Saving Billie by Peter Corris Read Free Book Online Page B

reluctantly. In and out in just under an hour and twenty dollars. I eat there as often as I can, perhaps twice a month. The waiters must know me but they never acknowledge that they’ve seen me before. I like that.
    Anticipating that Lou and Mr X would take longer over their meal, I wandered up George Street, checked out what was on at the movies, had a coffee. Still, I was back in Surry Hills too early and had to kick my heels for a while until the taxi pulled up. Lou and her date stood outside the apartment building for a few minutes. She gesticulated; he shook his head. He leaned down to kiss her and she stepped back, then relented and they kissed briefly. She turned away quickly and headed for the security buttons. He heaved a theatrical sigh, crossed the street and used his remote to unlock the Beemer.
    Very interesting, I thought, but what it meant I had no idea. I considered following him to wherever he was going, but decided against it. A light rain was falling and I wouldn’t have been able to keep pace with the BMW if he decided to open it up. Besides, a bit of voyeurism goes a long way with me and I had enough on him. By office hours on Monday I’d know who he was and where he lived.
    Late night news on TV. The election campaign was in its fourth week of six, but it was hard to get excited about it. The ALP had long ago put Karl Marx in mothballs and embraced Milton Friedman or one of his disciples. The conservatives were continually reassuring us that we were safe and secure, meaning that our houses and investments were—that is, as long as you had a house and investments. If you didn’t you were insecure and it was probably your fault. It certainly wasn’t theirs.
    Pollies in suits, men and women, went around the supermarkets and malls and appeared on television pretending to be ordinary people, when they probably couldn’t tell you the price of a litre of milk or what it cost to register a Toyota Corolla. Not within a bull’s roar.
    Time was when I followed politics and listened to what the players had to say to see who made the most sense. Now, it all sounded scripted and rehearsed and came out no better than white noise. Both sides made wild promises about what they’d do with our taxes; the side that lost wouldn’t have to honour them and the side that won would find ways to renege. I’d voted left all my life, and this time I was considering trying something witty as an informal vote—that’s if I was free on the Saturday.
    It’s fifty kilometres south-west from Sydney to Campbell-town and a few more north of that to Liston. I made the drive through light traffic on a warm Saturday morning. On a non-holiday weekend, with the football season finished and no other major sporting events on, the traffic is local in all directions and I made good time. It wasn’t an area I was very familiar with. The web search had told me there were 150 000 people in Campbelltown and the number was going up all the time. I knew that some of those people went south over the escarpment down to the Illawarra coast for their holidays and that many of them had never been to Sydney. There were pockets of affluence and stretches of poverty, ‘aspirational’ voters and battlers, a university and the ‘legend of Fisher’s ghost’—the story from colonial days of the ghost of a murdered man named Fisher manifesting itself and pointing the way to where the body had been deposited. That led to the murderer who was convicted and necked. It was about time I got better acquainted with the place.
    I drove the Hume Highway to St Andrews and worked my way to Liston via secondary roads. There was still a lot of open land around Glenfield and the Ingleburn military establishment, but all the area to the south was filling up fast.
    At first glance, Liston didn’t look too bad. For one thing the land rose and fell so that the dreary flatness that characterises a