The Big Whatever (38 page)

I sat back. “You and the riddles, Murray. How 'bout you stick them up your arse.”

Murray had preached at the Sydney Domain and outside
Town Hall Station, and he wasn't so easily heckled. He dropped his voice and leaned forward. “Max is somewhere. He knows where he is.”

I got up, shaking my head.

A knock at the door. A woman's voice calling, “Woohoo? Hello?”

A muffled man's voice, too. And a car door slamming.

I headed down the hallway to the front door. Murray followed me.

A middle-aged woman and a beaten-looking old guy with a plastered-down comb-over stood on the porch. Three more people were walking up the path.

“Ooh, hello,” the woman said when she saw me. “Another seeker?” she said to Murray.

“Yes, a seeker, a poor wayfarer, like all of us. Regrettably, Brother William won't be staying.”

He opened the screen door, smiling. I stepped out, they stepped in, and so did the next lot.

“Go on through,” Murray said to them. “I'll join you shortly.” And before they were out of earshot he said to me in a wise and kindly stage whisper, “You have the answer you seek, brother.”

“Huh?”

“You need no new information. The Great Spirit is telling you. You need only to listen.”

The old couple had stopped. They were loving it.

“With your heart,” Murray said.

“Meaning he's already told me? Or he's going to tell me?”

We were on the verandah now. The old couple's car was near the door. A Mercedes, not old.

I was still looking at it when Murray slipped something into my shirt pocket. I glanced down. A folded wad of money.

I looked at Murray.

“
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers
,” he said. “
For thereby some have entertained angels unawares
.” He closed the door on me.

I drove till midnight, camped on the dirt half a mile off the main road. Moved on the next morning, through long lonely stretches of flat country. Tall, straggly gums gave way to the lower, wide-spreading river redgums and coolabahs. Then long tracts of cypress, then mulga. Great mobs of cockatoos. Hawks and eagles in the sky. As the day wore on, the fences disappeared and I hit the saltbush country. An occasional emu by the road.

That night I camped by a river, and was woken in the morning by the birds: herons, egrets, swans, ducks, pelicans. Goshawks perched on the tallest dead trees. The land where the crow flies backwards, as they say. The river was thick and muddy, but it had a flow. I heated some baked beans, boiled an egg, then was gone.

I hit a far western town that afternoon, but Molly – “Motel Molly” – had long since abandoned the place. No one knew what had become of her and her teenage son. Or if they knew, they weren't telling the outsider. I drove out of town late afternoon into the desert country. The bitumen gave way to gravel. The car had meaty treads and gripped the loose surface well enough, but it was a slow, bumpy ride.

I camped that night in the saltbush, watched the sun set over the two thousand miles of nothing between me and the Indian Ocean.

I followed the single road north the next day. At lunchtime I filled up at a garage and went to use the public phone out front. It only offered operator-connected calls, which almost certainly meant there'd be at least one silent listener. So I drove on.

Next morning I stopped at the first town I came to. There was a public phone outside the single-person post office, and it was direct dial. I went to the milk bar, bought a sandwich and walked back to the phone booth with a pocketful of change. The day was cool, breezy.

My first call was to Sydney. Eloise and the kids were back home. The daughter came on the phone, told me a knock-knock joke, then the boy. Then Eloise.

“Sounds like everything's okay,” I said.

“There's been no trouble,” she said.

“Good.”

“And I've got a little story for you.”

I could hear the triumph in her voice.

“What?”

“Phil's houses. There
is
money involved. Quite a bit. Seems the state government might want those houses. The Department of Main Roads has big plans to build a flyover from the city right through Glebe and Annandale, to join up with Parramatta Road. A freeway right through the guts. The Western Distributor, they're calling it.”

“Fuck me! First I've heard of it.”

“It's still a secret. The government hasn't made anything public, but the word is out. Among
some
people, anyway. No one knows the exact route yet, because allegedly it still hasn't been decided. Phil and Joe might know something the others don't.”

“Gee. Okay. That's good. If you hear any more, let me know.”

“How would I do that, dear one? I don't even know where you are?”

“I'll ring in a few days.”

“Hang on, something else.”

“What?”

“Dad came around.”

“Yeah?”

“Joe and Phil are upset, he said.”

“Are they indeed?”

“Upset with
you
, that is.”

“Yeah.”

“At first, it was because you'd just vanished, when you're supposed to be on Phil's payroll.”

“That's not exactly true, but go on.”

“But then someone else on the payroll has become, ah,
scarce
, as it were. Some friend of theirs.” She left a meaningful pause. “And now they're suspicious about what that might mean.” She put a certain emphasis on the last bit, showing
she
understood
what that meant, and wasn't going to spell it out. Old-time skills.

“Hmm,” I said. “You didn't tell Donny about . . . recent events?”

“No.” Said very quietly. “Anyway, as far as they're concerned, you've gone AWOL.”

“That's not right, but whatever. If they've sent Donny along to you, that means they're putting something on the table.”

“Yes. Without all the padding, it came down to: Come home now, all will be forgiven. You'll even get back pay for the missing weeks. Things will be sorted out.”

“Otherwise?”

“Donny didn't say.”

Next I rang Terry. It was 9 a.m. and although he was up, he was still yawning. I heard him light a cigarette.

“So,” I said. “What's the mail?”

