A Different Turf

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Kagal smiled without amusement ‘Lovers? Is that the word you can’t get out? No, we’re just friends, the best of friends. He’s had his own partner for ten years, he’s never played the field. Unfortunately his partner did – he’s dying of AIDS. That was why he was on his way to the Albury to see the nurse. He’s been looking after his partner on his own.’

That, for the moment, left Malone without words. An officer, a major, appeared from somewhere, coming at them from the back of the car. He leaned in and looked at Malone on the passenger’s side. ‘Are you going to remain parked here for long? If so, we’d prefer you moved over there.’ He waved a swagger stick towards the far side of the ground.

‘Are we cluttering up the place?’ The words slipped out; Malone was still caught in the tension with Kagal.

‘Since you ask, yes.’

Just in time, Malone caught a retort; instead, he nodded at Kagal. The latter started up the engine, turned the car round and drove out through the gates. The sentry came to attention and saluted; Malone didn’t know whether it was from habit or whether it was satirical. Though he belonged to a service that had its own discipline, its own play-by-the-rules culture, he didn’t think he would ever have been happy in the army. For the next few weeks he was not even sure mat he was going to be happy in the Police Service, not in the wash from this latest case.

They had driven a mile or more back towards Strawberry Hills before Kagal said, ‘Am I still on the case, then?’

‘Do you want to be?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you are.’ It struck him that he would need Kagal to lead him through the shoals of prejudice, on both sides, that lay ahead.

Kagal nodded; then said, ‘Erskineville now?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ He looked at his watch. Time to be heading for lunch with the family; he had broken enough eggshells this morning. Normally he liked to keep at a case, not to let it cool; but: ‘Let Mrs Langtry have another twenty-four hours to get over it I’m not up to treading on someone’s grief this morning.’

Gazing straight ahead he felt, rather than saw, Kagal glance curiously at him.

3

Kate Arletti offered to drive him out to Watson’s Bay in time for lunch.

‘In your what? Goggomobile? G-O-G-G-O—’ He spelled it out as in a well-known Yellow Pages TV commercial.

‘The very same. Unless, boss, you’d rather not’

‘No, I’m game. My kids will love to see it.’

As he struggled to fit himself into the tiny bubble-car he thought of an old joke – ‘I’ve been in bigger women than this’ – but didn’t tell it to Kate. He was always decorous in dealing with women staff and not just because of the current wave of sexual harassment cases.

Driving out to the farthest of the eastern suburbs in the thick Sunday traffic, Malone felt as exposed as if he were on a Mardi Gras float. At traffic lights Mercedes and Volvos loomed up on either side of them like behemoths; the drivers and passengers looked down on them with superior amusement. At one traffic light a turbo Bentley pulled up beside them and Malone waited for the driver, a burly man with a fierce moustache, to lean down and pat them on the bubble.

‘Enjoying yourself?’ Kate Arletti was a small blonde Italian, neat in body but not in dress; she seemed to have great trouble keeping her shirt buttoned and her skirt seams straight. Today she was in slim dark blue slacks and a pink shirt that, as usual, had a button or two undone; her hair was hanging loose, not in its usual chignon, and she looked casual and pretty. Beside her, still carrying the weight of his discussion with John Kagal, Malone wondered if he looked as old as he felt. He found himself hoping that the people in other cars, staring at the two in the plastic bubble, took Kate for his daughter, not his date.

‘It’s my brother’s car, he bought it and rebuilt it. It’s a family joke. He’s on holiday down in Victoria, I’m looking after it for him. You’d be surprised the number of thumbs have been raised for a lift when they see me in it.’

‘They’re interested in you, Kate, not the car.’

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes. ‘Don’t flatter me, boss.’

He felt suddenly protective of her. ‘Have you taken John Kagal for a ride in this?’

She gave him the sidelong glance again. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘You go out with him occasionally, don’t you?’ Why had he not minded his own business?

‘Occasionally.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, abruptly retreating. ‘It’s none of my business.’

She didn’t answer, all at once appearing to find the thick traffic threatening. She concentrated on her driving, only relaxing for a moment to raise her middle finger as a carload of youths, surfboards on the roof of their battered Holden like warriors’ shields, went by with a yell of derision. Then she glanced at Malone again. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘What?’

