The terrain of the lexico man

M I C HAEL S M AL L, W RITER WEDNESDAY, 20 APRIL 2011

TERRAIN OF THE LEXICO MAN Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

George Orwell, 1984 Looking up from his cell in the bunker, Wrede could hear the hail of stones scuttling down the tiles of the ITLib roof and the yells of vitriol from the yahoos beyond the perimeter wall scrolled at the top with barbed wire. The lurch of nerves in his gut signalled warning as he gulped in the first of several deep draughts of air to quell his racing heart. No way did he want to endure another panic attack, snatching at every breath and feint. Behind his pebbled glasses, he sensed that every inmate had instantly come off task, with a gasp or tremble and a pained look, hands stilled on keyboards, heads tilting up at the rust-brick ceiling, all except Aisah in the carrel next to him, who reached down for her tae kwon do short stick.They heard the metallic click of their steel-plated entry door lock automatically, then the stertorous bray of the emergency siren that sawed at their eardrums unceasing.

‘Down keys and lock down!’ shouted Aisah, quickly removing her headset. ‘Save work and close! Next thing, leave by route of escape!’ She pressed four digits on the keypad and the studded metal door behind them swung open with a yawning creak into the dimly lit tunnel. At that moment something heavy clunked the roof and tiles shattered. With a judder of chairs the inmates jumped to their feet, replaced ringbinders of files to their shelves in the compactus and grabbed personals.

‘They’re launching rocks again, the yobbos,’ sighed Wrede with a shake of the head.

‘Sounds more like a raid than a demo.’ In his mind, he could see the wave of protesters muffled up in balaclavas, hooded tops, bandannas, combat jackets . . .

Bent over his out-tray, he was quickly checking that nothing significant was left exposed.

No, nothing incriminating. His latest updating of the Government-sponsored Glossary of Urban Slang he'd sent at the first rumblings.

‘Please, you stay with me, Mr Wrede. All others, you come quick. Come, come!‘You go on, Aisah. I shall only hold you up.’

‘Bullsh! I mind you, so you better do like I tell.’ She grabbed him by the arm, which felt as brittle as a fire-stick that might snap off at any moment, and hustled him along the underground passage.

‘Always happens on Shengo’s watch,’ mumbled Wrede, scarcely able to draw breath as he toddled along as best he could, skirting the black puddles that the others had splashed through, as if he’d stumbled across a suspicious package left unnoticed.

‘Can’t be pure co-incidence.’

‘Slip careful,’ Aisah half-turned her head to say, but her soft, breathy voice drowned in the echoey clip of twelve pairs of chunky wedgies up ahead and the rush of effluent in the sewage pipes gurgling the other side of the wall. ‘Nullah,’ she said. ‘Means channal’, making it rhyme with ‘canal’. She’d noticed the patches of dry rot and dark green lichen almost brown blotching the dank, blackened walls.

In the grey-to-dull orange light of the few working low-wattage globes, Wrede could just discern how firm Aisah’s jaw-line looked, accentuated by the bowl-cut style of her straight black hair. Yes, his new leader seemed a good sort, steady and reliable.

Most of the others he didn’t know too well. D Section comprised a fairly transient group. Usually of an evening they did a bit of moonlighting as translators and interpreters. For some reason, his own position hadn’t changed for years. Probably he was regarded by Security Control as a harmless old duffer, which suited him fine.

Half-hidden by the flaky plywood side-panel of his carrel, he was invariably left alone to indulge his pre-occupation with the sub-sets of language.

The dozen workers were gathered round waiting at the foot of a concrete stairwell.

Vijay was heatedly blaming the anarchist wing of the e-Literates for the attack. Two of the women wore burqas, not necessarily due to their faith, for lexicos were oldfashioned enough to regard their privacy as sacrosanct; perhaps too the black cloth covering acted as defence against pollutants in the atmosphere outside. More vulnerable was the Jew in black suit and earlocks, Chaim, who was kept in the loop

by the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem. Classical Hebrew wasn’t used solely for prayer or study or an esoteric pleasure but also by archeologists specializing in the ancient civilizations of the Middle East. Twenty or so new Hebrew words might be added to the lexicon each year after strenuous discussion.

As usual, Wrede was wearing his grey workaday suit; it was wiser to travel incognito.

‘Where is control?’ asked Aisah, bringing up the rear with Wrede in tow.

‘There should be a remote hidden in a cavity beneath this stone ledge,’ muttered the old feller. ‘Ah, yes, here we are.’ He pressed the now familiar code of numbers.

As the heavy manhole cover lifted slowly, an oblique ray of light opened up the shaft.

The group mounted two flights of concrete steps, issuing out onto a path of gravel and broken paving stone that cut though swampy nettles and long dandelion stems and seed-headed grasses waving. Single-file, they sloshed through an underpass potholed and slippery underfoot, flanked by the stunted black slashes of spray-painted graffiti on walls hinting at the mystical symbols of some violent or angry race.

‘Straight ahead!’ croaked Wrede, a regular evacuee who knew the ropes, except that they had to meander through an ITLib dumping ground for electronic paraphernalia.

So speedily superseded, the twisted innards of circuitry mocked like an apt symbol 'app symbol' flashed across his mind - for the new takeover culture. Can it really be fifty-odd years ago, that debate on the Two Cultures, when C. P. Snow lamented the triumph of the Humanities over the Sciences? When classics and arts scholars could rarely explain such common scientific terms as ‘mass’, ‘acceleration’, ‘entropy’ or much more ominously the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The language of physics back then was . . . what? Wrede was sifting through his mental file of French expressions and cosmic spin-offs . . . ‘le mot juste was nebulous’, he concluded, with a simper of satisfaction.

Whereas nowadays the Sciences were hell-bent as Icarus, the Humanities dickering along to a dead-end.

Ah, such were the days when conversation could be sprinkled with familiar references to the great artists and thinkers of the past, and yes, the discoveries of

great scientists and innovators too, even at secondary school. By contrast, contemporary culture revolved around instant gratification of the senses, instant money by electronic finagling. Another observation, his own imagination had been fostered primarily by the printed word. Even now in his sixties, this process held, though the amount of fiction he was reading had declined lately. But kids today, he wagged his head in disbelief, suck on the constant bombardment of impulse imagery fed them by vested interests. With few exceptions, their imaginations had been shackled by hi-tech and crass advertising. Consequently, Wrede felt dangerously out of step. Reading Toffler’s Future Shock in the 1970s had by no means prepared him for cataclysmic change.

‘Call me Luddite, but the e-Literates are winning the Kultur clash,’ he sighed.

Blinking to adjust their eyes to the warm rays of autumn sunshine, the troop emerged among the towers of an electricity grid. Through its silvery pylons mottled dull grey with time and grime, they could make out a razor wire fence spiked with barbed knots not thirty metres away. Security cameras with infra-red trip were mounted atop the gates. At night a detail of guards would be posted. Overhead, a chopper churning the air in a tight circle, racketing away on a lateral tilt.

Infra-red, info read, oh it’s all too much overload. Wrede’s silent complaint wound from his brain as a jingle in half-rhyme. Had he also become a victim of the glib mottoes trotted out pat in the politician’s ten second sound-byte?

‘Our only way out is through those electronic gates and I should be able to remember the numbers for the keypad,’ Wrede perked up, his upper dentures clamping down on his lower lip in the struggle for memory.

‘Come close round me, group. Chop-chop!’ urged Aisah, drumming her fists and bobbing on the balls of her feet.Over the road from the ITLib emergency compound, behind the shops and backpackers’ hostels and hostels for the homeless, row upon row of small, identical kit-built weatherboards went running up the hill cheek by jowl, scarcely a patch of grass or tree in sight, merely trails of over-hanging wires and horizontal lines of washing. On the horizon loured the cement plant sprouting mills and kilns and plumes of brown smoke.

