Allyson ignored them all. Flanagan had no idea if the girl had actually been taught to drive, but she swerved into the right-hand lane without either checking over her shoulder or indicating, and when Flanagan followed suit, a motorcyclist with a stockpile of karma barely braked in time before squealing his tyres and fish-tailing to a halt on the busy road.
The Civic was a four-cylinder automatic designed for economy. Flanagan’s sedan drew throatily behind the small sedan and he let loose with a blast from the horn once more. Allyson flicked a look behind, silver hoop ear-rings flashing in the gloom as the street lights came on. Then she veered madly to the left, giving leave for Flanagan to draw level and lean across, gasping with the pillowed pain, to roll his opposite window down.
“Pull over!”
He could see the girl laughing. They came to another intersection, the lights in their favour, and just as quickly Allyson tore off to the left, mounting the slight incline before the Japanese car disappeared up Bayview Terrace. Flanagan’s hands were all over his own wheel, the car swerving left and right with indecision as he overshot the mark. In the end, he slowed, the traffic mounting up behind him, dozens of eyes boring holes through the back of his head. He waved a non-conciliatory finger as he pulled off the street, rocking to a halt in a random car park as the Fairmont stalled and he clutched his side, lowering his forehead to the wheel’s arch as he winced.
The mobile rang and he eventually answered.
“Yeah,” he told her brother-in-law. “I found her. Now she’s gone.”
He nodded, sitting back slowly and looking out at the droplets mounting on the side window.
“Claremont.” He shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t know. Sorry.”
*
THEY ATE A humourless meal and Teneille left the table early when the phone rang, her mother checking in to speak with Allyson. Lord looked at Flanagan and tossed his fork into the middle of the remaining noodles. Flanagan wiped his mouth with a serviette and pushed back wearily from the table.
“I’m going to bed.”
“It’s only eight,” Lord said.
“School tomorrow.”
He regretted the stupid comment, but his earlier points-scoring exercise with the girl still floated in the fore-part of his brain. He gave a nod to Teneille, sitting tensely in the next room with the cordless, and after a brief wash of hands and face he moved back into the back room and removed his boots, laying down on what was now a gently perfumed bed.
Sleep came like an assassin. He dreamt of the jungle, mud up to his knees, the weight of a rifle, the curved magazine digging across his back every time he jostled with a missed step – sensations he’d all thought long behind him, though they’d been a torture of repetition at the time. Fingers clamped into the mud, vines, submerged tree roots. It wasn’t exactly Kokoda, the vast mountain-side plantations at the end of his trek, the Thai men with their red head-scarves, closed faces not much different to the Japanese though more orderly, less prone to kamikaze outbursts.
He was a moment trying to fit the rectangle of light into his dream. When it wouldn’t go – like some simple yet impossible mathematical equation – he blinked slowly awake, not much differently laid out than before, diagonal on the bed, top button of his jeans undone, shirt gone, phone still there, digging into his hip. Rain fell heavily outside.
Allyson was a wraith in the doorway, long dark hair spilling in unbrushed strands laced with fashionable streaks across her shoulders, the white terry towelling gown loosely belted and going down to bare feet, one arched and pressed against her calf.
“I still don’t feel I’ve thanked you properly.”
Flanagan lay a long moment. Her low voice wasn’t just for his benefit, though the slight huskiness came as part of the performance that was her life.
“You’d better come in then,” he said at last.
Allyson nodded, demure even as she slipped free of the robe, the room completely black once she closed the door behind her.
Until his eyes adjusted, Flanagan could pretend she was almost anyone.
NINETEEN
HE WOKE TO find the house empty.
Flanagan made his way around slowly, organising tea and toast, a small load of laundry, checking the other rooms of the house and examining Lord’s and Teneille’s bedroom on his way to the back veranda and a cigarette. It was nearly ten when his phone rang and he hobbled back through to the bedroom, sorting through the covers until he had the device in hand.
It was his mother.
“I was a little concerned, Mick, when you didn’t get back to me about Saturday night,” she opened.
Flanagan sniffled and sat at the kitchen table, Oregon pine that looked recycled from some rough former use.
“I had a bit of a blue,” he told her. “I’m not feeling too well.”
“Oh dear, I hope it’s nothing serious.”
“Mum, I’ve got a few broken ribs.” He kept talking before she could ramp up the hysterics. “It’s not the first time and it’s probably not the last. I’ve seen a doctor and they’re taped. There’s not much else, but for time to heal all wounds, as they say.”
“What have you been doing that you’re breaking –?”
“I told you I had a job to do. I was helping a friend.”
“What, with the running of the bulls?”
“No,” he sighed. “Not with the running of the bulls, mum. Jeez.”
“Let me come around and see you,” she said.
His mother sounded old, pleading.
He stared at the grain of the wood in the table like it might suddenly burst into rainbow colours. He could feel the inevitable words moving their way from deep in his bowels and up his throat, moments before he spoke them.
“Alright.”
And he gave her the address.
*
ANNE LYSAGHT AND Oliver Flanagan conceived their baby daughter in the back of Anne’s bombed-out old Volkswagen Beetle. It turned an unfavourable match into a necessary evil, with Anne Elizabeth and Oliver Plunkett Flanagan married before the start of the third trimester.