‘The finger. I suppose in your day a girl would’ve poked out her tongue.’

In my day … ‘Probably. Though I never went out with aggressive girls.’

‘You think I’m aggressive? In this?’

The Goggomobile crawled up the Rose Bay hill like a translucent bug, the sun shining on its plastic bubble and Malone, inside, wishing he had taken off his jacket. The traffic whirled by them, but Kate seemed unperturbed, even when some of the cars, driven by jokey show-off drivers, came perilously close. She seems able to handle anything, Malone thought, but how will she handle it when she finds out John Kagal is double-gaited? Or does she already know?

When Kate dropped him at the parking lot outside the famous fish restaurant, Lisa and the children were just getting out of the Falcon. Then beyond them Malone saw Lisa’s father and mother getting out of their green Jaguar. Oh crumbs! He had forgotten that Elisabeth and Jan Pretorius were coming to lunch with them. He opened the Goggomobile’s bubble and stepped out.

‘Thanks, Kate. Hold it a moment while the kids admire their dad’s chariot.’

‘Oh, my God, it’s so cool!’ yelped Maureen.

‘It isn’t actually. It’s bloody hot’

‘How did you get him into it Kate?’ said Claire.

‘He just commandeered me and the car,’ said Kate and flashed a smile at Malone. ‘Bye, sir. Have a nice lunch.’

On the spur of the moment Malone said, and later he wouldn’t know why, ‘What are you doing for lunch? Have it with us.’

‘Yes, do,’ said Lisa behind him in that wife’s voice that said she hadn’t been consulted.

‘Come on, Kate.’ Tom was walking round and round the car, shaking his head in admiration. ‘Dad’ll buy you lunch and then you can drive me home in this.’

Kate got out of the tiny car, grinned at Lisa and the two girls. ‘He knows how to woo a girl, doesn’t he?’

Malone had gone across to greet Lisa’s parents. Elisabeth was close to seventy, but she had inherited good bonework and married money and the two had kept her looking attractive. She had never aspired to High Society, if there was such a thing in Sydney; but she swam on the edges of what passed for it and, as far as Malone could see, was happy in the shallows where she had made her life. Jan was in his seventies, goodlooking in a heavy way, with a thick thatch of iron-grey hair. He was a serious man who still dreamed, however sadly, of the Dutch colonial life into which he had been born and in which he had grown up. Emigrating to Australia after Indonesian independence, he had worked for Dunlop, then gone into his own business and made a fortune in rubber heels. He was conservative in every way and once, half-drunk on wine from his expensive cellar, had confided to Malone that he would be happy if the world ended before the new century began. Still, Malone conceded and was glad, he wore his disappointment and pessimism with dignity.

Malone kissed Elisabeth, smelling the expensive perfume she always wore. Earlier in the year, when there had been a minor boycott of French goods because of the bomb tests at Mururoa, she had stopped wearing the perfume; but it had been like giving up something for Lent, not really a protest at the French. ‘You look frizzled, Scobie. Is it mat tiny car?’

‘Yes,’ he said, because it was easier. Whenever he was on a job he always wore temporary scars from it, but this was the first time he had been frizzled.

‘A pretty girl,’ said Jan, who never let his conservatism blind his roving eye. ‘She’s a policewoman? I always thought they looked like Marie Dressier.’

‘Who?’

Jan smiled. One of the few things he and Con Malone had in common was a memory for old-time film stars. ‘Some time, over a bottle or two of wine, I’ll tell you about the loves of my youth. Claudette Colbert, Kay Francis – so elegant, the rumour was she was a nymphomaniac—’

‘Who was?’ said Tom, suddenly at his grandfather’s side. Jan Pretorius gently punched his grandson’s arm. ‘I thought they only taught you computer sciences at school these days?’

