Stiff Read Free

people.’
    The CLS was half a mile down the road. I drew a map, wrote the appointment details underneath, and slid it across the desk.
    Ant folded his arms across his chest. ‘You’re just trying to give me the bounce.’
    True. But it wasn’t as though I hadn’t given it my best shot first. ‘Look mate,’ I said, marginally more firmly, ‘there’s nothing else I can do. The legal service will handle it from now on. Good luck. Let us know how you go. I’ll keep Charlene informed. But in the meantime my hands are tied.’
    He shook his head and settled his technicolour mass even more firmly into the moulded plastic cup of the seat. I opened Charlene’s correspondence file and buried my face in it, wondering how long it would take Trish to burst in with an urgent pretext. ‘Dear Madam,’ the top letter began. ‘You are a pinko ratbag bitch.’
    Five minutes later I was still pretending to read and Ant was continuing to glare. What did he want me to do? Whip out a bottle of correcting fluid and a blue biro and personally amend his faulty chest? ‘I’ll call the cops,’ I said, lamely.
    He snorted derisively. Quite right, too. For a start, we could hardly be seen having someone dragged away merely for demanding that the government do something about their problems. That, after all, was what we were there for.
    Also, I found it hard to sound convincing. If I called the coppers on every cantankerous customer we had, they’d have to start running a shuttle bus. And given the ongoing budgetary constraints faced by the various agencies under the jurisdiction of the Minister for Police and Emergency Services, a factional ally of Charlene, that was a poor prospect.
    Mainly, however, I couldn’t call the coppers on some lovestruck dumb-bum with Cupid engraved on his left tit because such an encounter was unlikely to be conducive to an outcome of social equity. Let the coppers catch who they could. I’d gone to school with blokes like Ant, and having to resort to the wallopers in my dealings with them would have been an affront to both my personal morality and my professional pride. Quarrels should be kept in the family. ‘Do us a favour,’ I suggested courteously. ‘Fuck off.’
    Ant smiled maliciously and leaned back like he had all the time in the world. Fortunately, at exactly that moment the phone rang. It wasn’t Trish but Greg Coates, a deputy director in the Melbourne office of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs.
    Nearly a quarter of the electors of the Province of Melbourne Upper had been born overseas and it wasn’t uncommon for constituents with an immigration problem to turn up on our doorstep. No problem. Immigration is a Commonwealth matter, so all we had to do was steer them over to the local federal member.
    But, as often as not, the problems were little more than language mix-ups, and it would have been criminal of me to allow an important federal politician to be burdened with such trifling matters. Especially if Charlene could get the credit for fixing them. Which wasn’t difficult to arrange since Greg Coates had been a mate since university, and was both a fellow spear-carrier in my faction and a member of the same party branch. So about once a week Greg gave me a call and we cut a bit of red tape together and swapped political gossip.
    I swivelled my seat around, pointedly turning my back on the tattooed wonder, and spent fifteen minutes firming up a batch of family reunion applications. Eventually Coates made his way, as if in passing, to the prospect of an early election. There was a lot of speculation about, and what with Charlene being in Cabinet, Coates was always trying to weasel the latest inside info out of me.
    I told him what I knew, which was exactly zip, and we finished off with the customary exchange of promises to get together for a drink. When I spun my seat around to hang up, Ant had helped himself to my Sun and was pretending to read it, something he wouldn’t