1. On the level

The taxidriver’s navigation screen was tilted. Quint noticed it as soon as he sat down in the passenger’s seat. He almost reached to straighten it, but instead buckled his seatbelt and put his hands in his lap, sitting quietly.

“Where are we off to?” asked the cabbie, looking at Quint looking at the map screen.

“2A Monash Drive, Campbell 2612.”

“Ohhhh-kay!” The driver put the car in gear, pulling away from the taxi rank into the maze of roadworks surrounding the airport. This was jarring, as the road surfaces were uneven, speed bumps mingled with potholes and abrupt changes in level as the cab sped past construction barriers and signs.

“You know the way?” Quint asked, quite lost already.

“I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve driven along here!” the cabbie said. He paused. “Oddly enough, that’s how it works out.”

Quint guessed there might be a joke somewhere in that, but he decided that it meant the cabbie knew how to find his home.

The interior of the taxi was cluttered with keypads, screens, mysterious gadgets and notices, and it took time to look at them all. The map screen was canted in two directions, he saw, but he kept his hands in his lap. Soon the jumble of the airport roadworks was behind, they had passed the guns mounted either side of the entrance to the Royal Military College, and Quint saw the name of Monash Drive come up on the tilted screen. He angled his head to read it.

He liked seeing streets and landmarks labelled and presented for his view. Like a living, moving map. From the air, although everything was laid out, especially when the plane was taking off or landing, there were no labels, and you had to guess what things were.

The cab turned into Monash Drive, and the cabbie, looking at the house numbers, said a rude word. But Quint knew where they were. The high end of his street had the high numbers and it was easy to remember. The cabbie couldn’t have been driving around Canberra long.

Here the houses were grand, on big blocks, with views out over the rest of the suburb, across the lake and onto Parliament House. The house price numbers were also high.

As they descended, the houses became smaller and closer together. Grouped around a central oval were the retirement home, school and shops. Newsagent, a small supermarket, restaurant, bakery and bookshop. A cluster of flats formed a red brick block between Monash Drive and Blamey Crescent.

Then a small hill, right in the middle of Campbell, and after that they were going down again, through the ex-government houses. Many of the cheaper sort, the “monocrete” fibro houses, had made way for more modern homes, usually with flat slab sides in pastel colours of mauve and green.

Sometimes the developers had managed to squeeze in two or even three small houses on a single block. The wide lawns and roomy yards replaced by a few square metres of pebbles.

Quint looked at a block enclosed by mesh fencing. Just a tangle of rubble where a home had been. A couple of bare fruit trees forlorn to one side.

The bottom of Monash Drive, where it hit Constitution Avenue, was home. Quint’s block of flats stood four and square on the corner. They were ugly but practical, and they suited him. A companion block on the Blamey Crescent corner had been modernised, and the tall panes of glass, angled like the prows of a fleet of ships, made them look most un-flatlike. Flats should be flat, Quint thought, not tricked out to look like an airport terminal or sports stadium.

The cabbie stopped in the centre of the row of flats. Quint looked at him sharply.

“Number 2A, please. Look, there it is. The number’s on the door.”

The cab moved forward five metres and the meter ticked over five cents to $16.20.

“That’s eighteen-twenty with the two dollar parking fee they stick us with,” the cabbie rattled, indicating a slip of paper. “Ah, just make it eighteen dollars, thanks.”

That seemed very high.

“Have the taxi fares gone up?” he asked.

“Not since the last time.”

Quint looked in his wallet. He had a twenty, two tens and a five. He pulled out the twenty, considered that the cabbie might not have any change, put it back and after some thought, handed over a ten and a five.

“I’ve got the rest in coins. Is that okay?”

“Fine, fine,” the cabbie said, watching Quint count out a fifty-cent piece, eight twenties, four tens and a series of five cent coins.

Quint wasn’t sure he’d gotten it right, and began laying out the coins on the centre console, but the driver scooped them up and jangled them into a bag. There might have been five cents extra, he thought, trying to remember how they had looked on the black vinyl. That wasn’t right.

But it could be a tip if it was extra. He smiled. “Thank you!”

The driver said something, but his words were lost in a great rending sound. Quint looked out to see one of the trees in the parkland across the street crash to the ground. There were men in orange vests with tools and helmets, vehicles with flashing lights, signs and barriers.

“That’s the new ASIO building going up,” the driver said, seeing Quint’s blank face. “Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation. The spy mob. Going to be a huge building. Five stories high.”

“Five stories?” Quint tried to imagine an office block stretching along Constitution Avenue, rising above the oak trees.

“Of course, those five stories will be underground. Security, you see. Just a grassy knoll on top.”

That didn’t sound so bad.

“Mind you,” the driver went on, “it’s going to be chaos here for the next couple of years.”

Chaos opposite Quint’s home. This was not good. He reached out and straightened the driver’s map screen.

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay