Shane Maloney: The Brush-Off

‘Oh, another thing,’ added Trish. ‘Wendy called. She says to ring her urgently.’ Wendy was the mother of my ten-year-old child Redmond. They lived in Sydney where Wendy ran equal opportunity for Telecom. ‘Not in trouble with the ex again, are you, Murray?’

‘ Malacca fungula,’ I said. A Mediterranean expression meaning ‘Don’t be silly’.

Trish, who’d picked up a smattering of Southern European at the Electoral Office, pretended to laugh and hung up. Pressing down the phone cradle, I quickly dialled Wendy’s mobile. Trust Wendy to have one, the latest toy of the corporate high-flier. At five dollars a minute, Nea Hellas could cop the tab.

‘Yes.’ Wendy’s phone manner was brisk, but she wasn’t fooling me. Somewhere in the background was the gentle lap of Sydney Harbour, the flapping of yacht sails in the breeze, the lifting of shirts. Wendy was probably at Doyle’s, finishing a long lunch. I could see the sucked-dry shells of pink crustaceans piled before her. ‘Oh, it’s you ,’ she said. ‘About time, too.’

Four years before, I’d assumed the prime parenting role while Wendy took a temporary secondment to the Office of the Status of Women in Canberra. Before I knew it, she was the big cheese in gender equity at the Department of Education, Employment and Training, our marriage was finished, and I’d become the non-custodial parent. By the time she got her fancy new job in Sydney, Red’s access visits had dropped to four a year. One was scheduled to begin that evening. But not before I was subjected to the customary lecture on my deficiencies as a parent.

‘I’ve got all the details already, Wendy,’ I told her. ‘How many times have I not been there to meet Red’s plane?’ A couple, actually, but they weren’t my fault and the kid had agreed, for a price, that they’d be our little secret.

‘He won’t be arriving,’ she said. ‘His orthodontist appointment was changed and there isn’t another flight until two tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Orthodontist?’ I said. ‘What does he need with an orthodontist?’ Red’s teeth were fine last time I’d looked. This was clearly a pretext to cut short my son’s first visit in more than three months.

‘Just a check-up,’ said Wendy. ‘But this guy’s the best overbite specialist in the country. You don’t want second-rate treatment for your child’s teeth do you?’ I let that one go by. ‘Besides which, school doesn’t start until Tuesday, so he can stay until Monday evening.’

‘I’ll be at work on Monday.’ I was trying to make a point, but as soon as I spoke I knew I’d walked into a trap.

‘Well, I suppose there’s always another time. He’ll be very disappointed, of course.’

If I missed this chance, it might be months before I saw Red again. ‘I’ll take Monday off,’ I said quickly. The way things were shaping up, I probably wouldn’t have a job to go to anyway. Not that I had any intention of sharing that hot little item with Wendy.

‘I daresay the place won’t fall down if you’re not there for a day,’ said Wendy. Telecom, of course, ceased to function every time Wendy stepped out of the room. ‘And don’t forget to see that he wears a hat in the sun. He nearly got burned at Noosa. Richard had to keep reminding him to put one on.’

Just like Wendy had to keep reminding me that she had successfully recoupled and I had not. And that her salary allowed her to take Red to fashionable resorts for his holidays, when the best I seemed to be able to do was take him to the cricket or the movies. And the cricket wasn’t even on this weekend. ‘Two o’clock,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there to meet him. Tell him I’m looking forward to it.’

‘Two o’clock is the departure time, Murray,’ she said. ‘The plane doesn’t arrive down there until 3.20.’ Her maths were top-notch. ‘It’s an eighty-minute flight.’

I knew that. ‘Three, then,’ I said cheerfully and hung up. I know when I’m licked. I went back down the stairs, past travel posters of old women with faces like hacksaws standing beside piles of picturesque rubble.

The air in Mavramoustakides’ office, what there was of it, was thicker than ever. And not just with cigarette smoke. Sophie came out the door blowing her nose into a tissue, looking like she’d just been betrothed to a donkey. She flounced back upstairs.

‘Okay,’ I announced. I hadn’t driven all that way in the heat to trade pleasantries. ‘This is the deal. You report the government in a more balanced way and Nea Hellas gets a regular advertising contract with a major government campaign.’

Mavramoustakides looked like he’d never for one moment doubted his newspaper’s capacity to strike fear into my heart. Papas wanted details. ‘What campaign?’

I’d brought a bone with me, hidden up my sweaty sleeve. I pulled it out and tossed it. ‘Keep Australia Beautiful,’ I said.

Leo and Jimmy lit up with a mixture of avarice and incomprehension. As far as I was concerned, Australia the Beautiful could look after itself. I was more interested in keeping my job. That, and a three o’clock appointment at Tullamarine airport the next afternoon.

We sealed the deal with a handshake beneath a poster of Mount Olympus. The gods, if I had bothered to look, were laughing.

Melbourne’s weather teeters forever on the brink of imminence. If it is warm, a cool change is expected. A day of rain bisects a month of shine. Spring vanishes for weeks on end. Summer arrives unseasonably early, inexplicably late, not at all. Winter is wet but not cold, cold but not wet.

So far, that summer, all we’d had was heat. Through a city limp and surly beneath its oppressive demands, I steered my butter-yellow 1979 Daihatsu Charade towards my waiting fate. Past the airless bungalows of Northcote and the tight-packed terraces of Collingwood, through the reek of molten asphalt and the baked biscuit aroma of the brewery malting works, I drove to Victoria Parade, a boulevard of canopied elms marking the northern boundary of the central business district.

Laid out by city fathers with Parisian fantasies and strategic interests, Victoria Parade was where the young gentlemen of the Royal Victorian Mounted Volunteers would have drawn their sabres if ever the working-class mob had come storming up the hill from its blighted shacks on the flat below. As it turned out, the tide of history had run the other way. It was the slums that had fallen, captured by the gentry. And me, for my sins, rapidly becoming one of them.

The Ministry for Ethnic Affairs occupied the top three floors of a brick-clad early-seventies office building overlooking the elms. I drove around the block and parked on an all-day meter beside the Fitzroy Gardens. The Charade was a step in the direction of anonymity I’d taken after a demented constituent ran my previous vehicle into a lake one dark and stormy night several years before. It was less conspicuous than my old Renault, but it didn’t do a thing for my image.

Short of walking around the block in the blazing sun, the quickest way into the Ethnic Affairs building was via its basement carpark. Suit jacket hooked over my shoulder, I advanced down the ramp into the half-darkness. The carpark was small, its twenty-odd spaces reserved for the building’s more important tenants. Agnelli parked there on the odd occasion he drove himself to work. The Director of the Ministry. The Commissioners of the Liquor Licensing Board. Senior managers from the private companies which occupied the building’s middle levels.

Taking up two spaces at the bottom of the ramp was a huge silver Mercedes, top of the range, an interloper among the familiar collection of managerial Magnas and executive Audis. At the far end of the garage, next to the lift, was a luminous white blob, Agnelli’s official Fairlane. Beside it, wiping the windscreen, was Agnelli’s driver, Alan.