DIAL N FOR MURDER

Another Saturday morning at the computer.

The computer room hums with the white noise of spinning hard drives.

These PCs are getting on a bit. They are certainly more than a year and half old. It has been said that the speed of computing doubles every 18 months, so these computers would be reaching prehistoric status in the eyes of Computer People.

Every year, piles of computers appear on the pavement in the City, as offices invest in the latest gear and dump the old. It would be a good time to pick up some of last year’s model, but there would be a lot to carry. Maybe there are companies that come and collect them. Maybe they just go to the Tip. Maybe there is an enterprising garbage collector who sells them or donates them to Old People’s Homes. Maybe they just get rained on.

A jarring thump in the doorway , makes me jump.

It is my son Zac. I have no idea how he came to be this big. He is a giant and getting around in the confined spaces of this house is something that he does with difficulty. For him, walking around in this house must be like trying to drive around in the City in one of those big yellow mining trucks.

The surfboard he is carrying has taken small chunk out of the doorjamb.

‘I’m off to the beach. See ya later’, and he sets off while I get back to work and try to ignore the departing cracks and thumps.

Let me try and describe the building that i’m working on at the moment.

imagine that you had come across one of those spinning tops that kids used to play with a long time ago. It would have been made out of two halves of pressed metal, and while it had a base that came to a point, the centre enclosed the mechanism that made it spin.

A child would work the rounded wooden handle at the top and coloured flying saucer would start to turn faster and faster, Sometimes the holes on the side would start to whistle and then the child would let go and the tin dervish would spin on the floor of the playroom, searching for the lowest point in the floor, slowing, slowing and finally falling over itself, like a clumsy circus clown.

Well, if you had taken one of these and thrown it out onto some muddy ground so that it had partially sunk in, that is what my new building is going to look like. I haven’t always favoured circular windows, but for this building they are going to be the only way to go.

The story goes that the architects for the new church that was to be built near the banks of the Thames were at a loss. Their client, Queen Anne, had proved difficult to please and had rejected design after design. Royalty can be hard to please and the penalty for failure can often be severe, so in the end they had asked her flat out what she wanted. Apparently this had enraged her. So it would seem that the conceptual phase of the project had been as frustrating for her as it had been for the architects.

Queen Anne flew into a rage and kicked the nearest object which happened to be a footstool. The footstool landed upside down with it legs in the air.

‘That!’ she screamed. ‘Build me that!’, and hobbling slightly, because mahogany footstools are not the ideal things to kick when you are in a rage, she left the room.

Whether she asked the retainers and footmen to slam the doors behind her is not a matter of record.

Sometime, when you have time, take a look at St John’s in Smith Square, which is also known as Queen Anne’s Footstool.

Yes, it is true. This story has been the cornerstone to my approach to designing buildings. Not that my clients are regal, but they are invariably rich and I always insist on meeting them in order to be able to picture how they would behave when they are in a rage and decide on what sort of object it would be that they would kick.

The next phase is the finding of that object and deconstructing it and reconstructing it with the aid of Computer Assisted Design.

There.

That’s my secret.

Now you know.

In thirty-five years no-one has tumbled to it.

The phone rings. Like the computers, this phone is not the latest thing in Technology. The handset has a curly wire that connects it to the body of the phone and the body of the phone has an uncurly wire that runs to the wall.

When I put it to my ear a voice yells ‘Zac!’

– Uh. No, this isn’t Zac

‘This is his phone isn’t it?’

– Er, yes

‘Where is he?’

-He’s just gone out

(and my eyes go to the dent in the doorjamb)

‘Tell him I’ve got some work for him’

– Sure. OK. Just a sec. Let me grab a pen

(This is weird. Zac works full-time odd hours in one of those gigantic buildings in the CBD that regularly leaves piles of computers out on the pavement)

-OK, got it

‘Tell him it’s Harry. Harry Nash. 9326 4189’

– Four, One, Eight, Nine. Got that. Er. Could it tell him what its about?

‘Electrical work. He’s an Electrician isn’t he?’

– Um, no, actually. He works at PWC…

‘You’re a fucking idiot!’

and the phone slams down

For a while I stare at the flying saucer/spinning top design on the screen and try to remember what it is.

Then I put the phone down.

Am i really a fucking idiot?

Let me see.

I work from home.I have a son whose name is Zac.

