Chapter Two
Bureau says lightning storm will hit Saturday!
Fire break ring around the city essential warns PM
Looting in Newcastle, Army troops deployed
No more fire insurance puffs GIO, AAMI, and NRMA
Dubbo Plains Zoo on fire – animals set free to fend for themselves!
Tuesday slept terribly. Even her subconscious reminded her that she was twenty-five and unemployed with no money and no assets to speak of that hadn’t been manufactured before 1974.
When she woke she slipped her hand between her legs, anxious to achieve something but she couldn’t get anywhere. When she stopped the only thing that throbbed was her hand. She’d let down her employer and now her clitoris.
Mid-morning she hailed a horse and carriage down to Bondi Beach for her bath.
Campbell parade was pumping. There was music and noise and crowds and soldiers with machine guns. Money was Tuesday’s first stop. Her ATM balance popped out and Tuesday screamed. $4.20! She got three receipts just to make sure before an old lady behind her whacked her on the back of the knees.
There it was, clear as day. $4.20. How had it come to this?
It was that bloody John Goldman book she’d bought, Tuesday swore. $89.95! She’d like to see him get her out of this one. And that $65 massage from Hulio last week. (Although she couldn’t regret this - Hulio’s fingers were awfully probing and quite close to the inside of her thigh and he was bonked out booked out for months).
And what else? Her food bill. Last night’s dinner was three bags of beef jerky, a litre of milk, a heaped bowl of hassle back potatoes drenched in salt and oil and a tub of chocolate ice cream that was so rich her intestine wouldn’t be able to pooh the little chocolate chip pieces for months.
But mostly, it was the fact that Tuesday lived on her wages on a day to day basis. She had no savings and didn’t know anyone who did. Sydney was the ultimate city of indulgence. The power grid virtually ran on debt.
What the hell was she going to live on? There wasn’t even enough for a camel home.
Tuesday crossed the road to the beach in a cloud of despondency and tried not to think about it. At least the sea was free. She sat down on the yellow bank above the concrete promenade. The grass was fried brown and covered with sticky sand, chicken salt, and squashed chips. Tourists and locals alike slumped over the railings, draped like Dali objects. People walked in slow motion, pausing for breaths, weighed down by the oppressive heat.
Tuesday drifted down to the water knowing any relief would be null and void the moment her shoulders broke through the salty surface and up to the hot air. Bondi had added empty shampoo bottles and cakes of soap to its cigarette butt pollution and when Tuesday swam into the warm sea water she struggled to find a clean space. The woman beside her floated on her back and shaved her legs. She figured this was better than the man a few metres over who was blowing his nose into the water.
Tuesday stood limp and languid in the waist deep gunk and soaped her armpits.
Surfers lay flat on their boards in the motionless sea, most of them asleep. There had been no waves for months and there was no room to surf. All Tuesday could see from sand to horizon were bobbing heads. Instead the surfers had taken on the new role of Shark Whistlers.
Great White Sharks approached the beach in record numbers, breeding easily in the comfortably warm water and sensing a main meal beyond the four kilometre long shark net. The bright red buoys on the surface of the water thrashed violently every hour or so at which point the surfer boys blew hard on their whistles. This apparently annoyed the sharks no end. It was an extremely dangerous and heroic job – there were always more surfers that went out than came back at the end of the day and gaggles of groupies in topless bikinis hung behind the surfers giggling loudly.
People stared at Tuesday and she pretended not to notice. Was she the only black woman in Bondi? Of course, they could be wide-eyed because her left breast had popped out of her bikini or because she was jaw-dropingly ugly, or because she was blindingly beautiful, or maybe she looked like a man, or they had never seen such a big ass, or maybe she had terrible BO that Ginny was too polite to point out, or maybe she had toilet paper hanging out of her bikini bottom or maybe…the list was endless.
Tuesday shook her head. What did she care what other people thought of her? But she did.
If only she could have the carefree joy she used to have as child. But where had it gone? She watched a gull soar high over her head. Exuberant, untroubled, the world its oyster, truly the Seagull of Happiness. If only she could swap places.
Uh oh. An ash cloud blew swiftly across in a down draft and the bird squawked. Tuesday covered her eyes. The gull exploded from an airborne ember with a bang. Singed feathers floated down to the sea and a yellow leg fell into the water beside Tuesday with a plop. She shook her head. Avarian self-combustion was really on the increase.
