Bloke, page 9
‘And the Notre Dame is beautiful.’
‘Built for a god.’
‘Did he enslave?’
‘People get killed in his name.’
‘Is that his fault?’
‘His?’
‘What?’
‘You said His, with a capital H. Are you religious?’
‘No.’
‘The Christian always lurks in Italians.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Should hear them in gaol. Killed men, sold heroin to girls, molested children, but they’ll pray like Mother Teresa when they get in trouble. Made me sick.’
‘Pretty scathing review of Italians so far.’
‘Some Italians.’
‘We were talking about whether I was religious or not and you came up with this know-it-all view of the Italian heart.’
We were silent for a moment, mucking around with the rim of our glass or ironing the crease of paper napkins between finger and thumb.
‘Obviously I didn’t mean you.’
‘It wasn’t obvious to me.’
‘I was trying to say that for some, religion is an excuse and that maybe the poor would prefer bread to churches.’
‘Maybe the poor want to hope. Maybe the poor enjoy seeing the Taj Mahal.’
I’d exhausted my opinion about art and wealth and returned to wine-stem rotations, she to ironing. ‘I know what you mean about the excess,’ she continued, ‘the privilege, but we seem to need beauty, and many need a God.’
I glanced up at her face, not just because I knew she was right, but because my ship was on strange seas – I’d always thought about things like this but had never talked about it with anyone. Had never known anyone who wanted to talk about it. And now I’d gone to the end of my chain and had to forge new links even as I spoke. It made me uncomfortable. I was used to long periods of consideration, argument and counter-argument with myself. Easy. You’re inclined to agreement.
The waiter noticed our silence and refilled our glasses. I thanked him.
‘There you go, James, that’s who you are.’
I looked at her to see where this was going.
‘You thanked the waiter. Most people see it as their due. They pay and think that means they can ignore the waiter.’
‘I don’t want slaves.’
‘But it’s nice once in a while to be served. And he gets paid and buys a rabbit on his way home to cook for his family.’
‘And that’s who you are, generous.’
I looked up at her, wondering, half amazed at how we’d spent the last hours. The last bottle and a half of wine. I looked about for the waiter and caught the eye of another man I hadn’t seen arrive. He came over to us and drew a chair up to our table. ‘Australians?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thought so. You’re Jim Bloke and you’re being extradited, pal. The Bolivian boys are with me, over there.’ He indicated three bandits leering by a post. ‘I’ve told them to shoot if you resist.’
‘You’re joking,’ Giovanna challenged him, blustering a little.
‘Afraid not, Ms Romano. Mr Bloke has been charged with piloting a vessel while unlicensed and importation of prohibited goods. That right, Jim?’
‘That bloody Stoker, he sets up innocent fishermen to —’
‘Nevertheless, Ms Romano, the alleged crime has taken place and Mr Bloke will have a chance to defend himself in court. More difficult for a man with a record, but there you are. Holiday’s over, I’m afraid.’
eight
I spent two nights in a gaol somewhere in La Paz and I didn’t see Giovanna again. Ozcop made a pretence of explaining my rights before the law. I didn’t panic because I suppose it’d occurred to me this might happen, just not in La Paz. It made me nervous that they thought it was serious enough to chase me to South America, but any fear was overwhelmed by sadness and deflation. Just when … But I couldn’t dwell on it, I needed to concentrate on staying alive.
Not that I feared being killed by them, they obviously needed me back in Australia, but a sentence on this charge, on top of my prior, would mean years, maybe a decade, and I couldn’t bear the thought of the grinding self-discipline required to see out the time.
And I was more certain of a lengthy sentence after the obligatory visit of my Legal Aid lawyer. He asked questions with a breathless caution, as if I had explosive belts strapped to my body. The police must have scared him half to death with the seriousness of my crime.
When he left I knew I’d have to do most of the spadework. I set myself up in the education room. Terrific education. The paedophiles had hacked the system to access sites the administration thought were impenetrable. But I had no choice. My search was conducted to the music of heavy breathing.
