The Trojan Dog

Acknowledgements

My thanks to my family, my editor Jenny Lee, Stephanie Johnston and Michael Bollen of Wakefield Press, my agent Margaret Connolly; and to friends and colleagues who read early drafts of the manuscript, in particular David Walker, Seven Writers and the ACT chapter of Sisters in Crime.

Give the Lady Flowers

What have I kept of Rae Evans from the moment when she half-stood behind her desk and held out her hand to shake mine? I think it is the impression of white—white face, white shirt between the two halves of a power dark suit. Hers were night colours, and though it was early in the morning, and she was my new boss, it seemed as though the ­business day had not quite caught up to us, and maybe never would.

But Rae's voice was level, businesslike, as was her handshake—unexceptional. She was head of the service industries branch of the Department of Industrial Relations. I was the one holding the flowers, hugging them in fact, a potted cyclamen with pale pink blossoms that had only opened the day before. Rae glanced at it briefly and did not quite smile.

We talked for a few minutes about the report on clerical outwork I'd been hired to complete. We were supposed to be doing the local interviews ourselves and paying small teams of interviewers in the other States. Rae hinted that there were a lot of ends that needed tying up and that perhaps the women I'd be working with did not have the knots in their hands quite as they should.

I waited for her to elaborate or be more precise, but instead she looked up at me and said, ‘Sandra? I don't know whether you're aware … I knew your mother—we used to meet at conferences. I liked her very much. How is she doing?'

I clutched my plant against my chest and said, ‘My mother died eight years ago.'

There was a fractional pause before Rae, paler than ever, replied, ‘I'm very sorry.'

I'd kept my mother's name when I married Derek. Perhaps Rae had recognised it when she read my job application, but she'd given no indication at the interview.

My knees shook, and sweat prickled the insides of my panty hose. I waited for Rae to say something more, or for words to come about my mother's illness, but they didn't.

Rae took me along a corridor to introduce me to Dianne and Bambi, the women with whom I was to share an office and finish the report. I felt disoriented. The corridor was grey—grey carpet, and the walls were painted a railway-station shade of it. It felt like moving along inside a tube of paint, squishing about in an environment created by an artist with a limited budget and an even more limited imagination.

My new boss walked ahead of me, her walk neat as the rest of her, legs long, feet straight and confident. I walked with my toes out, a fault I'd tried unsuccessfully to correct. My son Peter said ‘quack, quack' sometimes when he saw me from behind.

Rae stopped at an open doorway. A glance at a clock told me it was three minutes past nine. Pale grey venetians lined the tops of the windows, and on the other side of them the fog was grey. I wondered why I had ever thought that I might hide behind a potted plant.

A woman who looked about fourteen was sitting at a desk next to the windows, dressed in a scarlet hooded cloak. I shook Bambi's hand, and smiled hello.

My pot plant slipped and some soil fell out the bottom. With a murmured apology, I bent to pick it up.

I saw the man's toes first—black patent, lethal points. Gold toe caps winked against the carpet. My eyes travelled up dark trousers to a blue-and-green jumper with a design of a kingfisher diving into a river, to a full black beard and curly hair, on which was perched a yellow-and-brown striped beanie.

The man blinked. Then he smiled behind his beard, a shy smile for so loudly dressed a person.

‘Ivan Semyonov,' Rae Evans said, ‘this is Sandra Mahoney.'

My name sounded strange spoken in Rae's cool voice, as if it didn't belong to me. I reached out my hand uncertainly towards the man, and felt my plant slipping again.

Rae looked straight at me out of clear, river-coloured eyes and said, ‘Bambi will show you around, Sandra.' She didn't smile, but I felt a warmth, an interest and familiarity—as well as a determination to pretend that everything was normal. Again I thought it strange, though, that she hadn't asked me any questions about my mother.

The room was very cold.

‘Isn't the heater working?' I asked Bambi after Rae had gone.

Bambi was back behind her desk. She shook her head, silently watching me, composed in her red cloak. The winkle-picker man had disappeared.

The office was small. There was barely space enough for three desks, with a phone and a computer on each one. Old-fashioned grey steel filing cabinets separated two of the desks; mine was wedged into a corner.

