Shawn's Law (18 page)

Harley was nodding.

“I was wrong, I know. So I paid the fine, and next time we visited I paid for extra time. We were late again. I got back to the car four minutes after my parking had expired and there was a fine. The parking inspector must’ve sat there and waited for the time because the slip was printed at one minute past the deadline.”

Now Harley’s lips were twitching.

“There was nothing I could do about it—I was in the wrong. So I had to pay it again. But then they gave me a fine when my parking wasn’t expired.”

To this he frowned. “Huh? They can’t do that, can they?”

“Well, they did. So I rang them up and complained. I was in the right. I had my ticket, which was paid up to three minutes past two, and the fine was issued at one-forty-six. So the lady told me that it must’ve been a mistake on the ticket inspector’s side, and if I could send her the ticket and the slip, she would cancel the fine.”

“Okay—so what went wrong?”

I crossed my arms across my chest and glared. “Two months later I suddenly have debt collectors knocking on the door. No phone call. No letter. Nothing. Just suddenly two guys with their legal bits of paper. The fine hadn’t been canceled, and if I didn’t pay it, plus administration costs, I would lose my driver’s license, and they had the right to take my possessions.”

“What?” Harley gasped. “They can’t do that.”

“That’s what they told me when they turned up. So I got on the phone and talked to about fifteen people before I found someone who dealt with overdue fines. They had no record of my letter—you know the one? The one with the original ticket and the fine slip? And stupid me, I hadn’t taken a copy of it before I posted it. I had no record of my paying the ticket or anything. So then began a game of trying to make them believe me. I made so many phone calls, e-mails, more phone calls, and even a personal visit to their office—where they wouldn’t see me. I began to think that it wasn’t necessary and I should just pay the darn sixty-five bucks and be done with it, but it turned out that my debt was now four hundred and thirty-six dollars, because they had to call in the debt collectors.”

Harley was definitely amused with me now.

I ignored him as I told my story. “Finally, after making friends with Geoff and Colin, the repo guys, the Council told me that they’ve found my letter. But the ink is so faded on the ticket they now can’t read it. The stupid woman rang me and told me over the phone that they were going to erase the debts and costs that I had incurred from the
generosity of their hearts
. Oh, man. I was livid.”

Harley’s hand was over his mouth and I think he was laughing at me. “And this is why you hate them?”

“No,” I told him. “It was true I wasn’t happy, but the reason I hate them comes from June last year. The sixth. It was bucketing down with rain. People with their umbrellas were running everywhere. I was driving along Hay Street when the car in front of me hit a pedestrian.” Harley looked instantly concerned. “The woman darted across a pedestrian crossing, but she was running and the car in front of me didn’t have time to stop. The woman was badly injured, and since I saw it happen, I stopped on the side of the road and ran over to the woman. She’d broken her leg and her wrist. The ambulance was called, the cops showed up, there were people everywhere.”

“Was she okay?”

“Yes. But after everyone cleared the area, I got back to my car and found a fine slip on my windscreen.”

This time Harley couldn’t hold back his bark of laughter. “It’s not funny,” I told him in outraged tones. “The parking inspector fined me for parking in a disabled bay when I didn’t have a proper permit. While everyone else was worried about this woman, the bloody parking inspector was merrily handing out fines.”

I was righteous in my indignation while Harley was trying hard not to laugh. He chuckled into his napkin while I simmered and pouted on my side of the table.

“So what happened then?” he asked.

I was sulking and wasn’t sure I wanted to finish the story. I huffed and said, “More phone calls. More e-mails. I started to get angry and demanded they fire the parking inspector. So then they started to refuse to take my phone calls, saying that I was abusive.”

“You? Abusive?” Harley asked in disbelief. “You don’t even use the f-word.”

I defensively covered my mouth and muttered, “I may’ve called the lady an illegitimate child of a toad-sucking witch.”

That was it for Harley. He lost it and burst forth with loud laughter that startled my mother and had me glaring at him. He was supposed to be a supportive boyfriend, and he wasn’t. So I stormed to my feet and snatched his mostly finished meal from under his nose and took it to the kitchen where I could sulk in earnest. He was laughing so hard he didn’t notice.

I had washed the plates and was starting on the cups before he got himself under control enough to follow me into the small kitchen. He came up behind me and pushed me against the sink by leaning his body on mine and encircling my waist with his hands.

I tried to get away. Really. I did.

“I’m sorry, babe. I didn’t mean to laugh. But it’s funny. Can you tell me what happened next?”

“No.” I wasn’t ready to forgive him. I wondered what he would do if I demanded a blow job in order to forgive him. I stopped and thought about Harley and his horniness, then decided I would have to find an activity for my mother to do that would take her attention for at least five minutes because I was pretty sure that Harley wasn’t averse to dispensing blow jobs to me.

“C’mon, babe. Tell me?”

“No. I don’t want to. Just know that I’m really friendly with the repo guys now. Colin even brought his fourteen-year-old son around the other week for a visit. Colin thinks the boy is gay and is having a bit of an issue with it. So Ty and I hung out for a bit.”

My mother heard the magic word. “Ty?” she asked eagerly. “Is Ty coming for a visit?”

I sighed my regret that most days my mother struggled to remember my name, but could get so excited over a boy she had met just once, but had asked about nearly every day since. “If you finish what’s on your plate, Mum, I promise I’ll ring Colin and ask him to bring Ty around again.”

At that promise, she began to attack her food.

Harley was still chuckling. “You know the repo guy’s phone number?”

