by Alan Duff
‘Mon-gol. Like this.’ Jay made a face representing a Down’s syndrome person.
Lu said, ‘Cruel, Jay. Like cruel. Tell us your porky, Bron boy.’
‘Well, I’m sitting over there one time — before I met you guys — and this seagull comes hopping along my table like he owned it. So bang, I grabbed it by the beak and thought, might as well twist its head off. One less for pecking at people’s grub.’
‘So who’s cruel?’ Jay with a look at Lu like her one word hurt him.
‘Next thing it sprays shit all over me! I let go, it pecked me arm then off it flew, little shit!’
One day out of her own territory, in King’s Cross, Lu had walked smack into the middle of a deal about to go down between edgy Tongan street sellers and a couple of nervous Vietnamese. Clear she was about to get a flogging, or at least a backhanded slap from a Tongan equivalent to an ordinary man’s best punch.
But then another Islander wandered in. ‘Give the chick a break,’ he suggested. Seemed to know the sellers: maybe another King’s Cross local.
‘You know her?’ the Tongans asked.
‘Yeah, not well, but she’s all right.’
They laughed. ‘She’s yours, but don’t forget the favour, bro.’ The implication: if he did, they wouldn’t.
Instead of coming on to her right away like she thought, the newcomer shook her hand. ‘I’m Bronson, call me Bron. Seen you around, roam a bit myself. But you shouldn’t be walking down Llankelly Lane at that hour. Fuckin’ dealers always on edge, it’s their best selling time.’ Didn’t she notice the junkies crawling like insects from everywhere, he asked.
No, Lu had been in a bit of a dream, she said. When truth was her uncle Rick had paid a surprise visit and being told she had her period his demand was specific: he wanted, and took, anal. When always it had been oral, which she’d got used to. It fuckin’ hurt. Soiled her underpants. Made her the more soiled goods. Made her feel disgusting. Same asking herself, why don’t I just report him to the cops? Same old answer: How long has this been going on, young lady? the cop would ask. Then what would she say?
‘Just got walking,’ Lu told her rescuer. ‘Didn’t look up to see I was in Wankerly Lane.’ What everyone called it. ‘I know the selling hours,’ she added. ‘Not that I use.’ Didn’t say had watched her sister’s regular movements from when Monica was hardly a teen, up at the Cross buying — and probably selling herself.
Looked Bronson in the eye. ‘Thanks, mate. I owe you one, big time.’ She could see by his expression that if her favour was friendship he’d be happy, more than happy. Maybe the vulnerable, hurting state she was in had her respond. Hoped she didn’t smell of her own shit leaking out. It hurt.
Bronson chattered on, filling the silence she left. His mother a dope dealer, it turned out, who smoked all day. His whole remembering life, his mother and father were permanently zonked out, ‘Dozen, more than that, joints a day. Had ’em talking Samoan by noon, when they were born in New Zealand, hardly knew one word of Samoan.’ So he hated the drug scene — but wasn’t no prude, he said.
Wasn’t long before Bron was in with their lot.
Down the dock they strolled. All around them Lu saw contrast and yet connection between everyone, the busy workers and business owners, languid pace of the customers, the different stores in the main building selling a range of goods, people reading the Sunday papers. The sea, the lapping sound against wharf pilings, fishing boats and fishermen mending nets and smoking, lugging plastic bins of fish, and there the great straddling concrete supports of Anzac Bridge, wires draped like strings on giant musical instruments or a sculpture.
Could be this place was a mirror of Sydney town too, even when it hadn’t exactly blessed them with luck and love, but what the hell. Not born in black South Africa either. Or one of them other awful African countries. Or a whole lot of other bad places.
‘Eh, guys?’ Lu piped up from her thoughts, figuring the other two were about on a similar page. ‘I mean, how lucky are we?’ Giving Jay a playful shove when he said, ‘You call this lucky?’ He didn’t mean it. shove when he said, ‘You call this lucky?’ He didn’t mean it. Couldn’t.
