by Peter Temple
‘Which one?’
‘The one to take you home.’
‘It’s just driving, Rosa, it doesn’t have any significance.’
‘Who took you home?’
‘Drew.’
‘I think I might have been told. I wanted you to come here.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? So that I could look after you, that’s why. Is that a bad instinct?’
Standing in the dark, only the weak light from the street-lamp in the window.
‘It’s a good instinct,’ I said. ‘Thank you for having it. Only I don’t need looking after. I’ll be paying for the looking after I’ve had until I die. After I die. So now I’ll just get on with what remains of life. What about lunch, you could shout me lunch? Name the place.’
The silence.
‘Jack,’ she said, ‘I tried to pay the hospital bills. They’d been paid. You owe nothing.’
Tiny branch shadows moved in the corner of the window, twitches of dark little fingers.
‘Some clerical error,’ I said. ‘I appreciate you trying to pay. If you’d succeeded, I’d have repaid you.’
‘What do I have to do to be your sister?’ she said. ‘I think I’ll stop worrying about it.’
‘You don’t have to do anything and you don’t have to worry about it. I’ll drive over your way tomorrow for brunch. You’ll know the top brunch spot, where the Nokia elite gather to chatter. To people elsewhere.’
‘You shouldn’t be driving,’ she said. ‘You’ve had head injuries.’
‘I’m better than before, they say. Reflexes of a teenage Afghani warlord. You should see me collect bananas in Super Monkey Ball.’
‘Bananas?’ A note of caution in her voice. ‘Jack, do you have pills you should take?’
‘These monkeys are inside bubbles and you have to …’
‘So,’ she said. ‘Elevenish. I’ll pick you up. There must be a place over there with edible food.’
Food. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
I wanted someone to bring me food.
No one was going to bring me food. I put on lights and went in search. The pantry needed to take a good hard look at itself, it was a museum of preserved foodstuffs. I found a can of mushroom and leek soup, made in Scotland some time after the union with England.
The freezer too was overdue. Unidentifiable objects. I pulled something from under an ice overhang. Turkish bread. How long did frozen bread remain edible? Halfway edible. We would see.
I started the warming processes, opened a 1989 bottle of Elizabeth semillon, found hiding in the pantry in its grey papier-mâché sleeve, the last of a case. I took it to the sitting room. A fire, I needed a fire.
Tomorrow. Do some shopping. Go to Piedemonte. Just buy the necessaries. Then take a walk, there wasn’t anything wrong with my legs. After that, make a fire.
Why did I always say at least one wrong thing to Rosa? She brought out something in me, she turned me into a version of my grandfather, my mother’s father. For him, unqualified approval did not exist, he was unreserved about nothing. I learned early that, even when he smiled at me, I should brace myself. That’s a nice report, John. But I see here …
When I was older, it became clear that he hated the fact that his daughter had married a stonemason, worse, one who belonged to the Communist Party. And I was the result of that union. Ergo.
There was no photograph of my father in the Toorak house until the day of my grandfather’s funeral. After the cemetery, mourners came back and tea and fruitcake and sherry were served, people patted me, kissed my cheek, shook my hand. When everyone had gone, we went into the smaller sitting room. My mother sent me to find a bottle of whisky, that was something new. My mother and grandmother drank a few glasses. I could sense something in the way they talked about the funeral, how well it had gone. They were relieved.
My grandmother left the room and came back with a picture in a silver frame. She put it on the mantelpiece. It was the photograph taken after the civil marriage of William John Irish and my mother. He was in a dark suit, a handsome man and large, black hair disciplined with oil, a head and more taller than my pale and lovely mother, in a cream suit herself, a neckline hinting at bosom.
Where had it been? Had my grandmother kept it hidden, in a drawer?
For Rosa, born after her Commie father was dead, her grandfather was the first male of importance. The infant knew only the Toorak house, sleeping in her mother’s nursery, in her mother’s cot, with her mother’s stuffed animals, cared for eight hours a day by her mother’s nanny. When she was a baby, the old man took her out in the grand pram on Saturdays and Sundays. I had a clear memory of him, in a tweed jacket, leaning into the big-wheeled carriage, his nose pointing, his hand causing chuckling sounds.
