by Tim Winton
But this squalid little skirmish was all he had now. He was in it with them. Wasn’t he? He had to be. Even if he was shitting himself. Not quite present and accounted for. Pressed into service. But this was his chance to mean something again. He’d do whatever it took to keep them safe. Wondered if Doris could sense the wildness teeming beneath his skin.
* * *
They walked a while in silence. To break the sense of clinical observation, Keely relieved his mother of the shopping. He was shocked that he hadn’t even noticed her carrying it all until now. Made a lame joke at his own expense but was upstaged by crows as they fluttered down to heckle and strut on the grassy verge ahead, voices high and boastful.
Listen to them, said Doris. Like jockeys before a sauna.
You didn’t really answer me before, he said, emboldened. About Gemma. You said she was cunning.
It’s not an indictment, Tom. Kids use what they have, to survive.
But what do you make of her now? Honestly.
She’s a battler.
A battler.
I know. Sounds patronizing. But she’s got more starch than her mother. She’s woken up to blokes. And she’s done okay with Kai, all things considered. But of course it’ll never be plain sailing. She’s a damaged girl and he’s a troubled boy. She’s not a person of boundless resources. She’s doing what she can, what she thinks best.
Is it me, or are you a little wary?
Doris kneaded her hands. The bangles clunked and chimed at her elbows.
We always had such low expectations of Bunny.
I wasn’t really talking about her mother.
Bunny had a rough trot, no doubt about that. But looking back, I wonder if she wasn’t a bit dim and lazy as well. She got used to being helped, being absolved of accountability. I think, despite ourselves, we got caught up, Nev and me, making her the victim, only ever seeing her as, I don’t know, prey. She was passive enough to begin with. We didn’t expect enough. We didn’t really help.
Well, you were about saving the kids, I guess.
Yes, she said. From her, as much as him, truth be told. All that sixties optimism, love. We infantilized the poor woman, indulged ourselves. At her cost, I think, and our own.
So what’re you saying?
Gemma wants me to be her mother again. To pretend I am. And I won’t do it. I can’t. I’m hard-pressed as it is – being yours, Faith’s.
So that’s it – a professional distance?
It’s not my profession, Tom.
I never thought of you as dispensing kindness with quite so much calculation.
I suspect Gemma’s a little confused by kindness.
Jesus!
Don’t speak like that.
You should bloody talk!
Tom, people sometimes confuse simple decency with investment. You help them, therefore you must love them, require something of them, desire them, need them. And then you’re expected to forsake everyone else for them.
What’s this, Social Work 101? Ayn Rand in the Antipodes?
No, Tom, it’s half my life.
Well, he said. You sound like a jilted lover.
Doris offered up a saintly, suffering smile and the birds lifted testily from the grass.
Sorry, he said. That was mean.
True enough, though. In a way.
I can’t – Mum, I don’t understand.
Listen, I was young. Vain. Idealistic. Of course I adored Gemma. Because she was adorable. I favoured her, tried too hard to compensate for what she’d missed. And a lot of that came at Faith’s expense.
She’s never mentioned it.
She’s not a whinger, said Doris. Faith’s smart. She never had to be adorable. But she was always generous with Gemma. Took her cues from us, poor thing. These other kids had needs greater than hers or yours. From Faithy we expected too much.
And from me?
Tom, you never shared your room, your clothes, your dolls. You weren’t cannibalized so thoroughly in the name of charity.
Fair enough, he said, all the more irritated because he knew it was true.
So, what is it?
Nothing, he lied.
Not true.
He walked beside her a few moments and then just said it. You sound so cold-blooded, that’s all.
And you seem unwilling to face what’s real. Gemma made herself loveable in the way some needy kids do. To survive they cultivate you. They want so badly and they take compulsively. They learn to manipulate you. No one can blame a little girl for seeking comfort. But I think I crossed a line somewhere, flattering myself, thinking I really could be her mother, that she could be one of my own. It’s a wonder Faith ever forgave me.
You mean you’ve talked about this?