I turned in his arms so we were facing each other. This had the added bonus of our dicks saying hello once again, since neither of us were wearing underwear. “Of course. I know the repo guys well now. They would come and visit, and I’d send them home with a whole bunch of fresh vegetables. We had coffee and cake together while they billed it to the Council. I know all about Colin’s ex-wife who ran off with the neighbor’s son and Geoff’s aspirations to finish law school. Colin also has two daughters who are going through puberty, and he’s deathly afraid of it. So, he brought them around, and Lisa had a bit of a girl-to-girl talk to them both, and they ring her weekly now. Colin even meets up with Lisa’s husband in the pub some nights.”

Harley had that oh-my-God-you-are-joking look on his face. So I told him, “And do you remember three weeks ago, when I told you my car broke down and I needed to take Mum to the doctor? The auto-breakdown service was busy, so I rang Geoff, and he came over and got the car going for me.”

“But did you get the Subiaco Council to waive your fine?”

I felt myself blushing and fiddled with the button on his shirt. “I decided to stage a sit-in at their office. I was planning on sitting in their foyer until someone listened to me. Lisa came with the kids, and Brendan, and Colin and Geoff, and Kris, and everyone else I could find. I even took Mum with me. There were seventeen of us. The Council still refused to talk to me. It was Mum who persuaded them in the end.”

“Yeah? What did she say?”

“Nothing,” I whispered. “But she did pee in their potted plant that was next to the main desk.”

That sent Harley into hysterics again. I glared at him to no effect.

“It’s not funny. They listened and eventually canceled the fine. But I refuse to go anywhere near them again. I refuse to have anything to do with a Council that doesn’t listen to the little people. And I’m not meeting your father until he can see that. I’m sorry. But even a blow job is not going to make me change my mind.”

Harley

Negotiations.

“D
AD
? I
need you to quit the markets in Subiaco and find somewhere else to earn a living or else my boyfriend’s going to dump me.”

That was my second attempt at working out the problem between Shawn and me.

“Shawn? Can you be reasonable, mate? The whole Subiaco Council is not out to get you.”

That was my first attempt.

It was a good five weeks before I found the solution. That was a lot of angst on my behalf, and a lot of blow jobs.

To Shawn. The blow jobs were for Shawn, not for my…. Yeah. We just won’t go there.

It was a bit of a blow to my ego too. I don’t like to talk about it, because, in a way, I’m rather ashamed of what I do to earn a crust, but I’m actually a problem solver. That doesn’t sound like a very important thing to be, not really, but these days you need people like me. I’m a lateral thinker. I don’t just try to push my way through a problem, I find a way to go around it. Or under it. Or over it. Or else I goddamn walk up to it and knock on its door and ask politely to come inside.

I believe it’s the way people are brought up these days. We send our children to school and we plonk a book in front of them and we
tell
them how it should be done. Then we set a piece of paper on the desk and ask the child to regurgitate everything they’ve just read. Once they have the book memorized, we pat them on the head, tell them that they’re educated, and send them out into the world.

It doesn’t help them. People are full of facts and figures, but they have no idea how to proceed when they come up against something that’s not in the rule book. Children have been institutionalized in schools, instead of being given the chance to discover things for themselves. We can tell them that the fence is electrified, but some don’t believe it until they can touch it for themselves. And with everyone so afraid of being sued these days, no teacher has the chance to zap the kids in the classroom so they
can
experience electricity.

So, I have contracts with many corporate businesses all over town to find solutions to problems. To think outside the box. I can never tell what I’m going to be doing—and that’s the fun part of my work. I end up talking to a lot of people, chatting in coffee shops, and visiting a lot of powerful players. The problems can be anything.

A couple of years ago, a corporation wanted to purchase some land, but the owner refused to meet with them and ignored all communication. The owner was invited to swanky restaurants, to corporate boxes at the football, to a weekend of fishing on a very expensive yacht—but refused it all. I was sent to work out how to get the owner to sell. They had tried bribery, blackmail, and legal threats, and were just about to hire musclemen when they called me in. I knocked on the owner’s door and found the sweetest, loneliest old lady you could ever meet.

Three hours later, after drinking so much tea I was sloshing as I walked, I was looking through her family photo album. She was a widow, whose only daughter had committed suicide after her newborn passed away from SIDS.

Three weeks later I had the contract sealed. The woman was several million dollars richer, and I had found her a weekly bingo session where she could meet new friends. Beyondblue, an organization that helps with depression and anxiety, had received a large donation and a corporate sponsorship deal for the next three years, as did SIDS and Kids. But the thing that clinched the deal? A memorial in the middle of a new suburb where people could buy a plaque to remember the ones they had lost to SIDS.

Of course, my skills are not only used for big business. They often work
against
big business. So, when Matt approached me to find out how to stop the clearing of the Carnaby’s nesting ground, I knew how to help. We lost that one, and hundreds of hectares were cleared. But we put up a big fight.

I usually contract out my services until I have enough money to travel overseas and fight the next big ecological or social problem. I’ve campaigned for forests, for animals, for immunizations, and for women’s rights.

Fighting for my boyfriend was something new. This was personal. I had a lot at stake.

“Shawn, babe? Can you just forget about Subi Council for two hours and come and meet my dad?”

“Dad? If I promise to fund your retirement, do you think you’ll at least think about quitting Subiaco?”

“Shawn, sweetums? How about if we all meet in a park somewhere and you can pretend you don’t know that he’s my father?”

Negotiations were at a stalemate, so I went laterally. Shawn was refusing to consider that he’d made a mistake about Subiaco being the spawn of all evil, so I began to gather information. Instead I opened a can of worms. What I found were a whole bunch of pissed-off people who’d had parking tickets issued and had no way to fight them.