Coming close to where the pelicans had learned to gather for easy meals thrown, Lu suggesting they head for Bondi, kill the rest of the day and maybe the boys would get lucky with a bather’s wallet. Didn’t bother her, not stealing from strangers she had nothing in common with. Ready to go. But just then her feeling changed.
They saw the sneer growing like instant cancer on her pretty features. In fact Lu was more than pretty, just Jay and Bron didn’t look at her in that way, nor tell her she was a looker. Those green eyes, dark hair, thick brooding eyebrows that could yet lift up in totally innocent and loving expression, or leap up in laughter, full sensuous lips.
Now Lu’s looks were gone, replaced by this glistening stare shot with envy.
‘Dad? I’ve just noticed the wine label,’ a young woman’s voice was saying. ‘It’s Sue’s. Fig Shade.’
‘It’s Sue’s. Fig Shade,’ Lu parroted. ‘How sweet for Suzy and you knowing her, bitch.’
The guys turned and looked at the woman.
‘Holy cow …’ Jay. ‘That’s not bad.’ Meaning infinitely better than that, meaning the chick.
A ripe fruit of womanhood quite glorious in her youth and the glowing complexion of her superior breeding. At a table with her father and a packet of fries and cooked prawns gleaming red in the sun between them, a pottle of seafood sauce dip, white wine in two plastic glasses.
‘They mightn’t eat all their fries,’ said Bronson. ‘Bet they don’t.’ And he paused. So did Jay. But not for possible leftover fries. Just seemed Lu’s extreme reaction, how she was openly staring at the woman, might make for something interesting.
‘Mate, how gorgeous is she?’ Bron to a fellow male. Jay’s eyes flicking between Lu and the chick.
‘As if daddykins didn’t know he was buying it, stupid daughter. Why doesn’t she broadcast it over the Alan Jones Show?’ Lu with bile. ‘Wear a friggin’ sign round her skinny neck saying, “Yoohoo, everyone! We know who makes Fig Shade wine, she’s a family friend! Aren’t we something?”’
Jay said, ‘You have to admit she’s a looker.’
Lu snarled back, ‘What’s “admit” got to do with the price of fish? I never said she wasn’t. It’s her mouth I’m talking.’
‘Are you sure?’ Jay with one of the old sayings to express doubt, hardly heard it used these days. He’d picked it up from old-school knockabouts.
‘Listen, do I care how good looking she is?’ Lu, maybe more vehement than she needed, as if comparing herself, the different worlds, lives lived. All of an unexpected sudden. ‘She wouldn’t be so full of herself, Paris Sydney Hilton, if her period arrived and blood stained those fancy white pants.’
‘Bitch …’ Jay added softly for Lu. Kept his grin in check.
The father and daughter were smiling across at each other, behind designer sunglasses both. ‘Any closer and it’d be incest,’ Lu muttered.
Then the young woman lifted her shades up on her head, hair tied in a bun, real cool. Kind of casual but very sophisticated, as if a sign of membership.
She stood, took up a plastic bag from under the table, walked over, pulled out a fish and threw it to a pelican, fresh fish but not live. Dainty way she nipped the fish out so not to taint her hands with the smell.
She flung a fish high in the air which two pelicans competed to catch in their vast beak pouches, and she cried out in glee and said, ‘Room enough for a bucket of them!’ Laughing.
Jay and Bron more interested in Lu now, at how she was staring unblinkingly at the fabulous young thing. And when the girl turned back for her table Lu’s eyes blinked as rapidly as someone having an epileptic fit.
Jay said in a low voice, ‘Bleed, bitch. Go on, let your period come on. Make our Lulu happy.’
‘Come on, Jay. I never actually meant that.’
Didn’t she jus
t, her buddy wondered.
Daddy filled rich daughter’s wine glass again. They clacked plastic. Daughter put her sunglasses back down, she looked even more stunning, alluring and untouchable.
‘I’d fuck her,’ said Bron.
Jay leaned forward. ‘After me you would.’
Daddikins and dawter, wearing money the three could have dined out on for a year. Though not one of them had been to a restaurant, only takeout joints, Macs.
‘Say gidday to her, I dare you.’ Lu reversed it on Jay.