Tommy, it’s our grand theme, the pea under our mattress!
She never said.
Maybe you never listened.
They came into her street and Keely looked through the treetops to the broad reach of the river glittering in the afternoon sun. He wished there could be a settled interval, just an hour or so when he could let himself believe he knew what was what. Nothing was solid anymore, nothing felt safe or ordinary.
So you regret all that? he asked. Everything you and Nev did?
No, she said. I just wish I hadn’t been so romantic about it, so vain. I wish we’d known more, that we’d done a better job.
A horn sounded behind them. Gemma’s car rattled by and turned up into the drive.
Remember, she’s changed, too, Tom. Like I said, she’s not her mother. And neither am I.
On the way into central Perth, piloting the Volvo around the river’s edge beneath the bluffs and the park, he wondered if Doris had given him the ticket simply to get him out of the house. To have some time alone with Gemma. Take stock. Perhaps even take charge. He still felt awkward leaving Kai with her on only the boy’s second night in a strange house. It seemed flaky. But Gemma had no objection and Kai seemed indifferent. Maybe it was just Doris bunging on the charm and rattling the Scrabble box. All the way down Stirling Highway and into Mounts Bay Road he’d worn himself ragged with second-guessing, until his head felt like a tinful of bees. Why couldn’t he just take his mother’s offer as a gift? Why make so much trouble for himself? Some things were what they appeared to be.
* * *
At the concert hall he slunk down the aisles feeling underdressed and pitifully unaccompanied. Took his seat beside an elegant old couple. Peered at the program. Anything he’d learnt about classical music was picked up second-hand in Doris’s slipstream. Delius, Elgar, Britten. The Brits, for God’s sake. God’s little joke on their prickly republicanism.
He caught the older woman beside him glancing surreptitiously. Felt himself wither. Rescued by the dimming lights and the soloist striding onto the stage to warm applause.
Keely’s pulse quickened. A stab of apprehension. He was the same at any live performance, suddenly anxious for the players. So stupid; these people were professional musicians. But the way his throat narrowed they could have all been kids at a school recital. His kids.
And before he knew it, before he could get his thoughts under control, the concerto was up and running. From the soloist’s first brazen thrust he was captivated by her impish confidence. Such a naff instrument, really, the oboe, but she went at the thing like a jazzer. You could feel the ripple of indignation roll across the hall. Maybe it was the woman’s bebop stance, the way she appeared to goad the rest of the orchestra. Keely sweated on the sense of resistance in the room, the squirms and clucks. All this wild fingering, he felt it could come apart at any moment, yet he was swept up in it, fraught and amazed by the soloist’s reckless brio as she began, sally by wheeling sally, to win first the stage, then the auditorium and finally the piece itself, looking all the while like someone glorying in the peril she’d exposed herself to, beating the odds with a smile in her eyes and a hip cocked against all comers. She was nailing it. Surfing it. Riding the storm into the aisles, past th
eir greying heads and through the bars and braces of their ribs, skating home on the glory of having dared and won. Bravo, he thought, fucking brava, whatever. He was filled, overcome. And like an idiot he began to weep, silently at first and then in tiny, shaming huffs that were drowned, thank God, by the roaring ovation. The air felt too thin. Keely could not applaud; it was too much. He held his knees as if his legs might fly off, sobbing like a village fool until the silver-haired woman alongside him, a dame of some provenance if posture counted for anything, placed a neatly folded tissue in his lap as if he were an ancient bridge partner whose little weaknesses were old news.
There’s the Elgar yet, she said.
I’ll never make it, said Keely.
Come on, she said. No guts, no glory.
Doris was still up. Her hair was out and her bifocals shone as she closed the biography and stood. He dropped the keys in the bowl on the bench. It was too warm in the kitchen. Something about his mother having gotten to her feet seemed off.
So? she said with only a thin smile.
Unbelievable, he murmured. I’m wired. I’ll never get to sleep. Kai alright? What is it?
Gemma had a call, said Doris. Before work.
