Chapter 4

Harry backed into the driveway and climbed out of his car. Despite the heat of the day, it was cool under the house. Unlike many similar homes in the area, it hadn’t been built in underneath. Instead of fibro walls, there were just wooden slats, spaced far enough apart to let the breeze through. He thought he might sleep down here on really hot nights, then remembered the mysterious scratching noise. He needed to get some rat traps.

He walked out to the front gate, grass whispering against the cuffs of his pants. He pulled the wad of mail out of the letterbox. Grocery pamphlets. An Indian take-away menu. Three letters, all ‘To the Householder’. Christmas toy-store catalogues. And the green flyer. He remembered the man shoving it into the letterbox, after witnessing Harry ‘christening’ his new place. The pamphlet was crinkled, after being caught in the rain and then dried. He opened it carefully.

SAVE THE TOWER, the headline screamed. It was boxed in by clip art – a cement mixer down one end, a dump truck down the other.

Harry shook his head. Fred. His name wasn’t on the flyer but it didn’t need to be. And now that he’d made the connection, Harry recognised the guy who’d thrust it into the letterbox. Harry had seen him with Fred once, down the library. Bill, or Bob – something like that. He and Fred had served together. Harry scanned the text.

Swenson Constructions has put in an application to the Brisbane City Council, proposing to replace Paddington water tower with THE TOWERS – an eight-storey apartment complex and retail.

Swenson. That name again. Harry leant over the fence and peered through the drooping purple flowers of the jacaranda trees lining the street. There it was, in all its glory: a stark bulb of graffiti-scarred concrete in the distance, topped with a crown of mobile-phone antennae.

Harry had no interest in going head-to-head with Swenson again. But Fred would want him to. Like every other cause Fred had adopted over the years, this would be the most pressing issue Brisbane had ever faced, and Harry wouldn’t hear the end of it until he donated some coverage.

He headed back to the house. In the kitchen, he dumped the mail on the bench and grabbed a beer. He unlocked the back door, and took the beer and the green flyer out with him.

The afternoon sun winked through the mango tree’s thick branches and lush green leaves, painting his legs with dappled light. At the bottom of the steps a small concrete path doubled back under the house, to the laundry. The back yard sloped steeply upwards to a mossy picket fence that was falling down in places under the weight of the shrubbery on the other side. Through the gaps, Harry could just make out the back of another Queenslander, although this one had been raised and built in underneath.

He sipped his beer, grimaced, looked at the label. It was Corona, same beer he’d favoured since earning a decent wage. It tasted watered down. He took another sip, shrugged, continued drinking. It was still beer.

Up the street there were similar-sized patches of lawn – the same, but different. A greenhouse and a shed at the back of one, kids’ toys and a trampoline in another. Further up, a yard was given over to the rusting remains of an old car, partially covered by a fraying blue tarp. Each garden had a Hills Hoist, as though at one point this was a city council planning regulation.

Looking at the state of his own yard, Harry thought it might finally be time to buy a mower. He and Bec had lived in an apartment, and before that a place where the landlord had paid for lawn care. The thought of now having to mow lawn made his stomach churn. Another sign that he was moving on, the things ‘he and Bec’ had always done would now be decisions he made for himself. Maybe he could get someone to tidy the garden a bit, and then he could reassess.

The general condition of the house led him to believe it hadn’t been lived in for a while, which was odd, given the rent was reasonable for what it was and for the location – a short walk to Paddington’s fashionable cafes and boutiques. After moving out of Bec’s he’d expected to be dossing at Dave’s for a week at least. Maybe the woman at the real estate agency had seen the desperate look in his eyes and taken pity on him. She showed him a photocopied flyer for a place that wasn’t even on the rental list. He filled in an application right then and there, and they texted him that afternoon to tell him he’d got it. He’d thought about asking, ‘What’s the catch?’ but didn’t want to push it. He deserved a bit of good luck.

He sipped his beer. It still tasted odd, but he’d never met a beer he didn’t like. Besides, abandoning the beer would mean it was time to unpack boxes.

Harry focused on the pamphlet. The tower was built in 1927. The only one of its type in Queensland. An iconic part of the Paddington landscape. Fred had roped in his ‘IT mate’ to do a website, and Harry didn’t need to check it out to know there would be plenty of animated GIFs. Fred wanted people to share their stories about the water tower and send in photos.

Good luck with that. Brisbane didn’t exactly have a great record when it came to protecting cultural icons, and Fred didn’t exactly have a great record when it came to rallying people to the cause. It started with Cloudland dance hall, its picturesque arched entrance torn down by the Deen brothers in the dead of night back in the 1980s. Fred and his wife, June – like many of their peers – had met there. He launched a campaign to bring the Bjelke-Petersen government to account for its actions, or at least the Deen brothers. This was long before Harry’s time at the Chronicle, of course. Fred failed. Years before he’d told Harry that Joh’s secret police had tapped his phone. Since then he’d been iffy about phones, even though Joh was long gone.

Fred had little better luck against subsequent Labor govern­ments. Festival Hall – the birthplace of Brisbane’s rock’n’roll scene. Gone. The art deco-style Regent Cinema. Gone. The apartment buildings put in their place always had a ‘tribute’ to what came before, but a load of photos and memorabilia behind perspex didn’t really cut it in terms of preserving cultural identity. The perverse thing was that each subsequent defeat fired up Fred even more. It was as if he’d forgotten why he was fighting. The fight was enough.

Harry laid the flyer to one side. His fingers played gently over the skin at the back of his neck. He thought he could feel the design under his fingertips. He was angry, but didn’t know who to direct it at. He pulled out his phone and looked at the photo again. He’d often toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo. He’d once actually stood in a tattoo parlour, looking through books of designs. But he baulked at the thought of having something, anything, etched on his body for the rest of his life.

As a journalist, he was a literary omnivore. He consumed a wide range of books, magazines, opinions, commentary. He had engaged in a range of pursuits for short periods of time, usually while researching a story or shortly after writing a story. He’d done some volunteering for Meals on Wheels, delivering food to old people. He’d played beach volleyball for a while, and indoor soccer. But there was no real passion. No one thing that he adored above all else. So anything he got tattooed on his body would be flippant and have no real meaning.

He’d considered something symbolic. When he and Bec moved overseas he thought about two swallows – birds that mate for life – but was put off when she rebuffed without fail any talk of marriage. He’d dodged a bullet there.

He zoomed in on the design. He certainly wouldn’t have had some arcane symbol tattooed on his body just for the hell of it. What the fuck was that? It was ugly, and kind of creepy. He closed the image and put his phone away.