I followed the press stories of the abalone disease and heroin importations. My arrest was dispensed with in two pars, with no mention of the crime for which I was extradited. The press still hadn’t made the connection between the importation of the dodgy fishmeal and the heroin imports, but the reason for the energy and expense they’d put into my arrest became more clear. The President of the Liberal Party was on the board of several aquaculture businesses, in company with the sort of businessmen whose enemies often found themselves bleeding onto cases of bananas at the Victoria Market.
Politics and business are as volatile as aviation fuel. Everyone would be trying to blame everyone else and when the dust had settled and their lawyers had knocked a few heads together they’d look for a scapegoat. Me. The chicken they’d so carefully tethered in the tiger’s path. That’s the way I figured it, anyway.
The politicians had to get their own departments off the hook or elections could be lost, and the Fisheries Department and Customs were going to look like silly little boffins with fishmeal all over their faces. The public servants would be exiled to Veterans Affairs or worse – Aboriginal Affairs and the Arts. The Minister would simply lose his seat.
Six QCs trawled through thirty-four boxes of Department of Trade files and announced that there was no record of official importation of any fishmeal. Fisheries knew it was coming in but couldn’t say so because the National Party would have had a fit. The National Party are normally supine and as dozy as Eeyore, but one sniff of a New Zealand apple or Argentine merino and they dash around their lemonade bottle like a sugar-saturated blowie.
You’ve never seen indignation like it, you’ve never seen such impassioned defence of the public interest, so it was better for everyone that the fishmeal came into the country without going through a trade register.
Barristers loved the way facts dropped into place. They loved the accidental implications caused by the combination of greed, criminal intent and an assortment of characters who couldn’t trust each other. Recipe for chaos – and litigation.
The aquaculture business started as a bit of an entrepreneurial game, blokes trying to prove who was the most savvy business scoundrel. They weren’t necessarily trying to hurt me, but in any war there is always collateral damage and my fate was collateral to their ambition.
And then, of course, there was chance. Family Thirst, a right-wing, pro-life, pro-self-interest, pro-stupidity-in-the-guise-of-Christianity party, got a senator elected on the back of Labor preferences. Some stats genius worked out you could give your preferences to Satan in the belief that Satan had no hope of getting many primary votes. But in this particular election every party thought the same. Satan got up on the preferences of people who believed in the right of women to control their own reproduction, those who believed in a fair judicial system, those who believed in full declaration of politicians’ shareholdings, those who just believed in a better world. The only party that didn’t preference Satan was the Greens, but who’s ever been able to tell them how to win elections, the stupid pricks can’t count.
The upshot was that I was charged with importing heroin, prejudicing quarantine laws, and evasion of custom duties on imported marine vessels. The press, encouraged by certain barristers, made it sound like I was a biological terrorist.
Guilty. Guilty of being stupid, guilty of not questioning the source of my sudden rich employment, but worse than all that, guilty of being man trouble, the sort Giovanna was trying to escape. I’d ruined the holiday of her dreams and she’d had to go teaching at the only school she could get, to raise money for my bail should it ever be offered.
That school was in Beeac, in the Western District, home of Rufus Youngblood, according to the town’s welcome board. Even the people in the town had forgotten which race it’d won. I was in deep trouble but my greatest regret was the absence of her company. She tried to cheer me up with letters about the town, how they filled their volcanic craters with old combine harvesters which had forgotten how to combine. Funny enough, I suppose. If you were in the mood.
And I wasn’t. Still stuck in the education room desperately trying to find a way of extricating myself from other people’s crime. Ayres made it no easier. He was a thrice-convicted paedophile. And computer genius. There wasn’t a system he’d failed to corrupt. When Ayres ‘worked’ on the computer, pheromones stirred up his sweat glands. He smelt like boiled mutton, fatty, rancid; breathed like a dog lunging at the leash. Only became computer-literate so he could barrack for the dog. Or donkey.
