The Brush-Off

by Shane Maloney

  She didn’t answer at first. I knocked, waited, knocked again. A reggae beat was coming from somewhere, emanating from the very bones of the building, dreams of Jamaica. I knocked again and was about to turn away when the door opened a chink and Sal peered tentatively through the gap.

  ‘Oh, it’s you.’ Her mouth gave me a jumpy, automatic smile and her eyes tried to find their way around me into the hall. They were cold and glistening like she’d just been polishing them and had to put them back in to answer the door and they weren’t warmed up yet. Her once-fruited lips were thin and pasty. Unconsciously raising a little finger to them, she tore off a half moon of nail.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, harmlessly. ‘I haven’t come to take you up on your offer.’

  The skin was drawn tight across the bridge of her nose, accentuating the bird-like cast of her face. It was a face about five years older than when I’d first seen it. She didn’t open the door any further and she didn’t invite me in.

  ‘Sorry to drop by out of the blue,’ I said. ‘But I’ve heard that they’re pretty well decided that Marcus’s death wasn’t suicide. Thought I should let you know.’

  She accepted the news as though already reconciled to the possibility. Her neck flexed in a tiny bob, pecking an invisible grain of wheat. ‘Part of me hoped so, in a way. I can’t blame myself for an accident, can I?’

  ‘I was a bit abrupt yesterday,’ I said. ‘If you’d like to talk about it.’ I looked at the floor. ‘As a friend.’

  She reached out through the gap in the door and put her hand softly on my chest. ‘You’re a sweet guy, Murray. Really, you are. But I’d rather be alone.’ She gave me the most bathos-drenched look ever practised in front of a mirror, sighed heavily and stepped back.

  She’d tried that one before. Last time, it had nearly worked. Before the door could shut, I had my foot in it. Through the crack, I could see a bed. On the bed was a suitcase. ‘Going somewhere, Sal?’

  ‘How dare you!’ she spat through the gap, putting her shoulder to the door. ‘You can’t just force your way in.’

  My thirty-kilo advantage sat inert against the door. ‘Talk to me,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  The pressure on the door diminished somewhat. ‘This official, or what?’

  ‘Or what,’ I said.

  She backed away silently, letting the door fall open. Her lack of pretence at hospitality was refreshingly unrehearsed.

  What Salina called her loft was a large high-ceilinged room that might have once been a typing college classroom or the workshop of a manufacturing milliner. Chipboard partitions had been installed to create separate kitchen and bathroom areas, the floor had been sanded back and the place stocked with oddments of retro furniture of the Zsa Zsa Gabor On Safari variety. The wardrobe was a metal shop-display rack on castors, half empty. The bed took up the rest of the space, unmade beneath a scattering of clothes and a small, half-packed suitcase. The ashtray contained about five thousand half-smoked green-tinged butts.

  ‘Nice,’ I said.

  My opinion was a matter of supreme indifference to Salina Fleet. ‘What’s this all about?’ she demanded.

  A little of the old Sal had returned. She was wearing Capri pants with a pink gingham shirt knotted at the midriff and hoop earrings. She was still in mourning, though. The Capri pants were black. A bit of bluff might have got me through the door, but it wouldn’t get me any further. She’d backed herself against a window sill and folded her arms tight. She wasn’t going to take any bullying.

  I wasn’t going to give her any. By way of emphasising that my intentions were honourable, I turned my back to the bed and perched on the arm of a zebra-patterned sofa. ‘Suicide or accident, Marcus Taylor’s death is a hot story. You’re not the only one the press have been talking to. All sorts of stories are flying around. My job involves keeping one step ahead of the pack.’

  That was only part of it, of course. In the final analysis, it wasn’t the Protestant work ethic that was gunning my engine. It was my frail ego. I had the distinct impression that my string was being jerked. By whom and to what end was not yet apparent. But I didn’t like it. Not one little bit. ‘You being on the Visual Arts Advisory Panel, I thought you might be able to advise me.’

  ‘Stories?’ Feigning nonchalance, she put a cigarette in her mouth and flicked a disposable lighter. ‘What stories?’

