the Revolution, by the looks of things. I toasted that too, then examined the photos again. I tried to find an angle at which the FDC did not look like Audrey Hepburn. All I got was Roman Holiday. Even at 5000 metres halfway up Everest she looked more Gigi than Jacquie. Unless we are talking Bisset. Please, please, please let the natives be savage in Djibouti.

  With a bleeding heart I dragged my suitcase into the spare room. It was a good size, the same as Gabby’s, with a tall bookcase on the left as I walked in. I examined its contents. The first book, on the top row, right on eye level was this: Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. I noted the author was Inga Muscio before collapsing on the floor.

  Bloody hell. I just came to terms with The Vagina Monologues. The world is too much for me sometimes. Wars. Famine. Metrosexuals. Political cowardice and corruption. Now this Declaration. I give up. Or, at least, I own up. Women can have the word back. I’d used it once on Bob Green’s car and that was enough. I surrender, a poor example of the weaker, dumber sex. I have been brainwashed by patriarchy and capitalism, but I willingly submit myself for retraining. I want to be emotionally literate. I want to be vagina friendly. I am willing to take lessons, provided I get a say in the teacher. I want women to storm the corridors of power. I want to be a good brother to my sisters. I’m ready.

  When I recovered, I scanned the rest of the reading material. Nothing quite as confronting as the Declaration by Ms Muscio. The Feminine Mystique. The Female Eunuch. The Second Sex. The Beauty Myth. A touch of Camille Paglia for controversy. Hell, I had all of them.

  No surprises in the fiction department. A tattered Pride and Prejudice. Virginia Woolf. Toni Morrison. Not a great deal of chick lit. Still, I hadn’t expected either that or Tom Clancy. Bridget Jones was there, though, which went some way toward proving that there was at least one socialist on the planet with a sense of humour. The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, The Joy Luck Club and a Patricia Cornwall rounded things out on the second row.

  I was wrong about the whips and leather. But not by much. On the floor by the other side of the bed was a stack of fencing equipment, and two swords leaning against the far corner. When I say swords, I mean foils. Épées. Sabres. One of them, anyway. Plus the white gear and the masks. I wasn’t sure if it was Gabby’s equipment or the Female Dr Carter’s. Then I saw the bedside photo. It must have belonged to both. There they were, masks up, foils up, smiling at the camera again. So this is where you meet these days? At the fencing. A little parry, a little ri
poste, a little corps-à-corps.

  I told myself to be quiet and picked up one of the masks. I tried it on and grabbed a sabre. ‘En garde!’ I said. Yeah, I could do this. I wondered what my form was like, so I went back to the living room and stood in front of the large mirror on the wall. I nearly put on the lame and whites, but decided to check out the mask and my rapier style first. Yep. I looked the part. I could do this. I saw myself as a revolutionary. A row of male capitalist CEO misogynist chauvinist sweatshop-owning warmongering four-wheel-drive-owning right-wing bastards are charging towards me. I am unafraid. I lunge forward, on the attack, one hand held high, foil thrusting outwards. ‘En garde!’ I said again. ‘Prepare to die, you patriarchal pigs!’

  Which was what I was saying as the door swung open to reveal Gabby and a large Special Supreme.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Um . . .’ It could have been worse. Some women, as I understand it, come home to find their husbands in stockings and high heels. You can almost count on it if the husband went to a private school and votes conservative. Especially if Daddy didn’t love him enough. ‘Just making myself at home, I guess,’ I said.

  She stood at the door and glared at me. ‘You’re weird,’ she said.

  Yeah, well, I’m not the one with a book entitled Cunt: A Declaration, etc.

  ‘You’ve never mentioned the fencing,’ I said a short time later, sitting on the couch, eating pizza, drinking red from a bottle opened no more than a month before.

  ‘No,’ Gabby said.

  ‘Your thing? Jacquie’s thing? Did you meet there?’

  ‘No, idiot,’ she said, laughing. ‘I was into kickboxing. Jacquie fenced. We just liked to try out each other’s things.’

  Kickboxing? Bloody Nora.

  ‘She’s very attractive,’ I said. ‘Jacquie, I mean. I saw your photos. Really, very.’

  She nodded, broke an elastic piece of cheese stretching from her teeth to her plate, then looked at me sideways. ‘Fancy her, do you?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I dream all the time of women in white running at me with swords.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ she said. She was still struggling with the cheese. She’d completely miscalculated, and a long strand had stuck like sealant to her chin and throat. This is one of the times you can assess whether you like a woman. What they have to say is more important, obviously, as is their book collection, but this is one of those times for assessment too. I was going to tell Gabby I liked her. In an unambiguous fashion. Forget timing. Forget finding a petrified ex-Member of Parliament. No one could stop me. I couldn’t stop me. My libido was still in my Samsonite, but I was going to tell her anyway. My Declaration. Not in the Muscio sense, but the Love sense. I’d blame the four-week-old wine if I made a bigger fool of myself than I expected. ‘Gabby,’ I started, ‘you know how you said you wanted to play it straight?’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me you love me, are you?’

  Bugger. Talk about blind-siding me. I blushed. Where the hell did I put that mask? ‘What makes you say that?’ I said, indignant to the core. The idea!

  She stared at me. Knowingly. ‘You had that look about you.’

  ‘That look?’

  She nodded, smiling, still removing cheese from around her mouth.

  The hell with it. In the last twelve months I’d pleaded guilty to breaches of directors’ duties, and to inability to pay any of my debts as and when they fell due. I could plead guilty to love. Not even our law and order fixated politicians had made that a crime. Yet.

  I shrugged. ‘You knew?’

  She nodded, still smiling.

