‘You must be unhappy most of the time then.’
It was his turn to smile.
‘Well, Tony. It will be a new year in two days. You could make some resolutions.’
‘I think we both know what they will be.’
They shared the smile of old conspirators.
‘We go back, don’t we?’ Tony said affectionately.
‘I suppose we do. You were cruel back then.’
‘To you? Never. I adored you. Still do.’
Patricia ignored his banter.
‘To Beth Ann. And to Arthur.’
‘I loved her. I still do.’
‘So did he.’
‘I won.’
‘I guess you did, Tony. I guess you did.’
‘Are you going to judge me now?’ The flare of his temper was starting to rise.
‘No. It would be too much like judging myself.’
‘Yes,’ he said, his anger dissipating and a look of bleary affection returning. ‘Mind if I stay the night?’
‘So long as you don’t mind sleeping on the couch.’
Tony gave a playful smile. ‘Haven’t forgotten after all these years, have you?’
‘Seems like I have so you can’t have been that good.’
Tony laughed. ‘You’re a cruel woman, Patricia. But I love you.’
That, thought Patricia as she sipped her wine, just about cut her heart in half. Tony had made it a habit. Hers. Beth Ann’s. Arthur’s. All their hearts had been cut in two by Tony Harlowe.
37
Arthur Randall had known Tony Harlowe for as long as he could remember. They were hardly close now and few people would guess how entwined their histories were. But when they were young, they had been inseparable. Running down to the river; sleeping under the night sky; hiding in the big tree from where they could see all of the mission without being seen themselves. They played football together on the same team, Tony in the centre, Arthur, smaller framed but fast, on the wing. They would practise, running up and down the fields, passing the ball to each other.
And in their shadow had been Emily. Naturally they thought she was a pest at first and would try to elude her so she would not follow them on their adventures, or allow her along only if she agreed to be their slave and do as they said. Always she was obedient, adoring them both. Their shadow.
He’d always liked Tony’s bravado. There was a clear division between the blacks and the whites and while Arthur had barely understood it as a child, he had noticed it more the older he grew. Black kids and white kids rarely mixed. He liked the way that Tony was always saying things like, ‘We’re as good as they are, you know. Don’t matter about the colour of our skin. Just look at the way we play football better than anyone else in the school. We wouldn’t have won the premiership last three years running if they hadn’t had us, if it was all just the whities.’
Tony always had examples of how the blacks were as good as the whites. He knew that the first cricket team to tour England was Aboriginal. That an Aboriginal cricketer, Eddie Gilbert, was the only bowler to knock the bat out of Sir Donald Bradman’s hands and the only one to have bowled him for a duck. Gilbert played twenty-three matches for Queensland in the 1930s. During that time he took eighty-seven wickets at an average of twenty-nine.
He knew all the Aboriginal players in the football, could relate all the feats of Larry Cowara and Arthur Beetson. And he told Arthur how Lionel Rose became the world bantamweight champion in 1968.
‘So, you tell me, how could we be inferior? Way I see it, white people secretly worry that we’re better so they go out of their way to tell us that we’re not.’ To Arthur, Tony seemed to know about the idea of Black Power without ever having heard of it.
As Tony got older, he became even more brash, less reverent about the existing hierarchy in the town where white people had more privileges than blacks, where segregation was a way of life from the hospital to the school yard, the picture theatre, and even the cemetery. ‘You enter the world segregated and you leave it the same way,’ Tony would say.
The old mission was five miles out of town. It had formerly been run by the church many decades ago and had then become what was known as a reserve, land set aside for Aboriginal people where they were kept under the control of an administrator - a mission manager - and controlled by the government. While the days of the mission manager had disappeared about the time Tony and Arthur were born, all of the older people had memories of when their rations, movements, ability to work were controlled.
At night, when the old men and old women sat on their porches, talking in the evening air about the old times, Arthur and Tony liked to sit and listen. Arthur loved hearing about the old ways and was always keen to hear the stories. He liked to learn the language and hear tricks on how to catch fish or listen for birds, how to find water, which berries and flowers could be eaten, the best way to skin kangaroos and how to make string from their intestines. He liked the stories about the way the snake made the rivers because, when you went down near the river and looked at the way it wound through the landscape, it did look just like a snake had slithered through there.
He and Tony liked the stories about how people would outsmart the mission manager. His favourite was about the night Tommy Boney had wanted to go to a dance in town. He had stolen the manager’s suit off the line where it was airing and put it back when he came back early in the morning, complete with a cigarette burn in the pocket.
As they grew older, he and Tony felt the tensions in the town more acutely. The police had always come to the mission whenever anything happened in town and they started recognising Tony, and to a lesser extent Arthur himself, once they reached puberty. By the time Tony was fifteen, they were regularly being stopped by the police and questioned whenever they came into town.
Tony gave as good as he got. With his smart mouth and cheeky grin he would stand tall. ‘Evening Officers,’ he’d say.
‘You’ll eat that grin, you little black bastard,’ they would mutter back. Although the coppers seemed to change every year, the new ones seemed to have been told to watch out for Tony Harlowe.