An alarm shrieked out across the sand and thousands of salt-encrusted bathers stood stock still. There was no panic but a sort of bored confusion. Was it the shark alarm? Or the smust poison alarm? Or the fire alarm? And if so, was it the fire alarm for Bondi or North Bondi? Or was it the alarm for Bondi Junction being carried down the valley? There were murmurs and grunts and hands on hips and a lot of looking around at everybody else.
“Fire!” Called someone dispiritedly. “Tamarama!”
That’s right, Tuesday remembered, Tamarama’s alarm was one of the best - Midnight Oil’s Beds are Burning. She tapped her foot on the sand bank to the rhythm.
Around her there were moans and last minute water frolics and a slow wave of people began to move out of the dirty water scratching their crud-covered necks. Homes burnt to the ground in seconds these days. What was the point in rushing home to find nothing left?
Tuesday turned back to look at the beach. An enormous digital screen flashed the temperature (46 degrees), the number of people in the water (14,000), the smust and smash percentages (the smash at Moore Park and Randwick were at toxic levels) the melanoma ratio for the day (1:4), and finally in delayed capital letters ‘TAMARAMA FIRE ALARM’.
A tired inevitability was the signature of this endless drought and Tuesday pushed past the disinterested throngs queuing for spit-farting camels. A group of Tamarama locals identified by their footy t-shirts, headed for the pub instead.
It was that kind of summer.
If it was going to burn, baby. Let it burn.
At home Tuesday’s digital subscriptions had arrived on the iPad. This month’s issue of Black and White magazine featured Guy Pearce on the cover, naked, the camera focused simply on the side of his torso and one nipple. It was perfect. She didn’t even have to look at the by-line to know who had taken the photo.
Ken bloody Takihama.
Tuesday growled, flipped off the iPad, and picked up the phone. She was sweating and salty and perhaps even a little dirtier after being in the water but most of all, on the verge of despair. It had been a long and unhappy walk home.
The solution was simple. She would have to call Marcus and beg for work. She might even have to apologise. Tuesday swallowed. Of all the things she found hard to do, saying sorry seemed to be the most difficult.
Unless she actually looked for work. Hmmm. Look for work. Phone Marcus. Look for work. Phone Marcus. Buy a lotto ticket. Slit wrists. Drink Jack Daniel’s until she forgot her options.
Perhaps she could sell something to give her a little more time. But all she had was her camera and even when she’d leapt willingly into a long period of unemployment in her early twenties and had been forced to go and live with her father at the Self-Righteous Commune in Mollymook, even then she hadn’t sold her camera.
In fact, if she remembered correctly, she had made a quick buck out of photographing the Leader of the Self-Righteous at a strip club in the Cross.
Tuesday put down the phone and wandered into the vegetable garden, something her father used to do when he wanted to think. She sat on a milk crate between two dead tomato plants and thrust her feet into the cool dry earth. She slapped the Wentworth Courier onto her knees and pulled her breathing mask over her face. Inside the local rag were forty pages of adult sex advertisements, one hundred and fifty pages of unsellable real estate, and one page of positions vacant.
Tuesday opened it to the real estate section.
She liked imagining she was awfully rich and living in a glass-covered architect-designed steel-beamed warehouse with retro furniture. Or maybe a shady wisteria-covered cottage with the 1800’s pious look. Tuesday poured over the photos for quite some time, imagining she was a genuine buyer picking out a home for herself.
Property prices had dived and if someone managed to sell their house it was front page news but the Wentworth Courier was thicker than ever with glossy advertisements. Captions contained words like ‘fire-proof’, ‘popular concrete lawn’, ‘survived two neighbourhood fires – nothing left to burn’, and the perennial favourite – ‘fire sale’.
Tuesday was jerked out of her daydreams by the ringing of the telephone.
It’s Marcus! He’s begging her to come back because Ken’s asked another housewife to take off her top for art’s sake!
She ran to the phone pumping the air with her fist.
“Tuesday!”
“Oh.” It was Ginny in one of her upswings. Was it a full moon? Ginny had never called her from work before in a good mood.
“We’re going to have a party on Saturday night, Tuesday.”
