Read Online Something Fishy by Shane Maloney - Free Book Online

was expanded and a central bar installed, black marble with onyx inlays and overhead glassware racks. Messalina meets Maserati.
    Tony’s wife Rita pounced as I came though the door. ‘Murray, you big hunk,’ she said, offering her cheeks for a peck-peck. ‘It’s been ages. Getting too high and mighty for your old friends?’
    Rita was petite, not yet forty, tight-packed and high-maintenance. She had a haystack of raven hair, sculpted nails and enough gold jewellery to drown a duck. She abducted my arm and dragged me to the bar. ‘Your lot are upstairs, getting stuck into the nibbles,’ she said. ‘Have a quick drink with your auntie Rita before you go up.’
    We perched knee-to-knee on tubular chrome barstools and the barman poured two glasses of white wine. Rita locked her big brown eyes onto mine and ran a hand down my arm. ‘Still hurting, aren’t you, baby?’ Her hand settled on my knee.
    I shrugged and hid behind my drink. ‘Life goes on. And my boy keeps me busy.’
    Rita nodded knowingly. ‘He must be what, twelve, thirteen now?’
    â€˜Fifteen,’ I said, glad to be off the hook. ‘Doing okay at school. Couldn’t ask for better. Yours?’ I racked my memory. ‘Carla and…’
    â€˜Lauren. Both fine. Carla’s married now, threatening to make me a grandmother. Lauren’s on the overseas trip, waitressing her way around Europe. Must be in the blood.’
    â€˜You were never a waitress, Rita,’ I smiled. ‘Your old man would never have stood for it.’
    Rita’s father Frank had a furniture emporium just down the street from the electorate office. Rococo, traditional and moderne. An immigrant success story, he had higher hopes for his only daughter than marriage to the boy from the fish’n’chip shop. But when his ambitions were thwarted by teenage passion and its unintended consequences, he copped it sweet. He bankrolled young Tony into the pizza business, but only on condition that his princess never knead the dough or sling the capricciosa.
    â€˜Maybe I should take it up,’ sighed Rita. ‘I need a career now that the chicks have flown from the nest and Tony’s busy building an empire.’
    She waved her drink with weary forbearance at the starched napery, floral centrepieces and mood lighting, as if fate had condemned her to sit by the fireplace like some shrivelled, black-clad nonna.
    â€˜Speaking of Tony,’ I said. ‘Is he about? I should say hello.’
    A party of six were being led to their table by a waitress, a bit of a strudel, a fleshy blonde in her late twenties. One of the men made a joke and she laughed, a little too loud, too saucy. Rita’s rings tightened around her wineglass and her lips thinned.
    â€˜Tony?’ She raised her shoulders a millimetre, a gesture of utter indifference. ‘He’s around somewhere, handling something.’ She lit a Marlboro Lite, exhaled a long stream of smoke and showed me her profile, also utterly indifferent. ‘Handles everything around here, Tony does.’
    Just then, rescue arrived in the form of Ayisha Celik, my electorate officer. Ayisha and I went back a good ten years, back to the time when she worked at the Turkish Welfare League and I took care of the electorate office in Melbourne Upper. Once upon a time I entertained certain delusions about my chances with the kohl-eyed Levantine looker, but Ayisha was long-since married to a Macedonian mother’s boy and was now a mother of three herself.
    Since her days at the TWL, Ayisha had worked for the Multicultural Resource Centre and, until the incoming government cut its funding, an advocacy organisation for self-help groups. Foster parents, women’s shelters, recovering glue-sniffers, fur-allergic cat-fanciers, you name it. She also worked as Lyndal’s campaign manager in the three-way preselection contest that sent me to parliament. She