‘Is that man in here too?' I asked.

Bambi waved her hand in a bored way towards the office next door.

I opened the report Rae Evans had given me to read, wondering when the owner of the third desk would show up. Bambi ignored me, and I didn't feel like asking her any more questions. She picked up the phone and began to talk to it like a 1940s movie queen.

The report was a general one. There were sheets of statistics, and copies of the major parties' industrial relations policies. I was familiar with these; but the wage statistics—lines of figures, which I presumed in due course would yield up their significance—for the moment were a labyrinth with signposts in a foreign language.

After half an hour I grabbed my bag and headed for the Ladies. At the back of the building the corridors were lined with plywood room dividers that reminded me of the temporary classrooms at my primary school. The smell was the same too. I poked my head through several doors, discovering offices basically the same as mine, desks and PCs close together, the library, and a tiny tea-room and first-aid room.

I brought back a glass of water to give my plant a drink, though it didn't need it, but when I looked over from the doorway, my desk was empty.

‘My cyclamen,' I said. ‘It's gone.'

Bambi stared at me with an expression of distaste and pulled her cape more closely round her shoulders.

I laid a finger on my desk. It was damp and there was a speck of black potting mix to the left of my computer keyboard.

I said inanely, ‘My pot-plant, where's it gone?'

Bambi stood up and bumped into the edge of her desk. Then her phone rang, and she sat down again to answer it, pursing her lips as though someone had offered her a lemon to suck.

Feeling ridiculous, I walked to the window and looked down on two backpackers heading away from the travel centre. For one wild moment, I thought they might have taken my cyclamen. Did I see a delinquent petal, a furtive dark green leaf pressed against a shoulder, caught between two straps?

I heard laughter across the partition that divided my office from the next. I walked around and stood hesitantly in the doorway. A blond man and a young woman in a short black skirt and jacket were standing with their backs to me, studying something by the window. The man said something and the woman laughed. Then the woman turned around and I was struck by the nerveless appearance of her face, her perfect make-up, her glance of appeal towards the man, a gentle off-shore wave underneath her laughter. I nodded hello and turned back. I couldn't bring myself to ask either of them if they knew what had ­happened to my plant.

I hadn't seen any sign of the hairy man in the beanie. I took a bottle of vitamin C tablets from my bag and chewed through five of them, then drank the glass of water.

. . .

Peter's hands were blocks of ice when I picked him up from after-school care. I took them between mine and rubbed them till the blood came to the surface.

‘How was your day?' I asked.

‘Fine,' he answered without looking at me.

I resisted an impulse to push his floppy brown hair back off his face.

At Dickson shops, where we called in to buy something for dinner, a busker was singing outside Woolies. His voice was broken stones one minute, sweet as fudge the next, carrying for miles in the freezing dusk. His teasing late-night song freed me from my day, and it was comforting to turn into Northbourne Avenue with bags of groceries on the seat beside me. The lights were already on, galahs roosting on their long silver arms.

While we were preparing our food and eating it—Peter and I picked and tasted as we went, so that what we eventually sat down to eat hot, from plates, was only a fraction of our dinner—I said, ‘Something weird happened to me today.'

Peter turned to face me with a handful of grated cheese halfway to his mouth. I could see him remembering that it had been a special day for me.

‘Someone pinched my plant. You know, the one I took to work?'

Peter began eating the cheese and asked with his mouth full, ‘Did you report it to the police?'

‘No,' I said.

‘Mum?' He reached his hand towards the bowl again and, when I shook my head, resorted to licking his fingers. ‘I know! You could set a trap, and catch the thief pink-handed!'

We laughed. Not many other people laughed at our jokes. Peter's father, Derek, was scornful of them. But Derek was in America for a year, and in his absence Peter and I indulged ourselves in all kinds of small ways.

. . .

Memories can be a sudden black-and-white still shot in the middle of a coloured movie. That was my memory of Rae Evans, the one that came to me that night.

My mother coming home from one of her conferences. The end of a long Sunday afternoon. The lights not on yet. Or the heaters.

