As I closed the last few paces between us, the man’s features became more distinct. I realised, with dismay, that I knew him. Nearly twenty years had passed, but it was impossible not to recognise Spider Webb. Mr and Mrs Webb may have called their little boy Noel, but at school he was always the Spider.
Despite his nickname, there was nothing arachnoid about Spider. No spindly limbs or jutting canines. On the contrary. He had an athletic build, high cheekbones and fleshy, petulant lips. He would almost have been handsome if not for his ears. You only had to look at Noel Webb to know why they called them jug ears. Chrome-plated, his head wouldn’t have looked out of place in a trophy cabinet. Wing-nut would have been a better nickname. But Spider, despite Noel’s dislike for it, was the one that stuck. It suited him. There was something predatory about Spider, cold-blooded, self-serving. He’d been like that at sixteen, and he was still like that. You could read it in his pose. We’d been friends once, or so I thought. Then things had happened, violent things that gave me no reason whatsoever to want to renew our boyhood acquaintance. Especially since Spider had clearly fulfilled the criminal promise of his youth. I hoped to Jesus he didn’t recognise me.
As I approached, he massaged a piece of chewing gum loose from its pack, tossed it into his mouth and rolled his head like a prize-fighter readying himself for a bout. I resigned myself to our reunion, waiting for him to speak.
But Spider said nothing, gave no explicit sign of recognition. It had been a long time. With luck, he might not remember me. If he didn’t speak, I decided, neither would I.
Back to the wall, I sidled past, head up, eyes straight ahead. We were almost exactly the same height and so close that my own face stared back at me from the mercury pools of Spider’s sunglasses. Stereoscopic reflections, I thought, of a man not quite succeeding in mastering his loathing.
Spider straightened a little to allow me passage but still he said nothing. His face had slackened into a sphinx-like inscrutability. Only the muscles of his jaw moved, flexing almost imperceptibly around his gum, a gesture of contemptuous amusement at the discomfort of a stranger. Still an arsehole after all these years.
I pressed on. As I crossed the final few paces to the lift, I heard a dismissive, barely audible grunt and felt hidden eyes boring into my back. Then the lift doors yawned before me and out stepped Alan, a polystyrene cup in his hand, his gaze darting towards the Fairlane. Nodding, I stepped into the lift. As the doors whoomphed closed behind me, I felt a shudder of what could have been either relief or foreboding.
If ever there was a bird of ill omen, it was Spider Webb. Loosen up, I told myself, pushing the button for the top floor. It’s only a job. It’s not the measure of your worth as a human being. There’s always the slow descent into alcoholism and penury to look forward to.
The door slid open to a re-enactment of the evacuation of Saigon. Boxes of documents littered the corridors. Base-grade clerks from the Translation and Information sections bustled about, pushing trolleys in and out of rooms. Trish stood feeding files into the shredder. I recognised one of mine, Current Issues in the Macedonian Community. It was a slim document and held no state secrets, but that wasn’t the point.
Agnelli had been at Ethnic Affairs long enough to generate more than enough stuff-ups to provide ammunition to his political enemies. Especially those from his own party. So before his replacement arrived everything short of the potted plants would be fed into the shredder. By the end of the day, some of my most skilfully wrought briefing papers would be reduced to a pile of fly-specked tagliatelle in the ministerial dumpster. I prayed that I wouldn’t be in there with them.
Back when she ran the electorate office, Trish had been a rough diamond, well-upholstered and ready for anything. She was efficient, smart and knew her stuff. Eventually, Agnelli was persuaded to overlook her rougher edges and reward her loyalty with a promotion. A monster was born. Within a month of being made his private secretary, she’d joined Gloria Marshall and taken a course in fire breathing. Success, in accordance with the fashion of the day, had gone straight to her shoulders. She glanced up from the papery gnashing of her task and tossed a nod in the general direction of Agnelli’s shut door. ‘Take a number and wait,’ she commanded.
I took it into my office and had a cigarette with it. Ours was a smoke-free environment, but what the fuck-as of now I didn’t work here any more. Out the window, across the wilting greenery of the gardens, glass-walled towers quivered in the heat haze, molten swords plunged into the heart of the city. In the gaps between, ant-sized men plied construction cranes. Hardier men than the likes of me.
The building boom sustained by Labor’s rule was at its peak, a relentless reordering of the skyline that was the most tangible evidence of the government’s success. Everywhere the old was being jackhammered away and replaced with the spanking new. So headlong was the charge of money into real estate that slow-footed city shoppers risked being knocked down in the rush to build yet another office tower or luxury hotel. Anything more than twenty years old was obsolete. Yesterday’s skyscrapers were today’s holes in the ground. Tomorrow’s landmarks had lakes in their foyers and computer-monitored pollen filters and the city council was putting little lights in the trees so we’d think it was Christmas all year round.
Not that I, as I pondered my options, had anything to celebrate. My attachment to Agnelli, like his loyalty to me, was contingent on the political realities. Bypassed for promotion this time, Ange would need plenty of runs on the board if he hoped to impress the Premier next time around. My employability depended on how useful he thought I could be in achieving that outcome. This we both understood.
Anybody working in politics who claims to be without personal ambition is a liar. That I hadn’t yet quite formulated the nature of my own particular aspirations was beside the point. The fact that I’d placed my political loyalties at Agnelli’s disposal for the previous four years didn’t mean I had no interests of my own. If Agnelli thought I’d go quietly, he could think again. At the very least he should find me a new position appropriate to my skills. Try to throw me out with the dirty bath water, and he’d soon find that I had plenty of influential friends in the party who’d take a dim view of that sort of behaviour. Plenty. I tried to think of several.
While I was waiting for a name to come to mind, I finished my cigarette. Our smoke-free environment, naturally enough, provided no ashtrays so I took the butt into the executive washroom and stuffed it down the basin plughole. The executive washroom was what we jokingly called the small private bathroom off the minister’s inner office. Supposedly for Angelo’s exclusive use, it was also accessible from my office. Since it had an exhaust fan, I’d sometimes slip in for a quick concentration-enhancing puff when no-one was looking.
The door leading into Angelo’s office was open a crack and I could hear his voice. He sounded keyed up. ‘A new broom,’ he was saying. ‘Energetically wielded.’
I was history.
‘Money is the key.’ Just the sort of thing you’d expect to hear Agnelli barking down the phone. ‘All the policies in the world won’t save us if we don’t go into the election with a decent campaign fund.’
Party matters were the subject, so he wasn’t speaking to a bureaucrat from one of his new ministries. Whoever it was, my employer was warming to his topic. ‘It’s time to start getting serious.’
‘The finance committee’s doing everything it can, Angelo.’