23

MARCUS PUGH’S office was furnished with worn, beige carpet and corporate-style chairs around a conference table. His large desk held a keyboard and two screens, and three telephones. On a long, half-empty bookshelf was an assortment of wood carvings, a bent figure with a long beard, possibly Confucius, a tiger with a paw raised, and a swan with wings spread. The framed photos on the wall were of Pukus with Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, and Aung San Suu Kyi. The window had a view of a brick wall. As we entered, Pukus was sending his under-aged underlings home.

‘That will do for the day, Tristan.’

Tristan nodded. He wore a brown suit with a bowtie, and his hair was parted in the middle and slicked down with goo. ‘Good night, minister.’ He regarded us with suspicion, and withdrew.

‘Thank you, Portia.’ Pugh said to another minion. ‘Good night, goodbye.’

I will say this: Portia rocked a dark pantsuit. But hers was possibly the worst case of acne in recorded history, and I felt bad for her. She shook her head. ‘The Prisoner Advocacy Alliance are at it again, minister. I’m preparing a statement discrediting them,’ she said, then, registering our presence, darted a rueful glance at me.

‘That sounds specious,’ I muttered.

She was dumbfounded at something — my nerve at having an alternate opinion perhaps? My lack of political understanding? Her only reply was a haughty sniff.

‘I have a brother in the system,’ I explained. ‘I see prisoners’ rights a bit differently.’

She snorted. ‘Don’t be so naïve. It’s not personal. Polling in key outer-metro electorates indicates that voters there like it when certain sections of the community are punished or harassed or at the very least humiliated.’

Pukus held up a pudgy hand. ‘Portia is our most enthusiastic interpreter of polls. And we love her dearly.’

She blushed so violently I was worried the acne might rupture.

‘We’ve done enough for today, Portia dear. Tomorrow, we will slay that dragon.’

She acquiesced with a nod, juggling a Miu Miu handbag and a briefcase as she left.

When we were alone, Pukus loosened his tie. ‘Sorry to keep you.’ He held a decanter of whiskey and wiggled it at us. ‘Afternoon refreshment?’

‘Not for me, Marcus,’ Boss said.

‘Got anything else?’ I asked. My preference was to stay sober in this company, but it was warm and I could be persuaded by an Aperol spritz.

Pukus regarded me warily. ‘No.’

My power and influence were indeed imaginary, it seemed.

Pukus poured himself a double. It was unclear whether Boss or I were invited to sit. I pulled out a chair, and Boss sat in it. I pulled out another.

‘I was held up in a meeting with the OTIOSE people.’ He flopped in a Chesterfield armchair. ‘It’s all very hush-hush at this stage, highly confidential, but they’ve actually caught someone doing the wrong thing.’

Boss scratched his chin, distracted; the stubble on his chin was mostly silver.

‘Whistle-blower, apparently,’ Pugh said.

‘Sorry Marcus, back up,’ Boss said. ‘What are you talking about?’

Marcus and Brendan, was it? How had I not noticed their cosy relationship? These two went way back.

Pukus said, ‘An unfortunate public servant is, they have reason to think, being blackmailed. They have her under surveillance. All I can say.’ He drank the contents of the glass and went to pour another. ‘And something about passports.’

‘Why passports?’ Boss asked.

‘That was what I was going to ask you, Brendan. What’s the angle here?’

Boss opened his eyes fully, his attention shifting at last from whatever inner torment he was attuned to, to Pukus and I. ‘The angle? No idea. It’s a good thing someone had the guts to report it.’

‘Very brave,’ Pukus said. ‘The identity of the whistle-blower is under wraps for now.’

‘Have any of the passports been used?’ I asked.

‘They don’t know, they tell me,’ Pukus said with irritation. ‘They’re going over her work for the last three months, crosschecking. Taping her calls, all sorts of subterfuge.’

I looked out the window at the brick wall. I turned back to find Pukus had turned the discussion to the concerns of his portfolio. ‘Tough times, Brendan. Every cost gets a line through it. Coffers are dry and the old boy won’t hear a word.’

I groaned inwardly, assuming ‘the old boy’ was the treasurer. Coffers so dry the legislation to cut land-tax breaks for multinationals had just been quietly dumped. That’ll create jobs, they say. Jobs for the builders of enormous private yachts.

Boss was nodding. ‘The old boy reminds me of Brother Michael, remember? Saliva flying from his mouth, one eye looked the wrong way.’