‘Ah, workshop for concrete agitation?’ cried Aisah, squinting into the distance, a hand over her brow. She tucked her tae kwon do stick inside her blue denim jacket; no point in asking for trouble.

‘Sweatshop, more like,’ muttered Wrede to himself, not wishing to enter on a lengthy explanation and feeling another rising squirl of shame in his gut.

Last through the exit, he glanced down Gates road at the funnel of fug, his ears assaulted by blasts on the horn and shouts of abuse, a tailback of traffic harrumphing all the way to the ring road. ‘Plus ca change . . .’

‘Which is direction?’ Aisah’s movement, however, spoke of restless energy rather than anxiety about the impending raid on ITLib. The pavements were crawling, reminiscent of Old Delhi or Hong Kong towards the end of last century. What never failed to shock Wrede were the obvious stand-outs – kids young as five or six begging from doorway beds of boxed cardboard, plastic green laundry bags, wooden palliasses and stained mattresses billowing yellowy wispy stuff. More scary were the tattooed hard rock chicks with garish hairstyles and clashing colourants - synthetic hair, a wig of mangled mass Medusa-like, tumbling over the ears and forehead to eye-level; or the bushy crescent of fuzzy floss clamped by long French pins and straightening iron; or an orange mane formed with miniature crimpers, two stone-hard eyes ring-marked with dark red eyeliner staring out from beneath the rough-cut fringe. His worst nightmare was a gaggle of punk bitches eyeing off his crotch and wielding a pair of shears in front of his own horrified scream.

As for the male of the species, teens and young twenties, many were shaved bald.

Their favoured fashion statement was combat dungarees or jerkin opening in a V down to the navel, chest hair sculpted and/or dyed, with skin piercings and tatts in various part of the anatomy, an anatomy often pumped with sugar, salt and steroids unless half-starved or drug-besotted. The tatts weren’t completely novel, of course Maori warriors had punctured their bodies in Herman Melville’s time. Ugliest motif was the Uzi sub-machine gun mounted a few centimetres above the navel.

‘Unreal,’ he muttered, shaking his head, not for the first time since the hippy era gave

way to the anarchy of punk. But even this over-used word, ‘unreal’, had changed its texture of meaning to include the biggest philosophical debate on the exact nature of the world of reality, as opposed to the world of forms, since Plato wrote The Republic.

This was a no-go area, all right; definitely after 1800 hours when police patrols handed over to council vigilantes toting Taser stun guns that could sizzle your neck and rigged out in padded vests, bullet-proof on Friday and Saturday nights, and visor helmets. These heavies were backed by watch-houses and lock-ups storing a cache of tear gas canisters and riot shields. But if you were on the razzle for a bit of skirt or tranny, cheap drugs or punch-up, you’d rock up to this all-nighter strip in the northern burbs, no question.

Most in your face were those scum pushing their wares, the dope dealers, ‘White shit, mate? Wanna bag o’ white shit?’

Or the cops, for swinging toward him outside a peep-show or knocking shop, the baton of a barking officer: ‘Where’s your ID, chum?’

Wrede froze.

‘Move it!’

The short-sighted old codger was so nervous he fumbled over his mediscrip card.

‘ID, chum, can’t you read?’

‘Sorry, chief. There you go,’ snatching out a cluster of cards from the pouch in his croc-skin wallet.

‘Jeezus! You look like death warmed up, you old bugger. Haven’t they put youse away yet?’

‘This man A3 Verbal,’ put in Aisah, scurrying back to help.

‘One of them, eh?’ Youse could’ve fooled me. Okay, just keep moving along. Got it?’

Aisah bit her lip and seized Wrede’s arm with a reassuring, ‘It’s okay. We not rush.’

As they pushed and shuffled towards the old Angus and Robertson bookshop, formerly one of his favourite browsing spots, a makeover a few years back to an intimate theatre for cage sports, they were almost bundled over by the rollicking horseplay of youths of all genders aching for a brawl. ‘We wanna knockouts! We wanna blood! We wannit now!'

These roughs, it seemed, were targeting the Japanese tourists and students, many holding disposable paper face masks up to their nose. Then he noticed the neon sign above picked out in flashing red lights: TONITE’S MAIN FEATURE: WELCOME BACK GRIZZLY OZAKAKI! Suddenly glimpsing Shengo startled Wrede, who ducked and swayed like some derelict wino quicker than e-books become i-books. Falling in behind a couple of girls with cut-off jeans and identical T-shirts that bore the message SAY NO TO BOOKS! Old enough to be uni students in their bleached urchin cuts with dark highlights angled slightly askew by ears cocked at mobys. Probably were uni students, he thought, recalling the increasing hostility shown by first-years when handed the book list in the lecture theatre. Then he’d blown a gasket at the brief item of news that uni libraries were tossing out books and magazines by the thousand into the nearest skip, with apparently no qualms of conscience, no questions asked. The centre cannot hold, he reflected. Yeats?

But at street-level it did, because those bumping along toward him seemed to walk right through him, as if there were no substance at all to his slight frame; the invisible man yesterday’s man. Sad how those passing strangers over forty sought deep in your eyes any threat of menace; younger generations didn’t notice you, except as target to beat the shit out of.

The watchman was still standing on the steps just inside the doorway, putting on his dark glasses and safety helmet before casting a quick glance to left and right, then slinking into the slow slipstream of human traffic.

Shengo loitering about the theatre for caged sports? That meant the police must have

been called in and dispelled the riot. Had the watchman noticed the straggle of workers from D Section? Surely, he must have. Was he as clean as he made out?

Texting, still one of the most viral of old-fangled trends, got up Wrede’s nostrils.

Many texters had started late at five years of age and possessed, he conceded, astonishing touch control. Their inventiveness in breaking up the building blocks of old meaning with individual semiotics screamed out as a major cause for their eventual breaking with family and joining the global ranks of dispossessed aliens.

Rules of syntax and spelling were becoming a foreign language, if not dead already.

To this day, some ten years later, Wrede could still visualise every character of the last written communication sent to him by his lost son, the e-Literate, the freelance hacker and caged warrior. And possibly undercover agent for Security Control. i h8 wot ur lifes sirpost 2 b fun but ur no fun 2b with so i in10d 2 join the IT uth brigaid we r ant boox + toffe nos kulcher icu as past yr yousebi d8 i want owt + im gunna sqwot on mi lownsum or with sum ynos geny rools ok gr8

With Aisah Verbal A2, Wrede senior almost felt wrapped in a security blanket, for the time being. A fairly recent acquisition to the Lexico depot, this Chinese Malaysian was unusually slim - many would interpret her physique as unhealthily under-weight – and sinewy tall for someone of Asian extraction, with upright carriage. It had taken him a few weeks to get used to her annoying habit of peeking over his shoulder at his console, simply taboo in the depot, with quizzical frown and squinty eyes, making anxious or angry moaning sounds, trying to suss out the nature of his research task.

And because of his partial hearing loss and her strange aerated enunciation, he was slow to catch what she was gabbling on about. Somehow, though, she’d collected a utilitarian grab-bag of vocab, such ultra-important specimens as ‘entrenchment’, ‘entitlement’, ‘uranium’, ‘waterboarding’, ‘crack-head’ and ‘avagooday, mate!’; pretty impressive for a native speaker of Bahasa Malaysia, Cantonese, Tamil and, on a good day, passing English or, on a rumpled day, Chinglish. Soon he found himself smiling when in her childish delight at finding the sought-after word or phrase on her screen,

she emitted a little squeal of ‘Eureka’ or ‘Gotcha’ or ‘Bingo’ or ‘Yeah, man’ or ‘Yessss!’

Even her bucked teeth seemed endearing.

