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nothing urgent. Bye.’
    I ambled into my private office, a glass-walled cubicle distinguished only by a view across the K-Mart carpark towards the Green Fingers garden centre. I yawned, sprinkled some slow-release fertiliser granules on my African violet, plonked myself in my ergonomic executive chair and waded into my overflowing in-tray.
    Even in opposition, the flag must be flown, the good fight fought, the flesh pressed, the creed recited, the candle kept burning. Over the next couple of weeks, according to the priorities flagged by Ayisha’s multi-coloured post-its, my presence was required at the Housing Justice Roundtable, the Save the Medical Service Action Committee, a performance by the Glenroy Women’s Choir, the Greening Melbourne Forum, Eritrean Peace Day, the Sydney Road Chamber of Commerce, the Free East Timor Association and a citizenship ceremony at Coburg Town Hall.
    I checked the dates against my parliamentary schedule, then moved on to constituent matters, correspondence for signature and an urgent memo on Y2K compliance.
    Apparently some inbuilt computer glitch was going to cause planes to plummet from the sky and hospital operating theatres to black out at the stroke of midnight on 31 December 1999. This global catastrophe was still more than two years away but meanwhile an incessant stream of paperwork had to be completed, with the usual object of ensuring that nobody could be blamed.
    I stared down at the pages of techno-babble, thoughts wandering. I was going to miss Charlie Talbot. He’d been one of the good guys. Spent his life getting us into power, keeping us there when we won it and reminding us why we made the effort.
    â€˜If we don’t do it,’ he’d say, ‘some other bastards will, and they’ll be even worse bastards than us.’
    Bastardry, in Charlie’s language, was a political attribute, not a personal one. He bore no personal animosity towards his opponents. Not even back in the snake pit of the Trades Hall, back when he was state secretary of the Federated Union of Municipal Employees.
    Then, as now, Labor was out of power, state and federal. Whitlam had crashed in a blaze of futile glory and we were back in the wilderness. Blind Freddie could see that we’d be there forever if we didn’t get our house in order. Pronto. It was the Reformers versus the Shellbacks. The arena was the union movement and the battle was long and bitter.
    Charlie’s tolerance must have been sorely tested on quite a few occasions during those decisive tussles. But it was all ancient history now, water over the dam, a mere footnote. The millennium was approaching, bringing new and urgent challenges. I focused on the computer compliance paperwork.
    Come the apocalypse, nobody could say it was my fault.

One by one, the afternoon-shift shelf-stackers trickled through the employees’ door of the Bi-Lo food barn. When Red appeared, I gave him a bip and a wave. He sauntered over to the car, school backpack slung across his shoulder, shirt-tail hanging out his pants.
    â€˜Good funeral?’ Red knew Charlie. Sporadically over the years, Charlie had taken a vaguely avuncular interest to which Red had responded in a vaguely nepotal manner. Gifts had never been exchanged.
    â€˜His best yet.’ I started to open my door. ‘Want to drive?’
    Red looked around and scanned the scene. ‘Now?’
    On quiet Sunday afternoons, Northcote Plaza carpark was a perfect spot for introductory lessons in three-point turns and parallel parking. But this was a midweek evening at the intersection of homebound rush-hour and pre-dinner shopping flurry, dusk blurring the visibility, road courtesy somewhere between endangered and extinct. Out on High Street, the trams were crawling, every stop a stop, the backed-up traffic seething with latent rage.
    Red got into the passenger seat. ‘Not worth it,’ he said.
    â€˜I thought you wanted some