The Big Ask by Shane Maloney

steps. ‘You’ve got it cushy out here in the electorate,’ I said. ‘The worst Angelo can do is alienate a few pensioners. Back at the ministry, he’s at war with the entire trucking industry.’
    â€˜What do you mean, cushy? she huffed. ‘Some of these pensioners can be savage. The worst that can happen to you is an overdose of country and western.’ As she dived into the scrum surrounding Angelo, the lambent twang of a steel guitar wafted from the far end of the car park.
    The music was neither country nor western. It was rockabilly, and its source was a band on an outdoor stage beyond the blow-up jumping castle, the flat-bed of a truck trailer. Figuring I’d continue to pitch my woo at Lyndal when she finished bailing out Angelo, I bought myself a can of beer and joined the meagre gaggle of toe-tapping onlookers in the watery winter sunshine.
    They called themselves ‘Over the Limit’. Two guitars, a slap bass, a vocalist and drums. Middle-aged amateurs, paunches over their belt buckles, they laid with cheerful abandon into a repertoire of Hank Williams and Carl Perkins standards. Jambalaya Joe and his Blue Suede Shoes .
    The drummer’s name was Donny Maitland. I never knew he played the drums, but it didn’t surprise me. Nothing Donny did could ever surprise me.

I was sixteen when I met Donny Maitland. One hot summer afternoon, he sprung me reading a novel in the cellar of my father’s hotel, the Carters Arms, shirking my chores in the cool of the stainless steel beer barrels. He threw back the pavement doors and stared down at me, nimbus-headed in the furnace of the afternoon, bare-legged in his work shorts, the sleeves of his brewery-issue shirt rolled to the shoulders.
    â€˜What have we here?’ he declared, eyeing my Penguin paperback. ‘An intellectual?’ He must have been in his late twenties then. A man to my boy. A man unlike any other I’d met, and you meet a lot when your father owns a hotel.
    I slipped The Plague into my back pocket and helped him unload his consignment, taking the strain as he rolled the eighteen-gallon kegs down the ramp. Not that he needed much help. Donny was solid muscle, strong as an ox.
    Afterwards, he went into the public bar to get the delivery docket signed and have a beer. They always had a drink, the brewery drivers. I tagged along, drawn as if by gravitational force. Raising a silent toast to our comradeship of labour, he lowered the entire contents of his glass down his throat in one smooth swallow. ‘You ought to be careful,’ he warned, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘That existentialism shit, it’ll rot your brain. Start reading Camus, you’ll end up on Kafka.’
    I wasn’t sure who Kafka was. But I’d heard the name, so I asked about him.
    Donny and I talked books for the next half-hour, during which he consumed several more glasses of beer. His views were trenchant, visceral, political. Drawn from the certainty of his class, sharpened by his intellect and confirmed by his experience. And he talked to me like an equal. No grown man had ever done that before.
    From then on, through school and university and beyond, Donny was a comet that blazed intermittently on the periphery of my vision. A promiscuous reader and tireless talker, he was equally conversant with the thoughts of Mao Tse-tung and the licks of Lightning Hopkins. A hard drinker at bohemian parties, he somehow managed to combine unmoderated radicalism with steady employment. Women loved him. Loved his energy, his humour, his unruly mop of sandy hair and his big, expressive hands.
    Hands that were now wrapped around drumsticks, pounding out a steady four-four beat on an el-cheapo beginner-level drum kit. The passage of time had thinned his hair a little and softened the flesh on his frame. He was whiskey-raw at the cheekbones, too. You can get that in your fifties.
    Over the Limit weren’t bad