Shane Maloney: The Brush-Off

‘Get real, Jimmy,’ I said. ‘None of your readers vote for us anyway. Most of them can’t even read.’

The function of the Minister for Ethnic Affairs was to spread a microscopically thin layer of largesse over every ethnic community in the state. My task, as his adviser, was to help wield the butter knife. On a day like this, dealing with pricks like this, it was a job whose appeal was limited.

Fortunately, before I could say something undiplomatic, Sophie Mavramoustakides stuck her head around the door. ‘Phone call for Murray Whelan,’ she chirped, in the manner of a hotel bellboy paging a guest. ‘You want me to put it through?’

Sophie had a hair-do like a haystack and a lot more va-va-voom than she could burn off working as a typist at her fascist father’s rag. She splashed some of it over me. She was wasting her time. I was single but I wasn’t suicidal.

Only Trish at the office knew where I was, so this was the call I’d been waiting for. But the last thing I needed was Leo and Jimmy breathing down my neck while I got the news. I unpeeled myself from the plastic chair and indicated I’d prefer to take the call in private. Mavramoustakides grunted. My preferences were beneath his dignity. He’d wanted to talk to the organ grinder, not be fobbed off with the monkey. As far as Leo was concerned, I could go climb a tree.

Sophie, utilising as much of her bottom as possible, led me upstairs to the chaos that passed for the Nea Hellas production room, indicated which phone I should use and returned Eurydice-like into the Stygian realm below.

Nea Hellas was on the Northcote hill, one of the few elevated points in the otherwise flat expanse of Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs. The view out its first-floor window swept in a broad arc across the baking rooftops of houses and factories, all the way to the glass-walled towers of the central city, a shimmering mirage on the far horizon. Above, an unbroken blue sky beat down with the full power of a forty-degree summer afternoon. Below, a metropolis of three million lay prostrate beneath its might.

For much of the decade, the state of Victoria, of which this city was the crowning jewel, had been ruled by a Labor government. For a while things had gone well. More recently, the auguries were less auspicious. The previous year’s election victory had been snatched from the jaws of defeat only by the narrowest of margins. In politics, as in our city’s notoriously fickle weather, nothing is certain. When things change, they change quickly. From the direction of Treasury Place, at the foot of the towering office-blocks, wraiths of heat haze ascended to the remorseless heavens like smoke from a sacrificial altar.

It must have been the weather. All this Greek shit was going to my head. I picked up the phone. ‘Break it to me gently,’ I said.

For the past sixteen months, since the ’87 stock-market crash, the Economic Development Ministry had been haemorrhaging money. What had started as a trickle had become an unstoppable torrent. The government was losing money faster than it could raise or borrow it. A gesture was required. A head must roll. Bill Hahn, the Deputy Premier, had drawn the short straw. The fag end of January met the timing requirements perfectly. Half the population was too shagged out from the heat to be interested in politics. The other half was busy folding its tents and returning from holidays. When the Premier called an unscheduled Cabinet meeting earlier that afternoon, the agenda was only too obvious.

‘It’s over,’ said Trish. ‘Angelo’s just come back.’

Behind her voice I could hear the mechanical whirr of a document shredder. Which could mean only one thing. There had been a major reshuffle. Angelo Agnelli was no longer Minister for Ethnic Affairs. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense.’ I tried to make it casual. ‘What happened? Did he get the sack or did he get a new portfolio?’

Trish was Agnelli’s private secretary. I thought I could detect a suggestion of distance in her tone, a hint that old alliances could no longer be taken for granted. The flux was running, changes were afoot up there in the ministerial suite. ‘You’re going to love this,’ she said. She could afford to be flippant. She’d be okay. Whatever happens, they always take their secretaries with them. ‘He’s been given Water.’

‘Christ!’ I said. ‘Minister for Water Supply. The very thought of it made my mouth go dry. I looked about the Nea Hellas production room for something to slake my sudden thirst. The only cup in sight contained the congealing dregs of ancient Greek coffee. My future was suddenly as black as that bitter beverage. I touched it to my lips. At least it was wet.

I’d been at Ethnic Affairs for four years. Employing me as his principal adviser had been one of Agnelli’s smarter moves. In a state whose two major ethnic power blocks are the Greeks and the Italians, giving the job to a man with an Irish name was a masterstroke of impartiality. And since I’d once been party organiser in Melbourne Upper, Agnelli’s electorate, home to the highest concentration of migrants in the country, it wasn’t as though I didn’t have some pretty solid credentials in the field of dago-wrangling. But Water Supply? All I knew about Water Supply was it happened when you turned on a tap.

‘And the Arts,’ said Trish.

Water Supply and the Arts. My heart plummeted. Not only had Agnelli failed to win substantial promotion, he’d managed to put me in very ticklish situation. Local Government I could do. Community Services, no problem. But Water Supply and the Arts? I knew as much about rocket science.

‘The Arts?’ I repeated dismally. ‘That means I’m fucked.’

Now that I had embraced my fate, Trish could afford to allow a little more of the old warmth back into her voice. ‘Yeah,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I reckon.’

The odds that Agnelli would retain me as his adviser on hydraulic affairs were low. But the very idea that a man named Agnelli might employ someone called Whelan to advise him on cultural matters was inconceivable. The fact that Ange had been born in the Queen Victoria Hospital, not five kilometres from where I stood, was immaterial. What possible assistance could an Australian bog-wog provide to a man through whose veins surged the blood of Tintoretto and Tiepolo? A man sprung from the race of Boccherini and Vivaldi. Dante and Boccaccio. Bramante, Caravaggio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo and all those other fucking turtles. ‘What do you know about Water Supply?’ I begged, no longer bothering to conceal the desperation in my voice.

Trish and I went back a long way. She was a tough cookie who had run the electorate office in Melbourne Upper in the days before Agnelli got the preselection. If it walked in off the street, whatever it was, Trish could handle it. ‘Can’t be too complicated,’ she said. ‘Dams don’t go on strike. Pipelines don’t stack committees at party conferences.’

She had a point. Water seeks to find its own level. Even as Minister for Water Supply, Agnelli would still need a man with my skills. Someone to write his speeches. Fend off lobbyists. Crack the whip over the bureaucrats. Sniff the air. Test the water. Help him go with the flow. Maybe he’d keep me on, after all.

‘He wants to see you,’ said Trish. ‘Now.’

It wasn’t as if I didn’t appreciate the political realities of the situation. The government was skating on thin electoral ice. A Cabinet re-jig was essential if we were to keep the show on the road. But what was good for the party could hardly have come at a worse time for me personally. Not to put too fine a point on it, with the interest rate on my mortgage nudging 16 per cent, I was no candidate for early retirement. It wasn’t just the money, either. Family matters needed to be considered.