Never had Wrede wanted to be a lexico man, but there was not much choice these days. Fortunately, there were always jobs available for anyone with half-decent language skills in the global economy. Australians had seldom taken the acquisition of foreign languages seriously, being over-reliant on the world-wide practice of English as lingua franca, but with the rapidly expanding economies of Asia, it was imperative for ‘the lucky country’ to show a more sympathetic understanding of her nearest neighbours. In the 1970s, he recollected, the Government had pushed to train more teachers of Indonesian, but by the time of the Balinese bombings that programme had all but died.

From that moment in his late teens when he discovered Albert Camus, Wrede fancied himself as a novelist in the making. Probably due to his recognition of Camus’ outsiders. Latterly, what struck a chord was the image of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up to the top of a mountain, only to have it roll back down, obliging him to recommence the struggle all over again, together with the character of Joseph Grand in The Plague. Grand was continually wrestling with the task of writing the perfect opening sentence, altering a word here, a phrase there, but never feeling satisfied enough to begin sentence two. In all likelihood, Wrede had never had an inkling of self-belief, commitment or even ideas burning to express. Once, though, in the midseventies, he’d submitted a satirical piece to Nation Review.

‘Great story, man!’ one of the sub-editors had rung through. ‘You’ve got it made. No doubt ASIO will start sniffing around and open a file on you.’

Of course, he was young and naïve back then, glowing with excitement that he might have caused a few ripples, even though the story was wacky enough to be infantile.

He cringed at the memory. When thirty years later ASIO files became available to the general public, he couldn’t share in the back-slapping celebration of those on the endangered list laughing at the revelations of ASIO’s absurdly petty snooping.

‘Anyone who was anyone’ figured among ASIO’s files; in effect, it had become a status symbol. But notoriety had arrived twenty-odd years too late for the budding author.

For a year or two he’d dabbled in investigative journalism and found himself scraping out the crud and smut on celebs so-called, ‘personality’ radiating out of their super-whitened maws snap-frozen with dazzling cheesiness. Reporting on social goss for airheads meant being exposed to public ridicule by real writers, even a tap on the shoulder by the celebs’ minders, who often appeared to be spoofs of the Blues Brothers in dark glasses. Besides, very few writers made any dosh and those that did were state-funded and therefore hobbled by the party line. Political correctness had been the standard ethic of public life in the west for several years, so that printbound writers had steadily become marginalised. The turning-point, Harold Pinter's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, damning American foreign policy from the end of World War II: ‘. . . US crimes . . . have only superficially been recorded,’ Pinter had argued; euphemisms such as ‘low intensity conflict’ disguised the true horror of thousands of deaths shamefully disregarded.

Wrede was neither so brave, nor so foolhardy as the English playwright.

Besides, he was developing his genius for self-effacement.

Jermayne Wrede, the only son, sporting a stubbly Mohawk dyed a satanic black and red stripes, was bristling with resentment. The peep-show franchise couldn’t cough up the week’s’ insurance’ to which his protection biz was entitled. Worse still, he’d just been knocked back as virile and virulent lead for a porn flic due to a suppurating closed eye, stitches in the left eyebrow, facial bruising already turning from marine blue to jaundiced yellow and blubbery, blistered lips. Bugger the injuries, sensations in the octagon made you feel alive and alert, even if the blood you could only partially see was your own. Not even the ugly, scarred mug of Jermayne Wrede, The Manningham Mauler, his brand moniker, could claim the $50,000 purse for bulging, bruising middleweights. The ref, Jeez, a right wuss, fouled him for an illegal knee in the groin when that goon of a Samoan had bitten his ear on the ref’s blind side.

What’s more, the crowd had gone bananas, baying for even more gougings to break open and weep claret. It wasn’t enough for those blood-suckers that umpteen buckets marked plasma decorated the floor space at the base of the canvas. Yeah, the bloodbath circus was where you proved yourself as man and martial hero, slamdunking heads downward and flying scissors round the waist, elbowing, punching, wrestling with those butcher’s hooks, even a bit of percussion work on the oppo’s noggin, any bloody trick, kicking seven shades of shit out of the other boofhead. Jeez,

that felt so bloody good!

There were times, though, when Jermayne Wrede woke up shivering in a cold sweat, having dreamed of fly-tackling his old man and applying a rear-naked choke that damn near stiffed the stupid git.

‘Just passing,’ said Shengo, amiably enough. ‘It struck me that I’ve never paid you a little visit.’

Blast! Sounds ominous. Shengo was a hefty, sometimes formidable figure. The blueto-black pouches and lines beneath his eyes reminded Wrede of the rings of Saturn rather than mere half-moons. ‘Come in, Mr Watchman. Welcome to my humble abode.’

‘Snakes alive, what have we here?’ said Shengo, a mixture of surprise and admiration on his dial as he surveyed the interior of an old-style house with lofty ceilings and multiple rooms and space, so much unnecessary space. ‘You’ve certainly kept this shady nook quiet. Live alone, do you?’

‘Yes,’ he snapped too quickly, ‘but Aisah, my leader . . . come through to the sittingroom . . . she’s just helped me home.’

‘Hey lo,’ said Aisah. ‘I say to Mr Wrede, this room has no spirit. He know no feng shui, but he work like water buffalo at depot.’

‘Er, what can I get you to drink?’ asked Wrede, struggling to summon up the phrases from entertaining at home.

‘You don’t have to force me, chum.’ Shengo now had a twinkle in his eye. ‘Now about this afternoon’s little blow-up with the KKK.’ ‘We got out the emergency gate without any hassles.’

‘Yeah, I know, that’s the idea, but do they all know Security doesn’t want your mugshots i-peddling round the world on Facebook and i-Pad. The Government

counts the lexico team as one of its most valuable resources. Specially, Intelligence.’

The big man made a show of tapping his own forehead.’ Wrede noticed how thick his fingers were.

‘I’m sure they know. In any case,’ he lied, ‘they can’t but help see their treatment is so much better than that of the IT bibliotechs.’

‘Quite so.’ His chubby face creased into a smile, revealing a gold front tooth that invited attention. ‘By the way, the cops for once arrived quick as bunny fucks and kiboshed the whole damn thing. A few rocks and paint bombs, that’s all. Cops did a recce of your depot too. No probs.’

Aisah was fishing around the top pocket of her denim jacket. ‘Look-see, I have ginseng tea packet.’

‘Can you run to something a bit stronger?’ said Shengo, chuckling with a single clap of his hands, trying to be matey. ‘What’s your poison?’

‘I’m strictly gin and tonic, myself. Help yourself to some hot water, Aisah. In the kitchen there,’ he pointed.

‘That’s funny, ‘cause you don’t like other bods drinking,’ said Shengo, with a mischievous stare.

‘No, I never said that. I’m a one-drink-a-night man, I grant you, London gin for medicinal reasons. Juniper berries, you know. But really the dependence on alcohol these days, even by kids as young as nine. When’s it all going to stop? Road rage, drink driving, rising crime rates, random street bashings, brain damage . . .’

‘I’m a bit of a gin-cuddler,’ Shengo chortled, ignoring the issue of blood/alcohol levels, very pleased with his ethnic pun. Then noticing Wrede’s embarrassment and Aisah’s grumpy expression of puzzlement, he added, ‘I hope you’re not going to dob me in, old son. It wasn’t politically correct, I know, but we are among mates here.’

‘I’m no whistle-blower,’ said Wrede.

‘That’s the way.’

‘Do you blow whistle, Mr Shengo?’ asked Aisah.

‘Nuh,’ he laughed again, loosening his collar, ‘my job is to keep an eye on D section, body-search visitors, check your mob isn’t sneaking their i-Phones into the depot, sweep for bugs, run the videos to see if the cams have picked up anything suspicious.

That sort of thing.’