He stood there with that falling sensation.
Something unpleasant. A kind of threat, I think. She wouldn’t say.
Shit.
She took the call outside, said Doris. We were having a nice evening. Up until then.
Was Kai in bed?
No.
She didn’t say who it was, what they said?
No, but whatever it was, it wasn’t nice. She was upset. And then Kai was agitated.
And she still went to work?
That was what she said she was doing.
I’ll call her.
Her number’s there beside the fruitbowl if you don’t already have it.
Keely snatched the cordless phone from the bench and thumbed in the digits. A recorded message.
She never turns it off at night, he said. In case Kai needs her.
But he’s here with us. And she won’t need any more calls like the one she’s had.
Can’t she screen them?
You’ve never had calls like that.
I’ve been threatened, believe me.
Don’t be ridiculous.
Okay, I’m just saying. I don’t know what I’m saying. But hell. I think I’ll go down and check on her, he said, grabbing up the Volvo’s keys again. You mind?
Would it matter?
What’s that? he said abstractedly.
Tom, she’s at work. How will you check on her? They won’t let you into the supermarket.
I don’t really know. I just need to make sure.
What you need is to think clearly. She needs to go to the police.
She won’t go, he said. No cops, no refuge.
Just sit down for a moment.
I can’t, he said.
Stay, she said. Go to bed. Please.
Mum, I can’t, he said, pulling the door to. I just can’t.
* * *
Traffic into Fremantle was light. In the distance the Jurassic container cranes of the port loomed like some sort of lurid arena spectacle. Keely had no idea what he was doing. This aimless driving about. But anything would feel better than lying awake half the night at Doris’s.
He crossed Stirling Bridge. Turned away from the harbour and headed inland a little on Canning. Bitsy clumps of retail. Traffic lights. Car yards. The Cleo.
Pulled into the empty parking lot in front of the shopping complex on the hill. Sat idling a moment beside the concrete bunker where Gemma worked. No sign of her car. No vehicles anywhere except those flashing by out on the four-lane. And then it occurred to him. Basement entry. He eased up to the end of the building, angled onto the ramp and crept down the steep decline. But halfway down he came upon a boom gate and was forced to reverse out. Parked the Volvo on the street and walked back down.
The underground car park was well lit and so much warmer than the night above. Foetid, even. Over by the lifts, slotted in behind a Subaru and a couple of unloved Corollas, was the blue Hyundai.
He pushed the call button for the lift and waited but the doors didn’t open. He tried again and a crackly voice spoke from the pipework overhead.
Sir, if you’re not an employee, you’ll have to leave.
Keely looked up, saw the sinister dome of the CCTV camera.
Sir? said the voice. We can escort you out if you’re lost.
Keely grinned like an imbecile, showed the camera his palms and left.
He lapped the block in the Volvo and pulled into the alley behind the supermarket. Refrigerated trucks chuntered against the loading docks but the big roller-doors were shut. He fished out his phone and called her, but got the same message. Maybe it was enough to know the building was secure, that there was surveillance. Because if she was at work she seemed to be safe.
So why didn’t he feel reassured?
He rolled back down Canning towards the bridges. The wharves with their penumbra of yellow against the dark sky. The streets into town were empty. Even the drunks in the park next to Clancy’s were gone. The East End was desolate. A few gulls squabbling over food on the pavement outside the Woolstores. Disposable cups, newspapers in gyres against graffiti walls.
Rolled by the old Mirador. Counted lights on the top floor. Nothing at his, nothing at hers. All clear.
He drifted along the Strip with the windows down. The midnight news came on the radio. He switched it off. The street-sweepers were not yet trawling the alleys but the pubs were closed and the last evicted drinkers were plundering kebab shops and hailing cabs. There were modest altercations at the kerbside but this was a long way from the standard welter of puke and broken glass that graced the precinct at weekends. A few cafés were still open to service the late-shift bohemians and confused old men. On the Market Street corner a couple of Euro-hippies strummed and bojangled at pedestrians, whose indifference did not deter them.