“We are? You mean, like a dinner party for our parents?”
“No! Real people!”
Tuesday scratched her neck. “Like a party party?”
“Yes! With music and dancing and everything!”
“But we don’t know anyone.”
“Don’t be silly, Tuesday. All the people from work are coming!”
“They are? But I thought you said they were all back-stabbing losers.”
Ginny shrieked into the phone. “Ha, ha, ha, ha!” She hiccupped and snorted. “Don’t be sill-llly!”
“Uh huh.”
“And you can invite Marcus and Ken too and all the creative arty types you know!”
What creative arty people? “I don’t know any, Ginny.” Not anymore.
“And the best part is…” Ginny held her breath. Tuesday could imagine her almost clapping her hands with glee on the other end of the phone. “It’s fancy dress! Wildlife!”
“Gee. That sounds like it requires, you know, organisation.” They’d never held a party before. It had never crossed their minds.
“Don’t be silly!” Ginny squealed. “It will be fun! I’ll do all the cooking and all my exes will come and I’m going to email the invites today and guess what I’m going to dress up as? A marsupial!”
Tuesday let Ginny blabber on in the grips of her high-pitched full moon psychosis.
“…and Bill could come!”
Bill? Bill would look on her party as a quaint gathering of the poor and the needy. He was too proud to dress as wildlife for a start. Tuesday imagined him walking through the front door, all dressed in black, eyeing her with amused detachment and with Audrey perhaps trailing along behind him, careful not to touch any surfaces with her L’Oreal covered hands.
“It wouldn’t be his scene, Ginny.”
“Oh, tell him to come for a few minutes. He could bring some, you know…” Ginny mumbled into the phone.
“Chowder?”
“No! Powder, silly.”
Tuesday sighed. It sounded suspiciously like Ginny was trying to raise her cool factor amongst her work colleagues. Ginny, who’d pick chocolate fudge over a bong any day, who had once tried to prove Bill’s coke was dried bleach by tossing it in with her washing, who thought all drugs were mood suppressors secretly distributed by the government to keep the populace from suiciding like Monty Python leaves.
“Ginny.”
“Whoops. Gotta go. You working?”
Tuesday bit her lip. She tried to sound casual. “No.”
“Good. Tonight we’ll go look at fancy dress! Bye!”
Tuesday hung up and stood, sweaty and hot, in the dim living room. It would be best, Tuesday thought, to have a nap. To close her eyes. To make the world go away.
But she didn’t get the chance.
A particularly minimalist apartment was spread over two colour pages of the Wentworth Courier. The rooms looked like rabbit warrens. The balconies not big enough to fit a conversation.
Honestly, thought Tuesday, who would build such an ugly thing?
Georgeopoulouissis and Sons would.
And beneath their name, in tiny italics, ‘Photographer wanted’.
When Tuesday opened the door of Georgeopoulouissis and Sons a little bell rang above the door. She’d always been suspicious of doors like these. There were usually people behind them who looked her up and down and asked her if she was not perhaps mistaking their avantgarde clothes store with its polished floors and recessed lighting with perhaps say, the Centrelink office four suburbs away.
If Tuesday used her Visa card to pay for a $35.69 Super Influx Night Use Face Mask, the buck-toothed shop assistant (who rushed home early each day to masturbate and whose parents still controlled his finances) rang up for authority and scrutinised her signature. If she walked anywhere carrying a shopping bag, she’d find the friendly suburban security guard hovering over her and glaring at her from time to time.
Whereas Ginny had acquired a credit card while at Sydney University despite being $3,000 in debt to the local bar tab, a month behind in rent, and having no discernible income whatsoever, Tuesday was continually rejected at the bank by a small man with an upturned nose and an ill-fitting suit whose name was Trevor.
Tuesday had no debt at the same age at twenty. She was earning a respectable $250 a week as an apprentice photographer to the great Ken Takihama who kept telling her while he stroked her thigh that he knew all about racism, darlink, her mother had cornered the market on Feminist Yoga, and her father was making a killing teaching overweight executives how to get in touch with their Inner Native Man.