‘Could you plant bugs if you wanted?’ said Wrede, glimmering the degree of trust in which Shengo must be held, mulling it over for the first time, his influence and status, his opportunity to wreak havoc inside ITLib. ‘Well, I guess . . . Here, you’re not the one to be asking questions!’ Wrede gave a start unwittingly. Shengo’s abrupt change of tone had shifted suspicions up a gear. Was he eavesdropping on the depot for Security Control? Or could he even be a snitch for the Kultur Kringers Klub?

Must be getting schizoid in my old age, Wrede thought, as he brought his glass up to his lips.

‘Up your bottoms!’ burst out Aihsa, raising a toast, before slurping at her mug of piping ginseng tea.

The fall-out from his highly coloured satire in Nation Review, ‘the work of a raving nutter’ wrote a rival critic, Morgan Lafievre, led to approaches made by Sensis LA representing the advertising agencies. Ad men had tagged his wacky style as a potential gold mine for fast food companies raiding the under 10 market, recording that the little tackers exploited most clout with harassed mums. He’d even been head-hunted for speech-writer by a Government Minister, who was good at solemnity but saying zilch three times over to avoid committing himself to anything substantive. But Wrede, apart from reluctance to be tied to a minority government bleeding from within, knew that he stood behind Professor Don Watson’s condemnation of ‘weasel words’and the decay of public language. He deplored the Minister’s style of killing off fresh visual language with clichés of emotionless and

often abstract padding: ‘As I’ve said before, Australia is a great country’; ‘We’ve made the right decision, a tough decision . . .’; ‘We are seeking closure on this issue so that we can move forward.’

As he looked back half a century, Wrede came to acknowledge that language per se had always fascinated him. Perhaps it was his old gran’s comical idioms that seemed to speak from way back before the advent of the motor car. Even at primary school he’d bought himself a thick, blue-covered paperback with the sign of a cross on its cover entitled First Aid in English and spent hours working out correct answers to grammar exercises or providing his own variations if he didn’t know. Give the Collective Noun for parrots (‘parratroop’), hedgehogs (‘quillion’), songbirds in the Lake District (‘divas’). At secondary school it was obligatory to study Latin and French, both of which proved to be his two favourite subjects, but unlike most of his confreres his family were never wealthy enough to pack him off to Aix-en-Provence to study French over the summer hols. In any case, no one regarded him as a natural linguist, least of all himself; his deliberately anglicised French accent betrayed him for starters and later he insisted on calling Parisian waiters ‘Monsieur!’ instead of ‘Garcon!’ for fear of giving offence, much to their sneering disdain. At fifteen he’d picked up the rudiments of Spanish quickly, easy-peasy after all that grammar homework on romance languages. In his first year in Australia he attended Italian school for three hours on Saturday mornings, triggered by teaching migrants. Never, though, did he warm to Esperanto. Owing to its mish-mash artificiality, it lacked the integrity and diversity of organic growth that accompanied tongues that had spoken for at least two thousand years.

Yet ever since he’d been classified as a lexico by the Supreme Council, his physical world had begun to shrink. For ten hours a day he was collaborating with the Galactech search engine - sighting and citing under the harsh glare of mangled striplighting poorly maintained and humming sick as well as blinking security cameras that might or might not be functioning. That was the real terror of ASEC – the AllSeeing Eye of Constant Surveillance. Fall-out from 9/11, surveillance 24/7 had rocketed into a major growth industry. Beware eyes and ears both.

That physical world had grown insufferable in its vulgar, practically wholehearted grab at the materialist consumer ethic, an ethic which had steadily eroded, bowdlerised or buggerised the beauty of language and the pleasure of discourse;

indeed its very enunciation. People cared not a brass farthing about vocal projection, no longer gob-smacked by labial laxity. Long gone were the days when English - ‘as it is spoke’, so the old linguist’s joke ran - depended upon the BBC‘s Pronunciation Unit to assist its newsreaders, presenters, actors etc, while at the same time deferring to regional differences, such as the ABC in Australia. Or that era (often pronounced ‘error’, such was the linguistic bankruptcy nowadays) when pop groups from Liverpool were dominating the charts in both America and Britain, with the result that Liverpudlian lingo or scouse suddenly emerged as an acceptable, then fashionable accent even on national radio. Ironically, Wrede himself had become fascinated by the Mersey sound, even if it had killed off the ideal of received or standard English. His own curriculum vitae on the web disclosed, to his mortification, that he had in another life deconstructed Lily the Pink and A Whiter Shade of Pale for the Times Educational Supplement.

‘My father was friend to Mahatir. You know Dr Mahatir?’

‘Wasn’t he Malaysia’s prime minister for several years?’

‘Okay, two of them both were against Internal Security Act.’ ‘What was that about? Remind me.’

‘Okay, Internal Security Act, it say Government can hold people in prison with no trial, no charge. Soon as Mahatir become Prime Minister, he use this law to stop his enemies. He accuse them to be racist.’

‘What a hypocrite! A typical grab for personal power. I remember now. He fell out with Paul Keating, a former Aussie PM, over some diplomatic incident.’

‘He say Australia’s human rights not good. Australia is racist country. For many years have whites supreme.’

‘Had White Supremacy, Aisah, had: the past perfect tense takes you further back into the past. Even before Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. Now most Aussies would affirm the benefits of our multi-cultural society. However,’ he paused, ‘we haven’t

quite squared the ideal with what is exactly meant by “assimilation”. The definitions of these two descriptors seem contradictory. Moreover, the mainstream culture of Australia is unofficially Anglo-Irish. Has been for two centuries. Which blithely ignores the bedrock culture of her traditional owners that has endured for forty or fifty thousand years.’

‘Okay, but Mahatir say Australian Government lie about very bad condition of native peoples. That not multi-cultural.’

‘Hmm, I’m afraid he was correct there: Aboriginal deaths in custody, suicide rate three times the national average, lower life expectancy for indigenous peoples by a staggering eighteen years, inequality of opportunity in employment, housing, health . . . and still we can’t get these policies right.’

‘You see, my father Moslem. Malaysian constitution, it say freedom of religions is okay, but people who Moslem cannot change faith. Christians, Buddhists, yes. My father, he worry Mahatir become like dictator, forget law. So he want to change his religion to Buddhist. Mahatir show fear against my father who Malaysian people like very much. So he send my father into prison as politic activist. Do you know what happen inside prison?’

‘Yes, that grim business is coming back to me now. He wasn’t accused of being gay, was he? A homosexual?’

‘No, that was Anwar Ibrahim, him second in charge of government.’

‘Oh right. Go on.’

‘In Malaysia prisons, there is man with stick . . . ‘ ‘A caning officer. He beats the prisoner’s body with a cane, right?’

‘Caning officer, yes. He swing cane very quick, very hard so prisoner he lose . . . err . . . ‘ ‘Consciousness. He blacks out because of the pain?’

‘Conscience, yes, my father have many, many scars on his body. He have body searches every day.’

‘That’s Security for you, Aisah. Internal probing as well as external.’

‘No Security. Doctors visit him every day.’

‘Oh, I see. Poor devil.’ What sort of doctors? he shuddered.

‘Yes, but in his heart, Buddhist faith good. Tell him don’t hold resentment in here.’

She clapped her hand over her heart.

‘So he eventually brought your family out to Australia.’

‘No, no. He stay in prison always. Long, long time. Now he dead.’

Perhaps it was because he was an older dad, in his early forties when Gail gave birth, that there had always been bad blood between Wrede and Jermayne, ever since that last year of primary school, when the lad already clodding about in size 11 shoes, bigboned and stocky for his age, was outed in assembly as a bully-boy. He and Elspeth Hitchins were found writing bitchy notes to some petite, innocent lass, then bowling round to her front gate and, calm as you like, bawling out abusive names. The funniest thing they’d published yet on Facebook.

