I went to the counter to ask the whereabouts of the nearest public phone. The chief sandwich toaster was flat out filling orders. While I was trying to get his attention, Donny Maitland arrived. He breezed through the door with his handbills in his pocket and greeted me as though there’d never been an iota of doubt in his mind that I’d be there waiting.

So I ordered more coffee and told him about my run-in with Darren Stuhl. Then I warned him about Frank Farrell’s lurking presence and accepted his offer of a free ride after the campaign rally. Half an hour later, I was pinned against the back window of the Kenworth with Heather’s lipstick on my dipstick.

Through the mist-smeared glass, I witnessed Donny’s campaign rally descend into a wild affray when Darren Stuhl decided to start waving around his artillery. Then came the frenzied burst of activity as I quit the truck and went hunting for Donny.

And then I was jogging through the rain, not looking back, thinking only that I’d barely have time to swing past the house and throw some duds into an overnight bag before zooming to the airport. I trotted through the exit gate, past the clog of departing vehicles, and made for the Mobil roadhouse on the other side of Footscray Road. A mustard-coloured smudge was beginning to stain the sky beyond the office towers of the city centre. Maybe Red had turned up. It occurred to me that I’d forgotten to turn on the answering machine when I went out to buy cigarettes. Shit, shit, shit.

Footscray Road was a death trap, eight lanes of speeding trucks. I sprinted across, nearly getting skittled in the process. Drying my face on a paper towel at the pumps, I went into the roadhouse, found the payphone and called the cab company. Fifteen minutes, I was told. My watch said 5.42. By the time I’d finished waiting in line for a doughnut and bought a copy of the Sun, it was saying 5.55.

On the dot of six o’clock, a police car came screaming down the road, lights flashing, and turned into the market. Shortly after, an ambulance did the same.

Had the squished tomato incident gone ballistic, I wondered? I hoped Donny was okay but I figured he could look after himself. Was he not the victorious general who had just swept his foe from the field of battle?

I sipped what Mobil called coffee and thumbed through the paper, looking up every time a car pulled into the forecourt, frantic for the roof-light of an arriving taxi. MOSCOW COUP SHOCK, read the Sun’s front-page headline. Hard-liners had seized power in Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev was missing, location uncertain.

Fuck Gorbachev. It was my son’s whereabouts that concerned me. Was it raining in Sydney? Was Red sleeping rough? Five past six came and went. Another cop car turned into the service road leading to the market. What the hell was going on over there? Had some mafioso greengrocer decided to get antsy about a few dollars worth of hothouse tomatoes? Had hot-blooded Heather decided to take the situation in hand? She’d handled me so well that I was still sticky with her transmission fluid. I wished I could get Lyndal’s motor racing like that.

The news from Moscow was late-breaking, too recent for the Sun’s cartoonist. He’d found a more parochial topic. Angelo was depicted as an uncomprehending wombat, caught in the headlights of an oncoming semitrailer. Bob Stuhl was behind the wheel and the grille bore the words ‘Tonnage Levy’.

Fucking Stuhl family, I thought. They’re out to get me. I’d have to ring Angelo as soon as I got to Sydney, explain my absence, try to smooth his feathers. At least I’d found him a stalking horse to back against the Haulers.

At 6.07:14, a taxi pulled up and tooted its horn. For once, the driver was the silent type, a pockmarked Somali with skin like a chocolate-coated biscuit. I slumped low in the back seat, my fingers beating a fretful tattoo on the vinyl. Shrouds of cloud were swirling around the city office towers, lights beginning to appear in house windows, traffic building. To what kind of dawn was my baby boy waking, eight hundred kilometres away? Where and how and with whom had he passed this night? This one, and the one before it?

We reached the house and I told the driver to wait while I bolted inside. There was no time for personal hygiene or even a change of clothes. Wendy would have to take me as she found me. I rushed into the bedroom, pulled out an overnight bag and was feverishly ransacking my laundry basket, sniffing for packable jocks, when I heard a voice from the living room.

‘You wascally wabbit,’ it said.