  ‘Let’s start with yesterday first. You went to the YMCA to get a picture, right? But someone had beaten you to it.’ Her lighter wouldn’t fire. She kept flicking the wheel with her thumb. I got out mine, walked over to the window and lit both of us up. ‘Right?’

  ‘I told you.’ She exhaled Kooly. ‘I went to get some personal things.’

  ‘Toothbrush? IUD? Little things that slip easily into a folio case.’

  ‘And to make my private goodbyes to Marcus.’

  ‘By coming on to me?’

  ‘I was upset. Vulnerable.’

  We wouldn’t get far heading down this track. I took myself back to the zebra. ‘Tell me about Marcus. How did you get involved with him?’

  She shrugged. ‘How does anybody? We met last winter. At an exhibition. He tried to lobby me for a grant. He was hopeless—insecure and arrogant at the same time.’ All the things that women can’t resist. ‘I was on the rebound. We ended up in bed. You know how it is.’

  I nearly did. ‘And so he got his grant.’

  That was below the belt. ‘It was a committee decision, based on artistic merit.’

  Now we were getting somewhere. ‘Good artist, was he? As good as his father, Victor Szabo?’

  ‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’ Apparently the suggestion was ludicrous.

  ‘Like I said. Stories are flying around.’ I took the photos out of my pocket and showed her the snap of Szabo with the kid that might have been Taylor. ‘Like father, like son. And from what I’ve heard, there wasn’t just a taste for the booze in old man Szabo’s genes. Marcus inherited a dab hand for the brush. He could knock out a passable version of almost anything, I understand. Not that I’m any judge, but what I’ve seen of his work certainly confirms that view.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘You’ve seen it?’

  ‘It?’

  She didn’t say anything for a while. She was too busy giving me the slow burn. It could have popped corn at five paces. Lucky I was wearing my asbestos skin.

  When that didn’t work, she tossed her head back and studied the way her cigarette smoke rose in a lazy coil towards the ceiling. I studied it, too. Ascending effortlessly in a solid unbroken column, it reached higher and higher, an ever lengthening filament of spun wire, stretching up towards the embossed tin panels far above. Then, just as its destination seemed within reach, it wavered, broke into an ephemeral mass of swirling spirals, and dissipated.

  ‘There was never any misrepresentation on my part,’ she said abruptly. ‘I want that clearly understood.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  She started pacing then, stalking the right approach. ‘If this thing gets taken any further, I want protection.’

  Protection? From whom? What the hell was she talking about? ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to be the one that takes the fall?’

  Her point taken, Salina moved into negotiating mode. ‘Damn right,’ she said. ‘Marcus’s image production was a perfectly valid form of post-modern discourse, right out there on the cutting edge. His pastiche–parodies of actual artworks effectively deconstructed the commonly held notions of value, authenticity and signature. They were a critical response to the pre-eminence of the so-called famous artist.’ She paced, delivering a dissertation. ‘His pictures were never mere copies. If his images were subsequently misread as such by others, that’s not my problem. It was not my role to impose a monopoly on meaning. Legitimate appropriations, that’s what they were. There was never any attempt on my part to pass them off as originals.’

  Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, it’s as simple as that. Eek and y
e shall find. Unless my grasp of art-speak was even more tenuous than I feared, Salina Fleet had just told me that Marcus Taylor had been knocking up fakes and that she’d been marketing them for him.

  ‘And these “appropriations” ’—I hooked my fingers around the word and rolled it over my palate, savouring its supple resonance—‘included a “pastiche” of Victor Szabo? A “parody” of Our Home, perfect right down to the engine number on the motor-mower?’ She nodded. I was on the right track. ‘Like you say, a perfectly valid form of artistic practice. So where is it now?’

  That pulled her up short. ‘Christ!’ she gasped. ‘You mean you don’t know. I thought…’

  ‘You thought what?’

  But the shutters had come down. She’d been trading on the assumption that I knew something I didn’t, that I knew who had the duplicate Szabo. Her hands were shaking. She crossed to the door and flung it open. ‘Get out,’ she hissed. ‘You bastard.’ It came to me that she was very much afraid. When she wasn’t acting she was quite convincing. ‘Out. Out.’

  ‘Who do you want protection from? I can help.’

