Peter Temple: White Dog

I looked. A tall woman with cropped hair and long legs was exchanging words with some of the teenage loiterers outside Gorb’s. It was a joking exchange but you could see that she was an officer talking to the troops.

‘Just as well,’ I said. ‘Out there in Hay you farm boys were already over-excited by the bra ads in the Women’s Weekly. That and seeing the farm animals doing it.’

‘To this day,’ said Barry, ‘a bra ad can put a bit of strain on the daks. Unfortunately just a bit. Then there was the step-ins.’

Rain on the windscreen, the tiniest drops.

I said, ‘A fetching thing, a step-in. So no doubt there?’

Barry had the last of his cigarette, came close to smoking the filter.

There was no chance of him using an ashtray. I pressed the button, his window sank. He didn’t look when he flicked the butt. It could have landed in a passing pram.

‘Doubt?’ he said. ‘Well, the doubt’s either done him or had him done. It’s like a fucken jail. There’s three things to get through. Come from outside, you got help or you go home.’

‘And Mickey? Talk there?’

Barry sighed again, moved the big shoulders. ‘Well, Mick and the Massianis, six years on the job. They say very tight with Steve.’

‘I’m slow here.’

‘Me too, got to go,’ he said, patted me on the shoulder. ‘Keeping down in the weights, I see. Good dog. Have a drink one day, no business, okay?’ He got out, closed the door, stuck his head back in. ‘This, though. The tip-off. Who was that?’

I watched him go, heading for Gorb’s, stiff-legged cop walk from too much sitting in cars. The teenagers blocking the door noticed him coming, parted, found reasons not to look at him.

I left my office and walked the short distance to where the dented, pitted and gouged side door of Taub’s Cabinet-making was set in a redbrick wall on a lane that led to Smith Street, Collingwood. Opening it released the smell of hide glue.

I was looking directly at a low bench. On it stood the skeleton of a desk, a big and intricate construction, it would be deep enough for two people to lie side by side on its top, long enough for them to be basketball players. Even imprisoned in a steel cage of clamps, even without its sides, top, doors or drawers, you knew it was a special piece of furniture, probably far too good for the person who had commissioned it. It was probably too good for all the people who would sit behind it, dozens of them, because things made by Charlie Taub could last for centuries.

The man was standing behind the desk framework, left hand resting on the end of a three-metre sash clamp. Somewhere beneath the huge callused fingers was the spindle.

‘So,’ said Charlie Taub.

‘So,’ I said. ‘So, indeed.’

‘A suit?’ He raised an eyebrow flecked with sawdust.

‘Been to court,’ I said. ‘For a client.’ All true, insofar as it went.

Charlie removed the dead Cuban cheroot from a corner of his mouth and looked at it. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Good. A profession. You have it, you should stay in it. Then an old man can get a proper apprentice, person shows some respect.’

‘A strong girl,’ I said. ‘You told me.’

He put the cheroot back in its corner, waved a racquet-size hand at the desk. ‘Just a piece rubbish,’ he said. ‘Thirty-two joints to glue, who needs help?’

‘Not you, certainly. You didn’t say you were gluing this up today.’

‘You glue when it’s time to glue. You’re ready, you say, now we’re gluing. Then you glue. You don’t write a letter, wait for a reply to come.’

‘That’s a good point,’ I said.

Charlie shook his head and went back to work. I walked around and stood behind him to watch him apply his squares — three of them, short, longer, long — to every angle of the desk carcass. Each time, he put his head back, looking for light between steel and wood. Hide glue was slow drying, slow to grip, it gave you a chance to adjust clamps, to ensure that no clamp’s pressure was distorting the framework, pushing something out of square. Complicated pieces were glued in stages but eventually the whole thing had to be put together and then it took experience to ensure that it didn’t end up as firewood.

Experience was not lacking when Charlie was in charge.

‘Hold,’ he said.

I went around and prevented the sash clamp from slipping as he released it.

‘Down.’

I moved it. Charlie put his head down and sighted along the device. He didn’t need a spirit level. He had one in his head. I put my ill-equipped head down and looked. All I could see of him was one old, calculating eyeball.

‘Up,’ he said. ‘ Ein ganz klein wenig. ’

I moved it a few millimetres.

‘ Ja.’

Charlie tightened the clamp, tested the angle with a square, grunted.

And so it went, angle by angle, clamp by clamp. When Charlie was satisfied and we were both standing upright, I ran a hand over a strut.

‘Nice bit of planing,’ I said.

I had done the unskilled work on the desk: ripping stone-dry ash for the frame on the venerable German table saw, planing it by hand with a 28-inch Stanley, sole as flat and smooth as plateglass and polished by wear to the colour of old silver.

Charlie was looking at the skeleton, rubbing his hands together. He made one of his nose sounds. ‘A monkey you can teach to plane,’ he said.

‘That explains my wages,’ I said. ‘Are you close to finished here?’

A question expressing a hope.

We went through the knocking-off ritual. I swept and dust-panned while Charlie got out of his glue-stiff overalls, put on his stylish green 1962 jacket with the deep hacking flap. Then he fiddled around, put tools back on the racks, repositioned objects on the work benches, patted machines, tested fences, wound blades up and down, wiped them with an oily rag, dropped the rag in a bin.

I removed the rag and found several other oil-impregnated pieces of cloth, one of them a massive pair of Y-front underpants. Charlie believed that cotton garments once worn close to the body gave a special lustre when used for polishing. I put the items into a plastic bag, squeezed the air out of it, tied it, took it outside, crossed the road and deposited it in the bin beside the door of Kelvin McCoy’s so-called studio, once a self-respecting clothing factory. There was still a chance that these rags would self-combust during the night but they would not set fire to the largest collection of old furniture timber in the country, destroy irreplaceable machinery, some of it made by craftsmen dead these fifty years, and ruin two lives. Instead, there was the hope that the incendiary bag might set alight McCoy’s den of fraud and fornication and purge the earth of a collection of objects more worthless, tasteless and aesthetically offensive than any assembled since the heyday of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Comforted by the possibility of performing a service to the nation, I went back to Taub’s and worked on getting Charlie out the door.

We walked to the Prince of Prussia down old streets pinched narrower by the gathering dark.

‘The baby,’ said Charlie, not looking at me. Eyes on the ground, he touched my arm, the pat of a grizzly bear. ‘No one told me.’

It was a month since my daughter had miscarried at a late stage, the baby’s father at sea but homeward bound, Eric the Viking’s fishing boat running before a tropical cyclone. Claire hadn’t been alone though. Her mother was there, my first wife, Frances. She could organise an invasion of Iraq with a few quick calls. She rang Claire’s stepfather, pink Richard Wiggins, surgeon to the carriage trade. She also rang Claire’s aunt, my feckless sister, Rosa. The pair flew to tropical Queensland on the first available.