I Googled Stoker Stevens and the ships he’d had something to do with. I was clicking about trying to find crew members when a name loomed off the screen: Bruno Baras.
It took seven hours over several days to follow the links, but one vessel led to another, which led to the irregular fishing activities adopted by Baras and Stevens. And their influential cronies. I searched further back into these activities and finally the trials of Giovanna’s old man came up, the death of the young diver, even a photo of Baras and Stevens with a tall man not quite looking at the camera. Caught in the act of turning from it. Flying Bobby Phillips. I clicked off the computer and digested the results. Giovanna’s husband had dobbed in her old man. She’d never told me that bit. Doubt leaked into my mouth like mercury from a dodgy amalgam filling.
I rang her in Beeac. The gymnasts had worked out how to make mobile phones from ones we were supposed to be recycling. They’d been decommissioned, but you could still use the chips apparently. Sardine tin, bit of fencing wire and Blutac and Bob’s your uncle. All right, I made it up about the Blutac and fencing wire because I had no idea how they worked, I just knew they smelt like fish.
Elaborate, you reckon? Unnecessary? Trust me, the prison system is responsive to political mood. Well, it has to be, it’s the pollies who had just delivered them a contract to incarcerate twelve thousand nig nogs – and their babies and aged parents. So family visits and phone calls for fishermen and unlucky Australians were banned. They knew we didn’t have Lindy’s dingo, but they had to act tough just in case some journalist started getting earnest in tracking down public hysteria. But that rarely happened. Still, it paid to be careful.
‘G’day?’ I said, testing out the sardine phone.
‘Where are you?’ she said.
‘Barwon Detention Centre.’
‘But they told me you weren’t allowed to use the phone.’
‘This isn’t a phone, it’s a Greenseas tin.’ She ignored me. Even I couldn’t beat up enthusiasm for the joke.
‘Won’t they trace the call?’
‘You can’t bug bait fish. That’s what they tell me, anyway.’
‘They won’t trace mine?’
‘I’m told this will register on your account as a call from Vantage Videos, and if they tap in they’ll hear a movie menu that lasts eight minutes. Not bad for fencing wire, is it?’
She ignored me again. I felt as if I could almost hear her sigh of exasperation. But it could have been the phone.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah, right as rain, but I can’t talk too long – about as long as you’d expect a guard to believe you’re still weeding. The queue to do vegie maintenance is pretty long.’ Christ I didn’t sound like me; even to me. I was prattling, nervous, getting through the formalities before I could get to what was on my mind.
‘I miss you, Jim.’
I took a breath. ‘You never told me all about your hubby, about his fishing ventures.’
‘What?’
‘Bruno Baras. Your ex. You never told me about his —’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Not that it was him testified against your old man.’
‘Is that your business?’
‘It is if it’s the same mob sending —’
‘That’s why I was worried for you, Jim, I know how the bastards work. I knew you were in strife.’
‘Still in strife, we have to talk about Bar— But Giovanna, listen, ar, no hang on, they’re starting to look over this way … I miss you … next time …’
The line dropped out. Not enough pyrethrum or something. I snuck a look at Ayres, who was fumbling at a packet of cigarettes. He shrugged. Even the best paedophiles have tech malfunctions it seems. I leant on my knuckles and pretended to weed, exhausted by the false cheer.
Still, I’d spoken to her, heard the slight huskiness of her voice, but couldn’t linger on each syllable as I promised I would. Too little time, too much to do … or so I told myself. The computer thing and the cabbage phone were little excitements to erode time, to clip individual seconds from the 500-day clock. They hadn’t told me how many days, but the gym bookmakers had calculated five hundred, another game to pass the time. And I passed that time in doubt. I thought it reasonable to ask about Baras but she had brushed it aside as if it didn’t matter. Or wasn’t any of my business. But it was. Baras turned up in the society photos, at charity days sharing wine with the attorney-general. He was a wheeler and dealer. Flash as a rat with a gold tooth. Collected art, sponsored opera. Ex-abalone diver become respectable. A dangerous enemy.