  ‘Just leave,’ she commanded icily, her mouth again tearing at a fingernail. ‘I refuse to comment further without a lawyer present. If you don’t get out, I’ll start screaming.’

  She didn’t give me much alternative but to do as she asked.

  ‘Under the circumstances,’ she said, as I stepped past her. ‘I think it best if I resign from the Visual Arts Advisory Panel.’ Since trafficking in dodgy artworks was hardly an ideal qualification for membership, that sounded like a good idea. I didn’t get to tell her so. She’d already shut the door.

  Fifteen minutes had elapsed since I’d abandoned Red to his computer game. A couple more wouldn’t hurt. I called the lift up, pushed the ground floor button and stepped back out. Otis elevator smacked his big rubber lips together, growled and slunk away. I leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette.

  It had burned to the filter when Salina came out her door. She’d put on a pair of gold sling-back sandals and was carrying the small suitcase. She saw me and stopped. She was about to say something unpleasant when the lift arrived. It made a clunking noise and its doors slid open. Standing inside was Spider Webb.

  Old blank face himself, shades and all, flexing his jaw like a punch-drunk pinhead. He registered first me, then Salina, ten metres beyond. I registered her, too. She looked like a trapped animal. I stepped in front of the lift, blocking Spider’s way. He stood there, legs apart, sizing me up. The doors began to close. I stepped inside and the doors slid shut behind me.

  None of the buttons were depressed. He’d been coming to this floor. Where else? I punched the ground floor button with the side of my fist and we began to descend. I turned to face the door, the way you always do in a lift. ‘You really get around, don’t you?’ I said.

  His hand shot past me and hit the red emergency stop button. The lift slammed to an immediate halt, throwing me off balance. Before I could get it back, Spider had his forearm against my chest and my back pressed against the wall. ‘What the fuck you playing at?’ he snarled, breathing Arrowmint all over me.

  Under the circumstance, I assumed the question was essentially rhetorical. I kicked him in the shins. He stepped delicately sideways as though avoiding a spilt drink and rammed the ball of his open hand into my solar plexus. I got a little irrigated in the visual department at that point and would have liked a little sit down, if at all possible. ‘Ummphh,’ I said. ‘Whodja ooatfa?’

  Spider’s face was pushed so far into mine that when he opened his mouth I read the maker’s mark on his silver fillings. Any closer and we’d have to get engaged. All I could see of his eyes, though, was my own reflection in those fucking mirror shades. Five times in three days I’d seen him, and still I hadn’t seen his eyes. A regular Ray Charles, he was. By the look of the reflections staring back at me, he was doing a pretty good job of putting the wind up me. ‘You know what’s wrong with you, Whelan?’ he said.

  By then I knew better than to even attempt an answer. I just stood there, nurturing my inner cry-baby and waiting for the liquidity in my bowels to abate. Spider adopted the softly solicitous tones of a psychotic sergeant major. ‘You get in over your head. That’s what’s wrong with you. You gotta learn to take the hint. Lay off where you’re not wanted.’

  He slammed one of Otis’s buttons and the lift resumed its descent. Spider stepped back then and stood, legs apart, casually waiting for it to reach the ground floor. ‘You fucking ape,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be impressed, am I?’

  Actually I was, deeply. In my line of work, it’s reasonably rare to be strong-armed by a gun-toting thug. That sort of thing usually only happens in federal politics. ‘I’ll go to Eastlake. I’ll have your job.’ It sounded pathetic, but it was the best I could do. Fuck the macho shit.

  The lift hit rock-bottom and the doors slid open. ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ said Spider, cheerfully. ‘Not to an old mate.’ He made like a head waiter, ushering me out of the lift ahead of him. ‘And you shouldn’t leave your kid sitting by himself in the car like that. You’ll get done for child neglect.’

  We stood there, looking at each other. Him in the lift, me outside. Then he smiled. The kind of smile that could stop a clock. He was still smiling when lift doors slid shut.

  I turned then and ran. I ran out the front door of the Aldershot Building, down the hill and around the corner. At the intersection up ahead, Salina Fleet was getting into the back of a cab. She must have come down the fire stairs. I hit the Charade at a sprint.

