The Sea and Summer

by George Turner

  In our corridor a few hotheads showed fight – there’s always a death-or-glory element among nitwits – but I can’t say that I hit anyone hard enough to do damage. Why should I? It was a police action, not a gutter brawl. In the end we herded them down to water level where the army shipped them aboard as they showed their heads. All in all, it was a clockwork operation but I was glad to pocket the cosh and brass knuckles, though I don’t mind a roughhouse when the other party has some sort of a chance.

  3

  Kovacs came with a swaggering straggle of street brawlers at his back. He saw me standing behind Nick and knew me in spite of growth and six years separation but gave me only a flicker of a glance. He eyed the pack of us appreciatively, chewing slowly, and said, ‘Frens! Good seeins! Oos Nick?’ I guessed he knew well enough who Nick was but the masquerade had to be played for the ears of his unaware men.

  Nick said, ‘ ’S’me. You’m Billy?’

  ‘ ’S’me.’ He told his men, ‘Em’s Nick’s boys fum Ya’ville. Maties.’

  So our provenance was established with an easy lie and we were heroes to a well-wishing bunch who smelled as bad as we, plus the sour-sweet of chewey piercing their sweat. With introductions over, they were wholly practical; their talk was all of getting the tower operating again, particularly the sewerage. They spoke of a jobbing plumber new-tumbled into the Fringe, automated out of the Sweet life . . . he could be brought down, forcibly if need be, until he learned the facts of the gutter . . .

  Kovacs would not look at me but I had no doubt that he was the reason Nick had rostered me for the job. He was shorter than I remembered – or was it that I had grown? The lines of his rat face had plowed deeper and the hint of sadness around his mouth was a new thing. I could not know then that he had lost his eldest boy and seen a younger brother maimed for life since last we had met. He was still angular and forceful, at once muscular and skinny, alert and wholly relaxed, lively but unwasteful of movement and trying to wind foul-mouthed charm around Nick in a con man’s embrace. Did he hope to fool Nick from the Richmond Towers who knew him for liar, hypocrite and killer? (But who still praised him to my face.)

  I listened to them spitting the talk they had been brought up to at a speed that left me guessing at some of it. Nick was demanding the wages of interference while Kovacs weaved and ducked to reserve what he might against the need for future treacheries. But he had to give what he had promised.

  When the chaffering was done Nick pushed me forward. ‘Billy! ’S’Teddy Conway. Knowin’?’

  Kovacs spat and rubbed his shoe over the gob, so smoothly that it might not have been a statement. ‘Yuh. Knowin’.’

  ‘Go wi’m, Teddy-boy. Ketch’s bag.’

  That was a new phrase to me but I dared not question it then. (To work it out: ‘bag’ rhyming with ‘tongue-wag’ equalling ‘loose talk’ meaning ‘evidence’; alternatively, ‘carry his bags’ meaning ‘pick up what he gives you.’ It is a contorted, often ambiguous speech.)

  Seeing the trap set for me to meet again with my past, I questioned, ‘Go wi’m, me?’ Meaning, Why me? Get somebody else. Nick smiled very slightly, acknowledging and overriding, and pushed me gently. ‘Nuh. You.’

  I could have cost him ‘face’ by arguing, even refusing, but I hadn’t the nerve for it. Trouble now could have crabbed my whole future career. Besides – and he knew it, as he always knew – a maggot of curiosity squirmed behind my resentments.

  Kovacs said nothing but started up the stairs. As he turned the first landing his sideways glance showed me at his heels and he clapped on speed. He was nearing fifty, more than twice my age, but he went up four floors at a rate that stretched me. He was one of those fleshless wonders of natural stamina who do as a matter of course what the rest of us train to exhaustion for. On the landing between floors eight and nine he stopped, surveyed me with the hungry look so much part of him and spoke quietly in his pedantic, faulty English. ‘Know something? There’s eight liftshafts in the tower and once I got the whole lot working. Went three weeks before the last one broke down. Never tried again.’