  ‘I’m not going to jump on you,’ I said. ‘I haven’t done that since I was eleven. Or thirty. I can’t remember now. It’s been a long time. I won’t walk around naked, or sneak into your bedroom either. I’m entirely trustworthy. I just wanted you to know.’

  She nodded again. ‘You going to say something?’ I asked. She shook her head. I was on my own, full house, centre stage, spotlight on, one-man show. ‘If you’re only into women, Gabby,’ I said, a little shaky on my forehand volley early in the first set, ‘or, you know, if it’s not really over with . . . Jacquie . . . I respect that.’ I paused again. Respect? I wanted a better word. Admire? Appreciate? Shit, bugger respect. I wanted her, and stuff the FDC.

  ‘I mean, I’m all for same-sex marriages,’ I said, and only Christ knows why. ‘It should be legalised. If that’s what people want. The churches have had my contempt for years, but when they quote Genesis . . . as a reason for two men or two women not being able to marry . . . well, hell.’ She glared at me. I couldn’t quite read the look. Amusement or pity were my first guesses. ‘I mean, have you read Genesis?’ I continued. ‘Or Exodus. Who would rely on anything in that? Sure, Thou shall not follow a multitude into evil, I like that. Some of our politicians should have that tattooed on their foreheads. Except it should be I shall not follow a right-wing radio talkback host into evil. But the rest is mainly about what you can and can’t do with farm animals. Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death. That’s the only other part I agree with.’

  ‘Oh, me too,’ she said.

  Well, that extinguished my Old Testament chitchat. ‘I guess . . . I guess what I’m trying to say . . . I’m very politically correct. That’s what I’m saying. Very. Which I think is good. I read the other day that being PC is no good now. It means you’ve got no capacity for independent thought, or something. You’re not a free thinker. Something like that. An intellectual coward. I wish people would make up their mind about these things. Causes for justice need PC. You need a language, a structure. I look at these people who say they’re against political correctness – I hate most of them. And they’re all so fat and ugly.’ Oops. ‘I mean, of course, you can go too far, it’s important not to become a PC fascist, and . . . and if you’re not into PC for some reason, well, I . . .’ I was trying to find a dignified way of saying that while I love the female mind, its wisdom, its strength, its intelligence, compassion and empathy, I like tits and arse too. In a vagina-friendly, non-aggressive way. It’s not easy.

  ‘This is a question,’ Gabby asked, ‘or a statement?’

  ‘A ramble.’

  ‘I knew that. I was trying to see if it was a rambling statement or a rambling question.’

  ‘Rambling nonsense,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

  What was it that I wanted to know, again? That’s right. ‘That stockbroker,’ I said, ‘I take it you actually did fancy him?’

  She laughed. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘And he wasn’t a fencer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And he didn’t wear your clothes?’

  ‘Chris.’

  ‘Sorry. You fancied him?’

  She nodded. ‘I didn’t like him much, in the end. Maybe ever. But yeah, at first I fancied him. I was young.’

  ‘It’s important to have both, don’t you think? The fancying and the liking? Or the fencing, fancying and the liking?’

  ‘It’s highly desirable.’

  ‘Essential.’

  ‘It is.’

  I paused. ‘I don’t fence.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  ‘Or kickbox.’

  ‘I can tell.’

  ‘Is that fatal? I mean, is that an essential, as we discussed?’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve been convicted of a breach of each of sections 180, 181 and 182 of The Corporations Act. Fatal?’

  ‘Have you been convicted of being a capitalist pig?’

  ‘Convicted of the antithesis, really.’

  ‘Not fatal.’

  ‘I’m bankrupt, and a struck-off lawyer.’

  ‘I know. Not fatal.’

  ‘I’ll be honest, Gabby. I’m not sure I’m a socialist. I’m certainly liberal-left, but I’m not sure I have sufficient faith in my fellow man for socialism. I’m emphasising man, by the way.’

  ‘I’ll work on you.’

  ‘Sure. And I’m qu
ite a long way left. And a bleeding heart, true believer, black armband view of history type. And I really think the courts and parliament should almost exclusively be women-only institutions.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be on my couch otherwise.’

  ‘And I can’t tell you how much I loathe the right.’

  ‘Tell me. It might turn me on.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘No.’

  Bugger. ‘My ex said I was a metrosexual. Frankly, I’m not sure I’m keen on them. I believe I’m just a man. And . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I . . . I like Dusty Springfield.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  Shit. Nearly fatal for Gabby. ‘What about the being a man thing?’ I said.

  ‘Not fatal,’ she said, smiling, ‘but not essential.’

  Crafty.

  ‘Where does that leave us?’ I asked.

  ‘For now,’ she said, pointing to her bedroom, ‘it leaves me in that room, and you in the other.’

  For now. I was young. I could wait. The longer I did, the further the Female Dr Carter would float up the Congo River.

  When I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw figures in white jousting at me with steely sabres. I turned the light on and looked at the bookcase. I picked up Ms Muscio’s book. What the hell, it couldn’t hurt.

  Besides, I knew all the others off by heart.

  Twenty-Six

  I had to admit Dixon looked the part. You would never have guessed his first name was Colin. As tanned as a Bondi lifesaver, with the physique to boot, his dark brown hair was better styled than the last time I’d seen him. Losing the mullet worked for him. He still had a sprinkle of dark freckles over the bridge of his nose, tiny chocolate buttons that matched his eyes. Expensive suit, and the shoes he was wearing talked Italian, if I wasn’t mistaken. Sitting at a Bondi Beach coffee shop like he owned it, he looked for all the world as though he had just walked off the set of an upmarket cop show. It was hard to know who was copying who these days.