Tuesday could dress in Alannah Hill, or Country Road (although she’d rather be stuck in the eye with a needle), wear Bolinger shoes and carry a Vuitton briefcase and she’d still be stalked, questioned, given the cold eye, or asked to leave because, as someone had once said – she obviously didn’t belong there. And Ginny agreed. Tuesday didn’t belong there at all. Tuesday was in the Universe of Cool and those self-righteous pricks were in a turgid vomitus cesspool of malignant prejudice and self-masturbatory ignorance. And then Ginny had fallen off her bar stool.
Besides, Tuesday thought, stepping into the air-conditioned shopfront and ripping off her face mask, I have a long line of bony-kneed white boys attesting to my sensuality. Or did. Now she just had a long line of failed romances and a lover whose idea of fun was to putt golf balls into a coffee mug.
“Are you lost?”
Tuesday was lost. She’d never felt more lost in her life.
The room she was in was Antarctic white. There were five models of apartment complexes at various spots around the room and on the walls were huge posters of architectural site plans and photos of views over the harbour that were not actual views from the apartment houses but the view from Mr Georgeopoulouissis’ own living room.
In the corner behind a tall counter sat the forehead of a receptionist. She popped the rest of her face up like a lemming and then back down again. She called out again from behind the fake marble Formica which was no doubt a cut off from the Formica that graced the kitchens of the - Tuesday bent down to read the closest model apartment’s cardboard plaque - The Italiano.
“No.” Tuesday turned around. “I’ve come about the photography job. Mr Georgeopoulouissis is expecting me.” She held up her camera.
“Oh. Right.” The girl peeked over the counter. She looked wide-eyed at Tuesday. “I’ll just buzz him.”
Tuesday peered back into the model of The Italiano. How intricate. It had square cut holes for windows and tiny wooden shutters and little doors that opened into blank rooms. Except for this room. A stripe of blue cloth peeped through the shutters. But these shutters wouldn’t spring open like the others. She pushed a little harder. It seemed they were glued shut. And the door. Tuesday prodded the cardboard. This one seemed stuck. She pressed harder and the little door gave way with a pop.
“Wow.”
The door had crumpled into a living room. A plasticine figure in blue jeans swung from the ceiling via a noose with his head hanging down and his hands tied behind his back. His t-shirt read ‘I bought into The Italiano’.
Through the doorway into the bathroom a woman knelt over the toilet and vomited. Out of her mouth spewed hundred dollar bills, each one printed with a word that in all spelt ‘Money down the drain’.
Rats leapt over the floors. One of them was dressed in leather, standing upright and wielding a whip. Several more were lined in a row in ballet tutus doing the Can-Can.
Bird poop was splattered on the outside balcony and water stained the fake white brick, turning it green. Below in the courtyard, graffiti was spray painted in miniature. It was just like a real apartment complex!
On the painted cobblestones at the end of the courtyard a cat lolled on its back with its legs wide open and a Cheshire grin on its face. Between its furry thighs a rat performed fellatio.
Tuesday laughed. How bizarre. And dangerous surely. A little piece of Italiano anarchy. Perhaps a disgruntled employee?
There were heavy footsteps down the hallway behind her and Tuesday pulled the cardboard door shut in a panic. The door was creased and bent where she had pushed it in and through the new gap in the hinge the hung man’s foot swung in circles.
She smoothed herself down and turned around. The footsteps thundered towards her and a shadow loomed into the room.
Tuesday was wearing black boots, long charcoal shorts, and a lime green embroidered kimono shirt. She had rubbed Shine over her scalp and applied a dark burgundy lipstick to her lips. Diamond buds pierced her ears.
She was a cross between Tokyo, Alice Springs, Newtown, New York, and Bankstown (for the overall aura of ‘I’m New and Different – Persecute me’).
“Miss Cockadoo?”
“Cockatoo, actually.” Tuesday held out her hand.
She did her best impression to imagine Mr Georgeopoulouissis naked which is how she dealt with all middle aged men in suits. That way her eyes could coolly appraise him with amused detachment giving her an air of supreme confidence. However the thought of Mr Georgeopoulouissis naked seemed to also come with the vision of a meat cleaver and a very dead horse. Tuesday’s confidence shrivelled along with the nerve endings up her spine.
Mr Georgeopoulouissis was Italian. Or was it Greek? (They all looked the same to her).