Pukus cackled. ‘Don’t stand in the front row when Brother Michael’s conducting choir, face full of spit for your trouble.’

They were school friends. How had I missed that? There’d been a whisper that Boss had gone to a top private school. We reconciled this information with his work in community services by assuming it was an act of rebellion. Or redemption. He was a complicated man.

‘Enough of the nostalgia,’ I said. ‘Can we focus, gentlemen, please?’

Pukus was affronted, and coughed with disapproval. ‘State your business, then. What’s this hare-brained program?’ He addressed me. ‘You know, you’re wasting your time; I can’t get funding for diddly, let alone some socialist outfit that’s beyond my ministerial scope.’

I’d encountered this pre-emptive belittling tactic before. I wondered if it was taught in management courses. ‘Preventable house fires, poor immigrant families burnt to death, public liability, yadda yadda yadda, give us fifteen grand for a fire-safety education program.’ An ambit bid — we’d walk away with five thousand if we were lucky.

Pukus roared laughter, turned scarlet, slapped his knee. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said to Boss. ‘Out of touch with reality.’

‘Ten grand, and we’ll throw in English classes.’

‘Exceeds my bailiwick.’

‘Eight, and we’ll assist with administering any community-based orders for anyone holding a temporary protection visa.’

‘Sorry, lovey. They’d never get the visa in that case.’

I stood up, put both hands on the table and eyeballed Pukus. ‘All right. How about this? The passports scandal, whatever it is, becomes public, which it will. The opposition says it smacks of government mismanagement. There’s a great deal of hand-wringing in the press about our security. You immediately announce a fifty-thousand-dollar funding increase to public-employee background checks. Then, as a distraction, because you are so concerned with keeping the homeless off the streets, you include increased funding to get street kids into improved accommodation. And have better assessments on youth workers.’

I threw the youth worker checks in for the hell of it, thinking of Enright, and kept speaking. ‘Say it like you mean it, as though it were your idea. We use our resources, working with other agencies, to identify at-risk youth and find accommodation for kids sleeping rough. That’s in your purview, surely? There happens to be extra funds available, and we use it to create a fire-safety education program for recent arrivals.’

I heard tapping. Boss was beating time with a finger on the table top, a hint of a smile on the existentialist’s face. ‘Corrupt public servants,’ Boss said. ‘Looks bad.’

‘Very bad,’ I agreed.

Pukus pursed his thin lips. ‘Pre-emptive strike? Yes, that might get through to His Nibs. I’ll have a word to him, see what we can manage.’ He stood, our cue to leave.

On the stairs, Boss smirked. A stark reversal of his earlier mood. ‘Nice work in there, Hardy.’

He headed through the vestibule at a trot, as though he feared Pukus would change his mind and come after us.

I reflected on our success with the minister, albeit limited, and the performance we’d put on to get it. We’d circumvented all the usual channels, the painstaking application processes, the chain of public-servant command, the checks and balances. Our chances of securing funds via the official route were virtually zero. Instead, we’d taken the way of vested interests, a combination of threat and mutual benefit, and it had worked. What would this country look like if community support agencies had the clout of, say, a mining industry association, or a major bank?

Not that Pukus had actually promised us anything. In fact, the odds were that he’d take the idea, water it down, make an announcement that sounded good but offered nothing, and we’d end up with no fire-safety training money. But he had emerged so buoyant that I chose not to point that out. There was, however, one matter that remained unsettled. ‘What was all that crap about art?’

‘Lost its potency, for me at least. It’s futile. Pointless.’

‘All art? Even …’ I swallowed. ‘Television?’

He seemed cross. ‘Be serious. I’m talking about creative works.’

I was being serious, and now my feelings were hurt.

We were out in the fresh air, crossing Spring Street. It felt good to be away from the recycled exhalations of exhausted power.

Cantering down Burke Street, two steps of mine to his lunging stride.

He stopped suddenly. ‘My car’s up there.’ He pointed down an alley to a multi-level parking complex. ‘When we get back to the office, we can work out the details of the program.’

‘Ah, Boss, it’s after five. I thought I’d hang around in the city. Do some early Christmas shopping?’

He looked at his watch. ‘Monday then.’ His scowl said I had better not get any ideas about taking an unauthorised day off.

‘Yep,’ I said cheerily. ‘Bright and early.’

He hesitated. ‘And I might as well tell you now, I’m thinking of resigning.’

I waited for a punchline. Surely he was not serious.

‘Not thinking of. Doing. I’m leaving WORMS,’ he said.

