Free The Big Ask by Shane Maloney Page A

its bell tolling noonday prayers across the heathen roofs of weatherboard bungalows and brickveneer dream homes. Out past discount clothing stores and fried chicken franchises and the temples of gimcrack Protestantism with their couch-grass lawns and peeling facades. Out past second-hand office furniture showrooms and the wire-meshed windows of licensed grocers. Out into the heartland of the party of the proletariat, to the electorate of Melbourne Upper.
    Lulled by the swaying of the tram, I thought about Lyndal. About how I should’ve made my move when I had the chance. How we met during the ’88 election campaign and more than once exchanged the kind of signals that give rise to a man’s hopes. How I’d held back, justifying my timidity with spurious reservations about getting involved with a workmate. How I’d let her be snatched away by Nick Simons, a organiser with the Amusement, Entertainment and Theatrical Employees Federation. A ticket seller to the ticket sellers. How Nick was a nice enough bloke, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t entitled to try to rectify my mistake. Lyndal didn’t have children and, by definition, a childless woman is always fair game. She has not yet mated for life.
    When the tram reached the terminus depot, I got out and walked. At the Doug Nichols reserve, a little-league football game was in progress, half-pint ruckmen contesting the slippery pigskin across a trampled patch of mud, parents howling encouragement from the sidelines. The kids were younger than Red, eight or nine, but I could imagine my son, socks around his ankles, dashing for the goal posts, a look of fixed determination on his face, trying to hide his disappointment when the kick went wide. I turned away and hurried on.
    A hundred metres up the road I reached the Northern Region Performing Arts Centre, a post-modern assemblage of corrugated steel and tinted cement that rose from a car park between a railway line and an arterial road. ‘Official Opening Today’, proclaimed a banner suspended above the entrance, ‘Join the Fun’.
    The fun was already well advanced. Lambs were being spit-roasted and sausages sizzled in a row of open-faced rent-a-tent pavilions. Boys in bum-fluff moustaches, embroidered waistcoats and Nike runners tuned fretted instruments beside the stage door. Girls with coin-fringed headscarves rehearsed dance steps between parked minibuses. Community groups had set up stands in the foyer. The Nursing Mothers’ Association and the Movement against Uranium Mining. The Local History Society and the Committee for a Free East Timor. Beside the face-painting stall, an environmental Leninist tried to sell me a copy of Green Left Weekly .
    Slipping into the auditorium, I found a vantage point against the side wall. Formalities were in full progress, the mayor presiding, a former butcher with a face like a slice of corned beef. On the stage behind him sat a row of dignitaries, including the federal and state members of parliament. Agnelli’s wife, Stephanie, was seated beside him, the very figure of wifely rectitude in a russet-toned, knee-length suit and sensible shoes.
    The crowd was doing its best to keep the chatter down to a roar. ‘We are here to salivate the pre-forming arts,’ the mayor proclaimed, testing the new acoustics to the limit.
    I scanned the audience. Nick Simons was nowhere in sight. I found Lyndal in the second row. She was wearing a cable-knit sweater and stretch slacks, leaning forward in her seat, compact and muscular, her chin pointed forward like the figurehead of a sailing ship. Her face was a mask of dutiful attention but the edges of her lips were curling slightly in wry amusement at His Worship’s malapropisms.
    A country girl, six years younger than me, Lyndal had been drawn to the Labor side of politics by a temperamental disposition towards social justice and an intellectual disdain for the self-serving nostrums of the