His face had been sucked from the back of his head by a vacuum cleaner and pumped back into a body that put Elvis Presley’s obesity in the category of anorexia. He smelt of boiled cabbages and he was missing two front teeth and a neck. His breath rumbled into his chest and squeaked out of his nose like a recorder in the hands of a five year old. His hands could hold four Uzis each and still have room for the Glock. He possibly ran brothels in his spare time.
“Well, well, well.” He pumped her arm up and down with both hands. His face smiled and fell in on itself. “I’ve never met an Abor-rig-inee before.”
“And I’ve never met the Godfather.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.” Even his laugh sounded like a machine gun.
“I like funny people.” He shook his head sadly. “Not so many funny people in the building business.”
No, but Tuesday imagined he had quite a few dead ones buried under concrete.
The smile disappeared off his face and Mr Georgeopoulouissis stabbed at the air between them. “You qualified?” He had a voice like crunching gravel.
“Well, I studied under -”
“Hey!” Mr Georgeopoulouissis spread his arms. “It’s not an inquisition.” He jerked his head back to his receptionist. “Hey, Suzie.”
The lemming popped up. He beamed at her. “It’s not an inquisition.”
“No, Mr G, it’s not an inquisition.” The lemming disappeared.
Mr Georgeopoulouissis spread his arms back to Tuesday. He smiled and nodded. “It’s not an inquisition.” Tuesday suspected he used this phrase often. Perhaps just before a little friendly knee-capping.
“I, uh, have my portfolio.” She held out her over-sized folder.
Mr Georgeopoulouissis looked over his shoulder at the forehead and took Tuesday aside. He squinted at her, took hold of her arm, and stabbed a thumb the size of a cucumber in her face. “You like taking photos of buildings?”
It was difficult to lie to a six foot Cabbage Patch doll with the grip of a new born baby and a bullet hole scar in his forehead.
Tuesday tittered. “Like is a strong word. I’m good at it.”
“Ah, but you don’t enjoy? Very boring, no?” His grip was to the bone.
“Um.”
“Yes!” He nodded vigorously. “Suzie!” He shouted into Tuesday’s face. “Go and get us some tea.” Halitosis rolled over Tuesday and she fought off the urge to gag.
“Yes, Mr G.” Suzie’s heels clip-clopped into the distance.
Mr Georgeopoulouissis dropped Tuesday’s arm and rubbed his three chins. “You see, I have a leetle problem with an employee selling secrets to da competition. I need someone inconspicuous like you. You will follow her and take photographs of everybody she meets, okay?”
Tuesday brightened. This sounded like a lot more fun. This was cloak and dagger stuff. She was going to be an undercover spy! Wait a minute. Unless the employee lived in Arnhem Land, Tuesday was going to stick out.
“But as you’ve pointed out – I’m black. Not Indira Naidoo caramel, or Oprah Winfrey chocolate, or even Eddie Murphy ebony. Black.”
She was more like the colour of burnt wood, or of onyx, or as her mother used to say when she was surrounded by white toddlers at preschool, the colour of the night sky. Not all little girls could be that special.
“That’s perfect! She lives in Vaucluse - you’ll be invisible! If you’re not white they won’t even look at you! In Double Bay it takes me an hour to get any restaurant service – they just can’t find me.”
Tuesday doubted that very much. Mr Georgeopoulouissis’ girth was three dinner tables wide and his attention was worth the waiter’s face being dipped into a pan of boiling duck fat.
Mr Georgeopoulouissis shrugged. “I have whole gangs of wogs breaking and entering during the day and no one notices a thing.” He coughed. “But perhaps we should keep that leetle bit of information just between you and me.”
Tuesday paled. This was how it started. The Mafia told you something incriminating about themselves and then you were obliged to stay with them forever.
“I really don’t know.” No job was worth her peace of mind. Or her life. Or, at the very least, her morals.
“I pay you thirty dollars an hour cash in hand,” said Mr Georgeopoulouissis, reaching into his crumpled shirt pocket, “and here’s a five hundred dollar advance.”
“When do I start?”
It turned out Anthea Yialousis was away for a few days in Brisbane and Mr G, as he’d asked Tuesday to call him, suggested she check out Anthea’s house and nearby transport opportunities in the meantime.