It was the mothers who conceived their plan to bring the two families together, though both old women would be dead by the time baby Michael was born five years later. Until the day of the wedding in a hall in the Italian-dominated Swan Valley, neither of the older men of the family had met face-to-face.
Errol, always known as Old Errol, was a veteran of Milne Bay and Africa who turned a stellar stretch with the Australian Army into a drawn-out love-hate affair with the West Australian Police. Both his brothers were cops and so was his wife’s dad. A younger Frank Doyle became his protégé. Errol started with rank and quickly cemented a reputation as a hard man at the monumental East Perth lock-up.
On the other side of the family and very much on the other side of the law, John Joseph “Jack” Flanagan was a Republican dissident who fled Northern Ireland with his young wife after the 1950s border campaign against the British fell into complete disaster. Born into a family of farmers in South Armagh, during his three years leading shotgun-toting Republicans against the hated Royal Ulster Constabulary, Jack found work as a barman and occasional labourer, and he did a good line in busting heads for Republican-minded businessmen who felt they were owed debts. That skill-set was the foundation for his new life Down Under: he started on the wharfs in Fremantle and quickly fell in as an enforcer with the Maritime Union before upping stumps to buy a hotel in Guildford, conveniently close to where Oliver and Anne would first lay eyes on each other while Anne was at university and enjoying a Sunday session. Oliver was the barman and never much else, lacking his father’s wild ferocity, but sharing the same admiration for a drink.
When Errol and Jack shook hands at the reception, it could’ve been the moment for a famous photo, except no one was willing to spring for such things back in 1969. They stood there locked hand-in-hand, each sizing the other up until Errol finally spoke the immortal words: “I know you, you cunt.”
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Errol was the master of Perth’s foreshore station. He’d made a name for himself by regularly climbing into the cells to go one-on-one with that week’s hard case. By contrast, Jack had come from a family who thought Saturday night was for going down the local and taking on the bar. Jack and Errol had already danced on the hosed-down concrete floor of East Perth’s long cells before a ragged crowd of cheering inmates. No one ever said which of the pair came out on top, though it was fair to say it may have just been the fight of the century. Certainly Errol was the one with all the power in the gaol, Jack in and out of the cells in the early years thanks to his work making sure the ships got unloaded on time.
Becoming a mother ruined Anne’s career studying politics and psychology, none of which her father ever supported anyway. Her mother, Marian, was the sole champion of her daughter’s educational prowess, and when she passed away, Anne Flanagan soon delivered a second child into the world and not long thereafter started working six-days-a-week cleaning at the school her daughter attended, leaving Oliver at home to bungle through the job of fathering Mick. Sporadic attempts at returning to study occurred throughout Flanagan’s teenage years, but they all amounted to the same thing. The moment Oliver Plunkett lost his latest job, Anne would have to step in to resolve the crisis. The family were big on Irish-style bust-ups and lusty reunions. It was nothing to young Nuala and Michael for one or either of their parents to be away from their Midland shitbox for days at a time.
For the son of a publican, it took a surprisingly long time for Oliver to turn to the drink in a committed way. However, when he did, it was with a vengeance. “Making up for lost time,” as he put it himself. At age fifteen, Flanagan caught the old man sitting in his favourite chair nursing one of Errol’s German souvenirs, an old Luger pistol the old cop had entrusted to Anne, ostensibly for the day she got sick of her unreliable husband and wanted to put a bullet in him. Knowing what he did now, Flanagan guessed his father’s deliberations must have eventually reached a final conclusion, encouraged as they were by his illness.
He remembered his mother as a dour-faced woman: good-looking, but with something of the joy in life sucked out of her. Nuala had her lustrous, straight brown hair, and Flanagan had her Lysaght complexion that let him to take a tan without too much damage. He’d also inherited his father’s temper, but with his mother’s off-the-handle way of dealing with it. A nasty combination, as the people around him frequently found out.
He stood behind the flyscreen door and watched his mother step from the GTS Monaro, a dark figure hidden behind the wheel. She wasn’t an old lady yet, but she moved with a careful grace, closing the door firmly behind her and turning with her handbag clutched in both hands above her thighs. If Flanagan knew anything, she’d stopped at the bank along the way and had a couple of fifties to slip him if things looked grim. The knowledge made him crack a hard smile, which was the best and only way to greet her.
They fell into each other’s arms and before Flanagan could blink, his mother was wet with tears and apologies. Flanagan, who’d tried so hard and so often to maintain an almost professional disdain for the sentimentality of his family, almost swooned at the sudden flaring strength of his emotions, a rare experience, cuddled like a swaddling babe in his mother’s arms. He started hitching sobs that only stopped when he dug his nails into his palms hard enough to draw blood. Thailand had told him what Old Errol knew, that most men died crying for their mothers; and however far off and remote that fate seemed in the warm light of an overcast Monday, it still informed everything he felt, the moment he was back like a child in that coveted embrace.
Once they stepped apart, Flanagan motioned to the car.
“Is he gonna come in?”
