He lets the police tape resume, his fingers skittering across the keys, the headphones snug on his head.
CONSTABLE STEAD: [Indistinguishable] . . . February five, 2006, four oh five pm. Your name is Bradley Michael Stewart?
DEFENDANT: Yes.
CS: Did you break and enter . . .
Stephen types, the scene appearing before him—the boy mumbling and sniffing, the tired copper filling in pieces of paper, occasionally getting shitty when the kid won’t speak loudly enough. Stephen imagines the kid, hands deep in his tracksuit pockets, his shuffling feet. The boy keeps sniffing as he talks, is by turns subdued and hostile. It is clear he has done all this before. Then Stephen has to rewind a bit of the tape.
. . . legal representation up to your parents.
DEFENDANT: Yeah. Excuse me?
The kid’s voice is muffled but suddenly polite, hesitant.
CS: What?
DEFENDANT: Are the cells down under here? There is the sound of what Stephen thinks is his foot, scuffing a beat on the linoleum floor.
Stephen kicks the dictaphone’s stop button on the floor beneath his desk, takes off the headphones and sits back in his chair. He gets up, stretching his arms above his head.
In the next booth a woman is typing fast, staring at her screen. Stephen can read, over the partition, that a man in the interview she is transcribing is screaming at the police to let him give his son his medication, and then he’ll fucking answer the question. Stephen looks at the woman’s, Angela’s, face. She’s oblivious to him standing there beside her. Her bottom lip pouts in concentration, and she stares at the screen as though past it, into it. Her expression doesn’t change as her fingers flicker over the keys and the lines of type appear on the screen. She does a hundred and four words a minute, he has heard. He sneaks another look at the screen. No spelling mistakes either.
He walks past the supervisor, who is frowning, listening to someone on the telephone. Stephen slows as he nears her desk and dips his head, miming smoking a cigarette with two fingers. She nods, still frowning into the phone.
On the street it’s raining, and Stephen has to squeeze himself into a jutting corner of the building so as not to get wet. He lights a cigarette and inhales. Across the road at the courthouse, small drifts of people stand beneath an awning, smoking and muttering. Two men stand in line, waiting for a small woman with long blonde hair to get off the public telephone. She holds the receiver with both hands, then hangs up and ducks sideways from the booth, avoiding the glances of the men.
An older woman and a young man sit together on a bench at the top of the stairs, staring straight ahead. The young man wears neat brown trousers, and a crew-necked green jumper conceals the lump of a tie at his throat. He’s hunched forward, elbows on his knees, his hands dangling between them. The woman wears red lipstick and a camel-coloured raincoat. She could be his mother or his older sister. They don’t speak.
A gust of wind sends a little shower of rain needles into Stephen’s face. He draws back into his corner, pulling his collar up. On the brickwork at his shoulder he notices, in small, neat black texta handwriting: GOTH AS FUCK. He sucks on his cigarette again and rests his head back in the corner, closing his eyes against the smoke.
This morning there was another email from Cathy on his Hotmail address, as well as one—shockingly, with his father’s name in the ‘from’ line—from his mother. She must have got his address from Cathy. His mother’s began Dear Stephen, as though writing a letter. I’m not very good at this machine as you can see, so I hope you get this message. Then, Dad would like to see you, if you can manage it.
She doesn’t tell him what Cathy already has, in her earlier messages—about their father’s flailing limbs on the gravel driveway, their mother shouting into his ear to hang on, calling down the fluorescent hallways of his pain while the ambulance didn’t arrive. She doesn’t say, as Cathy did, that Geoff is unconscious. She signs the email All my love, Mum.
Someone else’s mobile rings, and a skinny man with a beard pulls a phone slowly from his pocket, then crouches down with his back against the building to talk. The tune of the ring-tone is familiar, yet Stephen can’t quite place it. He pictures his mother trying to find the ‘on’ switch for the computer in the back bedroom of the house that his father has used for an office ever since they all left home. He imagines her peering at the screen as she obeys Cathy’s telephone instructions on opening the email program. As he pictures his mother’s hesitant, one-finger typing in the little airless bedroom he feels the lump of rising tears in his throat for the first time since he began getting the messages. He swallows it down with the last breath of smoke.