  ‘You should have been here, Dad,’ accused Red bitterly, his eyes downcast, his little hands twitching ceaselessly. ‘I got 20,000 points.’

  Russell Street Police Headquarters was straight out of Gotham City, a brick wall with a thousand blind windows and an RKO radio mast on the roof. Calling all cars.

  As a functionary of the incumbent government, albeit an insignificant one, I could not but regard the police as my colleagues. Benign and efficient upholders of the rule of law. Our boys in blue. In other parts of our great nation, the rozzers were thick-necked bribe-takers, rugby-playing racist bully-boys, brothel creepers. But nobody said that about the Victoria Police. Defenders of widows and orphans they were. Protectors of the innocent.

  But not necessarily of a ministerial adviser with spiralling suspicions, insufficient grounds for the laying of charges and a child’s safety to think about. Quite a lot to think about, as a matter of fact. We drove past Russell Street and kept going. ‘How about a movie?’ I said. Something we could do together. Somewhere cool and dark where we could hide and I could start drawing some mental maps.

  ‘Die Hard?’ said Red. ‘Young Guns?’

  Whatever happened to Pippi Longstocking? Maybe the movies weren’t such a good idea. We kicked around a few other potential game plans. We decided to go exploring again.

  We covered a lot of territory that afternoon. We covered school, friends, holidays. We covered Wendy. My former consort had taken up with a prosecutor from the New South Wales Crown Law Department. His name was Richard. You didn’t need to be Clifford Possum Japaljarri to connect the dots there. ‘What’s he like?’ I asked.

  Wendy was a go-getter. It was her go-getting that had got rid of me. In our marriage of equals, some were more equal than others. We didn’t fight. We weren’t unfaithful—not that I knew about. Wendy was just moving faster than me, aiming elsewhere. It took me nearly ten years to figure that out, her a little less. If this Richard could make her happy, fine. A happy Wendy would be a sight to behold.

  ‘He’s okay, I guess,’ said Red, an endorsement so insipid it brought a smile to my lips and nearly broke my heart. This Richard might be around for years. Wendy could shack up with whoever she liked, but if Dicky Boy started calling himself Red’s stepfather there’d be hell to pay.

  Equipped for high adventure in sandshoes and sunscreen, we followed the same route as the previous afternoon. Out the freeway,
past the roadside flower vendors, the orchards and stud farms, the go-cart tracks and vintage car rallies. At the Sugarloaf Reservoir, we bought sandwiches and sodas and ate them in the sausage-scented smoke of the public barbecues. The crowds were out in force, clannish Croats and cacophonous Cambodians and stubby-clutching Ockers. Swimming was prohibited and once we’d walked across the weir, thrown rocks into tomorrow’s drinking water and watched the spillway fishermen not catching trout, we struck out for more challenging terrain.

  The humidity was 110 per cent, the air as thick as Faye’s tapenade, wet as a sauna. The sky oozed over us like a clammy slug, threatening to rain, not delivering. At the Christmas Hills fire station, the sheds sat empty. The brigade was out on a call. A troop of Scouts were filling their water-bottles at the tap. Red disdained them from behind the window of a feebly air conditioned Japanese hatchback.

  A kilometre short of Giles Aubrey’s private road, we parked in a turn-around and skittled on foot down the wooded incline towards the dull sheen of water. A cascade of rocks and leaves dribbled down the slope ahead of us. The river was slow-moving and not much cooler or wetter than the surrounding air. We stripped to our togs and rushed in, thrashing and splashing and laughing.

  Half an hour later, rock-hopping our way upstream, we disturbed a full-grown brown snake. In a single fluid motion, it slithered across our path, long as a broom-handle, flicking its tongue. Watching it go to ground in the fissure between two boulders, Red backed against me. ‘Wow,’ he whispered, awed and not a little afraid. ‘Tark will be pissed he missed this.’

  A tad more respectful of our environment, we pushed on. Red was still keen, if a little less gung-ho. Even when he charged ahead to blaze our trail, he kept me in sight, looking back over his shoulder to make sure I was keeping up. It grew darker. The clouds were engorged eggplants, roiling and stewing, close enough to touch. A dry stick of lightning forked across the sky.