‘Gramps was lovely,’ Rosa once said. ‘I miss him so much. Perhaps he never had the chance to bond with you.’
I said, ‘Bond? What do you understand by bond?’
And in asking this, I knew the rich, thin-lipped old bastard lived on: my mother had bequeathed me his genes. And I knew also that my unease about that fact matched exactly my grandfather’s feelings about the genes of a Communist stonemason in his grandson.
I fetched my supper and sat in the most uncomfortable chair because I wanted to punish myself. I drank a glass of wine, had half a bowl of soup. The soup had aged well, the bread was edible. Had the Turks ever mounted any Polar expeditions?
Tired in the moving parts. Inside too, in the core. I’d stripped the bed, I would have to make it. Not tonight. The spare room, I would sleep in my own spare room, the bed was made. A mug of Milo. No milk, no Milo. Shit.
I brushed my teeth, avoided looking in the mirror, not wanting to see myself. I switched off the heating, the lights, stood at the front window and looked out at the visible universe. Bare branches moving, headlights on the street beyond the parkland.
I was turning back the covers when I thought about putting on the answering machine. It was 9.15 pm. Someone might ring, adults weren’t supposed to be horizontal at 9.15 with the intention of sleeping.
To the sitting room, press the button on the machine, back to the bedroom. A good mattress on the bed, hard. I opened my book, got comfortable on the pillows, drowsy immediately, fought it, a few paragraphs, put the book down, switched off the light, half turned. The blessing of sleep, the laying on of oblivion.
I woke in sweat, heart thudding, dreams vivid, incoherent – fleeing in terror, heavy crippled legs, climbing sheer surfaces that crumbled, ladders with missing rungs, rungs that broke underfoot, the abyss below, pursuers close, gaining.
It was a long time before I fell asleep again, lying in the dark, needles of pain when I moved, feeling sad in the way I’d felt since waking up in hospital, a chronic sadness.
In the morning, I found the keys to the Lark and to Linda’s Alfa inside the front door, pushed through the letter slot. The cars were outside. Cam. The Cam taketh and the Cam returneth. The one person who didn’t come to see me in hospital. Instead, he sent a parcel with half a bottle of Grange Hermitage 1983 in a flat silver flask.
I liked him even more for that.
Time passed, a chain of forgettable and forgotten days, weeks. I fended off almost everyone who inquired, didn’t reply to most telephone messages, extinguished them. People became exasperated.
‘If you don’t get back to some semblance of your former self,’ Linda said from London one morning, ‘I’m coming back and I’m taking stern measures. Arse-kicking I’m talking about.’
I had no rejoinder.
I went to Charlie’s on most days, made myself do that. With no heart in it, I worked at tasks he gave me to do. He didn’t say anything about my absence, carried on as always, lectured me on accurate measuring, the need to tune tools after every use, the virtues of a slow and humiliating apprenticeship in the trade, the wisdom of certain European thinkers. Sometimes after my run I went back to bed, sleeping fitfully, not getting up until midday, sleepi
ng badly that night, the old dreams back, the unconnected images: my father coming towards me down a passage, picking me up, raising me above his head, my mother crying, holding me tightly to her in a doorway, car lights gleaming on wet bluestone gutters.
I woke earlier and earlier and, as the body pains lessened, the runs got longer and longer. I didn’t go to the Prince much. I caught people frowning at me, exchanging glances. People told me jokes. Everyone seemed to want to cheer me up.
In mid-June, I read a bank statement, the first time in months. There was a deposit of $50,000 about which I knew nothing. I rang the bank. The money was an electronic transfer from a Luxembourg bank called CreditInternat.
The hospital bill? It had been paid, said Rosa. I hadn’t thought about it again. I rang the hospital accounts department. Paid by electronic deposit from CreditInternat.
The next day, I ran through the dawn streets as far as once-lovely Royal Park, ran down to the tramlines, turned and angled across the expanse, through the clumps of grass and the scrubby native trees. The splendid parkland was now ruined, courtesy of a government falling for some vague pencil sketches produced by mystical landscape designers in the 1980s. Soon they would find bodies here.