‘How dare he monster my daughter!’ ranted the mother. ‘He should be suspended and placed in a special school. Teach him some manners for Christ sake!’

Wrede wilted on his doorstep. The shame, the suggestion of not caring, an unworthy parent.

‘And I’m going up the school to speak to the Principal. I’ll give her what for!’

Yes, well, perhaps calling him Jermayne was a mistake, but then Gail had wanted to call him Gabriel. Wrede had put his foot down: the boy would never be able to live up

to angelic expectations and he’d be dubbed ‘Gabby’ for sure, which reminded Wrede of Hopalong Cassidy’s sidekick in the comics, Gabby Hayes, a stupid old windbag whose spittle flew whenever he mashed out his unfunny monosyllables. How on earth could someone with a supposed sensitivity for words not have anticipated that the lad’s peers would dub him ‘Germ’, the cause of so many stoushes for his warrior son? If it weren’t for that intrusive ‘r’, the course of their lives might’ve run a helluva lot more smoothly.

But it was the school’s policy that finally unhinged Jermayne, its embrace of compulsory computers from years 7 to 11. For a start, he stopped reading, ‘the most unkindest cut of all’ for his bibliophile father; out of spite, Wrede wondered, for his own silent preoccupation with printed books that he loved to handle and breathe their fustian scent like some exotic infusion. Jermayne’s house tutor would inform his dad of the absurdity for such a robust and active pupil to turn surly if the duty teacher at recess or lunchtime encouraged him to go out into the playground and get some fresh air instead of sitting cross-legged in the corridor zapping aliens on his laptop.

Nor was Wrede capable of initiating father-and-son bonding at the consoles, for Jermayne’s computer skills were light-years ahead of Wrede’s; indeed, Wrede had none, was treated with contempt for his inability to grasp basic instructions beyond the use of the keyboard, let alone to comprehend the whole range of programmes and the reach of the toolbar. Perhaps if he’d been a silver surfer . . .

‘Why don’t you show some initiative and take him away for a father/son weekend?

Go camping or something!’ Gail was pretty frazzled herself by her son’s glowering remoteness.

‘He’s at that age where he doesn’t want to be seen dead with his parents.’

His wife was a senior English teacher in an independent school and what with supervision of sport, faculty and staff meetings, PD, chapel on Sundays etc. she seldom staggered home before Jermayne, then threw a wobbly trying to balance the preparation of dinner and killing her marking before midnight. No wonder she’d thrown in her career and would eventually decamp to the jacuzzi of a shock jock on Radio 3IMOZ.

Caught in the web, wired-up and Looped-In, their chronic hyper-interactive son was furiously working the social networking outlets, closeting himself in his studybedroom –what a misnomer that was! - night after night and barely speaking to either parent. The lad absolutely put the chill on his father, emerging with a smile like a toad bloated on sex. It wasn’t long before Wrede felt in the pit of his stomach that his son derived his moral compass from cyberspace.

Virtual reality? Visceral reality? Whatever, an invisible force-field had suddenly been activated.

He hit the mouse as if were on speed. Drumming the podgy fingers of his left hand and jouncing antsy pants on his chair, the cyberpunk kid was now firmly in control of his own destiny. Just itching to make his own stamp on the world, to alter his own identity with the twitch of a finger, to morph into the real Jermayne. Another click and the title screen his window already dissolving his very own interior private space, his avatar stalking . . . Now go go go for it, Jermayne! urged a voice in his ear. Yeah, Jer, go get it! gunships + choppers scour night sky thousands of twinkling stars searchlights on full beam racketing lower over canyons of skyscrapers wailing of sirens occasional gunshots on the streets cops yakking on intercom with static feeds into pulsating thump of hard rock

Jed Starr me rockerboy muso + rebel warrior with silver-chrome cyberlimb + attitude like bulldust roaring off in my red open-top Jag into Knite City on San Francisco Bay to collect five Golden Orbs from Montezuma Malkovich who mean as a meat-axe golden bronze skin + Roy Orbison specs president of Pizzaro Corporation

me rescue three voluptuous ladettes blonde + raven + brunette busty blouses and cheeky shorts held captive bound + gagged by Malkovics six musclemen maulers on floor 10 Malkovichs office suite chicks claim to be asylum seekers from Irania

Jeds popularity stands at 65% me yeah accepts help from bi-guy Rod Ram to whump Malkovichs muscle-men + stiff his buddy the Los Angeles pollie on the take with gambling addiction who craves to rush the blonde to the altar in Las Vegas Jed + Rod roar off in red open-top Jag to Montezuma building chased by bent cops tooled up Rod launches mortars from Jags boot bent cops combust

Jeds popularity soars to 73% me yeah

but elevator to floor 101 not working how will Jed proceed Jed accepts ropes + crampons from black concierge who doubles as guard for Malkovich Jed sends Rod abseiling up outside wall

Jeds popularity plummets to 29% me yeah

Jed starts running up flight of steps concierge alias Phong Phong Li fires silver arrow at ropes at floor 20 bullseye Rod falls screaming to death

Jeds popularity soars to 81% me yeah

Jed wrestles with Phong Phong who has black belt in kung fu Jed booted on the jaw falls to ground almost unconscious Phong Phong dives for the kill with switchblade hidden inside vest how will Jed react reach for piece of cable wire on floor to strangle or conserve energy to grab concierges wrist Jed twists Phong Phongs ear stud forces concierge to mend elevator

Jed holds switchblade to Phong Phongs throat elevator reaches floor 101 Jed calls for Malkovich who armed with Uzi sub-machine gun Jed pushes Phong Phong into Malkovich who drops weapon Jed wastes Malkovich + cleans up problem what to do with the chicks who are being hunted by their kinsmen hill tribesmen of Fazal Fuzzhead who seek to stone and shame them hand over the chicks who hate Jeds choice of rock music or wed raven haired Princess Rhianna with whom hes fallen head over turkey or lash out $200000 for a super special engine booster from jump up merchant Joy Popper to zip him to Graceland

Schezerada has taken a shine to Rod Rams cool partner Rove who asks Jed for compassionate leave no way Jose nix

Jeds popularity plummets to 43% me yeah

but Rove will sacrifice Schezerada to Jed if he can conjure up the password

‘Agggh, no-o-o! Shoot! What’s the fucking password?’

No computer geek by a long stretch, as soon as Wrede settled himself on his vinylseated swivel chair with delicate finger-tips caressing the black keys, it was as if his entire body gave a huge sigh and he was about to glide off through Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’; he was content, about to travel forth on his global exploration for new worlds, new words. Indeed, it was a journey towards a semblance of immortality, because there had to be some readers out there, a select few wordies, incidental surfies or accidental stumblers, whose interest would justify his existence; strangers who might search and store, earmark or burn, cross-reference or even read and digest his material, eventually, in this life-time or the next. He might be small fry, but his own treasury of words, little gems, would last forever.

There were a few other nerdy types much more tech-savvy in his province or domain

or ballpark who were also lexico-tragics or willy wordsmiths or loquistadors beavering away on the compilation of a texter’s incomplete shorth or flat chat made easy or just occasionally a list of thematic words required by Government officials et al for the explanation in close detail of a more off-centre policy concept; or lexicons of thousands of languages already dead; or the slang of a bygone age being learnt by interest groups, such as historical societies and re-enactment aficionados – ‘greave’ and ‘gauntlet’; ‘farthingale’ and ‘mantua’ etc. Their worth unacknowledged, lexicos were treated at best as copy typist drones from Queer Street; more likely grubbies from Grub Street.

All this for Government mandarins, ‘overseers without oversight’, a phrase he’d coined but committed to memory only. Such polemicists were mealy-mouthed hypocrites.