I also have a son whose name is Nathanael. I work in isolation because every time I get into the car to go someplace, the police will pull me over and fine me for something. After I lost my license, people would abuse me when I walked on the pavement. The police fined me for jaywalking. I was abused for walking too quickly. After my hip replacement operation, I was abused for walking too slowly. Once, at Wynyard, when i kneeled to tie a shoelace, a wild smelly woman with a Queen Anne Complex kicked me into George Street and a bus stopped in time and did not run me over.

It seemed best to remove the doorbell at my front door because it seems that an endless stream of assholes was queuing up to ring it.

In ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’, George Orwell describes what it is like to be someone who hands out flyers on the street. I took it that he was asking me, as a personal favour, to treat the people who hand out flyers kindly. So, when I was at my front door and a guy asked me if I wanted a leaflet, I said that I would and he told me to get a fucking doorbell.

I thought about it some more and decided that i was not actually a fucking idiot and that since Harry Nash had been so kind as to give me his phone number and that I had written it down, I would call him back and let him know.

9326 4189

He picks up on the second ring

‘Talk to me’

– Harry?

‘Yeah’

– Harry Nash?

‘Yeah? What?’

– Look, Harry, you called me. Are you listening? I have a son called Zac….

‘You’re a fucking idiot’, he said

and slammed the phone down again.

I sat there for a good long while. The receiver was still in my hand and purring. Eventually I hung it back on its cradle.

It was then that I decided that i would stop staying indoors, miss my deadline for the Spinning Top Building and get Harry Nash.

–

Finding out where he lived was simply a matter of looking for Nash in the White Pages. It was not so very long ago that this was how you went about getting people’s phone numbers. Every so often, these fat books with white pages and other books with yellow pages would appear on your doorstep. These books listed everyone in the city Alphabetically. If you wanted the telephone number of someone in another city you could call Directory Enquiries. If you wanted the number of someone in another country you could call International Directory Enquiries and speak to an Operator.

But I didn’t want to speak to an Operator, I wanted to do my own looking and the place that you had to go if that was what you wanted to do was the Main Post Office in North Sydney.

I knew this because I had once wanted to look up the names of Literary agents in New York. You went to the main post office and you asked at the main desk for the international phone books and were directed to the third floor to the international phone book section.

If you wanted to make photocopies, there was a photocopier at the disposal of the public and each photocopy would cost you fifty cents. I had imagined that I would need to copy a few pages and had a bag of fifty cent coins at the ready, but the entire section listing the Literary agents had been neatly cut out with a razor.

This will all sound very silly in today’s world of hi-tech communication when all you have to do is to ask your computer a question and be presented with the answer moments later.

Looking for anyone called Kray, with the initial R, with an address in the east end of London turned out to be a lot easier.

There were several R. Krays who lived within spitting distance of Brick Lane. There was even a Ronald Kray in Hoxton and a Reginald Kray in Whitechapel.

I knew full well that the boys themselves were both deceased, but still, they were the sort of paranoid schizophrenics whose names could well breed paranoia in others.

I called International Directory Enquiries to ask for the number of a Ronald Kray in London. The Operator was very helpful and asked me to be more specific. Anywhere in the East End of London was going to do, as was the number of anyone whose name was Ronald Kray. The operator gave me a number. Because they were being so helpful I also asked if they had a number for a Reginald Kray at the same address. There wasn’t one, but there was another Reginald Kray in the East End and I wrote that one down too.

In the thrilling first part of this story, I got a phone call from a man called Harry Nash who had called my number because he wanted to get in touch with an electrician called Zac.

My son’s name is Zac and when he had asked to speak to Zac I had told him that Zac was not here and asked to if he wanted to leave a message. Harry Nash gave me his number and said that Zac should call him. When I asked if I could tell Zac what it was about and he had said, a little impatiently it seemed to me, that it was about electrical work and added ‘He’s an electrician, isn’t he?’ in a manner that made it seem less like a question than a matter of me being a fool for not knowing that. Realizing that he must have called a wrong number, I had had to tell him that Zac was not an electrician at which point he called me a ‘fucking idiot’ and hung up.

Harry Nash had just given me his number , so I called him back in order to try and clarify things and to establish that I was not a fucking idiot, but he called me a fucking idiot again and hung up again.

When you look in the white pages under N for Nash, you find that there is a Nash, Harry living at 18, Blaxland Road, Bellevue Hill, which is a classy suburb of Sydney. The phone number for this Nash, Harry is 9326 4192, the number that Harry had given me earlier. So I now knew Harry’s address.

In the weeks that followed Harry Nash came to represent all the rude and selfish people I had ever met.