By this time, Emily followed them around less. She was always helping her mother, cooking and cleaning, working on her studies or sewing. She liked to make and mend clothes and embroider handkerchiefs. She would stitch dainty little flowers and letters, even tiny bluebirds. She stitched one for Arthur for his sixteenth birthday. It had his name in blue letters and was trimmed with white.
On her fifteenth birthday, with money he had saved that summer fruit picking, Arthur bought Emily a gold cross on a thin gold chain.
Then that night, that terrible nightmare night, changed everything. They’d heard about the way car loads of boys would take girls down to the riverbank, each taking their turn with them. But that night, when they heard the whispers in town about a gang-bang, they had not paid much attention. Neither he nor Tony thought that kind of behaviour proper but neither did they do anything to intervene.
Jenny Dixon, one of Emily’s closest friends, had found them. She was frantic. ‘I think they have taken Emily to the riverbank,’ she panted. ‘We were walking on the road out, coming into town, and the car pulled up and they dragged her in. They tried to get me too, but I was faster. When they had gone, I ran here to find you.’
Tony and Arthur didn’t have to hear any more. They ran as fast as they could down to the riverbank, to the weir, where it was town folklore that the gang-bangs took place. Arthur could not remember much of the run, only the panic to find her, the dark horror creeping over them as they sped towards where they hoped Emily would be.
They saw the cars. They could hear the voices. Neither could remember much of what happened next, it was all instinct and adrenalin, but two boys took on eight and with their rage got the better of them. Tony had always been a fighter but Arthur could never explain where he got his strength from that night. It was the first and last time he ever raised his fists in anger. In the end, the white
s made their way back to their cars and sped off. Tony bundled up the broken, naked body of his little sister and the two boys carried her all the way home. All Arthur could remember was the sound of Emily’s sobbing. He would hear it in his worst dreams for years to come.
They rushed into Tony’s house, yelled for his mother. She gasped at the bundle, and only then in the better light could they see the cuts, the grazes, the blood and the bruises that were starting to bloom.
‘Get me a bucket of warm water and some cloths,’ she had said. The boys sprang into action. As Mrs Harlowe nursed her daughter behind a closed door, the boys looked at each other. Tony finally spoke. ‘Let’s go get them.’
He stormed out of the house, grabbed a thick plank from the woodpile and started heading back to town. Arthur followed his lead. They knew where to find each of the boys who had attacked Emily because they had grown up with them. Gone to school with them. Played on the same football team with them. They were the very ones whom Tony had joked were inferior. The ones who needed Arthur and Tony to win even a game of football. They found five of the eight boys that night and, adrenalin still throbbing, beat each one unconscious.
‘The cops will be after us. We almost killed those bastards,’ Tony had said. ‘We should lay low for a while.’
‘What will we do? We’re only seventeen?’
‘Almost eighteen. Remember that Tent Embassy I told you about. Was in the paper and they were talking about it yesterday at Tommy Boney’s place.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, let’s go there.’
‘We’ve hardly been out of the town, except on football matches.’
‘Then it’s more likely no one will think to look for us there.’
They packed a few belongings and headed off.
They never spoke of the events of that night again.
Arthur thought nothing would lift his mood after what he had seen, that nothing could dispel his anxiety over Emily. Then, only days later, he had seen Beth Ann and fallen in love with her the first time he spoke to her. It filled him with hope but also with guilt.
Arthur loved Tony like a brother. He had seen what Tony had seen that night by the riverbank. He knew what it had taken out of him. So when Tony said, ‘I’m really keen on her, Art, you know. Like no one before. Would you mind if I made a play for her?’ how could he do anything but graciously bow out? Especially when Emily, whose handkerchief was tucked inside his pocket, was all battered and broken back home.
Arthur had known at the time he was giving up something precious. It was only as the years stretched and his feelings for Beth Ann still simmered that giving in to Tony’s request that night became one of his greatest regrets.
When Tony left to follow Beth Ann to Sydney, Arthur went back to the mission. He arrived at night and knocked, late, on the door of Emily’s house. The light was on. Tony’s mother opened the door and, when she saw him, pulled him into her arms.
‘How is Emily?’ he asked. Mrs Harlowe started crying. Emily was a skeleton of her former self. She hardly spoke and rarely smiled. She seemed to barely recognise Arthur and would often stare at the wall.
He persevered. Every day he would sit with her. Would read her stories. Watch television. She stared blankly. Or worse, would sob.
One time, when he caught her crying, she whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’
He fell on his knees before her. ‘Emily, love, what do you have to be sorry for?’
‘I lost the cross you gave me. It must have fallen off that night.’
‘I’ll get you another one,’ he had said gently.
‘It won’t be the same,’ she had whispered.
Three days later, she hung herself from a tree. No one said that they were surprised.
He stayed for the funeral, helped Mrs Harlowe with the arrangements. Tony came that day, arriving in the morning and hastily making his farewells the minute everyone began leaving the church. Arthur virtually lived with Mrs Harlowe for a while but eventually, he knew, he had to move away from Emily’s shadow.