  I wondered how the people on the upper floors coped but was too sullen to ask. He shrugged and raced on up.

  He lived on the twelfth floor, at the end of a corridor. At his door he spoke again. ‘You’re looking good, Teddy.’ He nodded, rat-grinning. ‘The copper style suits you.’

  Trying to loosen my tongue? He succeeded. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Never forget it.’

  He raised his hands in mock horror. ‘You wouldn’t beat me up, mister!’

  How do you handle a type like him? He opened the door and would have put an arm around my shoulders to usher me in, but I swung away. He pleaded, ‘Yesterday’s gone by, Teddy.’

  So there it whined still, the sentimental streak of the canting crook. I said, ‘Forget it. Where you are is always yesterday, stinking.’ He stood back for me to enter.

  It was a four-roomed flat and it was clean. Searching the Swain-held flats for stragglers we had seen some like animal pens but this was fit to exist in. That is all it was. Every fitting, every furnishing was old, worn, ready for throwing out but nothing that I could see was broken, though everything had been repaired. Apart from the inescapable smells of poverty, chewey and drains, the thing that stank worst was me. Kovacs, discounting a bruised cheekbone and split lip, was scarcely rumpled. I felt at a disadvantage, in the presence of a shabby Swill aristocracy, and out of my depth.

  I don’t know how many lived in that flat – there were beds and bunks wherever they could be fitted – but only one other was present, an enormously fat woman who bulged and sweated in a home-made rocking chair and surveyed me curiously.

  Kovacs waved at me. ‘ ’S’ Teddy Conway.’

  Hostility flashed for a second in her eyes and vanished behind elaborate boredom. ‘T’Fringy drop?’

  Kovacs gave no sign of being aware of the current of her mind, as if there was no outrage in bringing his mistress’ son into the family home. ‘ ’S’im, love. Copper tyke.’ He switched to English. ‘Teddy, this is my wife.’

  What could I do but say, ‘How do you do, Mrs Kovacs?’

  She also dropped her Swill argot. ‘As well as can be expected. Are you disguised or are you always filthy?’

  ‘I dress to suit my company.’

  The chair rocked to her laughter. ‘A quick one, eh? Take no bloody nonsense from Swill, eh?’ Her head snapped forward, striking. ‘How’s your mother?’

  I was too furious to answer. She took a piece of sewing from her lap and lifted it to the light to jab a needle through it as she said, ‘Not that I care if she’s dead, mind you. But then, as Billy tells it you don’t care either, eh?’

  I said, with a feeling of having been clubbed, ‘I care.’

  ‘Does she know that?’

  It was too much. ‘Mind your own damned business.’

  She waved her scrap of mending at me. ‘It is my business. My Billy looked after muck like you and your brother’ – she said this without spite, stating irreversible truth – ‘when you came helpless to the Fringe, and his business is my business. I’m a Tower Wife! You two brats were a poor investment for a man who works his guts out for people who aren’t worth it. Somebody has to watch his interests.’

  There can be few more helpless feelings than being stood up for target practice. I turned on Kovacs, if only to get back at her. ‘Did you bring me here for this?’

  He said thoughtfully, ‘No, but there was always the chance. The women like to have their say.’

  I was angry beyond thought of right or wrong. ‘And she’d have plenty to say. It must get lonely for her of a night.’

  To his credit he did not take to me with that knife always handy at his belt. His face set stone hard and relaxed slowly like a mask cracking; somewhere in him was a flinder of sexual conscience. Behind me his wife tittered; somewhere in her loyalty lurked a flinder of vengefulness.

  It was time to make an end before worse happened. ‘Just
give me what I was sent for.’

  Silently he produced a sack from under one of the beds and showed me its contents – rolls of State coupons, printing samples, a corrected design layout, a thick wooden baton with a discolouration like old blood, a bundle of rags and bits of metal whose purpose I could not guess, an offcut from a roll of pulp paper and (surprisingly, for guns are not easily obtained these days) an ancient but serviceable Biretta.

  ‘That’s all?’

  He nodded. ‘Enough to hang ’em.’

