Free Sucked In by Shane Maloney Page A

to a call-out to assist victims of flooding in other parts of the district.
    I’d forgotten about the weather, I realised. Even by Merv’s standards, it was particularly perverse to drag a pair of reluctant fishing companions out onto a lake in what must have been miserable winter conditions. No wonder Charlie had copped a dose of hypothermia. The water must have been freezing.
    The next report was lifted from the Herald ’s stable-mate, the Sun . It was dated two days later, the Monday morning edition. It described a more extensive search, including the use of divers and a line search of the shore, but the headline summed it up. Hunt fails to find unionist’s body.
    A similar story appeared in the next day’s Age . It was slightly better written but contained no fresh information.
    Out on the street, the lunch crowd was thinning, scurrying back to the grind, shoulders hunched against the breeze. A young woman of the Oriental persuasion materialised at my elbow, washcloth in hand. A Chinese student, probably; about as Japanese as a California roll.
    â€˜Jew finish?’ she said, whisking away my plastic tray and giving the benchtop a perfunctory swipe. ‘July a trink?’
    I ordered green tea. When it comes to coffee, the Nips are the pits. While I waited, I pondered the newspaper reports. Although they told me nothing I didn’t know already, they’d begun to prime the pump of my memory.
    Now that I thought about it, I seemed to remember that there were others up at the Shack that day. Colin Bishop? Someone else, too, but it eluded me for the moment.
    In any case, the incident had faded into the background pretty quickly. With Merv out of the picture, the amalgamation proceeded apace. By the end of the year, FUME had been absorbed into the PEF. The Municipals’ staff being surplus to requirements, jobs were slated for slashing and mine was high on the hit list. Charlie saw me right, though. Found me a full-time spot at the Labor Resource Centre, a policy think-tank tasked with cooking up a strategic vision to be enacted in the event that Labor ever got itself elected into government.
    Which, in due course, it did. By then, both Charlie and Barry Quinlan had seats in federal parliament, Charlie in the Reps, Quinlan in the Senate. Our glory days were upon us. I was married to Wendy and Red was on the way. And Mervyn Cutlett, like the stegosaurus, had receded into prehistoric oblivion.
    My green tea arrived, pallid but piping. While it was cooling down, I sucked air over my scalded tongue and ran my eye over the last of Inky’s pages. An obituary from the Labor Star , official organ of the ALP, it summarised the salient features of Merv’s biography.
    Born 1920, youngest son and third child of a slaughterman. Apprenticed as a motor mechanic, then worked at Footscray Council maintenance dept before volunteering for the AIF in 1940. Service in North Africa, repatriated, rejoined the council. Shop steward, then elected to union executive in 1948. Sailed close to the communist wind but never carried a card. Emerged from the splits and ructions of the fifties as national secretary, a position he continued to hold for the next two decades. One of the longest-serving union officials in Australia, survived by wife and daughter, to whom the labour movement extends its sincere condolences.
    As intimate and revealing as your average obit, it revealed nothing about his personality, such as it was. On that subject, the Great Leader photo offered more clues.
    In line with Charlie Talbot’s advice, I’d kept my contact with Cutlett to the bare minimum. But once a month, I was compelled to enter his office in the Trades Hall to get his approval for the layout sheets of the FUME News .
    â€˜Look out,’ he’d say. ‘It’s Scoop Whelan, our very own Jimmy Olsen.’
    That’d get a big guffaw from Sid Gilpin, his spivvy sidekick. ‘Charlie Talbot’s bum