Bear Pit

‘There’s a State election coming up. Is this the time to start ferreting? You could be accused of bias.’

She grinned again. ‘Only the ABC is accused of that. When did you ever hear of a commercial station accused of being biased? The politicians, both sides, know where the majority of viewers are. They’re not going to tread on the voters’ toes.’

He shook his head; without realizing it, he had trained his girls too well. ‘You should’ve been a cop.’

‘I always left that to Claire – remember she wanted to join the Service?’

‘I talked her out of it,’ he said and was glad. Five years after it had happened he still had the occasional vivid memory of Peta Smith, one of his Homicide detectives, lying dead with two bullets in her back. The Crime Scene outline of her body had once or twice been an image in a dream in which the wraith of Claire had risen out of the outline. ‘What have you dug up so far?’

‘Some of the inner branches are stacked – they want to topple the Premier before the Olympics. There are three or four starters who want to be up there on the official dais at the opening ceremony. A billion viewers around the world – they’ll never have another spotlight like that.’

‘Hans Vanderberg isn’t going to let anyone take his place. He’s got his own gold medal already minted.’

He stood up, reached across and ruffled her hair. Lately he had been touching his children more, as if getting closer to them as he got closer to losing them. Maureen would be gone from the house before too long; and even Tom, the lover of his mother’s cooking, would eventually move out. Malone had hugged them when they were small, then there had been the long period when intimacy had become an embarrassment. He was his own mother’s son: Brigid Malone hadn’t kissed him since he was eight years old. Con Malone had shaken his son’s hand on a couple of occasions; when he saw footballers and cricketers hugging each other he said he wanted to throw up. He actually said spew; he never used euphemisms if they were weak substitutions. He never used a euphemism for love, for love was never mentioned. In the Malone family while Scobie was growing up it was just understood that it was there. There was no need to mention it.

‘Take care.’

She looked up at him; there was love in her smiling eyes and he was touched. ‘Don’t worry about me, Dad. I’m not going to get in the way of any punches. What are you wearing that old leather jacket for?’

‘I’ve been out for a walk. It’s a bit chilly.’

‘Throw it out. You look like the back seat of a clapped-out Holden.’

‘I had a lot of fun in the back seat of a Holden when I was young.’

‘Not with Mum, I’ll bet.’

No, not with Lisa. The first time he had had fun with her had been in the back seat of a Rolls-Royce in London when she had been the High Commissioner’s private secretary. The glass partition along the back of the front seats had been up and the chauffeur had not heard the heavy breathing. He had been a pretty rough-and-ready lover in those days, his Ned Kelly approach as Lisa had called it, but she had been an experienced teacher. She had taken him a long way from the back-seat-of-a-Holden directness. ‘You’d be surprised.’

He went out to the kitchen, where Lisa was making tea, their ritual drink before they went to bed. She was measuring spoons of tea into the china pot; no tea-bags or metal pot for her. The kitchen had been newly renovated, costing what he thought had been the national debt; but anything that made Lisa happy made him happy. He took off his leather jacket and looked at it, a faded relic.

‘What d’you think that would bring at St Vincent de Paul?’

‘A dollar ninety-five,’ said Tom, coming in the back door. ‘You’re not going to give it away? What about your 24-year-old shoes? Vince de Paul might find a taker for them, too.’

‘Pull your head in,’ said his father. ‘Where’ve you been tonight?’

‘Mind your business,’ said Lisa, pouring hot water into the teapot. ‘He’s been out with a girl. There’s lipstick on his ear.’

‘There’s lipstick on both his ears.’

Tom wiped his ears. ‘I told ’em to lay off.’

‘Them?’

‘There was a girl on each ear. It was supposed to be a double-date tonight, but the other guy didn’t turn up.’

The banter was just froth, like that on a cappuccino; but, like the coffee’s froth, Malone had a taste for it. They were not the sort of family that boasted it had a crazy sense of humour; which, in his eyes, proved it was a family that had no real sense of humour. Instead, the humour was never remarked upon, it was a common way of looking at a world that they all knew, from Malone’s experience as a cop, was far from and never would be perfect. The comforting thing, for him, was that they all knew when not to joke.

‘I was celebrating,’ said Tom. ‘I made money today. Those gold stocks I bought a coupla months ago at twenty-five cents, there was a rumour today they’ve made a strike. They went up twenty cents. I’m rolling in it.’

‘He’ll be able to keep us,’ said Malone. ‘I can retire.’

Tom was in his third year of Economics, heading headlong for a career as a market analyst. Last Christmas Lisa’s father, who could well afford it, had given each of the children a thousand dollars. Claire had put hers towards a skiing holiday in New Zealand; Maureen had spent hers on a new wardrobe; and Tom had bought shares. He was not greedy for money, but they all knew that some day he would be, as his other grandfather had said, living the life of Riley. Whoever he was.

