is the same silver colour as the full moon. The face on the clock says it’s 7.35 p.m. and I’ve missed my deadline for tomorrow’s paper. I see visions of Brian Robertson in his office bending bars of steel in anger as he curses my name for not filing twenty measly centimetres of fawning colour about the glories of a Queensland Champion named Tytus Broz.
I find Bevan Penn in the reflection in the rearview mirror. He sits in the back seat. He stares out his window, stares up at that full moon. He hasn’t said a word since our car tyres left a cloud of gravel dust to blow on that sprawling jacaranda in Bellbowrie. Maybe he never will say a word again. Some things can’t be put into words.
‘Nowhere to park,’ Caitlyn says. ‘Nowhere to fucking park.’
The central CBD gutters of Adelaide Street are lined with cars.
‘Fuck it,’ Caitlyn says.
She yanks on the steering wheel hard. The Ford cuts across Adelaide Street and bounces hard up a kerb into King George Square, the central meeting point of the city of Brisbane, a paved square of manicured lawns and military statues and a rectangular fountain kids piss in when they’ve drunk too much lemonade at the annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
Caitlyn slams on the brakes directly outside the Brisbane City Hall entry doors.
A young male City Hall security guard rushes to the car. Caitlyn winds her window down in expectation.
‘You can’t park here,’ the security guard says, dumbstruck, clearly disturbed by this unexpected threat to the hall’s security.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘Call the police. Tell them Bevan Penn is in my car. I won’t be moving until they get here.’
Caitlyn winds up her window and the security guard fumbles for the two-way radio on his belt.
I nod at Caitlyn.
‘I’ll be back,’ I say.
She gives a half-smile.
‘I’ll keep this guy distracted,’ she says. ‘Good luck, Eli Bell.’
The security guard barks into his transceiver. I slip out of the car and scurry in the opposite direction from City Hall, past the water fountain and across King George Square, then I double back, taking a wide and clandestine angle to the hall’s grand entry door, behind the security guard who is busy shouting at Caitlyn through her closed car window. There’s a welcome desk inside the hall. A bright, beaming Indian woman on the desk.
‘I’m here for the awards,’ I say.
‘Your name, sir?’
‘Eli Bell.’
She scans a wad of papers with printed names. I have the black tote bag over my left shoulder. I slip it off my shoulder, down behind the desk, out of her view.
‘Have they announced the community awards yet?’
‘I believe they’re announcing them now,’ she says.
She finds my name, ticks it with her pen. She tears a ticket from a pad, hands it to me.
‘You’re in row M, sir,’ she says. ‘Seat seven.’
I scurry to the doors of the auditorium. A vast and round room built for fine music. Maybe five hundred red chairs and important people in black suits and nice dresses, divided into two main groups split by a central aisle. Polished wood floors running to a polished wood stage with five levels of choir staging before a backdrop of imposing brass and silver acoustic pipes.
The MC tonight is the woman who reads the news for Channel Seven, Samantha Bruce. She comes on every afternoon, straight after Wheel of Fortune. Dad calls Samantha Bruce a ‘quinella’. A double win. Easy on the eye but bright too. He recently confessed this adoration for the newsreader when I asked him if he would ever entertain marrying another woman and he came back with his quinella theory and how his dream date would be a night with Samantha Bruce in Kookas restaurant at the Bracken Ridge Tavern, during which Samantha Bruce would stare longingly across the table at him, whispering the same word over and over: ‘Perestroika’. I then asked Dad what the womanly equivalent of a trifecta would be.
‘Shuang Chen,’ he said.
‘Who’s Shuang Chen?’ I asked.
‘She’s a Shanghai dental nurse I read about.’
‘What makes her the trifecta?’
‘She was born with three tits.’
Samantha Bruce leans into a lectern microphone.
‘Now we move to our Community Champions,’ the newsreader MC says. ‘These are the unsung Queensland heroes who are always putting themselves last. Well, ladies and gentlemen, tonight we put them first and foremost in our collective heart.’
The packed house applauds. I walk through the central aisle, looking at row numbers on the edge of seats. Row W for why. Row T for