White Dog

9

I drove back to Fitzroy in a mood not far from gloomy. Federation Square didn’t help. It had an innocent awfulness, like the results of allowing small children to play at cooking. In Brunswick Street, luck delivered to me a space not too far from what would soon be the fashionable street’s newest eatery. On opening day, anyway. New cafes, bars, bistros opened regularly — places to hang out and exchange hilarious one-liners with your friends while sitting on old sofas and 1950s chairs. And they closed. This had started in the 1980s. For a long time before that little changed in the long shabby street of clanging trams, dangerous pubs, ethnic clubs, marginal shops, murky pool cafes, the offices of minor trade unions.

Then young people began to appear. At first alone and shy as urban foxes, they grew in numbers, became bolder. Soon they were loitering in the laundromat, venturing into the pubs, daring to claim a table in the snooker dens. Places catering for their special needs — breakfast in mid-afternoon, for example — opened. Affiliation clusters developed, here dud musicians, here talentless artists, here the illiterate writers, here those who combined all these qualities in spades — the film people.

The old inhabitants, like many original owners, thought the newcomers were simpletons but harmless. So when the speculators arrived and offered to buy their once unsaleable properties, they hid their smiles, took the money and ran for a new brick-veneer in the west.

In the mid-1980s, on a spring Sunday morning, a Volvo stationwagon parked in Brunswick Street. A young couple got out. She was trim, blonded, tanned. He was already broadening in the midsection, sockless, short and hairy legs ending in boatshoes. From a restraining chair in the back seat, he unloaded a child, complaining, flailing. They took it into a cafe.

They were going to have brunch.

The old Brunswick Street was dead, Brunchwick Street born. There was no turning back.

I thought about these things sitting in my car watching a signwriter at work on the window of Morris’s two-down, two-up building. It had once been the premises of C. K. Dovey, printer of personal and business stationery, advertising material, invitations to occasions of all kinds, calling cards. People passing would see Ken standing at the cabinet, selecting each letter from its tray, placing it in the stick in his left hand, inserting spaces — en spaces, em spaces, line spaces. He put the metal down on his steel stone in a frame, a chase, cut decorative borders, mitred their corners, locked the assemblage up tight with quoins. Then he transferred it to the press bed and inked it with a roller.

On Ken Dovey’s window, the painter had outlined the word Enzio’s in a fat italic hand and was working on the E in gold paint.

I got out and crossed the street, made my way in the late-morning throng, young and youngish people mostly, modish, long-haired, hairless, the odd balding man with a small tuft sticking out of the back of his head like a vestige of tail, people in Melbourne black, people in Gold Coast white, people in saris, sarongs, the odd suit, the odd secondhand pink tracksuit, many naked midriffs, some not much wider than a grey-hound’s, some not much narrower than a 44-gallon drum but the colour of lard.

‘Going where I’m going?’ said a woman behind me.

‘In principle, I’m willing.’

She came up beside me, brushed against me, you could feel the solidness of her arm, the muscle, not an unpleasant feeling.

I didn’t have to look down to meet her eyes, slate eyes. She was letting her hair grow; it was almost army bootcamp height.

‘How’s business?’ I said.

Her name was Boz. I’d done the work when she gave up being a film grip to buy a two-truck inner-city removal business with a line in carting works of art. The seller was an apparently exhausted man ready for a long rest. When I tried to ensure that he didn’t start up a week later under another name and pinch the goodwill he claimed to be selling, he had to be wrestled to the ground and sat on.

‘Excellent,’ she said. She licked her lower lip, showing a viper of pink tongue. ‘I may have to get another truck.’

‘Wait a while,’ I said. ‘Till you see it’s all flow and no ebb.’

We walked. The oncomings seemed to part for us — well, for a six-feet-two woman, with a broken nose, in overalls.

‘Fussy bastard, this Enzio,’ she said. ‘We go to collect the gas stove he’s bought, it’s disgusting. It looks like it’s been in shearers’ quarters for fifty years, they fire up all eight burners and chuck on a dead sheep, turn it over at half-time in the footy. Just looking at the fucking thing makes you itch. Enzio makes me get the blankets and wrap it up like it’s a French antique.’ She shook her head. ‘Had to throw away the blankets. Good blankets.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘he tells me it is a French antique. Chucked out in some refurbishment of the Melbourne Club.’

We entered the stove’s new home. Enzio, scowling, his expression of choice, was on a ladder, painting a wall. He was wearing tracksuit pants and a singlet and he had sprinkled paint on his thinly covered scalp, his stubbled face, the exposed hairy parts of his body, on his garments.

‘Jack, Boz,’ he said. He pronounced her name Boss.

‘Good colour,’ I said. ‘Ancient nicotine. When’s opening day?’