I ran home, showered, dressed, and, without calling, drove up to Macedon. When I’d parked outside the garages and got out, I stood on the raked gravel for a few moments. A day in its final quarter, winter stillness. Clean, cold air, the perfume of woodsmoke and leafmould and regret.
I was on the second terrace of the stone path when the front door opened, inhabitants warned by a sensor at the gates, no doubt. A woman in jeans and a poloneck sweater. She had blondish hair to just below her ears, parted at the left. I didn’t need to be told who she was. Sophie. I could see Sir Colin Longmore in her – the chin, the forehead. But she had Sarah’s build, tall and whip-thin, the long neck.
‘Jack,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’
She pointed at the forecourt. ‘My father. You’ve been on the security camera.’
We shook hands.
‘Leaving messages on your machine doesn’t work,’ she said. A direct gaze, disconcerting, no automatic smile.
‘I’ve gone off answering machines for the moment,’ I said.
‘I can understand that,’ she said. ‘Come in.’
She led me down a long, broad, unadorned passage, through a room with no clear function, into a sitting room, not large, a sisal carpet, rugs on it. Sir Colin got up from a severe wooden chair. He was in an old grey jumper and corduroys, shoeless, long blue bootsocks pulled up over his trousers. It gave him a pixie-like look.
‘Jack,’ he said, his hand out. ‘Bit thin but you’re vertical, that’s the ticket.’
‘I wanted to ask about the paying of my hospital bill and a deposit in my bank account,’ I said.
Sir Colin looked at his daughter, a sliver of a look, looked back at me.
‘I’m sorry?’ he said, his eyebrows now not on the same plane, the left higher than the right. ‘Are you demanding money?’
I turned and left the grand house, found my own way out. No one came after me. The front door closed with the sound I remembered from the second-last door at Pentridge Prison, the Stone College, in the old days, when I had a respectable job, did what I could for people who generally found themselves where they were because life hadn’t opened up before them like a flower. Early on, it hit them in the face like a big fist.
I liked those people more, a lot more.
‘Funny business,’ said Harry Strang. ‘Travellin well, good Lord’s givin all the other bastards the rough end. Smack. Holy boot up ya own bum.’
Beyond Camperdown in the mist, three of us in the big BMW, Harry at the wheel. I was in the back, reading the Age. Cam was doing something on his laptop.
‘Ireland,’ said Harry. ‘Never should’ve bin there. Two meetins to go, championship in my pocket. Get a call from this trainer, done me a couple of good ones when I first come out. So I go up on the Wednesday, get on this nice little grey for him.’
He took a large hand off the wheel to reach for the winegum ashtray while overtaking a milk tanker. A truck was coming at us. Its airhorn brayed. I groaned with fear. Cam looked up, went back to his screen.
We escaped annihilation by a short half-boot.
‘Panicky, your average truckie,’ said Harry. ‘No bloody judgment. Where was I? Yes, the finger. There I am, a perfect sit, we’re goin to street the cattle. Come round the bend, straighten up, the pony in front throws a shoe, I never see it, hits my bloke between the eyes, I’m airborne, crossin the rail at altitude.’
Harry looked back at me, sharp brown eyes, a look longer than I liked. He snapped fingers. ‘Broken leg,’ he said. Another snap. ‘Bloody collarbone too.’
‘Unfortunate,’ I said.
‘The championship it cost me,’ he said. ‘Plus a swag of bickies, needless to say. Didn’t need the bickies that much, would’ve liked the championship, my word.’
‘And the moral of the story?’ I said, looking at the land, dark-green, waterlogged, like Ireland with added extinct volcanoes.
‘Avoid Ireland,’ said Cam. ‘And don’t return favours.’
Harry shook his head, pained. ‘Don’t ya listen?’ he said. ‘Life, I’m talkin about life.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Cam.
‘Any life in mind?’ I said. ‘Any particular wimpy, self-pitying existence in mind?’
Harry waved his left hand in dismissal. ‘Gettin up and goin,’ he said, ‘that’s the important thing. Not so, Cam?’
‘The goin part,’ said Cam, not looking up. ‘I’m the goin expert. Left with the best of them.’
Harry sighed, sought comfort in winegums. ‘Near here. Getting close, as I remember.’
