that stage, Mum hadn’t quite got around to mentioning his name in conversation. So Poppa and I didn’t know of his existence. I happened to be in the city with Maddy to see a movie. We were coming out of the cinema complex and there on the other side of the street, across the tram tracks, I see Mum and this guy in a dark suit carrying a briefcase covered in gold catches and combination locks and with this mobile phone in a leather holster clipped to his belt, although I didn’t notice that right away. He was explaining something to Mum, who was listening intently, her face turned toward him in a way that made my flesh crawl.
Well, you have to deal with all sorts of people in this world, don’t you? Lawyers and accountants and all sorts of creepy wheelers and dealers, especially when you’re a woman living by herself because she’s walked out on her family, so I didn’t instantly think, God, who’s Mum’s repulsive friend? I just thought, Poor thing, she’s stuck there having to listen to some wheeler-dealer and be nice to him.
I gave Maddy a nudge. “Hey, Mads, there’s my Mum on the other side of the road.”
Maddy never misses a chance, so she says, “Well, let’s go and cadge a hot chocolate.”
We’re standing on the curb and yelling at her, but it’s Bourke Street in the late afternoon, and even though the Swanston Mall blocks off most of the city through-traffic there’s a tram and a romantic carriage pulled by a lovely old horse with incredibly hairy feet and a few cars that look lost, and Mum doesn’t hear us. I still don’t think there’s anything weird about this. We skip across the road and get clanged at by the tram driver, and by the time we get to the other side Mum and the wheeler-dealer are a bit in front of us with other people getting in the way, and they’re walking slowly towards the lights.
“Who’s the guy?” Maddy asks. “He looks as if he’s loaded.”
“Dunno,” I say, a bit out of breath. “Never saw him before.”
We’re hurrying to catch them up and you can tell, from the way Mum keeps leaning her head close to him, that she’s having difficulty hearing what the wheeler-dealer’s telling her, probably some doubtful scam with money, but her trouble hearing him is pretty much what you’d expect in the middle of the city at that hour, the traffic being what it is and all the other people swarming along, etc. I think to myself, What a nerd, why can’t he wait until they’re up in his expensive air-conditioned office before he starts explaining about stocks and shares or her income tax deductions, or whatever it is? Why does he have to give his client a hard time by trying to make her listen to this sort of complicated detail in the middle of the rush-hour traffic? All this goes through my head in a flash as we’re hurrying to catch up with them, and then Maddy tugs at my arm and pulls me to a stop. I shake off her hand, but she hisses at me in a conspiratorial way.
“What?”
“Let’s watch them for a minute.”
Maddy’s my best friend, but she has some really dumb ideas sometimes. Why do we want to watch the back of Mum’s head in Bourke Street while she’s consulting with some ill-mannered nerd? I just say impatiently, “Come on, Maddy...,” and keep going.
We catch up with them at the corner when the lights go red. I arrive alongside and say, “G’day, Mum.” And my mother sort of jumps, and takes a quick step away from the wheeler-dealer, and lets go his arm which I hadn’t actually noticed she was holding, and is really surprised to see me.
“Jenny!” she squeaks. “Oh...er...hello, darling. What are you doing here?”
“Been to the movies” I tell her, sneaking a sidelong look at the nerd. “We thought we’d hit on you for a hot chocolate or something. That is, if you haven’t got to do something else.” It looks by now more as if they’re on the way to the nerd’s office, rather than having just left it. Anyway, his office would be in Collins Street, wouldn’t it, or Williams Street? One of the business zones? But my mother says hello to Maddy, and then says to me, “Oh, what a good idea. Edward and I were just going to have a drink ourselves. I’m sure we can put off the alcohol for a bit. Let’s go to The Coffee Place.”
Unbelievable. She’s been heading off to some bar with this nerd. First you go to see them in their office about something and then you have to go to the bar with them. I feel like I’m charging in here to the rescue, saving her from a long boring time with the boozy accountant. Maddy is making some sort of face at me and I don’t get it. I grab Mum’s left hand, which I never do, and clutch onto her. After a moment she pats my hand with her other hand, and smiles in a way that I can only describe as nervous. The light changes and we get swept across Swanston Street and into the Bourke Street bit of the Mall, and while we’re getting tugged along by the crowd Mum does these funny formal introductions. Apparently the wheeler-dealer’s name is Edward Thing, which is so ridiculous that I almost get a fit of giggles but actually I’m suddenly not all that sure it’s funny.
“They keep changing the geography,” Mum says brightly to Edward Thing, and he says something about the Mall being an improvement to civic tone and potentially a boost to small business in the CBD, whatever that is, and we end up in The Coffee Place sitting around a little table with black coffee and foamy chocolate and pieces of chocolate to nibble on, and it isn’t anything like what I’ve had in mind—I mean, with this wheeler-dealer, this Thing person being there as well.
“How’s your bike?” Mum asks me, so we start talking about this new U-shaped bike-lock I want that’s made of duralumin or titanium or something and costs the earth but they keep your bike safely locked to the lamp post, rather than being ridden away by some rotten thief with a pair of bolt cutters. Poppa bought me the Malvern Star mountain bike, but he reckons any old chain and cheap K-Mart padlock is good enough to protect it. He’s a bit simple, sometimes, old Poppa. He goes on about how when he was growing up everyone just leaned their bikes against shop windows and came back half a day later and they were still there, just sitting there. And they didn’t used to lock the front door, either, just went out for the day and left the place wide open. Of course they didn’t have computers or videos in those days to steal, or street junkies either. So he doesn’t really understand about bike locks. He thinks if I’ve got to have one, I can make do with an old padlock and an iron chain. I reckon if I lean on Mum a bit, she might come good for the classy U-shaped unit.
While Mum and I are raving on about bike locks, poor Maddy is left to have a conversation with E. Thing. I can sort of hear them in the background, over Mum’s insistence that she isn’t at all sure Carlton and Brunswick are good places to ride a bike in the first place, and how Sydney Road and even Lygon Street are death traps even if you’re in a car. She seems to be trying to convince me that I’ll be run down by some huge interstate 18-wheeler if I so much as put my front wheel out into the traffic, which is true enough in some places; you’d need to be a suicidal maniac to try to ride a bike down Sydney Road.
“I know, Mum,” I say, “but the cool thing about old Melbourne suburbs like Brunswick and Carlton is all the small side streets and back lanes.” We’ve got this excellent networks of back lanes where I live, even if half of them are still cobbled with huge blocks of blue granite and shake you about if you ride fast. “If you know your way around you can avoid all the traffic.”
But Mum is ignoring this and starting on about how I should avoid the lanes and only ride down proper streets because of the risk of muggers and perverts and junkies. In fact she’s getting so worked up I expect her to start telling me to only ride down the tram tracks in the middle of Sydney Road. So I switch off and try to hear what Maddy and Edward Thing are saying to each other. I wouldn’t have thought they’d find anything to say at all, but he’s murmuring away in his posh accent and she’s lapping it all up.
Edward