I was twelve or thirteen. The still shot is photographed through 13-year-old eyes, the way a disgruntled teenager might store the faces of two middle-aged women, one of them her mother. I have a generalised memory of Mum carting me about with her to conferences and meetings, but I have no picture at all of what I'd been doing on this ­particular weekend when I'd elected—been allowed?—to stay at home. My mother frowned on the popular activities of girls my age, and when I indulged in them it had to be in secret, so maybe I'd been trying out some mascara, or tinting my hair.

My mother came in unceremoniously, with no apologies for being late. She walked into the living room where I was sitting in the fading light. Behind her was a woman whom I'd never seen before. My mother introduced us, then left the room to hang up their coats.

It happened quite often that Mum brought someone back with her for a drink or a meal—someone she'd met at work, or through a work-related activity. If she hadn't had me, they would've gone to a pub or a cheap restaurant; but she was stuck with me, and so she brought them home.

The stranger and I stood and stared at one another. Was it then that the picture became fixed, the still shot I've added to as I've been writing about it here, a single image to which I've tried to give a before-and-after meaning? Myself, awkward in front of this unknown woman in my house, annoyed with Mum, and probably tired and hungry as well, cross because it was becoming obvious, without anybody needing to say anything, that the evening would be theirs.

The woman had straight dark hair cut just below her ears, grey-blue-green eyes above high cheekbones, a thin straight nose. She was smartly dressed, more so than my mother, who was wearing pants of some sort and a bulky jumper. The woman felt no need to make small talk, and neither did I. We simply stood and looked at one another till my mother came back into the room. That woman, as I recall her now, was Rae Evans.

. . .

Next morning the cyclamen was sitting on my desk, with a note tied to it by a piece of blue ribbon. ‘Thanks for the loan,' the note said. ‘Hope I've returned it with interest.'

Bambi was on the phone to someone, tapping her pen on the edge of the desk. At the third desk was a young woman all in black, with tangled blonde hair. She must have spent hours working on it to get it to look so messy. I knew she must be Dianne Trapani, who'd designed the outwork report, but who, for reasons I didn't understand, seemed unable to complete it.

The winkle-picker man appeared in the doorway. He bowed and clicked his patent heels, then dipped his head with a bird-like jerk. He gestured with a flourish towards my computer. ‘Turn it on! Have a squiz!'

My monitor whirred and came to life. Filling the screen was an almost perfect reproduction of my cyclamen. It seemed to me that whoever had done it could have produced a flawless photographic image if he or she had wished—I wasn't sure if it was the winkle-picker man or not—but had decided to tilt the image ever so slightly off the true. I leaned closer, discovering leaves that were more rounded, petals flat. There were no shadows. There was no background at all. It was a pink still-life statement of a flower, covering a pale grey screen.

The man, whose name I was trying to recall accurately, was staring at me with the expression of a hopeful puppy.

‘Have lunch with me,' he said. When I didn't reply, willing him to leave, he shouted, ‘OK! You don't have to! You can tell me to get stuffed!'

‘Get stuffed,' I said.

‘Done!' he cried. ‘A deal! Twelve-thirty, OK!'

And so, by thirty-three minutes past twelve, Ivan Semyonov and I were on our way out of the Jolimont building, Ivan goat-leaping ahead, me hurrying to keep up.

Ivan stopped abruptly by the lifts. ‘You're cursing your luck for having landed an office next to mine, right? I look like a weirdo, I pinch your comfort toy, I've got terrible BO! Cor, look at that! Looks about twenty-five! Beaut age for retirement!'

I swivelled to see the poster he was pointing to. A young woman with long pale hair was swinging in a hammock in front of what was ­probably a beach.

‘Softening us up!' Ivan said in a penetrating stage-whisper.

‘What for?' I took a step back, wishing the lift would come.

‘God!' Ivan startled a pair of dove-grey suits who'd come quietly up behind us and were also waiting for the lift. ‘Let's not waste any more of our lunch-hour studying this crap!'

Outside, the air was what people called bracing when they didn't want to depress you with the thought that it might go on like this until November. Ivan walked with a bounce, with long, uneven, energetic strides, hesitating for a fraction of a second before placing each foot down with a surprising sideways twist, as though he'd just noticed that he was about to tread on a dollop of dog poo.