A couple of days later, we were cutting salmon into wafers of translucent flesh, and because we were using knives there was an armed warder at the door to the kitchen. Cooking class. Incarcerated education. I was working with a big Islander, massive forearms like hams, a gym-worked physique, but a delicate touch with the blade.
Everyone else deferred to his judgement in anything, even the couple of whitefellas doing the class. Wise. Not that he gave orders or flaunted his authority, we just waited to follow his lead, a couple of beats behind his actions. When he grabbed a bunch of shallots we got shallots, and two seconds after he started cutting we cut them to the exact length he did. If he diced we diced. He doused the fish and vegetables with vinegar and soy, so did we. He sprinkled chopped Italian parsley and oregano onto the fish, so did we. It was hard to tell if the Education Officer had chosen to prepare the fish in this way or was sensible enough not to argue.
We took our bowls into the sun of the yard and sat with our backs to the warm bricks and ate the fish cured in vinegar and shallots. It was delicious, of course, but I’d have settled for a cold pie in different company.
The other blokes traded quiet barbs in a joking routine that had the patina of repeated use, but the big Islander said nothing. One of the blokes picked up everyone’s bowls and took them inside and brought back a single bottle of white wine and ten glasses. Part of the course. The education unit must have worked hard to convince the boss that this was essential to rehabilitation.
I waited to see what the others did. They tilted their glasses in a kind of salut and mumbled a single word I couldn’t catch.
‘Merrijee,’ the big Islander murmured in my direction. ‘Good one.’
Was he translating? I sipped my wine and said, ‘Merrijee,’ and he raised his thumb in acknowledgement that I’d got it right.
Raw fish and a thimble of wine in the sun. It could be worse, but it could be a lot better. I’d slipped back into my old routine of reading and exercising and keeping my eyes down. There was a trick to it, and a protocol. You didn’t want to challenge anyone by looking too tough, you didn’t avoid speaking in case they thought you were snobbing them, but neither did you want to look too compliant, too intimidated, too weak.
It was precarious. Your manners had to be immaculate, and at the same time the inmates had to notice how much you could bench-press and how long you could maintain it. I knew the rules. I was just sick of them and had to struggle to hide my disappointment in case they saw it as disapproving of their company. Tricky. Nerve-wracking.
They exercised me with the Koorie division. I did education with them too. The admin must have sized me up as having enough manners and sense to avoid conflict, and just enough presence to deflect attack. Or maybe they knew that from my records. A reader, a cook, gym freak, polite: Koorie unit. Perhaps they knew a bit more than that.
Every second Tuesday we had an hour in the education-centre garden. We kicked the footy, end to end. The horticulture boys were nervous we’d smash up their peonies and mint bushes but were too sensible to mention it. But the footy hardly ever went astray; the kicking was precise, even the party-trick check-side curves, and anyway, no one wanted to destroy another bloke’s distraction.
The big Islander was called Soloman. Nobody called him Sol. He wasn’t a Rules man and he was disinclined to kick the ball, preferring to spin it out of one hand the required forty metres. Nobody thought this offensive, acted as if he’d kicked the ball just like everyone else. Soloman wasn’t going anywhere. This was his home, and it showed in almost invisible mannerisms. Invisible unless you’d seen them before. When you passed his door you could tell straight away the interior was meticulous, but you couldn’t stare at another man’s things, so it took the progress of repeated glances to realise the strange order of his CD collection had nothing to do with the music but was arranged by colour.
Why did the CD player sit so neatly? – because the cord had been cut to the exact distance from the power outlet. The few photos and even fewer books on the shelf rose and fell in a perfect sine curve. The bed linen looked starched and must have been snapped into sharp lines by those massive wrists. This was the obsessive tidiness of a man who had little, but what little he had would be his for the rest of his life. This life. Made you shudder.