  ‘Enough to let us do your dirty work for you.’

  His easy grin let me know the insult was cheap. ‘I reckon.’ He recovered fast and would not be baited.

  I took up the sack. ‘My people will be waiting.’

  ‘I’ll come down with you.’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘You think? You’re off your territory, copper. Things can go wrong.’

  ‘You care?’

  ‘About you? A dead copper is bad for public relations.’

  ‘Do I look like a copper?’

  He agreed that few would pick me. ‘But you’re a foreign face and that’s bad if you aren’t spoken for.’

  As we left Mrs Kovacs cried gaily, ‘Give my regards to your mother. She’ll love that.’

  I felt I wanted to run and as Kovacs slammed the door behind him I would have loved to beat his head against it. But I could only croak in rage, ‘Did you put her up to all that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were always a liar.’

  ‘Only at need. No need here. She knows her own mind.’

  There were few people in the corridor, passing us in quick whiffs of sweat and chewey. Kovacs leaned against the wall, forcing me to stop, and dropped back into Swill, ‘Tell yers.’

  Meaning he had something to say to me. I won’t try to reproduce it; no phonetics can give the sound of Swill. It amounted to this: a Tower Boss needs a close confidant because he has to keep so many at arm’s length, and his wife, Vi, was his. What he knew, she knew. Only right, wasn’t it?

  And my mother?

  No, that was different. She was his love, his delight, not for dirty tower business. (Love? Delight? These needed some sick thought.) She had to be protected.

  But Vi didn’t?

  A bit, yes, but that was different . . . He ran out of explanation because he had none, seeing no paradox in his attitudes to the two women. It was a matter of what was due to each, right? I could see that, couldn’t I?

  Yes, I could see that he did what seemed suited to his needs, estimating instinctively (that is, selfishly) and never really thinking it out at all. Yes, but that’s different . . . He was a creature of appetites with the freedom to gratify them, of instinctive responses with the egotist’s ability to justify them.

  Nick’s canoe waited below the corridor window on the first floor above the water. I dropped the sack and he caught it. As he looked curiously at its contents I swung a leg over the sill to make my own drop but Kovacs moved coolly to thrust his arm across my chest and call down, ‘Teddy’s gun see t’ ma.’

  See my mother? Like hell! I pushed his arm away – and that was not as easy as young strength expected – and told Nick, ‘No, I’m not,’ as I edged forward for the jump.

  Kovacs took hold of my jacket to pull me back off balance, and muttered for my ear alone, ‘No guts? Haven’t you learned nothing—’ and even then had to stop to make his amendment – ‘learned anything in growing up?’

  Glancing down at Nick I smelled collusion, fancied a pale, interested twitch of lips in the starlight: his meeting with Kovacs this morning had not been the first, despite their comedy of greeting. Evasion now would earn contempt from both sides; whether simulated or real seemed beside the point. Looking for a way to slip between them, stalling for time to think, I asked softly, ‘Learned what?’

  Kovacs surprised me. ‘If you haven’t got a past to fall back on then you haven’t got a real life at all.’

  To this day I am not sure whether or not that is nonsense. He could have appealed to filial instinct, sentiment, even reason, but instead reached so far behind all those that a shock of elemental understanding touched my unprepared mind.

  ‘All right,’ I said aloud, for both of them. ‘All right.’

  Nick called up cheerfully, ‘It is now about five a.m. You can have eight hours special leave. Get him back to barracks on time, Kovacs. We’ll give you a lift as far as the water’s edge.’

  Not bothering to hide the scheming.

  I dropped into the water beside the canoe and Kovacs splashed down beside me; the suction grapples held it steadily to the wall as we clambered aboard. Nick headed inland in the direction of our house without asking direction, but nothing would have been gained by commenting on that; Nick always knew whatever was necessary.

  We paddled up the black street between drowned houses that emerged gradually as the slope rose beneath us. All the way a question, a whole slew of questions really, occupied my mind. How did the tower dwellers manage without lifts? As many as seventy stories down and back each day. Women loaded with stores, old people, small children. I would not ask Kovacs and my resentment against Nick then was nearly as great.