He tosses the cigarette down into the gutter and turns toward the stairs. His mind still echoes with the man’s phone ring-tone, trying to place it. He pushes through the large glass doors and it comes to him; it’s the theme from The Greatest American Hero, a television show from his adolescence. He hums the tune beneath his breath as he waits for the lift. Believe it or not, I’m walking on air . . .
Angela from the next booth upstairs is standing beside him at the lift, smiling, her shoulder bag clutched across her chest.
‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ he says, hands in his pockets, but leaning slightly towards her.
She looks up at him, suddenly expressionless. ‘What?’
He sees now that she has a mobile phone earplug in one ear and the phone is lit up in her hand; that she is mid-conversation with someone else.
‘Sorry,’ he says, shaking his head.
Angela glares at him a second, then turns back to her phone, smiling exaggeratedly. ‘Sorry,’ she says into her hand. ‘I’m just going down to the car park now.’ She takes a deliberate few steps from Stephen and looks at the floor, chattering away on her phone while the numbers of the floors bing in lights above the lift doors.
Stephen thinks of his half-transcribed interview, of the boy in the tracksuit, and then of the angry father and the medication in Angela’s transcript, and all the while the familiar melody traces its way beneath the images in his head. The doors open and Angela steps in, still talking.
The doors close again, and he’s alone in the lobby, thinking of a young boy wondering about bars on prison cell windows, and his own father convulsing, moaning in the gravel.
I never thought I could feel so free-hee-hee, hums the song in his head.
MANDY SITS alone by her father’s hospital bed, watching the robotic rise and fall of his bare chest as the ventilator makes him breathe. On exhalation, his ribcage sinks and seems to reach an almost concave point, then jolts and swells again. It is a perfect, terrible rhythm each time; the exact same measured breath, forced in and out.
A wardsman is strolling about the ward, joking loudly with the nurses, offering to help them. He wears navy overalls, and a short metal chain of keys hangs from a loop at his hip pocket. He has brought the nurses a tray of polystyrene coffee cups with white lids, and deposited it at the sink around the corner. The nurses scurry behind there, one by one, to take sips of their coffee. No drinks are allowed at the new work station.
Mandy is sitting with her chin in her hands, a magazine in her lap, when she senses the wardsman approaching. She hopes he will pass, but his blue legs stop. Although she has not been reading, she places the tip of her index finger at a place in the magazine column, then looks up.
‘G’day,’ the man says, grinning, his hands on his hips.
She nods, gives a thin smile. ‘Hi.’
He just stands, as if waiting for something. When she offers nothing else, he says, ‘I been seein you on the telly.’
She nods again.
‘I’m a wardsman these days. Wardsperson, political correctness.’
There are no pauses between the phrases; this line is something he has said many times before. His attention drifts as he speaks; he watches a nurse winding the handle of a patient’s bed across the ward. Then he turns back to Mandy.
‘War reporte
r,’ he says gravely. He pronounces it repordah.
‘Mmm, sort of,’ she says. She hates the term, but can’t be bothered arguing.
‘Are you gunna do a report on me?’ he says and then grins, looking around the room, ready to snigger, but no-one is watching. Without waiting for her to answer, he says, ‘Nah, only jokin.’
He is used to people saying no, to their averted eyes, their fixed smiles.
‘I seen you, anyway. On that.’ Nodding up at the television screen.
Mandy raises her eyebrows in acknowledgement, nods again. Then she looks down at the magazine in her lap, at the line her finger is marking.
But the wardsman is undeterred. He pauses a moment, watching her.
‘When you was on the ABC, then SBS.’ He sniffs. ‘And now Channel Four, over there,’ he says. ‘England.’ He’s nodding respectfully as he talks.
‘Yeah,’ Mandy says, surprised. Her own family doesn’t appear to pay this much attention to her jobs. But it’s a small town. And television attracts weirdos. She forces herself to keep her tight smile.