‘I would if I could but I won’t. And don’t ask me why,’ the words streamed from Jay. He could see the gulf between the girl and them.
Lu glowering until the girl got close and then looking away.
‘Watch ya don’t trip and fall in the drink.’ Muttered some steps after the girl and her father had passed.
Then to her male buddies, ‘Whaddaya lookin’ at me like that for?’
The guys grinned.
‘Let’s go round the back of De Costi’s,’ Jay said. ‘Bloke there sometimes wants a hand lifting sacks of oysters or trash moved. He gives you a feed of prawns, fries. I’m starved.’
Trailing behind, Lu wondering why she felt so suddenly miserable. Surely the chick hadn’t done it to her?
Chapter nine
Anna wondering if to say anything about the disturbing look the girl gave her back at the fish market. Her father would say something like, If we reacted to every look we get from strangers we’d be forever distracted and likely reading it wrong, anyway.
So she was supposed to go around with her eyes closed?
A daughter understood a certain predictable pattern to her father’s voiced opinions: he often gave homilies which, much as they made sense, were also irritating. Even from a father she loved. Genetically, to use Daddy’s most frequently used word, she was close to him in looks, attitude and outlook; nonetheless she was her own person. And for starters, without the slightest intention of following in his horse-breeder footsteps — hoof-prints. Soon, no more talk of bloodlines and conformation, head and wither, the endless permutations of mating up this quarter bloodline with that half-sister-to, no more pretending to love it with near his passion. The animals themselves, yes, but not the business. Too complex and everything to do with winning and out-thinking the other breeders. Close to a crowing contest even if her father did not crow in public nor, even, much in private; just a quiet little comment at the dinner table, given he could find time to sit down and eat with his family, the human one.
Turning and grinning, him the same back. They didn’t have to exchange words, though he did reach out a hand from the steering wheel to run it over her hair and say, ‘I love you, my darling.’
He needn’t. ‘You too, Dad.’
‘Next time at the fish market let’s have a muddie each, Singapore style’ — a large mud crab cooked with garlic and chilli. ‘We’re not allowed to leave until each has finished. Okay?’
‘You’re on.’
The stereo system in this new hybrid Lexus 600 perfect for two music lovers, engine whisper-quiet, Anna just old enough to remember not having such luxury. Still, no less appreciative. Eva Cassidy, the singer who had died of cancer, was on. Anna always thought of the tragic loss: who wants to die young? But at least the beautiful singing voice was alive. Her father said there was a pull-down television screen in the back seat. Anna didn’t say she thought that a bit over the top. More for younger kids. Feeling not at her usual ease.
Wondering if that glaring girl back there might have got her emotions stirred up. Why would she look at a perfect stranger with such hatred?
‘Did you notice a group of three by the boats, a girl about my age and two men who looked like hoods?’ she asked.
‘I did.’ The look he threw said the homily might be about to follow. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just she gave me the real evils.’
‘As she would.’ Her father surprised her.
‘Why would that be if I don’t know her?’
‘Envy. Something you’ll have to get used to. One of the seven deadly sins.’
Like lust, she thought but would hardly say. Knew her father had an eye for the women, didn’t like it one bit, though no hard evidence to say he actually crossed the line. Just clues here and there like wafts of perfume not her mother’s. How he would step away to take certain cell phone calls. Certain her mother had no idea.
‘Envy of what?’
‘Surely you know how striking you are?’
Not something she thought about. Blessed with looks, guess so, but growing up in a rural setting surrounded by testy, highly strung if delightful animals, living in view of a national park and a minor but beautiful mountain range, the bush trilling and cawing with birds and loudly competing insects, minimal human company when not at school, the mirror was last place one went to. Just as country living took her out of the image contest which she saw, once it dawned on her, as a female treadmill she had no intention of jumping on.
‘Dad, while I have nothing to complain about, I hardly go around thinking of myself as striking. I’m just me.’ Her father did have a thing about looks — in women. As if they had little else to offer.
‘Life is unfair,’ Riley said. ‘So get used to it, as the saying goes.’
‘Whatever turns you on, Father dear.’
