id="u5ddefee9-644d-5621-8c98-3f8b3ac3767e">
JON CLEARY
Dilemma
For Natascia and Vanessa
Contents
March 1994
1
Malone pulled up his car in the Erskineville street where he had been born, got out and waited for the memories to flood back. He had been doing this for the past six months, but now the memories were only a trickle; drought, the bane of farmers and sentimentalists, had set in. One side of the street had lost its row of workmen’s cottages; they had been replaced by a row of town houses or, as the estate agents now called them, villas. On the side where Malone stood, his side, the terrace houses had been gentrified. All had been painted: pale cream but with different-coloured doors: red, yellow, blue, green; all with ornate knockers, like suddenly proclaimed coats of arms. Some of the narrow verandahs that opened right on to the pavement had planter boxes behind their painted iron railings. All of them had security grilles on the windows; some had security doors. Only on the very end of the terrace was the rebel, the memory anchor.
Painted cream like the others, yes; but the door was brown, the plain knocker was black, there was no security grille. A youth had broken into the house a couple of years ago and Con Malone had met him with one of Malone’s old cricket bats and beaten him senseless. The kid had wanted to charge Con with assault and the two young cops who had been called by Brigid Malone had had to hold Con back from assaulting him further.
Con Malone was sitting on a kitchen chair on the verandah, soaking up the hour’s sun that the front of the house managed. He was reading the morning’s newspaper, a ritual that took him from the front pages, through the obituaries to the sports pages, read in sequence like a book. Malone paused a few steps from the front gate and looked at his father. The old man, like the memories, was fading. The tree-trunk body was thinner and smaller, there was now a hunch to the once-straight back. He suddenly felt an immense affection for his father.
Con looked up as Malone stepped in the front gate. ‘G’day.’
‘G’day. You’re still reading the Herald.’
‘Nothing but bloody opinionated columnists.’
‘The Daily Worker was all opinion.’
‘It was an honest paper, knew what was going on.’ He folded the paper carefully. If he had believed in butlers and could have afforded one, he would have had the butler iron the paper before bringing it to him. He had read that British aristocrats did that, the only thing he admired them for. ‘Bloody country’s going to the dogs.’
The bloody world, which didn’t really interest Con, was going to the dogs. The IRA had just attacked Heathrow airport in London; Bosnia was trying to go back to pre-1914; in the US the Whitewater scandal was overflowing its banks. At home things were slightly better: the economy was breaking into a gallop, condoms were being urged in schools to protect sexually rabid teenagers against HIV. The Chippendales were on tour, always promising but never actually doing the full monty, whatever that was. And down in Canberra, the Prime Minister, as all PMs before him and to come after him, was attacking those who criticized him and his politics. The world spun in monotonous circles.
‘Look at ’em!’ said Con in disgust. Two women had passed by on the other side of the road: Arab women in chadors, though their faces were uncovered. ‘Wogs, slant-eyes … When you were a kid growing up, this street was ours.’
‘Grow up, Dad. That was the nineteenth century. Mum inside?’
‘She’s down at the church. Putting the holy water in the fridge, case it goes off. You know what she’s like. Bloody churches, they’ve gone to the dogs, too. You been away?’
‘Up to Noosa, just Lisa and me.’ He had told his mother and father about the planned trip; but their memories, like themselves, were fading. ‘A second honeymoon, I think they call it.’
‘You’ve been lucky. Both of us, you and me. Mum’n I’ve been happy. Just like you and Lisa. That ain’t common, not these days. I read in this—’ holding up the paper ‘– two blokes married. Blokes! You think they’ll be happy like we been?’
Malone shrugged. ‘They could be.’
‘Bloody poofters. Wogs, slant-eyes – I’m in a foreign country. You back at work?’ Con Malone, then working on the wharves, hadn’t been able to hold his head up when his only child had become a cop. The union had doubled his dues