  Dawn was breaking as we stepped on to the footpath. The receding flood water was below our back gate but the line of muck on the fence showed it had been higher. Twenty-four hours before it must have been swirling through the house.

  I was tired and unready for an encounter. I thought encounter and felt defenseless. Against the past?

  Some truth has to be told: I had never had much positive affection for Mum. Or for anyone – until Carol slipped through a chink and was simply there, without so much as the surprise of discovery. My parents had loved me but there had been on my side no deep sense of an emotional link. I was spoiled: I passed through childhood in a procession of benefits, knowing no reason for gratitude; what Teddy was given was rightly his and giving was a parent’s duty. Our fall to the Fringe was dereliction of duty, their fault. I had deserted the home without a qualm.

  Qualms came later – the sense of unidentifiable loss, the sharp edge of undefined feeling pricking through solitude to touch wastelands in the mind . . .

  Recognizing where fault lay did not bring automatic love or yearning or repentance, it brought deep apprehension so that, at the front gate, Kovacs’ hand at my back urged me, shivering, past a point of no return.

  4

  The garden was flattened, rained. While my only feeling was of unpreparedness for what was being thrust upon me, Kovacs lingered over the destroyed beds. ‘Two or three times a year it happens and she starts again. Makes you wonder.’

  I said sharply, ‘People don’t give in easily.’

  ‘Balls! Course they give in. What do you think a Tower Boss does except keep them standing up? Alison’d make a good Tower Wife.’

  That was pushing it hard at me. I’m closer to her than you are, Teddy-boy. You’ve got it all to learn.

  It was better to look at the house than at him. The broken boards of the veranda had been replaced; the walls had been painted; the once brown front door was now pale green. A man about the house . . .

  Kovacs opened the door on to a passage whose walls were still wet with a mud line, ankle high, down their length. As lately as last night. . . The place smelled of damp and refuse. He called comfortably, ‘It’s me, Allie. Got a visitor.’

  Her remembered voice came from the bedroom, bridging time, ‘All right. Wait while I get up.’

  We went to the lounge-room where nothing seemed to have changed in six years. It was inexpressibly drearier than the cool colours of my police quarters. In the kitchen Kovacs fiddled with the gas ring, said, ‘I’ll make a cuppa. Real tea, courtesy of your brother’s Ma’am. You know her?’

  ‘I know of her.’

  I did not want chat but he was deliberately talkative. ‘A good woman, looks after Francis well. There’s another graceless brat that’s done all right for himself.’

&n
bsp; His ricocheting between pacification and insult showed nervous uncertainty and I should have got some advantage from it but I was too highly strung for tactics. ‘What did you expect? You set him up for it.’

  Spooning into the pot a more expensive tea than we ever saw in barracks, he admitted sourly, ‘I make mistakes. Same as you’ve made a few. Not many friends, they tell me.’

  ‘Who’s they?’ The rat face split in a comedian’s smirk and at once I wanted the question answered. ‘Who was the PI man under cover in your tower all last week?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  I should have known Nick would do that job himself. The pair of them would have had a high old gossip’s time with the private lives of the Conways. It was not possible for me to hate Nick but very possible to be furious with him; it would be a long time before I forgave him for Kovacs’s gibing.

  Then Mum came in, wearing over her pajamas a Japanese Kimono I remembered from the Sweet home. She was looking to Kovacs but saw me and stopped dead in the doorway with an extraordinarily pensive expression, as though she must make up her mind about something and would not be hurried.

  Because my nerves were jumping and my tongue could not be still I said, ‘Good morning, Mum,’ in a voice that would have shamed a frightened child and she frowned exactly as she used to do before chiding or punishing.

  She said, but not to me, ‘It’s about time you showed up, Billy,’ and kissed him – one of those kisses that says this is mine without wasting effort on it, an owned and owning kiss.

  ‘Been busy,’ he told her.

  ‘Did it work out well? No trouble?’