I told him how I loved him.
He said, We could get into a lot of trouble.
I said I knew. I was totally high on danger, on justice, righteousness and rage. It was not my fault my father failed. It was not my fault that this was left to us to do.
The following night I brought Frederic to Darlington Grove and we sat around the kitchen table. It was scorching hot and the sprinkler was sighing in the garden. Miss Aisen wore a tennis dress and her father shorts and a navy singlet. Miss Aisen sat on her hands and would not look at me, and I thought, we have made a big mistake here. She will not break the law. Plus Mervyn had been having trouble looking at Frederic. I hadn’t thought of that: Freddo was back on the eye shadow and nail polish. Mervyn directed everything to me.
Later I discovered Miss Aisen was waiting for me to say I was pregnant. She was working out her position, although she never told me what that was. Was she Catholic? Maybe. All I could feel was the very heavy vibe and I was incapable of asking for what we really wanted. I babbled. I regurgitated everything they had taught me: MetWat’s brutal mistreatment of the creek, its totally misconceived attempts at flood control, its deceit over Agrikem’s effluent. I did not reveal that we finally had the proof.
Miss Aisen asked me, Is this what you came to talk about? She put a hand on her father’s arm, and I thought, he is too creeped by Freddo. He can’t even look at him.
It’s to do with that, Frederic said. In that area.
To do with MetWat? Miss Aisen asked while Mervyn studied a salt shaker.
Yes.
Oh, she said, and totally beamed at Frederic.
Mr. Aisen, Frederic said, Gaby tells me you took the dragline in hand.
Sabotaging the MetWat dragline had been a serious crime. No-one had ever told me Mervyn had committed it. Now I must have seemed a gossip and a dangerous girl.
She did, did she? said Mervyn. After which he went back to his salt shaker.
I said I was very sorry if I had been wrong.
We all sat in awful silence until Mervyn finally allowed his smile to show. You tricky old codger, I thought. So I told him about Frederic’s hack. Frederic offered to go online to show them how, but Miss Aisen did not want to break the law.
Her father said she was a nervous little mouse. He winked at Frederic.
So she let Frederic do it, in the kitchen. Then she was so excited and angry she donated a floppy so we could have a screenshot of our evidence.
You’ll need a plumber, Mervyn said.
I’ve got one already, Frederic said.
Today we could have dealt with Agrikem differently. We could have hacked their system and instructed the plant to shake itself apart. But twenty years ago remote access to physical assets was a different matter—a business like Agrikem would not have had the level of instrumentation of the modern sort. Everything was operated in person. You opened a valve by hand. You set the speed of the centrifuge manually. Twenty years ago we needed four metres of 80mm PVC pipe, four metres of 80mm flexible agricultural drainpipe, a two-into-one 45-degree PVC junction, a joiner, a tub of Bostik PVC Weld, a plastic bucket, a roll of gaffer tape, a metre of 3/8 steel rod from Surdex Steel in Edward Street Brunswick, two 3/8 nuts and washers, a scrap of 8-ply, a hacksaw, a jig saw, tap and die set, an adjustable spanner, a drill, a 9mm drill bit, a jemmy, eight Undertoad suits and Cosmo natch.
36
SO, FREDDO GAVE Cosmo the chance to build a PVC drain system with a plunger that would induce a suction action to expose Agrikem’s toxic dioxin effluent to the public eye. Cosmo became scarily excited. He began to make dumb jokes so often, he was a liability. I took him up to the Ferguson Plarre and bought him a neenish tart and said he must not even say our names. He could not even tell Doug what he was doing.
What should he say to Doug?
Say it’s steampunk, I said and Cosmo looked so winded that I bought him a malted milk and then, quite clearly, the great wilful dork went back to Doug the Organic Mechanic and spilled the beans.
Doug was like one of those whiskery barkless dogs with a traumatic stare. Whatever dog that was, Gaby did not know, only that his most prosaic shop instruction was whispered. Draw a line all round and cut it off square. Doug had lived in Japan. He taught woodwork with Japanese handsaws. He was also a furtive sci-fi fan and manga otaku and Cosmo’s sole supporter amongst the staff.
Now, suddenly, Doug began publicly distancing himself from Cosmo. He used his loud voice so everyone would hear he would no longer let Cosmo Palermo drag “all your crap” into the classroom. Go find somewhere else, not here. We’re not a plumbing business, mate.
But it was Doug who found us a safe place where we could assemble the pipes: an abandoned building site just near the school on David Street. Under the awning was a rough workbench. Below the bench were a few empty beer bottles and a lot of fag ends sort of composting themselves.
Doug was fulltime engaged with his own innocence. He said Cosmo better take more time with his English literature he would end up an unemployable moron.
Go to my office. I’m sick of you, Palermo.
Then they spent about an hour compiling the list of stuff that Cosmo would need to make his pump.
We were not worth a plumber’s bootlace, but somehow we managed to assemble the basic structure of his pump with not much more than a hacksaw and a tub of Bostik PVC Weld. We had it done in one weekend and it stayed there unprotected for five more days until Mervyn brought his mate the Catholic Worker. The Catholic Worker had some very complimentary things to say about how Cosmo had attached the brass spigot to the PVC. Being an activist himself, he understood we must have a steel cage to protect us from the cops.
The cops never did arrive but that cage, chained to that sewer manhole, is what most people remember of the action: a steel-mesh cube imprisoning two operators in Hazchem suits. One of these operators was Mervyn and the other was his Catholic Worker mate.
It was later said I was the innocent tool of left-wing unions, but in fact the opposite was true: it was my will that drove our war machine. I was the one who “borrowed” the Hazchem suits. I was the one who would reveal her face to the cameras when I removed my hood. I wanted to be responsible. Look at this young girl. If she can do it, why can’t we?
There were many people who I represented. I would have given credit if they wanted it, not just to Mervyn, but about fifty people we never even spoke to, not least the now famous band who supplied a van and driver to take the unassembled pieces to McBryde Street. This is how it would be all my life. I would be the one who everyone could love or hate. But you cannot be a solo artist and release asylum seekers from their corporate jails. I was, always, in every single action of my life, spoon-fed by others. It is hard for my mother to accept this, but it is my job to take the heat and do the time.
It was frosty again on the day of the action. Even before I got off my bike, the two men inside the cage were waiting for the PVC weld to set. No-one in this part of Fawkner was awake. There was no traffic. Frederic and I dressed in our Hazchem suits in the middle of McBryde Street.
The so-called steampunk pump was already rising from the earth. Now Mervyn withdrew the steel rod with its plywood circle and there was a thrilling sound of liquid passing up the PVC tube, a lovely slowly elevating slurp. Driven by the forces of cohesion and adhesion, the toxins travelled vertically, then turned horizontal, then emerged from the brass spigot, like bathwater heading down towards the sewer. Suddenly the air was filled with the vaporous horseshit poison. We let it run, but it was in our public power to turn it off, poor Daddy, now I am sorry for the hurt I had to cause.