‘Never let it be forgotten,’ declared the Security Council, frequently, ‘that genuine copy typists have a vital role to play in the modern world of historical now: All our sins will be remembered for time everlasting thanks to the computer operative.’

Even if they are secreted away in some dusty file in Security Council’s memory bank, added Wrede, sotto voce. Ambiguous use of the personal pronoun? he pulled himself up. Does ‘they’ refer to the files or verbal hacks like me?

‘Have you seen his bedroom recently?’ Wrede was busy micro-waving their Lite N’ Easy, corned silverside and creamy leek sauce.

‘Oh give us a break. I’ve only just got in!’ The disappointing grades for her year 12s practice essays had been gnawing at Gail all day. Then there was the two-hour seminar for house tutors at three-thirty: ‘Recognising Computer Junkies in Your Classroom’, for Christ sake.

‘I thought you’d reminded him last week that he was responsible for tidying his own room.’

‘If I’ve told him once, I’ve told him a thousand times. He doesn’t listen to me. And what were you doing trespassing on his privacy?’

‘His room’s like a museum or a shrine rather. Generations of notebooks and printers, scanners and disk-burners, mice . . . er mouses and cables trailing all over the floor.

Consoles for the disconsolate, junk for the junkie. One day he’ll be hoist on his own petard.’

‘Do you actually know what a petard is?’ she asked meanly.

Which he ignored, waiting for the ping of the micro-wave. ‘And why is the plasma screen which I never hear him use still blocking out much of the daylight from his front window?’

‘He probably downloads everything onto his i-Pad. The digital generation are far more cluey than you give them credit for.’

‘Would that they were the digitalis generation. I just can’t read this current lot.’

‘There you go again, sounding off with sweeping generalisations. Let me remind you that I do have several seniors at St Meg’s who cannot abide their PCs, who refuse to use them. “We much prefer to use books for research,” they say. Mind you, they’ve also heard from the horse’s mouth that unis strictly ban the use of quotes from the internet.’

‘Thank the Lord for that small mercy!’

‘And when we surveyed our tutor groups, several of the girls admitted that they’d entirely cut out Facebook and Twitter from their social life so they could concentrate on study. “Only so many hours in the day,” they sigh. So the outcome was far more favourable than we anticipated.’

Wrede was only partly mollified; he’d winced at the jargon word ‘outcome’. Its bland lack of image should have killed it off years ago. Whatever happened to ‘result’? He already knew the answer: it had stealthily upgraded itself to ‘win’.

These lexico-tragics, or lexos for the majority of the population who dared not

venture beyond words of more than two syllables (all too frequently, 'laxos' for the aurally impaired or the bloody-minded), were not particularly communicative about the work-place; it was safer to meet up in the teeming world outside if you were going to rub shoulders or noses with your own kind. Most of his co-workers in the depot were classified as obsessive introverts, so could happily cope with working in solitude much of the time, but were also wary of exposing themselves to ASEC, the All-Seeing Eye of Constant Surveillance. Like Wrede, they thrived on privacy and quiet space and loathed deep down i-Person’s current rage for celebrity, notoriety, mass hysteria, i-witnessing so-called history in the moment or even flashing with iPhones and i-Pads and i-Amacamera-watches. In effect, the i-Con had become the populist attitude of the age. Why not re-cycle the phrase ‘the me generation?’ Wrede wondered. Heaven help us, the Evil–i.

Although his nerves were as highly strung as a Columbian cocaine cartel on the run, Wrede’s stomach settled more quickly when poring over the etymology of words or going giddy over the dance of diction or the syncopated rhythms of incantation, browsing through archival editions of the Greater Oxford’s twenty navy-bound tomes or a hide-bound, liver-spotted Dr Johnson, whose musty fustian he’d inhale with great gusto. But every so often he would stop in his i-Carbon Footprint and ask himself just where his life had short-circuited. Why did he feel such compulsion for premature burial? After all, much of his research was involved in bringing back to life the starbursts of Shakespearean imagery or the argot of smoky-eyed gypsies or the rhyming slang of cockney twang for an extremely small minority; whereas the majority favoured a deadened, dumbed-down, simplified version of the language.

Or the crap of rap.

‘What the dilly yo? All dis bo janglin’. I can’t stand it no mo!’ Such experimental doodlings illustrated Wrede’s shortcomings as a modern lexico. Fortunately for him, the colloquialisms of yesteryear still punched above their weight.

All of a sudden, banging of thunderclaps against the front door.

Wrede spluttered gin over his beige cardigan, choked in getting up from his armchair and coughed all the way through the hallway to the spy-hole.

O god, it’s Jermayne. As a matter of habit, he slid the chain into the door before opening it a few centimetres.

‘Quick sticks, old man, open up. It’s blowing its tits off out here. It’s your son, your one and only, the light of your life, remember?’

Unfortunately he did, reluctantly admitting the tyke who brushed past him without ceremony. He’d got Mt Macedon on his shoulder again.

‘And why haven’t you repaired the chimes? You’re bang out of order not having voxcom at the door or gate.’

‘Is anything wrong?’ asked Wrede.

‘Christ, ain’t it ever! Come to talk business, ain’t I?’ The beefy bulk was already hovering over the mini-bar. ‘Where’s yer Thug Passion then? Not a solitary Jager Bomb! “Depth-charge” and “bomb shot” not in yer dictionary of slang then? What, no Jim Beam neither! Christ, I could do with two shots of amber fire. Now there’s poetry for youse.’

‘I can do you gin and tonic. Or camomile tea.’

Irony was not Jermayne’s strength. He plunked his beef into his father’s favourite well-padded green leather recliner with foot-rest on which to stick his grimy snakeskin pointies. ‘Make that gin, no tonic. And listen up. I ain’t got time to faff around.’

‘I hope you’re looking after yourself,’ Wrede said, discreetly not staring at his son’s bloodshot eyes and pulpy, spud ugly face and ooo! a fresh deep red weal where his forehead had been split open again and recently tracked with mini-stitches.

‘Stuff you!’ the prodigal son blurted, draining his nip of gin and banging down his glass on the round three-legged side-table. ‘Same again!’

‘And to what do I owe this pleasure?’ asked Wrede, fearing the worst, as he measured

out another slug at the bar, slowly to prevent the bottle jinking against the shot-glass.

Once upon a time he believed that people should take greater care with the language they used about one another, to one another. He’d even coined an acronym, PPP: politesse from preppies to pollies. These days the atmosphere fairly crackled and spat with violence.

‘You know why, old pop. You’re in deep shit.’ How the sneer in that whiny voice of his own twenty-five year old flesh and blood could still grate and cut. ‘Government’s rehoming policy for geris. And you’re fifty plus, so you’re a sucker for re-locating in a Twilight Village. It’s bloody disgusting that a single old fart should still be occupying a three-bedroom brick veneer with all mod cons when Gen Y can’t even afford a kitbuilt bed-sit. I’m jack of dossing down in squats with all the deadbeats.’

‘Surely now that you’re earning good money . . .’

‘Pig’s arse!’ Then suddenly he was on his feet and making for the wall-to-wall cupboards. ‘You haven’t still got those fucking books, have you?’ Wild-eyed, like suddenly unnerved by a bad trip.

‘Now steady . . . ‘Wrede scrambled up, stretching out an arm as if to restrain this sacrilege.

But Jermayne had already wrenched at the silver handles of the central cupboards and flung them open, so that they dinged back a few centimetres off the adjacent doors still closed. ‘Shit, I can’t believe this. I warned you to get rid of ‘em. You cacked yourself then, but you’ve nixed! Does Shengo know about your oh so precious books?’