Tuesday hailed a horse and carriage. The carriages seated nine and seven people were inside already. Just like the bus, the carriage had a set route and passengers got on and off at stops. And just like the 380 there was always a crazy person on board. Somewhere in the Eastern Suburbs there was a giant secret hospital for the mentally ill, Tuesday was sure of it. In fact, perhaps that’s what Vaucluse was – community housing.
On the rise up Old South Head Road Tuesday tested Mr G’s theory. She was squashed between an Afrikaner, an ordinary looking housewife, and two women who conversed in French. Tuesday cleared her throat and coughed. She coughed like a cat throwing up a fur ball. No one blinked. The French women talked louder over the top of her.
Interesting. Tuesday hummed and stuck in a couple of laa laa laa’s. Nothing. All heads were firmly focused out the windows. Mind you, so would hers in the same situation. She shifted in her seat. And bounced up and down. And picked up the Afrikaner’s suit jacket and sniffed it. Not even the blink of an eye. No one even moved away from her.
What a great deal of effort they took to avoid acknowledging her existence. They were determined to ignore her. Tuesday smiled. This was going to be a piece of cake.
Anthea Yialousis was a very rich woman. Tuesday breathed through her mask and surveyed the house from the dead grass verge. A pink mansion rose above her like a castle. At the end of the street there were two burnt out stately homes but Anthea’s rose like a phoenix from the ashes.
Two snarling Dobermans patrolled the tiled terraces. A security sign graced the garage door. Dead branches of Wisteria wound over the house. The front was all glass, tinted, unseeable in, 360 degree views out. Funny, it didn’t look like the house of an employee of Georgeopoulouissis and Sons. It looked more like the house of the woman who owned the company.
Tuesday looked around. There wasn’t much undercover cover should she need it. And just how was she supposed to engage in surveillance without a car? Without a tree? She couldn’t pose as a council worker cutting the grass. There was no grass. She couldn’t pretend to chalk cars because all cars were involuntarily abandoned. She’d be beheaded.
She was pondering this problem when a girl sidled out of the house next door. She must have been about ten. She sat on a low wall and kicked her legs. She stared at Tuesday.
Tuesday had forgotten that you couldn’t hide from kids. They gawked at everybody, whatever their colour. They asked people with one leg what they’d done with the other one. They told grumpy old men they were very ugly. They shrieked to their parents in a voice that could bring rain that the teenage boy behind them HAD ACNE!
To them, nothing was sacred and all adults were the enemy. Particularly her own mother, Tuesday guessed, who had dressed the girl in a stunningly ugly pastel dress that made Nikki Webster’s Olympic effort look trendy by comparison.
“What are you doing?”
There were only two ways to approach this. One, Tuesday could tell her the truth. Two, she could kill her. Tuesday was pretty sure that infanticide would probably do the trick in drawing attention. On the other hand, the frilly dress with bows the girl was wearing deserved to be buried in a shallow grave.
“Depends if you can keep a secret.”
“I’m an only child, I don’t have any friends, my parents work nineteen hours a day and my Filipino nanny doesn’t understand English.”
Christ, and Tuesday thought her life was bad. “You mean you don’t have anyone you can confide in?”
The girl looked up at the sky thinking. “I have a grandmother and a cat but they’re both deaf. Does that count?”
Not in Tuesday’s book. “How’d you like to help me on a spy mission?”
“Really?”
“Really. But you can’t tell anyone.”
The girl crossed her chest and hoped to die. “Never ever.”
“Never ever ever ever?”
“Never ever ever ever ever.”
“Poke your finger in your eye and stick out your tongue.”
The girl did as she was told and Tuesday walked over and examined her. “Oh, you’ve got a blue tongue, that’s a very good sign.”
“It is?”
”Sure. That’s a sign we Aborigines say is a sign of loyalty. Of courage. Of bravery. I think you’ve got what it takes.”
“I do?” The girl touched her tongue.
“Sure.” Tuesday took the girl’s word. She was a sweet kid. Tuesday offered her five dollars a day to keep her mouth shut.
The girl’s name was Esther and Esther agreed to play felt ball with Tuesday on the dead verge outside their home whenever Tuesday required her. Tuesday tossed in a few made up code words to fire up Esther’s enthusiasm for playing hand-eye coordination in forty-six degree heat.
Esther took