Unlike Tony, who never returned after the day of her funeral, he did come back from time to time. He came back with his fiancee, Sarah. He came back when both his girls were born. He would come back for the funerals of the old people whose stories he had heard.
And he built a happy enough life for himself. He loved his wife. He adored his daughters. He did the public service exam and worked in the Housing Department.
When his wife died of breast cancer at the age of thirty-eight, he devoted himself to being a father.
After all these years, he still held a place in his heart for Beth Ann. And, tucked in the top drawer of his side table, was the carefully folded handkerchief, his name spelled out in blue letters.
38
Tony’s head was still thumping from the night before. He’d drunk too much at Patricia’s and was feeling the worse for it now. He flicked through the transcripts Darren Brown had dropped off and tried to concentrate. The Legal Service was closed between Christmas and New Year but he thought that doing some work might take his mind off his troubles. It hadn’t helped the way he had hoped.
His life had unravelled. Six months ago he had been smugly thinking about the dilemma of juggling a wife and a girlfriend. Now he was facing the new year alone. And as Patricia reminded him last night, no one would have any sympathy for him. He didn’t know why he had gone to see her. His life had hit rock bottom. There were several women who would have happily given him some comfort but he chose the one who, he knew deep down inside, would tell him the truth.
He admired Patricia. Always had. He cringed when he thought of the clumsy pass he had made at her last night. Trust her to reject him so bluntly. He smiled at the thought. She was one of the few people in his life who was always honest with him - along with his mother, his daughter and Beth Ann. These four women were the mirrors of his true self.
When he had fled the mission, he had written those five steps for survival. One had said: ‘Appeal to selfinterest, never to mercy or gratitude’. The surest and best way to make your fortune, he had thought, was to let people see clearly that it’s in their best interests to promote yours.
Always he tried to make people think they needed him. He knew Patricia never did. He had tried to make Beth Ann dependent on him. He had, through his own insecurity, distanced her from her family, made it difficult for her to see them. He had refused to allow her to take a paying job and had eventually agreed to one that was voluntary, and then only because he knew that, if she was in the prison all day, she could not contact him when he was up to no good.
He was more aware of his shortcomings than others would realise. That’s why he invented his five steps for survival in the first place. So he could create a facade, so he could fool people.
And yet, Beth Ann had loved him and she was the one who knew him best. That day, that awful day, when she confronted him in the laundry, the evidence in her hand, he had fled. He couldn’t face the hardness in her face, this look he had never seen before. He knew in his heart, by looking into her eyes, that she had turned cold against him. It was the second time in his life that he had run away.
He had thought at the time, justifying things to himself, that if he could legitimise his relationship with Rachel, it would make everything less shabby. When she had ended it with him, he’d been stunned. And hurt, he’d begrudgingly admitted to himself. But a deep part of him was relieved. He’d known as soon as he’d moved in with her it had been a mistake. But Beth Ann would give him no ground.
‘I have packed your things. I would like to arrange to have them sent somewhere,’ she had told him.
‘I can come by and pick them up.’
‘I’ll be out between four and eight tomorrow. They’ll be in the garage. I’ll leave it unlocked.’
‘Do you think they’ll be safe there?’
‘Don’t know. Better come close to four then.’
‘I’d like to see you.’
‘I don�
��t think that would be wise.’
Not rude but not welcoming. He had not expected her to beg. She was too dignified for that. It was one of the many things he loved about her. But her determined stoniness had given him no opportunity to talk about a reconciliation. He looked for every possible opening, any loose word. She gave him nothing and now he found himself heading towards a divorce that he didn’t want.
His relationship with his daughter had improved but there was still a long way to go to properly repair it, to bring it back to what it had once been. He missed their talks and their rituals.
‘How’s my favourite daughter?’ he would ask.
‘I’m your only daughter,’ she would reply.
‘If I had a hundred daughters, you’d still be my favourite.’
It was silly but he had always loved it because it was their ritual, developed with affection and repeated over the years. Simone always smiled so brightly when they played the game. Lately she had refused to play along. He’d asked his lead question several times only to be rebuffed and it hurt too much to keep on trying.
Her angry early morning phone call had forced him to face what a coward he had been about Emily. He had used his rage at what had been done to her - and what he thought had been done to him - to make it impossible for him to stay. And he dreaded coming back to face her, his little sister who he could not protect. When she killed herself, he realised just how selfish, how irredeemably selfish he had been.
When Tony went home for the funeral he knew that he could never be in the town again, never be at the mission, never be in the house they grew up in, without seeing Emily and being confronted with how he had run away from her when she needed him the most. There was no place in that town where he would not have a memory of her, no place there where he would be able to forget her or his role in her death.
He had thought that the attention of others - the admiration of the Darren Browns and the Rachel Mileses of the world - would help him to forget his biggest failing, his biggest mistake, but now he realised that it didn’t. It was a false sense of self he gleaned from their attention. It cultivated vanity, not self-esteem. Their adoration should be a pleasant compliment; it should not define him. He should enjoy it only if he could keep it in context, not get addicted to it.
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