‘No,’ said Wrede, sniffily. ‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘When I was a kid, I’ll never forget it, you opened up this cupboard to show me, a special treat you called it. “Open sesame! Da da! And behold a feast for your mince pies!” he mimicked in a posh ABC Classic FM accent. ‘Expecting me to go, “Wow, daddy pops, what a bewdiful collection of super-duper booky-wookies! Gee whiz and golly gosh!” This is my Aladdin’s cave! you gushed. Like hell it is. It’ll be your ruin.

How much dough have you wasted on this sludge?’ He seized a weighty, stiff-bound tome with silky, gold-coloured tassel of a page-marker, pristine as the day it arrived

in the mailbag smothered in bubble wrap, carelessly scuffed through some pages to crease and smirch, then tossed it sharply over his shoulder to land at Wrede’s slippers, spine skewed.

His father swallowed hard, fought back the tears welling in his eyes, yet could make out by its Oxford blue hardback cover The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Then that muscly right arm pumping like a piston flung up behind him a flurry of thick, multi-coloured spines and flickering pages that landed with a thud in a dishevelled scatter on the Turkish shag-pile.

Wrede sank to his knees with convulsions of dry sobs.

‘Christ! What’s this?

‘Eh?’ ‘Next to the Bible. The . . . Q . . . How do you pronounce this? Q U R comma-thing A N?’ Lifting his pebbled eyes swimming in the thick-woven swirls of oxblood carpet, Wrede muttered apologetically, The Koran.

‘What! For God’s sake, you think you’re the dog’s bollocks trying to get away with this, doncha?’ Reddening in the neck, he volleyed a glob of spittle at his crumpled old man. ‘I’ll have you committed, I will. I’ll be seen doing my duty like the good citizen I am.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Jermayne.’ To his own surprise, Wrede found a little more resolve in a voice that had begun cracking up with fear and anger repressed.

‘It’s my modus operandi.’

Jermayne was stung by a tone of sneaking triumph. ‘What the fuck’s that when it’s at 'ome!’

‘My current assignment,’ he said, slowly getting to his feet.

‘You’re lying through your dentures!’ Jermayne yelled, moving a couple of steps forward with heavy deliberation, as if about to spike the old man. ‘This is gonna impact youse orright!’

Wrede raised two hands, palms out. ‘Surely you wouldn’t dare challenge Internal Security?’

‘What d’yer mean?’ the young man snarled, his bloodshot eyes narrowing with distrust. ‘I’ve got my snitches, yer know.’

‘I’m preparing a state paper on the terminology and interpretation of Islam,’ his father quickly got out, pressing home with as much confidence as he could muster, then swallowed with an awkward jerk of his throat, leaving his son struggling over the import of his words.

'You ain’t got the bottle.’ Jermayne was giving him the death stare, long and hard, then suddenly, ‘Fuck you,I’m outta here!’ with a slam of the front door.

Wrede was lying through his dentures.

Slumped down on the pile as if the blood was leaching from him, Wrede gave himself up to doubt, huge doubts about his role of father. Had he gone the extra mile to encourage Jermayne to read for half an hour every night, even something of the boy’s own choosing? He conceded he’d never permitted him to lay so much as a finger on one of his own classics. No, even then Jermayne would have flung it against the wall in a tantrum of defiance.

Had he used these precious books to armour himself against the tough and getting tougher world out there? A defence mechanism, maybe? Or were they his only outlet for aesthetic satisfaction and more recently sensory pleasures? After all, it had been a few years since he’d actually finished one of his De Luxe editions. He’d given up on Proust one third of the way through volume two of the box-set of six, his weak eyes filming over after a long day’s strain at ITLib. And there were several tomes that he would never get around to reading now. He had run out of time, perhaps the spirit of intellectual enquiry also. In any case, he had nothing of spiritual value to hand down

to his chippy son, too overwhelmed to make space in his heart for a moment’s pity.

He was prepared to admit that both of them needed a buffer from reality, whatever that meant, in entirely opposite ways. But the breach was irreparable. There was no point in going on with this torment. He’d take the easy way out. So what was stopping him?

Simple - he was a moral coward: always had been, always would be. Oh yes, with his penchant for irony, he had often imagined he might die on a pyre of books, Jermayne with that loathsome sneer of superiority tossing a can of kerosene into his library cupboards, even over his dry old stick of a father’s body. But again he was good at imagining such things, poor at taking action. He’d best check with Security Council as soon as possible, grease a palm or two if necessary. Would they really permit him to make arrangements to fly to Switzerland? He could drum up no moral qualms with euthanasia, especially not for himself.

The lexico dragged himself up, leg muscles still quivering.

Why does the local council never fix up the roads out here? Wrede had got off a bus in the outskirts of Pentonvillea and was walking past a conglomeration of empty warehouses, motley premises boarded up, tattoo parlours, bustling amusement arcades and takeaways. Some lap-dancing joint, whatever that was, was bouncing hard-core lyrics the length of the street. Several stores had installed iron grilles over their display windows. A second-hand dive was still flogging dust-covered DVDs for die-hard sentimentalists or those who couldn’t afford an i-Pad. Yet even here, the odd double-storey McNugget in beige stucco with faux eave stuck out on a quarteracre block like a dangling participle - columned porch, artificial turf for skimpy lawn, pool out back and BMW in the driveway. Typical.

There was plenty of street parking. Rust-speckled clunkers as well as the huddle of winos supping cans of VB sprawled out against the front wall. Empty phials of crack and bilious green cigarette packets, paper bags and serviettes from takeaways and corner milk bar blew about and rustled the gutters. ‘’Ere, youse got some spare change, mate?’ spluttered one old geezer, nodding in a dozy manner, his bleary eyes blinking, his chin grizzled grey.

Wrede rummaged in his pocket and came up with a couple of dollar coins. ‘There you go.’

‘Good on yer, mate!’

He’d been keeping ears attuned to the gaggle of goons slouching along behind him.

Was he being tailed? Their honcho kicked out at the first pair of down-at-heel boots.

‘Get outta my road, yer stinking old dossers!’

‘Stinkos and bludgers, the lot o’ youse!’ rapped out the second lout.

Wrede smartly stood aside next to the winos, not daring to look any of these cocky youths in the eye. The grey army had given up the ghost years ago.

Suddenly he found himself pressed up against a baby buggy by a jittery young mum coming from the opposite direction, a half-chewed apple in hand.

‘Gi’us a bit,’ leered the last wop shambling by, taking one hand out of his pockets.

‘You okay?’ Wrede said to the woman, with arm extended, but already she’d skewed and scraped the buggy round the lolling winos, screwed up her face to avoid infection and went jogging off down the road pushing the buggy.

Phew! It was a ratty neighbourhood all right.

Wrede checked the address again. A block of flats, not so much a tower but ugly squat done on the cheap, washing hanging over balconies, the harsh repetitive boum boum boum of rap thumping out over the estate. In shadow the stairwell, with a pong of urine. The lexico pressed the light button encased in a square plastic box, but no response. Starting to mount the steps, but cautiously, he heard murmurs relieved by spurts of chuckling. Someone was smoking a joint; he could smell its trail of sickly sweet smoke curdling the air. As he gingerly rounded the wall at the first landing, the voices fell into a silence that congealed. More slowly he started up the second flight.

They were waiting for him, staring beneath a thick cloud of smoke, leaning back against the parapet wall, two youths taking it in turns to have a drag and breathe in

deep and heavy, their big-hair mullets gelled up like a dumperabout to smash your face into the sand.

Wrede studied his own chunky wedgies as if he’d noticed nothing and made to turn the corner at their landing.

‘Just some sparrow-fart,’ one muttered, blowing out a long stream of smoke in his direction.

‘Got some pansies there, ‘ave yer love?’ the other said and both cracked up with snorts and brays.

Once out of immediate reach, Wrede was tempted to take the steps two at a time, but resisted; he was puffing already and didn’t wish to betray his fear. Continuing to the third storey, listening to the clip of his own heels but no, he wasn’t being hunted.

