Stiff (13 page)

What gave this conjecture enormous appeal was not only the possibility that a barely literate migrant was sticking it up snotty-nosed Lionel Merricks to the tune of many thousands of dollars, but that he was doing it using names equivalent to Friar Tuck, Brute Bernard, Frank Sinatra and Robert Redford. If it was true, this Bayraktar deserved a posthumous industry award for having more front than a well-known city emporium.

Diverting as I found all this conjecture, it wasn’t plugging the hole in my roof. I closed the file, tossed it on top of the ever-increasing mound that was my in-tray, shot Adam Ant a filthy look, and turned my attention to the swatch of phone messages that had accumulated on my blotter since the previous morning.

Most of the little yellow slips logged calls from missed appointments. Three were from Agnelli. These I threw in the bin. Two were call-backs from roofing companies. The first was engaged. The second, A-OK Allweather, couldn’t have been more obliging. A very chatty woman made sympathetic noises, took my particulars and offered to send a man round to assess the situation at my earliest convenience. I suggested seven that evening, asked Ant to switch the light off before he left, and was out the back door before Trish even noticed I’d been there.

As I settled into the traffic flow I began to hum a tune that had lodged in my brain and wouldn’t go away. ‘
Bir tesselli ver
,’ I crooned. I was sure I had the pronunciation right. But I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it meant.

Tuesday nights meant something special for us Whelan boys. To be precise, it meant the Manager’s Special at the Bell Street Pizza Hut. Hawaiian Slice with extra pineapple plus the All-You-Can-Eat Dessert Bar for only $5.95. Lucky me, eh?

The cocktail hour crowd was thin, a handful of birthday revellers in paper hats with balloons tied to the backs of their chairs. ‘Grade Ones,’ Red sneered dismissively as we slid into our usual booth with its panoramic view of the carpark. The party table were tourists all right, lowering the tone of the joint. But to give them their due they had brought their mothers along, some of whom were a bit more interesting to look at than the artificial stag fern that constituted Mr Hut’s idea of decor.

The mumsie crowd, faces half-familiar from the schoolyard gate, were jammed into a booth against the far wall, smoking, drinking white wine, and laughing too loud. When Red and I came in they looked up and watched us cross the floor and I nodded a tentative hello in their general direction. They nodded back and returned to their conversation.

One of them, a red-headed looker in the early Bette Midler mould with satellite dish earrings, held my gaze for several seconds longer than was absolutely necessary. A fellow single parent, no doubt about it. The idea that she was probably wondering who had attacked my face with a Whipper Snipper failed to occur to me.

Anyway, just as I slid my backside in next to Red and my eyes motherhoodward, my line of sight was obstructed by an adolescent waitress in a red and white pants suit that made her look like a piece of boiled confectionery. She thrust a laminated menu into my hand and in a single breath intoned that if our order did not arrive within five minutes we would not have to pay.

‘Starting when?’ said Red.

My heart went out to the poor girl. Some hormonal eruption had given her face the texture of a coconut macaroon. Being forced to dress up in a ludicrous corporate costume was humiliating enough without having to cop lip from every smartarse seven-year-old that walked through the door.

I elbowed Red in the ribs and ordered our usual. The instant the words departed my lips, Red whipped his sleeve back and locked in on the dial of his precision-engineered four-dollar digital timepiece. I left him to it and sauntered over to the pay phone near the door, taking the long way around, as close as plausibly possible to the group of women. The redhead looked up and gave me the eye. True, I swear it.

I fed the phone and dialled Greg Coates at Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. It was just on six, past office hours, but Coates hadn’t got to be a Dep. Dir. by flexing off at 4:52. He answered on the second ring. I threw him a speedy pleasantry and cut to the chase. ‘Do us a favour,’ I said. ‘Punch up a name for me on that computer of yours.’

Coates must have been on his way out the door. ‘Can’t it wait until tomorrow?’

Sure it could. But that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t as though I was asking for the world. All he had to do was tap a few keys and he’d be through to the departmental database in a nanosecond. If some anonymous global corporation that didn’t know me from Adam could commit itself to delivering my pizza in less than five minutes, surely Greggy-boy could bend over his desk and press a couple of buttons for me. Aside from which, standing at the phone gave me a much clearer view of you know who. I gave Coates a gentle reminder about the nature of mateship. ‘You still running for the state admin. committee?’ I asked.