South Mole. Victoria Quay. The old passenger terminal. Crossed the tracks again. The warehouses, backstreets. Round House, the Roma.
Everything familiar. His town. Doing what it did in the weekday wee-hours. Nothing to be agitated about. Riding around like a bored hoon.
* * *
Just before one he buzzed himself into the Mirador car park.
Rode the lift to the top floor. Along the gallery the usual night noises: thudding bass, scrambly TV atmospherics, gurgles of plumbing and conversation.
The flat was hot and closed up. Out on the balcony the air was cooler. The cranes of the port flashed and lumbered. Closer in, on the pavements below, there was nothing moving but blown trash and gulls that looked like blown trash. Gloom, tranches of deep darkness, spills of light. He could feel the pending, aching nearness of something about to happen. The streets, so familiar, now a maze as much as a neighbourhood. Their very emptiness made him uneasy. Caused the roof of his mouth to itch.
A horn sounded. Freight train wending its way around the water to the old bridge. Rumbling, squealing on the bends. White quills of masts bristled on the marina. The sea beyond winking out measures of distance and depth, flashes of warning.
Gemma’s balcony was dark. All well. Not feeling it.
Before locking up he rolled the knife drawer out and snatched up a few cards of medicine. Just to get him through the next day or two, while he was gone. Found a Coles bag and stuffed them in. Necked a couple of the Valium for a steadier.
Out on the gallery the wind caused the plastic bag to rustle against his leg. And the moment he turned from his door he could see something hanging from the grille at Gemma’s. It hadn’t been there when he arrived. Or at least he hadn’t noticed it.
From a distance it looked like an out-of-season Christmas decoration. Up close it was a leprous teddy bear suspended by one leg. Keely swore and yanked at it. The bear tore free but the snared leg hung twisting in the easterly, leaking sawdust and lint that blew in
his face and caught in his eyes. He pulled at it madly, broke the dirty packing string and got it off, but by then it was little more than a hollowing scrap of fabric. He stuffed this and the mutilated bear into the shopping bag and headed at a trot for the lifts. Halfway along the gallery he caught a brief flare in the street below, as if someone were lighting a smoke.
The lift down was ponderously slow. No one in the lobby. Nobody outside the laundry. He shoved the bear into the garbage skip. Couldn’t see anyone in the car park, but the lighting out there was patchy.
Got to the Volvo without actually breaking into a run. For a few moments sat peering out. In the side street, a flicker of movement. Someone there. Definitely there. So he started the car, buzzed the gate open and rolled down the ramp without lights. As he swept into the street he snapped on the high beam and saw them. Beside the stranded shopping trolley, the parked bike, the yellow-topped recycling bin. A tall, white-haired bloke in pinstripes. And a smaller figure in a tracksuit. One smoking. The other busy on his knees.
Keely took the corner too fast to be safe. Launched out onto the main street wildly. Like a fool. Like a man who couldn’t tell if he was relieved or ashamed. Traffic lights. Side street. Esplanade. Rail lines. The shimmer and open space of the marina.
The sardine dock was deserted. He pulled up and got out shakily. The tarmac glittered with scales. He strode out to the planked jetty, feeling the sparks in his fingertips, pacing under the jaundiced lights until he got his breath back and trusted himself to think again. Underfoot the reeking timbers bore all the hallmarks of night-owl anglers – bait bags, beer cans and stomped blowfish. A few gulls worked through the scuzz of pollard and bait scraps. Out in the pens, boats nodded at their moorings and light flecked the water.
He leant against a wooden pile. It still had the warmth of the sun in it.
Wondered if he should have kept the teddy bear. For proof, evidence – he didn’t know what.
He had to bring this matter to a head. Another kind of man would have had it sorted by now. No use hiding and hoping these nasty pricks would go away. No point reasoning with them. What this situation required was swift and sudden violence. Stop them in their tracks. Disable them. But that just wasn’t in him. He could imagine it easily enough, fantasize. But he’d never do it.