They went into the big restaurant, packed as usual on a Sunday. Closest to the harbour view, with the city skyline in the distance like a row of ancient monuments, Stonehenge on the Harbour, were a large group of Japanese and an equally large group of Koreans; they were the ones who ordered crayfish or crab, the two most expensive items on the menu. The rest of the diners were a mixture of natives, all of them able to afford the prices, even if at the lower end. Waiters and waitresses whirled amongst the tables like tail-borne dolphins. It was noisy, but with no walls to hold in the sound it was bearable, unlike some other restaurants Malone had visited where noise, apparently, was designed as part of the menu. I’m getting old and cranky, he told himself, a sentiment seconded by his children.

Lunch went well until Jan, on his third glass of semillon and holding it well, said, ‘What case are you on now, Scobie?’

Malone saw Lisa’s look of disapproval, but her father missed it. Malone said, trying to sound casual, ‘The murder of a boy last night in Oxford Street.’

‘Oxford Street? A homosexual?’ Jan Pretorius was another who rarely used the word gay.

‘No. He was with a gang bashing up a – a homosexual.’

‘Poofter-bashing?’ said Tom. ‘You’re gunna be mixed up in that?’

‘Where do they learn these expressions?’ Elisabeth asked Lisa.

‘That will be the – what? Third murder like that?’ Jan, retired and waiting for the end of the world, read the Herald and The Australian right through every morning, beginning with the obituaries. Malone, too, occasionally read the obituaries, but murder as the cause of death was virtually never mentioned in the notices.

‘Four, actually,’ said Malone. ‘Could we change the subject, Jan? I’m just about to cut up a dead fish.’

Jan changed direction, if not the subject. ‘Are you on the case, Miss Arletti?’

Kate looked at Malone. ‘I don’t know yet, Mr Pretorius—’

‘Possibly,’ said Malone, cutting into his barramundi.

‘Dad’s anti-gay,’ said Maureen.

‘So am I,’ said Tom.

‘How do you feel about them, Kate?’ asked Claire.

Kate shrugged. ‘I’m neither for them nor ag’in ’em. But I don’t like the idea of them taking the law into their own hands, which is what seems to be happening in these cases.’

Has she been reading the running sheets? Malone wondered. Or talking them over with John Kagal? He wanted to get off the subject. He looked imploringly along the table at Lisa, but for once she didn’t read his expression. Instead she seemed to want to enlarge the subject:

‘Is there much bashing of lesbians?’ she said.

‘A little, so I understand,’ said Kate. ‘But dykes, it seems, are not so conspicuous. Or maybe the bashers don’t recognize them so easily. Maybe the gangs just like to harass their own gender, their own form of sexual harassment, I guess you’d call it. I don’t know, really.’

Elisabeth delicately turned over her John Dory, lifted a forkful to her mourn. ‘However did we get on to this subject?’

‘The world isn’t full of nice subjects,’ said her husband. ‘When else do I get the opportunity to talk to Scobie about his work? I’m interested in other people’s jobs. I was always willing to talk about my work.’

‘Rubber heels?’ said Lisa.

‘Do you know any gay guys, Kate?’ said Maureen.

Malone glanced at Kate; but she seemed to be avoiding his gaze. ‘One or two.’

‘I know a couple,’ said Maureen. ‘Guys I met at a disco. Nice guys, treated you with respect, no fooling around.’

‘Urk,’ said Tom.

‘Grow up,’ said his sister.

Claire glanced at her father. ‘You’re quiet, Dad.’

‘I just don’t like working seven days a week, that’s why.’

Jan Pretorius took the hint: ‘Sorry, Scobie. I should have thought of that.’

‘Indeed,’ said Elisabeth round a mouthful of fish.

‘Will you like working amongst the gays, Kate?’ Maureen persisted.

‘We’ll handle it, I’m sure,’ said Kate and once again appeared to avoid Malone’s eye.

He had the sudden feeling that the days, maybe the weeks ahead, were going to bind themselves tightly round him, that he could find himself floating on a stream that would run down to the place Lisa had once pointed out to him on an ancient map, the Sea of Doubt. It wouldn’t be the first time, but always in the past the company had been straight, if criminal.

The Japanese had stood up and photographed the Koreans; the latter in turn stood up and photographed the Japanese. Then both groups turned their cameras on the natives, there were blinding flashes and the natives turned their smiles on the tourist dollar.