Party rules stipulated that a member attend at least three branch meetings a year to remain current. Thus far Coates’ total for the year was exactly zero. Not that there was anything unusual about that. If the attendance rules were enforced, half the office bearers in the party would have been out of a job. The reason they weren’t was because they had mates like me, branch secretaries who made sure their names went down on the roll, show or no. It was the sort of thing mates did for each other. Like looking up the odd file.

‘No need to get stroppy,’ Coates said. ‘What’s the name?’

‘Bayraktar,’ I said. ‘Ekrem.’ I gave him what little detail I had from the coroner’s file and listened while he made some keyboard noises.

‘While you’re here,’ he said. ‘What’s your little pal Agnelli up to? He’s been working the phones in a major way, I hear, but I can’t get a word out of anyone he’s been talking to.’

Typical Agnelli, having sworn me to secrecy on his hot election tip, here he was blabbing it to half the town. And since when had he been my little pal? I started telling Coates what Agnelli had said about the early election, and a blaze of sparklers hurtled past my shoulder. The waitress plonked a spluttering cake in the middle of the Grade Ones and a ragged chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ twittered across the restaurant. The redhead, bending misty-eyed over the birthday girl, glanced upwards. Our gazes locked. No doubt about it, I was in with a chance.

‘Access denied,’ Coates said.

‘What?’

‘Access denied, that’s what it says on the screen. I got a folio number, so this bloke’s in the system, but I can’t call the file up.’

This was interesting. ‘Why not?’

‘Dunno. Probably just a software stuff-up.’

Computer talk was all double-dutch to me. More likely Coates was sticking it up me for getting shirty on him. Fair enough. ‘I’ll try again in the morning,’ he offered. ‘If that’s soon enough for you.’

By the time I got back to the table Red had all but demolished the pizza. ‘Four minutes and thirty-two seconds,’ he said dismally. You’d have thought it was him who was paying.

The last of the birthday crowd was straggling out into the rapidly gathering dark with their lolly bags and balloons. I sent Red over to the dairy-whip dispenser and ambled nonchalantly over to where the birthday girl and her mother were packing presents into a shopping bag. Mumsie was about thirty, obviously a child bride. Close up, the red of her hair was shot with henna, an affectation from which I took strange encouragement.

‘Hi,’ I started in. ‘I’ve seen you at the school, haven’t I? I’m Red’s dad.’ I indicated the fruit of my loins who was engrossed in constructing a half-scale model of Mount Kilimanjaro out of aerated dairy fat.

Henna-head smiled and nodded. So far, so good. ‘This is Alice,’ she said. Alice looked like a proper little miss. Her mother had a squeaky little voice that sounded like a cheap fountain pen signing a bad cheque. Still, conversation wasn’t the only thing I had in mind. I gave the brat a courtly bow. ‘Happy birthday, Alice.’ A few short years out of circulation, I thought, and I’m reduced to this.

Alice took one look and bolted. ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ she screamed. Daddy was coming through the door in a camelhair overcoat and striped scarf, a tenured sociologist or a freelance travel journalist by the look of it. He gave torch-head the kind of self-deprecating look that women seem to go for. ‘Darling,’ she trembled.

I scuttled over to the dessert bar and fiddled with the snocone dispenser. From the icy mirror of its stainless steel my face stared back at me, bathed in sweaty condensation. A face like a freshly ploughed field. The face of a man who had just made an inept play for a married woman in a Pizza Hut at six-thirty on a Tuesday evening, stone cold sober. ‘Phew,’ I told it. ‘That was close.’

‘Sure was,’ it replied and watched me pull myself a comforting big bowl of sugared gloop.

Red sidled up beside me. ‘Nuts,’ he said. ‘No nuts.’ So that was the problem. We took All We Could Eat back to our booth and I watched Red eat one-handed while he did the puzzles printed on his place mat. Join the Dots. Spot the Mistake. Between scoops of ice-cream he gnawed the end of his pencil and furiously scratched his head. ‘Want to hear a riddle?’ he asked. ‘What’s white and bites and lives in your head?’

I made like it took some figuring out. ‘Teeth?’ I hazarded. Red crowed. ‘Ha, ha. Wrong. Guess again.’