It couldn’t be soon enough for me. I’d had no home in Brunswick Street for months, not since Neil Willis, absentee owner, wedding-reception gouger, sold Meaker’s, my hangout of too many years, to some jewellery-hung wise boys looking for a place to run drug money through. They’d sacked the staff and accused Enzio, the cook, of stealing from the kitchen. It had taken some doing but I’d managed to wring the workers’ entitlements out of Willis, including Enzio’s superannuation, fourteen unpaid years of it. Meaker’s was now called Peccadillo. My hope was that when they nailed the new owners, it would be for some offence to which that term did not apply.

‘So?’ said Enzio to Boz. ‘Where my furniture?’

I could see that being able to look down at her for once had empowered him.

Boz gripped the stepladder with a big hand, gave it a little shake, an exploration. Enzio cried out. The balance of power had been redressed.

‘Waiting down the street, mate,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have to make room out front. Two spaces.’

‘I got a plan for that,’ said Enzio. ‘Carmel!’

Carmel the waif waitress sacked from Meaker’s appeared in the kitchen door, paintbrush in hand. She was wearing a skullcap and looked about twelve. She was thirty and knew much of men and the world.

‘Move the cars,’ said Enzio. ‘The furniture’s coming.’

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m not being paid for my time here.’

‘Please,’ said Enzio.

‘That’s a first,’ Carmel said. ‘That’s a personal best for you. Move them where?’

‘The lane. Two minutes.’

‘Keys?’

‘On the counter.’

She went out.

‘Here’s your lease,’ I said. ‘You are now legally occupying this building. Rent’s due the last Friday of every month, paid straight into the bank. The account number’s written on the first page.’

Enzio came down the ladder. He took the envelope, held it in both hands. He went over and put it on the counter, patted it. ‘Never thought,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Never thought.’

‘Yes, well. When?’

He looked at me. I thought I saw a glint in the black eyes. He cleared his throat. ‘Monday,’ he said. ‘Monday we open. Six o’clock, we have a little drink, champagne. Okay?’

‘Okay. See you on Monday.’

He followed me to the door, took my sleeve. ‘Jack,’ he said, barely audible, ‘listen, I want to say to you, I want to…’

I said, ‘Enzio, don’t say anything. Monday, I’m having poached eggs with the lot. Soft. I’ve had it with hard poached eggs.’

‘I hold them in the boiling water,’ he said, showing me a cupped hand.

‘Ordinary cooking methods will be fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just a matter of the timing.’

At the office, my two rooms, tailor’s table, two chairs and a framed degree certificate, I made a pot of tea and sat behind the tailor’s table to read the three-page report on Mickey Franklin.

The work was by Simone Bendsten Associates, specialists in due diligence and the lice-combing of candidates for jobs with share options and performance bonuses and a company jet. Once the firm was just Simone, a Scandinavian-Australian refugee from the finance world working from home. Now it was three people in an office off Brunswick Street.

‘Jack,’ she’d written on a card, ‘the press clippings are attached. We haven’t been able to add much.’

I read, marking bits, sat in thought for a while, trying to see Michael Franklin — funny, clever, dangerous-feeling Mickey Franklin. The report said he’d worked for MassiBild, the Massiani family construction company, for six years before going out on his own in 1995. It listed more than twenty inner-city residential developments he had been involved in, including the Serena apartment block in South Melbourne where he was murdered. Franklin’s most recent project, the $250 million Seaton Square complex in Brunswick, had been stalled for more than eighteen months. The tangled history of the project took up a page and a half, a case study in how not to deal with the neighbours’ concerns. There was a list of creditors, including a company called Glendarual Holdings. ‘Glendarual is Sir Colin Longmore’s investment vehicle,’ noted Simone.

The report ended:

Franklin had a reputation in the property and investment sectors as someone who did not linger in projects, accepting lower than possible returns in order to move on. Descriptions of him include: ‘tightrope act’; ‘not a person we’d want to be involved with’; ‘high-pain, low-gain operator’; ‘much too hurried for us’; ‘one-man bobsled team, no thanks’.

Between them the Age and the Herald Sun had found four photographs. Two gave a good idea of what Mickey looked like. In one, he was in a dinner jacket, bow tie, in profile bending forward to kiss a much younger woman, a piece of hair falling. She was offering her mouth, no cheek kiss here, she wanted to kiss him. A birthday, perhaps a twenty-first, the woman had that shining look. The second was taken at the opening of a gallery in the Serena building. He was photographed with his wife, Corin Sleeman, a slim woman with short fair hair that looked as if she’d finger-combed it straight out of the shower.

I read the report again and then I set out for the city centre, walked up to Brunswick Street to catch a tram. Once tram rides from Fitzroy to the city were more or less free, it was only a few blocks, the connies knew you, looked the other way. That had come to an end too.