‘Over the hill and about two ks,’ said Cam. ‘There’s a shed fallin down. Just after.’
Harry looked at his watch. ‘Give her a ring. Did it quicker last time as I recall,’ he said, putting his foot down.
I breathed again when we left the main road, turned inland. We travelled through a bumpy landscape, winter creeks running, sheep in clumps and strung up slopes like woolly beads. I got out for the gate at Middle Hill, Breeding and Training, W. & L. Halsey. It was a good gate, well hung, over a grid too, no easy escape from Middle Hill. The mist was gone now, sky full of fast-running cloud, blue holes coming and going.
‘You only bring me for the gates,’ I said when I was back in the warmth, rubbing my hands.
Black Angus cattle on both sides ignored us as we went up the gentle rise, over the crest.
‘Nice things, cattle,’ said Cam. ‘Shame to eat them.’
At the homestead, we parked on dry gravel in front of a big steel shed. The earth beneath us had been ripped and veined with drainage pipes, there was no other way to provide such a surface.
A door in a door opened and a woman stepped out. She was wearing what had been closest to hand in the icy dawn: a jumper at the point of fibre collapse, a short Drizabone, a tracksuit bottom possibly from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, elastic-sided Blundstones. As she came, she had a hand on the knitted headgear, the beanie.
We got out. I thought it was the sight of Cam putting on his dark-grey Italian overcoat that decided her against the beanie. She ripped it off, stuffed it in a pocket, pulled up her saggy pants.
‘Mr Strang, Cam,’ she said. ‘Freeze your bum off today. Yesterday, like Bali.’
‘Bracin,’ said Harry. ‘Don’t think you’ve met Jack. Jack Irish, Lorna Halsey. Jack’s my legal fella.’
We shook hands.
‘How’s he doin?’ said Harry.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Like a dog with Chink, never seen a horse so rapt. Can’t believe he’s supposed to be a killer. My girl’s ridin him.’
‘Chink settle him?’ said Cam. He wasn’t looking at her, gazing around like an inspector. ‘Stay over?’
‘Three days,’ she said. ‘Slept in the barn, in his swag. Couldn’t get him
no further than the kitchen. Not house-trained, he reckons.’
‘Tells the truth,’ said Cam.
Lorna was looking at Cam, a look you recognised after you were eighteen.
‘This way,’ she said.
We crossed the shed towards an open door, across the concrete floor of a tidy room for farm equipment, horse tack, feed, entered a big gravelled courtyard with horse boxes on each side. Two long heads stabled next to each other looked at us. The fourth side of the yard was an open-sided shed.
Crossing the yard, Lorna said, ‘Chink’s something, makes you feel like a beginner. Got a mongrel here, supposed to be broken, won’t let anyone on him. It took about fifteen minutes, Chink’s riding him like he’s the clerk of the course’s pony.’
‘Keepin this beast outside?’ said Harry.
‘Chink’s advice. In the near paddock.’
It was even colder on the other side of the buildings, the wind up the slope bringing tears. A teenage girl in rain-gear was riding a horse in a paddock with a good surface, not too wet. She saw us. Lorna made a signal, a circle with an index finger.
The rider took the horse around on an oval course, canter, brief gallop, canter, came to us, reined in near the gate and sat patting her mount.
Lorna opened the gate and went in a few steps. The rider brought the horse up to her. She rubbed its nose and its neck, talked to it, led it over.
‘Sure that’s the animal?’ said Harry.
The horse was not recognisable as the one we’d seen in the paddock in Gippsland. This Lost Legion’s coat had sheen, its head was up, you could see the alertness in its eyes.
‘Good, not so?’ said Lorna, stroking the animal. ‘This is my girl, Terry.’
We said hello to Terry. She was around fourteen, had red hair, bits sticking out under her riding hat, a few big ginger freckles.
Harry went into the paddock, put a slow hand on Lost Legion’s nose. He found something in a side pocket of his corduroy jacket, fed it to the horse, its big mouth in his hand.
‘Got a bit of condition,’ said Cam.
‘Chink reckons he wouldn’t eat for days at the start,’ Lorna said. ‘Then he comes around, pigs in, puts on the kilos like a new bride.’