‘That wasn’t intended with edge, was it?’
‘No.’ She turned her best smile to him. He knew.
‘Is greed a deadly sin?’ she asked, almost flippantly but it was on her mind.
‘Now that is aimed at me.’
‘Sometimes you’re guilty of it,’ she said. Blushing slightly, as if she had betrayed her father. ‘I don’t mean in a really bad way. Just you get that look when you come home from the sales.’
‘As I would. I make millions each time. A lot of it on behalf of my clients, sure. But an awful lot sticks. So I’m allowed to indulge. The rest of the time I’m working too hard to think greed. Half the money goes to you, remember.’
‘If I want it.’
‘As you surely must.’
‘No, I don’t. Some Vatican bishop came out with a pronouncement on the new deadly sins. One of them is being obscenely rich.’
‘But we’re not Catholics. Nor that rich.’
‘It’s a moral code. And we are rich.’
‘Hardly obscenely so. The men who invented Windows and the iPod are obscenely rich. The Murdoch and Packer families are only filthy rich. And that’s fine by me. This bishop, do you think he wants to redistribute the wealth? Why would anyone bother to invent anything if some bunch of moralists — envy mongers more like it — took their rewards away? Perhaps to employ more bureaucrats, increase their undeserved salaries and pensions? Never mention of the tax-free status of the Church, note.’
Hardly time to digest that when he added, ‘The service fee our glorious stallion Raimona gains us is an obscene amount for just one bonk. Eighty grand for a few minutes’ work, times more than two hundred a season. But should man or institution try and take that from us? Well.’
Well what, Father?
‘I’d defend it to the death,’ he said with surprising force. As if he was truly capable. ‘It’s a principle.’
‘You know what I mean,’ she said with more pout than she intended. ‘I said obscene wealth, like billions.’
‘Wealth doesn’t have to be obscene. Only to those who envy and can’t get it. Anyway the Catholic Church, of all institutions, has made billions off the backs of the poor. And all this mass hysteria about global warming has become the latest morality imposed on the world. From the bio-fuel con to nuclear power generation not being good for us. Socialist bullshit. Now the world hates bankers.’
‘As we should.’
‘I agree. But greed is good because it’s human nature.’ This was his moral-high-ground voice. ‘It feeds more of us than morality does.’
‘I’m talking principles and moral standards,’ she said, ‘T
hey’re part of human nature too.’
‘Sure. But those things were neither invented nor practised by the Catholic Church, I assure you,’ he said to his windscreen. ‘Governments use those exact same words to cover up their complete absence of —’ he threw her a look — ‘morals. And principles.’
‘A sole bishop made this statement.’
‘With tacit backing from the Church. Using him, I’ll bet, to send out a feeler for the people’s moral pulse.’
‘Sometimes you are so cynical, Dad.’
‘No. Just older.’
‘Another of the new deadly sins he mentioned is paedophilia.’
He looked at her.
She shrugged. ‘Just telling you what he said.’
‘And no Catholic priest ever sexually abused a kid? Anna.’ He turned down the music. ‘Just live a good life is all I say.’ The engine of this Lexus so quiet she could hear her father’s mind ticking over. Questioning how clear his own conscience? Then again she might have it wrong; she hadn’t exactly seen him philandering, just picked up on the clues, little signs that didn’t quite add up.
‘Shall I join you at your hotel for dinner tonight?’ Try him on that.
Not a blink. Turned fully to her with genuinely apologetic look. ‘Sorry, honey, wish we could. But I have a business dinner tonight.’
‘Where?’ She pushed him.
‘One of my clients’ homes.’
She looked away. ‘Just a thought.’
‘But we could do breakfast together, before I drive home.’
‘At the Stamford?’
‘Sir Stamford, not be mixed up with Stamford Plaza hotels. And they still do the best fresh kippers in town.’
And right across from Anna’s music school, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
‘Maybe I could stay the night?’ She pushed it. ‘You can have your meeting, I’ll have room service —’
‘The college accommodation not working out?’
Not what she meant. But since he raised it. Her facial expression did the shrugging. ‘It’s all right.’