She looks over at her father, at the white hump in the bed, hinting at the wardsman to leave.
Then he says, ‘You don’t remember me, do ya.’
His grin has turned hopeful.
Shit. She searches her mind now, looking into his narrow, acne-bitten face. Her mind is blank. She half-smiles. ‘Umm.’ An apologetic shake of her head.
His brown eyes meet hers. ‘We’re the same,’ he says quietly then, smiling shyly.
‘What?’
A nurse’s voice calls out then from across the ward. ‘Tony, can you give me a hand?’
He looks toward the nurse’s voice, then back to Mandy.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he says. He licks his lips quickly, then winks.
‘Seeya,’ he says, and strides off across the room.
‘Seeya,’ she says.
Relieved he’s gone, she turns back to look at her father. He has not moved, save for the hissing shunting of his breath, forced in and out.
The bruises, yellow and black, a dreadful mosaic all down his body.
MANDY LEANS against the bars of the empty neighbouring bed, a red jumper tied around her waist. Margaret has earlier said, ‘You’re ruining that lovely jumper,’ gazing at it sorrowfully.
‘It’s old, Mum,’ Mandy said, taking the limp, hollow ends of the sleeves in her fingers, flipping them back and forth while watching the television and her father in alternating glances. Chris and Cathy—again the couple—delivered Margaret to the hospital and have gone to do some grocery shopping. As they left the ward together Mandy saw her mother’s fond glance after them—and then noticed her take a deep, silent breath, as if to draw strength before turning back to her elder daughter, and the empty hours ahead of them.
‘So is this what it’s like all the time?’ Mandy now asks her mother, who is reading a gardening magazine on the other side of the bed. Margaret takes a second to look up at her, then nods. ‘Yes.’ Then she juts her bottom lip and looks upward, thinking. ‘Or sometimes people come and talk. The wardsman, or that nice nun who comes sometimes.’ She pauses again, looking around the ward.
Mandy follows her gaze and sees the wardsman from earlier, leaning across the nurse manager’s desk, offering her a biscuit, joking with her while she tries to work. Mandy turns back; she does not want to catch his eye.
Margaret is scanning the pelmet above the bed where a scattering of Get Well cards is taped. ‘And visitors, sometimes.’ She nods at the cards. ‘Rotary people, mostly.’ Then she looks back down at her magazine.
Mandy leans forward to inspect her father’s face again, then the monitor screen with its series of green and red and yellow and pink lines. There has been no change in his condition, the doctor told them this morning, but he is stable. The thing now, it seems, is to wait for the swelling to subside, and for the results of the new lot of scans. When Mandy had asked about hospitals in Sydney she saw, from the corner of her eye, her mother suddenly turn her full attention to tucking in Geoff’s blankets while the doctor said his piece firmly: the care here was top-notch; Sydney hospitals were overcrowded and anyway—his parting shot—both Westmead and Royal North Shore had made it clear they wouldn’t take him. Mission accomplished, the doctor had smiled at Margaret and walked away.
Mandy sits back down in her plastic chair, and watches her mother across the bed. Margaret’s skin is still pink over the cheeks—the healthful appearance she has always had, and which none of her children has inherited. They are more like their father, long-faced and sallow. Margaret’s thick short hair sits over her head in orderly waves, its colour an almost perfectly uniform grey, like the colour in advertisements for ‘platinum’ hair dye. Mandy wonders if her mother has ever coloured her hair. She doubts it, from the way Margaret has exclaimed over whatever colour Mandy’s own hair has been each time she has come home: ‘Oh! Red, now!’ The way she would stand back to stare at it a while, one hand across her chest, before lowering her eyes again to meet her daughter’s.
Mandy sees it—this careful distance, always, between herself and her family.
Now she observes how her mother frowns as she reads, how concentration makes her bite one corner of her upper lip. Maybe she does dye her hair after all, Mandy thinks. For who knows what women do in country towns when their children are grown and gone; when their husbands fall and lie jerking, legs buckled the wrong way, on the blood-sodden gravel of their driveways.