Shanninder was right. Again. That woman was Nostradamus. But even so, I felt off-kilter at the news. The earth was off its axis and was free-wheeling around the solar system. ‘But why?’

Eyes on the ground. ‘I can’t summon the energy.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘This is that crisis of yours. You need to have a break. Take some time off. You can’t seriously think of leaving. I mean who can possibly replace you?’

‘Interesting you should say that —’

‘You know what I think the problem is? A fear of death. Well, I hate to break it to you. We can’t escape it, death awaits us all.’

He glared at me; I’d touched a nerve. I continued. ‘Even though those annoying health-policy bossy-pants types are constantly telling us not to die. We will. They don’t like it. I know, neither do we. But humans are, well, human.’

‘Nietzsche couldn’t have put it better himself. But about the job —’

‘We can’t all die in our sleep. I mean, it’s not that I like the idea of a fireball, or a mincer, or being eaten by some crazed sea lion —’

‘I don’t think sea lions eat people.’

‘Maybe not eat, but they attack. Remember that girl in WA? A sea lion leapt out of the water and mauled her —’

He raised a hand, stopped me mid-sentence.

‘What?’

‘What are your career plans?’

Career plans? Did anyone’s life trajectory match their plans? I reeled from one job to another, taking whatever work I could get.

‘Let me put it this way,’ Boss went on, sensing my confusion. ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’

In five years, I expected to be living on an island with Brophy, wearing tropical prints, making coconut cream pie, and getting together with Thurston Howell the Third for the luau on a Saturday night. I raised my shoulders. ‘Dunno.’

‘Apply for my job. I can’t guarantee you’ll get it, of course. Nothing can be guaranteed. It is a dog’s arse of a job, too. Thankless, tedious, involves copious arse-kissing. Much responsibility, little thanks.’

‘You make it sound so attractive.’

‘It pays well, and more importantly, I know you’d do a good job.’

‘Flattery won’t change my relaxed attitude to working hours,’ I warned him.

‘Think it over,’ he said, then he marched down the alley.

With his departure, a weird sensation overcame me — happiness. Not since Brophy and I had started hanging out together had I felt this kind of joy. My current job was a dead end. Being the new Boss probably had dog hairs on it, but it paid well. For those of us in the community sector, well-paid positions were rare, mythical, exotic.

I noticed that everyone else in the city seemed cheerful, too. People were chatting into their phones and to each other, and were generally being happy, and it occurred to me that I might just be getting a contact high from the people around me. It was the end of the working week, a four-day weekend was in the offing for most, and the general air of excitement in the city was almost immoderate.

I caught a passing tram heading west and stepped out near the Docklands Stadium. I did a circuit around the outside of ground, appraising the buildings that surrounded it, some built barely an arm’s length from the arena. One angular glass structure, tinted mauve, was the only one that matched Phuong’s description of a ‘purple tower’. Inside the foyer was a bank of residents’ names with buzzers. I found William Blyton’s name and buzzed.

Loud sniff. ‘Yes?’

‘William Blyton?’

‘Who is this?’

‘Stella Hardy. William, sorry to bother you at home. I was told you might be able to help me. I’m a social worker with WORMS.’

A blast of nose blowing. ‘You’ve got what?’

‘I have a client, a teenage boy.’ Cory was not a client in the strictest sense of the word, but I was not one to get bogged down with semantics. ‘He died yesterday. I believe he was caught up in a fake charity scam, or something, with an outlaw motorcycle gang, and I wondered if —’

‘Look, mate, I’d like to help, but I can’t. So you tell whichever of those trainee clowns who gave you my home address that I’d like to strangle them. I’ve got the flu. Going back to bed. Ring the station.’

I re-entered the high-spirited atmosphere of the emptying city. I squeezed onto a packed tourist tram, and stood amid families checking maps, listening to pre-recorded commentary describing a town I didn’t recognise, and headed back to Swanston Street. As I made my way towards Flinders Street Station, I encountered a human statue coated in gold. She made a grab for me as I passed, but I ducked out of her reach. I didn’t know much about art, but I knew I didn’t want it molesting me. Boss’s crazy claim that art served no purpose was starting to seem like a carefully reasoned maxim.

The commuters at Melbourne’s main train station swarmed, funnelling onto the escalators, filling out the platforms, and around them, but somehow a multitude of barely visible, lost souls gathered on the steps, or loitered in the concourse, or grazed in the burger franchise. And now they were waiting for HARM to happen.