Peter Temple: White Dog

I was hardly back in my seat when Stan was opposite.

‘Wits’ bloody end, Jack,’ he said, softly. ‘She says I get him to sign it over now or she’s off.’

I reflected that some people did not know a golden opportunity when it sounded like the Crack of Doom.

‘Off?’ I said. ‘Off where?’

Stan’s eyes flicked to the Youth Club but they weren’t listening, they were discussing the value of things their doctors prescribed for them. I detected a certain negativity.

‘Taken to visiting the sister in Castlemaine,’ Stan said. ‘Didn’t want to know her before she went to this wedding. Her niece. Now it’s up the bloody highway every second day, stays over.’

‘Siblings often grow closer over the years,’ I said, speaking from no knowledge at all.

Stan shook his head. ‘Not a word about the sister. Listen, Jack, it’s all smiles before she goes, gives me a kiss, that’s a novelty I can tell you. Comes back, she’s like a bloody snake, vicious, don’t dare open my trap.’

‘And you read what into this?’

With a gentle finger, he touched his flushed cheek-bone, a tumescence now evident. ‘Mate, what do you think.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘Came back today, did she?’

Sombre nods.

‘And you’d like to patch things up, get title to the place?’

‘Well, yes.’ More nods.

I leaned forward. We were closer than we’d ever been. ‘Stanley,’ I said. ‘Consider this possibility. Morris signs the Prince over to you. The next day, Liz leaves. She wants a divorce. She’s got twenty years of sweat equity in this business. You’ll have to sell it and give her half.’

Stan’s eyes went large, went thin. He shook his head, smiling, not the cheeriest of sights.

‘Forget that,’ he said. ‘She’d be the one walking out. She’d get bugger all.’

I tasted my beer. Not bad for the Prince, where it usually failed any test, no doubt tainted by something living in the pipes.

‘Bugger all,’ said Stan, eyes willing me to agree. ‘That’s right, not so? She’s the guilty party. Believe me, I’d get the evidence.’

‘Stan,’ I said, ‘where have you been? That stuff went out twenty years ago. It wouldn’t matter if you got pictures of Liz with Rickos and his Crazy Cuban Castanet Caballeros, all eight of them, naked except for sombreros.’

‘Half,’ he said. ‘You sure?’

Eric Tanner tapped me on the shoulder while continuing to talk to the members.

‘Never mind bloody doctors,’ he said. ‘What do they know? Bloody drugs. Probably bloody lollies. Gazebo effect. You heard of that, Wilbur? Scientific term. Ask the dentist, he’ll tell ya. I say, ya time’s ya time.’

He turned to me. ‘Listen, Jack, we goin to see the Blue Boys cop a hidin this Satdee? In the circus tent.’

‘Put your life on it,’ I said. ‘On second thoughts, put something of value on it.’

Sarah Longmore’s studio was in Kensington, on the rough edge, near the Dynon railyards in a cracked and potholed dead-end street with unpaved verges, weeds battling to survive.

Just before a six-metre corrugated iron wall, I turned into a small cinder yard. A yellow Ford ute, better days seen, had its blistered nose to a building — partly brick, partly cinderblock, partly rusted tin. I parked the Lark next to the ute, switched off the wipers, sat listening to the engine note. The machine had been in the oily and expensive hands of Kevin Trapaga, Studebaker fanatic, and it was making the lovely stroked-cat sound, the V-8 cat. This would last for only a short time, so it was important to savour every moment. Then I could go back to driving Linda’s Alfa.

With reluctance, I switched off and got out. The day was cold, wet, clamorous. I could hear trains, what sounded like steel being dumped from a height, the regular banging of a stamper of some kind, and, from inside the building, the screeching sound of metal-grinding. A steel-framed sliding door was the only entrance. I put a hand to it and pushed hard. It slid easily, taking me by surprise.

The inside was one huge, dim space, easily ten metres high at the peak. Unlit fluorescent lights hung in two rows from wooden beams, the floor was a patchwork of surfaces — oil-stained concrete, uneven bricks, cracked pavers, a rectangle of wood, bleached and blotched, probably covering an inspection pit.

Objects stood around, welded metal forms, human-like but bigger, one-and-a-half human size perhaps. In the gloomy corner to my right were what could be witches around a suggestion of a pot. The thing nearest the cauldron was carrying something. A piglet? A child?

Close to them were what I first took to be two boxers, angular stainless steel figures close together, the impression of a left being thrown at an averted head. But as I walked, I saw that one figure appeared to be bound and the other had a projection from his hand. He could be cutting the throat of the bound figure.

I looked left and saw a pack of dogs, six or more, attacking something, mounting each other in their lust to get at it. But then I noticed the thighs, the calves, the ankles, the feet. They resembled humans on all fours, humans with long dog heads, engaged in some hungry act.

Did people buy these creations? Where would you put one?

The grinding noise was coming from a lit area behind a pile of metal scrap — two car bodies, a stack of car doors, a large disembowelled machine, possibly a litho printing press, offcuts of steel and aluminium sheeting, a pick-up-sticks pile of rusted steel rods.

I came around the heap.

In a clearing, in a pond of bright light, a person in filthy overalls was kneeling on someone much bigger, face down, arms outstretched, applying a metal grinder to the head.

I took a step back and looked through the empty socket of a car door. There is a sinister, expectant pleasure in watching someone using a tool that spits on protective gear, makes from a small clumsiness a whine of ground bone and sends a lovely arc of warm blood into the air.

There was no clumsiness. Sparks streamed from the felled knight’s metal shell until the worker raised the grinder in both hands, held it up like a howling icon, killed it.

Silence.

I stepped around the car skeleton and the person saw me. The yellow helmet visor reflected the glare from a light on a tripod.

‘I’m looking for Sarah Longmore,’ I said.

The person stood up, pushed up the visor, pulled off a glove by its fingertips. Then she combed her hair with her fingers.

‘Jack Irish?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks for coming.’

Sarah Longmore wore no make-up, her short hair stuck up in several directions, her face was dirty, smeared, her eyebrows furry. She didn’t look like the dark-suited woman in court. I thought she looked better this way.

‘I told Andrew I’d come to see you,’ she said, ‘but he said that wasn’t the way it was done.’

Her accent was hard to place: not Australian, not quite upper-class English.

‘Drew’s good on the way things are done,’ I said. ‘This is also more interesting than my place.’

‘What time is it? I lose track.’

She pulled at the zip that ran diagonally across her chest, exposed a black T-shirt.

‘Just after four,’ I said.

‘Beer time. There’s tea, coffee, water.’

I could stomach a beer. On many days, I felt that a beer would go well with the muesli, then it would be nice to have another one to get the day moving, get things stabilised.

‘Beer, thanks,’ I said.

‘It’s in the shed.’

I followed her, walked around the prone cruciform figure to a lean-to in the back corner of the building, a building inside a building, a rough fibro structure with a window and a flue coming out of the roof. The foreman’s hut, presumably. Inside, there was a drum wood-burning heater, a formica-topped kitchen table with an electric frying pan and a toaster on it, two kitchen chairs, two 1950s Swedish-style easychairs. A small fridge, new, stood in the corner.