* * *
ONE OF the nurses is a man Cathy recognises; a boy she slept with a few times years ago. Older now but still the same Jim Galvin, with his gaunt, sexy face and an earring. She sits by her father’s bed with her chin cupped in her hand and watches Jim Galvin across the ward, on the phone. She remembers his flippy dark hair in front of his eyes, standing at the bar in The Royal, the guitar band loud behind them. Her own boyfriend was away in Perth—sleeping, she suspected from his letters, with his friend’s sister—but still she jolted in shock when this boy Jim leaned down and kissed her long on the mouth. She saw her boyfriend’s workmate Dave Shanahan watching interestedly from the end of the bar. But she was seized by the kiss, by its panache, the bald lustful declaration of it here in the open, and she saw then the eyebrows of girls from school, holding cigarettes and gin-and-squashes and leaning against their sturdy boyfriends. And there in the dank pub she had kissed Jim Galvin back even though she didn’t know him, and she felt the lean length of his thigh against the inside of hers, and they left the pub and walked up Park Street to his flat above the pizza shop near the Commonwealth Bank, stopping here and there to press themselves against a wall, a windowpane, his hands gripping her bum through her jeans. In his flat he had gone down on her, pushing her thighs open and thrusting his face in, sliding his tongue all over and into her, and she’d lain there, dazzled and reeling at the pleasure, the astonishing luxury of all that pleasure.
Today Jim Galvin had recognised her slowly, reading her father’s name on the card above the bed. He’d said, ‘Cathy Connolly,’ and she smiled, rocking on her heels with her hands jammed into her jeans pockets.
‘Hi.’ She wondered if he was plunged into the same memory, but he only glanced at her father’s chart and then back at her, and said, ‘Sorry about your dad.’ Cathy murmured her thanks and then he walked off, with his clipboard and his clicking nurse’s keys and tags.
She heard him a few moments later telling another nurse—a new girl, from Sydney—about his house extensions and his kids going to the Catholic school, about his wife who works at Western Electricity and her parents with the butchery in the plaza.
Everybody has a place here. Butchers and electricity company administration officers and nurses and builders and teachers; they are parents, and home-owners and renovators, and they can forget their hands around a girl’s arse and kisses in pubs because that was years and years ago, and they aren’t lonely anymore.
Cathy sits waiting for her sister and mother to c
ome back from lunch. She looks at her father now and then. Nothing seems to have changed in his swollen, ripening face; the monitors bleep and the coloured lines trail in jagged, unhurried pace across the screen.
She wonders if she is heartless, for not yet crying. She had held her breath for it, feared it as they walked into the hospital but as soon as she saw him the need for tears evaporated. Perhaps it is shock. Perhaps she is heartless. Jim Galvin has gone on his lunch break, she supposes. Maybe to meet his wife, to sit in Sidewalks and eat a toasted ham and cheese sandwich together. Or maybe he’s gone home to his half-renovated place on acres. She imagines him and his wife after the kids are in bed, sitting on a couch covered in a paint-spattered cloth, drinking wine from tumblers and eating pizza from a crate set on the unpolished floor, like the couples in home loan advertisements.
Cathy’s studio bedsit in Surry Hills has a shower, a toilet, and an electric hotplate plugged into the wall. Years ago Chris gave her a couch and some dining chairs from a city hotel that his firm was redesigning, and she has a dining table made out of a bench top she found in a rubbish skip, now resting on the pedestal legs from two café tables dumped in the lane. In the corner is an old double bed of Mandy and Chris’s, an ugly country-style one made of cheap wood with turned legs, but with a good mattress that is still comfortable.
When she first moved there, halfway through art school, she felt thrilled at the place, at the midday sun that slammed in through the tall, graceful window and washed light over the whole wide room. Back when the pharmacy was just a part-time job while she studied and painted, she would enjoy the dulled traffic sounds that came in waves like the sea, and she would light a cigarette and drink wine from a cardboard cask, and draw and draw.
The Children Page 6