I guessed all right, amazed I hadn’t thought of it before. That crawling in my scalp earlier in the day at the meatworks definitely hadn’t been unconscious revulsion. Grabbing Red’s head I shoved him cheek-down onto the laminex. He fought for a second, then went limp, resigned to humiliation. I pinned his head in place and ferreted through his hair. Within seconds I found the first of the tiny white specks. ‘Nits,’ I hissed.

Jesus wept, how had I not noticed them before? All that scratching in the night. And if Red had them, I had them too. We’d been sleeping in the same bed all winter. We paid the bill, went out into the drizzle and headlights, spent thirty minutes finding an all-hours pharmacy where we could buy flea shampoo for double the recommended retail price, and drove home to our dark and damp house. As we turned into the street, the seven o’clock news came on the radio and a flat-bed truck with A-OK Allweather painted on the door passed us going in the opposite direction.

I put Red in the bath with a foaming halo of toxic dioxins, stuffed the washing machine full of bedsheets and tipped in half a bottle of Pine-O-Cleen. Then I changed into a pair of old jeans and a moth-eaten jumper and braced myself to climb the ladder into the roof. Rain had been falling off and on for most of the preceding twenty-four hours and I guessed at least some of it had found its way past my makeshift plug.

That’s when I noticed that the lounge room ceiling had changed colour. It used to be an off-white. Now it was a pale tan, the exact shade a milk arrowroot biscuit turns when you dunk it into a cup of steaming hot tea. Worse, it had developed a slight but distinct droop. Wrestling the kitchen table into the centre of the room I put my chair on top, climbed aboard, reached up and pressed the palm of my hand against the surface of the plaster at the point where it sagged lowest. It felt clammy, but firm. I pushed gently upwards. The plaster strained back against my hand. Right then, Red started screaming from the bathroom at the top of his lungs that he had shampoo in his eyes and unless I rushed in and removed it instantly he would go permanently blind.

Judging by the weight, my ceiling now housed an undercover aquatic recreation facility deep enough to drown a small mammal. But not for long. The exploratory pressure of my palm, slight as it felt, was sufficient to produce an immediate effect on the precarious hydraulic dynamics of the situation. The exact amount of water and sodden plaster that fell on top of my head at that point may never be known. It felt like a lot. And it hit me hard enough to tilt me off balance. I flailed out, looking for my equilibrium, and found the cable holding the ceiling light pendant.

It was handy, but I don’t think it had been designed to be swung from. A blue spark jumped, a pop and a fizzle sounded, and the entire house was plunged into darkness. By then I was flat on my back on the floor, the light fixture in shattered pieces beside me, gungy water dripping into my open, stunned-mullet mouth.

The very moment this happened, Red’s sight was miraculously restored. Being a clever kid, he immediately noticed that the lights had gone out and, lest this fact escape his rather dim father, decided to bring it to my attention. ‘Dad, Dad,’ he called. ‘Dad. The lights have gone out. Dad, Dad.’

At that point the phone began to ring. General de Gaulle, it is said, permitted no telephone within earshot of his office in the Elysée Palace. Not for him the presumptuous summons of some anonymous jangling bell. I wished I had his singlemindedness. I stumbled through the blackness, dripping and twitching like a half-drowned Labrador, following the siren wail of Red’s voice.

‘Dad, Dad,’ he was chanting. ‘Dad. The phone’s ringing. Dad, Dad.’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ I screamed reassuringly in the general direction of my only child as I grabbed the phone. STD pips sounded. Either it was the prime minister calling to offer me a place in Cabinet or Wendy calling from Canberra.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Wendy.

I took a deep breath, shook a couple of litres of filthy water out of my sleeve and counted to five. ‘Red’s in the bath,’ I wheezed, calmness itself. ‘I’ll get him to call you when he gets out, if you’ll still be there.’ Meaning the office, the flat, wherever she was calling from. A busy woman is always on the hop.

‘What do you mean, if I’m here? You’re the one who’s never there.’

‘What do you mean, never here? Never where?’ It was all going swimmingly, so far.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said in a tone that meant I should do precisely that. ‘I know how much he enjoys his bath.’ Unlike his cruel father who would drag him out at a moment’s notice to come to the phone. ‘Tell him I’ll see him on Thursday. I’ll be down for a few days for the Construction of Gender Reference Group. And maybe you and I should have a bit of a talk then, too.’