“It's fucking weird,” he said. “Still no sign of your mate. But the dogs are barking.”

“How so?”

“You speak to one source and you'll be told that certain crims decided Barry was just too much trouble and took action. Another will tell you the police did it. He's a rock spider, you know that?”

“I'd heard.”

“A third line of thought is that the cops and crims got together and dealt with him.”

“So everyone thinks he's gone?”

“Unless you go with yet another theory. That someone
did
have a go at him, it didn't take, and he's licking his wounds, preparing for a comeback.”

“That's not what I want to hear,” I said. “But it's the only explanation that really makes sense. Okay, what about Guilliat Street?

“Right.” The heaviness left his voice. “The women's group moved into the biggest house. The first one. The bloke who lives just around the corner from them is a harbour worker, a
good bloke, and he got the Seamen's Union to help out. Brought around some furniture, cots and beds and things. Probably hot, but who cares? The union got them a lawyer too.”

“All right, And they'll piss off when I give the word?”

“Well, yeah. I think so.”

“You
think
so?”

“The women are onside. It's the others.”

“Go on.”

“There's a group of musos setting up a studio in one place. And some silkscreen poster collective in the other. They might be harder to shift.”

“Jesus. Fuck. That cat's right out of the bag.”

“Funny thing, it started a bit of a land rush. Squatters are moving in all over the area. Those old houses in Glebe? Up near the uni? There's half a dozen or more squats there now. Another bunch down near the dog track. People are moving in – heads, students. They put new locks on the doors. Get the electricity and gas connected.”

“No wonder Phil and Joe are spewing.”

“I thought that's what you wanted.”

“It is. I guess. But you've got to keep my name right out of it.”

“I have. You're a hero, but an unknown one. All the kudos is coming to me.”

“You're welcome to it. Hey, and thanks, Tez. For everything. It's big.”

“It's okay. We're partners.”

“Tell the squatters to keep a lookout.”

“I told them that already. But I'm wondering, what's your grand plan here?”

“Stand by for updates,” I said.

My grand plan? Good question.

A road train filled with cattle rumbled down the street. The first vehicle to pass the whole time I'd been there. It rolled right on through without stopping, leaving in its wake a smell of diesel
and cow shit, and utter silence.

I walked back to the shop, bought a packet of cigs, got another handful of change and went back to the phone.

I rang a contact in Sydney, got a phone number for one Neville Wran, who had just become leader of the state Labor opposition. And the way things were shaping up, the likely next Premier of New South Wales. It took some blarney from me to get through to him, but I got there eventually. Last time we'd spoken was years ago, when he'd been a young law student and a bookie's penciller on the side. But like any good politician, he remembered exactly who I was and came on the line saying, “Good morning, Bill,” with a balanced mix of friendliness and formality. “What can I do for you?”

I told him I'd heard some mail that the state government was planning to bulldoze huge parts of Glebe and Annandale to build a freeway. People whose houses might be in line for demolition were obviously very alarmed about the plans, which they said had been kept under wraps for sinister reasons. They'd heard that the current government, via the Department of Main Roads, was secretly buying up properties, doing deals with developers who'd bought up cheap housing after being tipped off in advance. So I was wondering, I said, what Labor's position on that business might be, should they win the upcoming election.

Wran cleared his throat, like he was talking to the TV news, not just lowly W. Glasheen, before delivering his reply. “Well, Bill, as you know, I come from Balmain myself. And I and the Labor Party would be opposed to any hasty plans for demolition of working-class housing which would destroy the social mix, character and heritage values of old inner Sydney. That's on the record as Labor policy.”

I was silent for a moment. I'd obviously gone in the wrong way, and now he was talking on the record, in bullet-proof lingo. “That's very official-sounding, Nev,” I said. “Are you blokes going to press ahead or not?”

“Could I ask what your interest in that might be, Bill?”

Did he know I had links to the Combine? “Some people I
know have, ah, have an involvement,” I said.

Wran laughed. That was all I was going to get.

After I hung up I considered what he'd said. Decoded it
maybe
meant, all things being equal, they'd most likely go anti-freeway. Which also meant they could probably be persuaded to swing pro-freeway too.

I lit a cigarette, tried to follow my thoughts to their logical conclusion. Not so easy. I didn't know how this sort of shit was done. Phil, Joe, even Abe, they pulled strings all the time, bending circumstances to suit their interests, getting the mail from weak politicians and officials. I'd achieved nothing by ringing Neville. Maybe I'd even made things worse.

I rang Denise in Melbourne. She sounded happy that I'd called and asked how it was going, I said okay. I told her about my visit to Murray and described his spook act. She laughed.

“You should see this place I'm at,” I said, looking out at the flat, dusty street, the endless nothing beyond that. “It's sure not Melbourne.”

After a few minutes of chitchat I said, “So, your brother and the Federal government . . .”

“Oh Billy, let's not start that again,” she said wearily. “He's who he is. He's my brother.”

“No, no, it's not that. I didn't ring to be a shithead, I promise. This is something else. You told me how he went into bat for your friends in Collingwood. With the housing co-op? I've been wondering how he got the government interested in buying those houses.”

Speaking carefully now, she said, “I might've overstated that a bit, trying to put you in your place.” She laughed. “That particular deal didn't come off in the end. At least, it hasn't yet.”