Chat and chuckles were receding into faint echoes.

'Sparrow-fart'. Wrede tossed the word around. He was fascinated by slang, of course; it went with the territory. Most likely English or Irish derivation. Often witty, original, sometimes stoically understated like convict slang, till it declined into cliché and lost its cruelty. Huh, maybe.

It was a pokey little flat up on the third floor; one bedroom, Wrede supposed. From his garden he’d brought a medley of pink floribundas - the kind of old-fashioned roses that still emanated perfume - and scarlet fuchsias with purple pearl; half a dozen squishy figs; and a bag of lawn-grown camomile leaves freshly dried.

Aisah smiled ‘Welcome’ at the door, spruced up in a tunic and long skirt of batik dyed lemon. ‘Oh, thank you. You very nice man. Please to come in.’

‘Thank you.’

Wrede found himself in a cramped living room. Four Chinese red lanterns dangling from the low ceiling gave a subdued light. Along three walls hung patterned cloths of batik splashed in bright colours. Potted palms spread their fronds in each corner. A woven basket of fruit dominated the small dining table, pineapple, mango and pears,

under which were tucked four chairs of bamboo and rattan. Between the two photographs mounted at either end of the mantel, presumably Aisah’s parents, were three or four abstract creatures carved in wood.

His nose was already twitching at the sweet pungent aroma of joss sticks. ‘This is all very pleasant.’

‘Please to meet my mother . . . Puteri . . . er, it’s better, Mrs Irene Ong. We Peranakan family of mix Malay and Chinese.’

With graceful dignity in a sarong of light but vibrant green and deeper rainforest green shawl to match, the mother minced forward, bowed solemnly and said something Wrede couldn’t understand.

‘She say, “Please be contented in our house.”’

‘Thank you,’ replied Wrede, giving a series of nods to the woman nervously chewing her lip, then practised a slow, deep bow himself.

Irene gave a modest smile and fetched a little woven basket of rice cakes from the table. ‘Please,’ she said. Petite of build, she held her spine straight like her daughter.

‘We say “ketupat”, added Aisah. ‘She cook them in palm leaves.’

‘Kuh-too-paht?’ repeated Wrede, sampling a bite. ‘Mm, delicious!’

‘And she make very good nasi lemak with chili sambal. You like some Chinese tea? Or we drink black tea and green tea also. Or you like decaf?’

‘Black tea sounds good.’ He wondered what that spicy aroma was, with just a hint of coconut milk.

Aisah nodded to Irene. ‘Tolong, dua teh kosong. Now, Mr Wrede, please to come over here and sit on this woven mat. I have somethings to tell.’

Wrede was in the awkward act of crossing his legs when he looked askance at her

typical puzzled expression.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have interview with Internal Security.’

‘Have or had?’ Wrede jumped in.

‘I have already.’

Alarm bells began ringing the changes in Wrede’s heartbeat. ‘About what?’

‘Mm, dirty dealings. Government don’t like that workers show understanding for Kulcher Kringers. Take care of sensitive copy and classified info, they say.’

‘Is that all?’ Wrede allowed a long, loud sigh to escape. ‘Huh, what a beat-up!’

‘Beat up? Who is beating? Or beaten?’

‘No, no. It’s the same old warning to strike fear into state workers. Personnel files are always top secret.’

‘They also say I must upskill my English.’

‘Well, I think you are making excellent progress. I understand almost everything you say.’

‘But they not happy. Kapitan Wrede don’t teach you quick enough,’ they say.

Blast! Was this a threat? ‘Do you mind if I stretch my back against the wall? Excuse me.’ The sinews around his thighs were also stiffening up.

‘Ah, here is black tea. I hope you like. Terima kasih.’

‘Sama-sama,’ replied Irene with a slight nod of the head. ‘Sambal?’ tempting their rare guest by gentle thrusting of the arm with a dip and what looked like griddle bread.

‘It spicy hot,’ warned Aisah.

Palm up and respectful smile: ‘Thank you, later perhaps.’

‘I want you teach me how to say “nyooc- yular”.’

‘It’s nyoo-clee-ah.’

‘Nyoo-clee-ah.’

‘Well done!’

‘Can you teach me Australian English, no American English, no English English?’

‘I can but try, my dear,’ he said, with a tinge of resignation. ‘And how does your mother manage? Irene.’

‘She very sad.’

‘But she’s pleased to be here in Australia?’

‘She please to escape politic, yes, but she miss Malaysia very much. Adat? Mm, festivals and traditions. She miss woman friends and talk at longhouse with family . . . sit on mats between big sacks of palm nuts and cacao seeds and coconuts . . . or shop at market . . . mm . . . shadow puppets . . . You see, our family have longhouse in rain forest. In holiday we leave Kuala Lumpur and go to family house. Many relations share longhouse . . . aunts and cousins, grandparents and babies. We share everything. Family very important in Malaysia, very sacred.

Longhouse very old . . .’

Wrede noticed Aisah’s widening s mile was that of a young girl, her eyes moistening. ‘. . . it made from hardwoods and sit on sticks . . . er stilts, is it? Ya . . . above stream.

Stream very beautiful. There is path of logs go down to bank of stream. You must

walk through some palm trees with big leaves like windmill. They give you cool. You go over bridge and you come to many rubber trees and next rice paddies.’

‘Sounds quite delightful.’

‘Ya, rain forest very green because of monsoon. A lot of rain. Oh and there is basket of dried heads, how you say . . .’

‘Skulls?’

‘Ya, skulls, they hang from main hall.’ She gave him an embarrassed glance. ‘No, we respect ancestors; ancestors bring good luck for rice. My father, he tuai rumah then.

You know, chief of longhouse.’

All of a sudden Wrede became aware of sniffling sounds and noticed Irene sitting on the mat away in the shadows of the palm in the far corner.

‘Yes,’ said Aisah, squinting across, ‘she very lonely in flat. She frighten to go outside, so she don’t know no one. She use to family and sharing.’

‘So what does she do all day?’ He took a sip of scalding tea. ‘Yikes!’

‘What is 'yikes'?’ Aisah was alarmed.

‘Ooh, it’s so good it takes the breath away,’ he lied, rolling his tongue round the roof of his mouth.

‘Please be contented. Yes, Irene always do housework, sewing and make clothes, batik. She miss my father too much. He prisoner for many years, half my life.’

‘I can understand,’ said Wrede. For many years he too had felt like a prisoner. A captive of his own cultural inheritance, an employee of Internal Security, a pawn of the e-lusive son he could never read.

The inevitable had caught up with him at last, like the dumper that would crush his frailty to smithereens. There was no escape. No longer could he stretch to a smile at

the irony, the paradox that in a security culture his very own mindset was at risk.

Perhaps always had been. Driving him back deeper into the life of a frightened bookworm. Hooked on books, words, the hook on which he’d hung his identity. The fact remained: if they were going to put him out to pasture, how was he to go on living? And why would he? With the soldier’s bottle? Ugh, he winced at the ambiguity of that expression. He was sick of it all, trying to find meaning behind the little black symbols. Could he bunk over, become an embed for the Security Council? No, he wouldn’t be game, except the hunted sort. Or cark and croak? The word ‘hemlock’ flashed across his mind, but no image of the plant; not the vegetable sort anyway.

Simply a bald-domed old man with long white hair straggling over his shoulders, wearing a sack-like robe and sandals. No, he certainly wasn’t made of the stuff of martyrs.

The future couldn't come quick enough: very soon he’d be forced to make a decision about personal arrangements, living or otherwise. Whichever way the die fell, he would have to choose his words carefully.

Michael Small February 9-March 31, 2011 P O S T E D B Y MICH A EL A T 19:07 NO

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