If someone was being rude in the supermarket queue, I found myself asking ‘Are you Harry Nash?’ which had the effect of confusing them and stopped them from being rude while they thought about it.

Sometimes they were being so rude that it no longer became a question. ‘You must be Harry Nash’, I would say.

And after a pause they would give quite a long explanation of who they were which would have enabled me to add them to my list, but Harry Nash always remained my number one priority.

I had wasted a lot of time calling people at random from random phone boxes all over Sydney and telling them that I was Harry Nash and that my phone number was 9333 4192 and then calling them fucking idiots and hanging up. But I found this process upsetting.

So I made up cards for non-existent Escort Agencies whose contact number was 9333 4192 and left them in phone boxes and waiting rooms and buses and ferries and trains all over town in the hope that Harry would get a few calls late at night and in the wee small hours.

In preparation for the call that I would make myself, watched a lot of Michael Caine films. I had decided that this would be the best voice to use because Harry sounded like someone who might have hung out with the Kray twins.

When I thought that I was ready I called, this time it was from a phonebooth at Hornsby station. A woman answered. This took me by surprise and I hung up.

A change of plan and I called back. This time I was ready for her voice and asked if I could please speak to a Mr. Harry Nash. When she told me that he wasn’t there, I told her that I was sorry not to have been able to reach him at this time and that I was calling on behalf of New South Wales Lotteries and that I would be calling back later with some very, very good news.

It’s amazing what you can do with an electric typewriter, a sharp razor blade and access to a laser photocopier. I have lost count of the number of overdue bills, final notices and parking fines that were sent to Bellevue Hill.

His car was easy to spot. For one thing it was ale ways parked in front of his house, which was nice if you liked that kind of thing, but a little bit showy for my taste. I thought the roman pillars looked silly and I have never been a fan of gold leaf, even in churches.

The car was a Ford ‘Statesman’. Its colour was somewhere between British racing green and hot English mustard, a hot British Duckshit colour and the pearlescent effect made it look like it had only recently come out of the duck. The numberplate was HN 111. I kicked myself for not having guessed that it would be.

At a few minutes after midnight, I killed the engine and let my Honda Civic coast further down the hill. I had taken care to wear only black. The door opened noiselessly because I had greased the hinges that afternoon. I slipped the knee-length, oversized black football socks over my sneakers and slid silently onto the pavement. The Vegemite that I had used to blacken my face was a bit smelly, but it would wash off.

I crawled along the kerb until I reached Harry’s car. I imagine that I slid over the bonnet like a spreading stain, nothing more than a shadow. I found the small wire with my tongue and trapped it in my teeth. It was a moment’s work to probe it into the eyes of the windscreen washers of HN 111 and get them to point over the roof of the car. Then I slid back into the darkness and crawled back to my car.

Slipping the clutch and letting off the handbrake, I let the car pick up speed before putting it into third and letting the motor kick into life. Turning the headlights on felt like lighting up the ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign. I chuckled to myself at the thought of the next time Harry came to need to use his windscreen washers.

It was at the third red light in Double Bay that I thought that the people in the car which had pulled up alongside were giving me funny looks. When the lights turned green, I peeled rubber and took a sharp left onto a winding road. The road climbed steeply and I shot through all the roundabouts. There was a sharp right hander ahead. A blind corner. I took and pulled up to the kerb and killed the lights. It was when I was sitting there in the dark and checking the rearview mirror to see if they had managed to follow that I remembered the Vegemite.

Finally, one day, Michael Caine did get through to the man himself.

‘Allo’

– Harry

‘Allo’

– Haaaaaree(more long drawn-out this time)

(suspicious) ‘Who’s this?’

(even longer)Haaaaaaaaaareeee Hee Hee Hee (with a chuckle)

(chuckles too) Nah, come on, who is this?

– Harry, Harry, Harry

(a hint of recognition) ‘Reggie?’

(snort) – Not even close

‘Kev?’

– Diamond geezer that Kev

‘Johnnie?’

– Guess again, Harry

‘Who the fuck are you?’

At this point Michael Caine was going to say:

– You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off’,  but instead I said in my own voice:

– It’s me, Harry. Harry Nash. And you’re a fucking idiot.

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Is there a moral to this story? I suppose there is.

If you were unlucky enough to have been taught ‘Good Manners’ as a child, Australia is not a place where they will be of any use to you. You might as well forget them, or you are going to be crippled by them.

‘Is he really a nice person or does he just smile a lot?’ – Frank Zappa