‘You’ll never retire.’ Tom looked at his mother. ‘Would you want him to? While you still go on working?’

‘All I want is an excuse.’

Lisa was finishing her second year as public relations officer at Town Hall, handling the city council’s part in the Olympic Games. For twenty-two years she had been a housewife and mother; she had changed her pinafore for a power suit, one fitting as well as the other. For the first six months she had found the going slippery on the political rocks of the city council, but now she had learned where not to tread, where to turn a blind eye, when to write a press release that said nothing in the lines nor between them. Whether she would continue beyond the Olympics was something she had not yet decided, but she was not dedicated to the job. When one has no ego of one’s own there is suffocation in a chamber full of it.

‘If he retires, I retire. We’ll go on a world trip and you lot can fend for yourselves.’

Tom looked at them with possessive affection. He was a big lad, taller now than his father, six feet three; heavy in the shoulders and with the solid hips and bum that a fast bowler and rugby fullback needed. He was better-looking than his father and he used his looks with girls. If Riley, whoever he was, had a line of girlfriends, Tom was on his way to equalling him. He had the myopic vision of youth which doesn’t look for disappointment.

‘How come you two have stayed so compatible?’

‘Tolerance on my part,’ said both his parents.

‘They’re so smug,’ said Maureen from the doorway.

Then the phone rang out in the hallway. Malone looked at his watch: 11.05. As a cop he had lived almost thirty years on call, but even now there was the sudden tension in him, the dread that one of the children was in trouble or had been hurt: he had too much Celtic blood. Was it Claire calling, had something happened to her?

The ringing had stopped; Maureen had gone back to pick up the phone. A moment or two, then she came to the kitchen doorway:

‘It’s Homicide, Dad. Sergeant Truach.’

2

‘I never take any notice of him,’ said the Premier, speaking of the Opposition leader seated half a dozen places along the long top table. ‘He’s too pious, he’s like one of those Americans who were in the Clinton investigation, carrying a Bible with a condom as a bookmark. Of course it’s all piss-piety, but some of the voters fall for it. We’re all liars, Jack, you gotta be in politics, how else would the voters believe us?’

Jack Aldwych knew how The Dutchman could twist logic into a pretzel. It was what had kept him at the head of the State Labor Party for twenty years. That and a ruthless eye towards the enemy, inside or outside the party.

The Dutchman went on, ‘The Aussie voter only wants to know the truth that won’t hurt him. He doesn’t want us to tell him he spends more on booze and smokes and gambling than he does on his health. So we tell lies about what’s wrong with the health system. But you don’t have to be a hypocrite, like our mate along the table.’

Aldwych usually never attended functions such as this large dinner. He had been a businessman, indeed a big businessman: robbing banks, running brothels, smuggling gold. But he had always had a cautionary attitude towards large gatherings; it was impossible to know everyone, to know who might stab you in the back. He was always amused at the Martin Scorsese films of Mafia gatherings, backs exposed like a battalion of targets; but that was the Italians for you and he had never worked with them, not that, for some reason, there had ever been a Mafia in Sydney. Maybe the city had been lucky and all the honest Sicilians had migrated here.

Tonight’s dinner, to celebrate the opening of Olympic Tower, was a gathering of the city’s elite, though the crème dé la crèmé was a little watery around the edges. The complex of five-star hotel, offices and boutique stores had had a chequered history and there was a certain air of wonder amongst the guests that Olympic Tower was finally up and running. There were back-stabbers amongst them, but their knives would not be for Jack Aldwych. This evening he felt almost saintly, an image that would have surprised his dead wife and all the living here present.

He certainly had no fear of this old political reprobate beside him; they were birds of a blackened feather. ‘Hans,’ he said, ‘I have to tell you. I always voted for the other side. Blokes in my old profession were always conservatives. Where would I of been if I’d voted for the common good?’

‘Jack,’ said Hans Vanderberg, The Dutchman, ‘the common good is something we spout about, like we’re political priests or something. But a year into politics and you soon realize the common good costs more money than you have in Treasury kitty. The voters dunno that, so you never tell ’em. You pat ’em on the head and bring up something else for ’em to worry about. I think the know-all columnists call it political expediency.’

‘Are you always as frank as this?’

‘You kidding?’ The old man grinned, a frightening sight. He was in black tie and dinner jacket tonight, the furthest he ever escaped from being a sartorial wreck, but he still looked like a bald old eagle in fancy dress. ‘You think I’d talk like this to an honest man? I know you’re reformed –’

‘Retired, Hans. Not reformed. There’s a difference. Will you change when you retire?’