MELB NOIR (idea for the start of a detective novel)
Thomas Kent
Thomas Kent
You can buy anything that you want in this wretched little city.
It pretends that it’s not, but it’s as corrupt as Karachi, as Canton, as Port-au-Prince.
Everybody has their hand out in one way or another.
Just because piles of bills are not always slipped under tables, or left in paper bags at back doorsteps, or slipped into a cashing pile of chips at a casino, doesn’t mean that there not subtler ways of paying.
It’s an oligarchy made up out of an aristocracy combined with a clerisy, and it’s self-sustaining and won’t let anyone in unless they are too dangerous to keep out. It’s a matter of membership; playing the game; and it used to be all about blood and haw-de-haw lineages of brokerages and families and legal clans, and the fact that now, like Sydney, it is at least partly about who is rich and who is not changes nothing, because money will never buy access to the club.
The politicians who pretend to be on different sides work together over beer or wine to sell the health, the comfort, and the power of the people, and the supermarkets look at each other’s prices and duplicate them, and the retail chains sip very bad white wine together at fashion shows, and whatever you can think of, there’s just two or three major players, a monopoly, and anything challenging is wiped up or bought out, thought is a threat, innovation a disease. Because it has not and has never been about the good of the city only about the good of the lords. It’s a necropolis railway, grinding and heaving its greasy stained bulk to destruction.
The poor, the junkies, the outcast and despised, full of bitterness and hatred, can see the truth, because they have their noses to the window. It’s a city full of grifters, scavengers, scratching with their fingernails for the few slots that make money, sliding upwards on oleaginous slime, inching their way up the blackboard with chalk fingernails, conscious of the yawning gulf beneath and the hungry mouths snapping in the pit. Gleaning, networking, scraping, yeah, guarding their reeking junkyard-dog patch of ground, and the price of protection – not admission, for that is far too dear – is your soul. And it’s a buyer’s market. Oh, there are plenty of souls, plenty of people looking for the rectum to make the sealing kiss, lithe young bodies all lined up like little licorice soldiers, and they’re cheap and when they wear out, easily disposable.
And the few who sit up there at the pearly gates, the fat men, gross in their distended opacity, unimaginative, supremely confident, laugh and sit down to another plate of souls.
…