“Derek? No.”
She shook her head firmly. Her hair was loose, straight, mostly grey, but not completely. Her brown eyes remained sad, though there was something else there amid the twinkle.
“Best to leave that for another time. I won’t stay long.”
“Come in, then,” Flanagan said. “This is a friend’s house, but they’re out. I’ll put the kettle on.”
*
THE TEA WAS perhaps the worst he’d ever made. His mother sat swilling a mouthful and peering with mixed feelings into the mug and Flanagan rose, moved to the sink, and poured his down the drain.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll try again.”
“Don’t worry, love. Talk to me. Sit down.”
He turned his rear against the bench-top instead, arms folded and chin down. The incessant stubble tickled his bare throat.
“I’m not sure what to say. I’ve been away a long time. I’m sorry. I knew you’d worry, but I. . . .”
“You needed the space,” his mother charitably offered. “Nuala said you were in Asia. With the government?”
“For some of the time,” Flanagan replied slowly. “I took some time for myself, too. I did some travelling.” He considered teasing out the lie and decided not, seeking refuge in silence instead.
“Why did you give up the job? We were so proud of you over there, serving your country, making a good wage. Your dad always joked he’d hit you up for a job once you got back. Put in a good word for him.”
“I can’t believe you left him.”
The words seemed to reverberate around Teneille Tennyson’s restored colonial kitchen, spinning like trapped birds with no way out. Flanagan mashed his palm against his face, burying his eyes as he tried to trace where that pronouncement had lain in wait. When he lifted his red eyes, Anne had both hands in fists on the tabletop, her gaze down yet somehow resolutely ahead.
“I never thought it would come off like that,” she said. “If I had’ve known he had cancer, or was due for it, I never would’ve left. It seemed so cruel. You have to understand it was a year before I even knew.”
She lifted her eyes imploringly and all Flanagan could do to acknowledge such raw emotion was to dip his own head and shake it slowly.
“It’s awful.”
“He made the right decision.”
Flanagan snapped his head up. “Killing himself?”
“Yes,” his mother replied, and shook her head so that her hair flowed over her shoulders again. “He was in terrible pain. It was brave. Much braver than he’d ever been. I almost . . . it sounds strange, but I almost loved him again for it.”
“You almost loved him . . . for killing himself,” Flanagan paraphrased deadpan.
“I know it sounds strange –”
“It sounds fucking sick, mum.”
Anne snapped her mouth shut and after a minute Flanagan realised she was silently crying, miserable at a frequency only cats could hear, sitting there at the table without any man there for comfort. It was the one thing she’d always had, possibly her weakness, what she couldn’t do without. And yet to his discredit, Flanagan couldn’t bring himself to move. For all their many faults, she and his father had been inseparable even when threatening separation, a passive-aggressive co-dependence Flanagan always believed would end only in the grave. There was an old joke in his family, the root of which he couldn’t remember and wasn’t funny anyway, the image of Oliver and Anne in side-by-side crypts still arguing.
“I’d better go,” his mother said.
She snatched up her hand bag and moved to the door. Then she stopped and glanced back.
“I’m glad you’re home, Mick. Five years is a long time for a mother to worry. I hope you’ll call soon. I’ve got a few boxes of your stuff and some things from Errol for you too.”
Flanagan licked his dry lips and froze moving to the door.
“Granddad left something for me?”
“Yes,” his mother replied, and for a moment she had an impious smile. “You’ll have to come around to see what.”
She smiled, waved, and moved through the door.
TWENTY
HE’D NEVER BEEN introduced to meditation as Teneille promised. For that matter, he doubted he was going to make his appointment with I
rene at the yoga studio either. However, after a second breakfast, some TV and a brief lie down, Flanagan sat cross-legged with his back supported by cushions, flicking through the introductions to Teneille’s eastern philosophy books, all of which covered meditation as well as yoga and massage. Cushioned thus, he tried to empty his mind, particularly his own association of meditation with the dodgy Hong Kong action movies he’d grown up watching and had enjoyed overseas like a connoisseur.
Gradually, a sort of soft serenity came. It wasn’t much – it was a little like sitting in the same room as someone smoking a joint instead of smoking the whole damned thing yourself – yet for a taster, Flanagan found it strangely rewarding. A knock on the door sounded and he unwound himself, thinking it was time to take another painkiller, and he dog-eared the page he was on and stuffed the book back into the shelf.
Allyson leaned into the doorway in her checked green school uniform complete with silly hat, a heavy dark green rucksack over one shoulder.
“Hey there.”
“Jesus, look at you.”
What was a one time-only deal suddenly seemed like a hard promise to keep as she slipped past him, arching like a dancer, hand brushing his denim-clad crotch, hemline riding high to flash a bare stretch of tanned leg and long white socks.
“How are you feeling?”
Allyson moved into the kitchen and dumped her bag on the table, removing the hat and quickly bending to do the same with her shoes. Flanagan wondered if it was accidental she pointed her choice posterior in his direction as she fussed with her laces, the back of the dress riding high enough to glimpse black lace. He deliberately moved around the table to the fridge and started pouring them two glasses of juice.
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