A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  I believe that later in the night he returned with two of his police officers, one of them being Yuri, and searched the open land—there were reasons why he could not come back with battalions and flashlights. I would not be aware of this later search however, just as I was not aware of what a busy night in general it would become for him.

  The last event I saw from my vantage point, as the camp was becoming quieter, was Galina and my mother rushing along the fence, my mother stopping to look under the older huts by the playing fields. They spoke for a while to the sentry, but he seemed to have become bored with the Kabbelskis and their friends by now and answered only briefly, ultimately turning his back to them.

  Halfway back across the playing fields, in the shadow of the clinic, Galina and my mother began to argue. I was absolutely diverted by the strangeness of this. Galina became increasingly angry, took my mother by the upper arm, pushed her this way and that. It might have been a re-enactment of a schoolyard scene, I naively thought. Then Mother, pulling away from Galina, landed on her haunches in the mud. Galina jumped behind her, dragged her half upright with a crooked arm, and began choking her. While I cried out to the treacherous Galina, my mother arched her back and tried to find purchase on the miry earth with her feet. At last she managed it, wriggled out of that vise, the elbow of her old school friend, and staggered away calling my father’s name. Galina responded neither to my cry nor to my mother’s escape, and collapsed against the hut wall and stared at her bare knees.

  It seemed to be soon after that I awoke in the pit with the consoling knowledge that the pit could not hold me. Through the wooden lid high above me I could see the glimmer of an ice-gray morning. I was prodigiously cold and thought in semidelirium that searchers might be attracted to me by the noise of my organs, above all my heart and brain, creaking under the weight of icy air. I called for help as much to warm myself as in hope. The earthen walls absorbed any cry. My little lumber platform, wedged above the cess, began to shake. I suffered a natural concern as to whether the waste of Frenchmen and Poles and Russian soldiers employed here in the war years would be a foul sea still or would have solidified and become one with the earth itself.

  Considering these questions, I grew comatose. Once I awoke and knew that either it was dusk or the steely day had grown unnaturally dim. It was at some stage of that night that I saw the lid removed above me to show stars of savage clarity. A hand reached down to me and I reached up. It was a hand so callused I did not need to see the face to know who was the rescuer. I concluded, intuitively and at once, that it was the old man I had seen on the corner of Marka and Bryanska streets on the day Onkel Willi was shot by the partisans. “Come on, come on,” said a voice in Belorussian. “We don’t die in holes. Not people like us.”

  It was all I would hear from him. Gratefully yet shrieking with cold I was lifted out and carried a little distance in a needling north wind and set down in the lee of a pile of lumber.

  53

  They played the tape in fast motion, then in slow. The images of Delaney’s outrage against the integrity of Lynch’s jawline appeared on an enormous screen of the type generally found only in clubhouses, in vast areas, among bar tables. In the small boardroom, the infamy of that tackle seemed gigantic.

  The members of the judiciary board were reduced to stillness by the electronic evidence, the collision between Delaney and Lynch. Even old Bernie Bell’s asthma could not be heard.

  Now the board had seen the impact at the speed of the human eye, the official in charge of the video machine let the tape rewind in slow motion. Delaney loped ridiculously backward into the state of taut innocence which had preceded the tackle. Lynch himself took similarly grotesque backward strides. Yelling, “Coming through, Baz!” backward, he got rid of the ball to Austin and disappeared around his flanks. His energy, run backward, resembled fear rather than a hard offensive intention. Behind Delaney one of the journalists tittered.

  Run forward as slowly however, the event did not look quite so comic. Even to himself, Delaney-on-the-screen looked like someone who wanted to punish. His face was set in an aggressive rictus. He seemed to push the slow-footed Yorkshireman Tancred out of the way in his rush to launch himself against the developing movement. He looked as though he would come in low, a fine five-eighth tackle. Then he unwisely straightened and drove his forearm against Lynch’s jawline.

  Behind Delaney someone whispered, “Jesus!” Nausea overcame him. If I get sick in here, will it do me any good? He remembered the berserk elation he felt as the structures of Lynch’s face yielded. Run at normal speed, the tape might support a defense based on reflex action, impulse, lack of malice. Run slow, it looked like bloody murder.

  Golder had insisted the club provide him with counsel. The counsel was, in this case, a young barrister named Vickers, who now asked for an adjournment and led Delaney out of the boardroom and down the corridor into a toilet, where hissing urinals provided some cover for private conversation.

  “All right,” said Vickers. “I think now you should be frank with them about Lynch’s provocations offered earlier in the game.”

  Delaney said he didn’t want to do that.

  “Come on. Provocation’s important! It’s all very nice, Terry, to be brave and take your medicine, but we’re not schoolboys here. We’re talking about a loss of thousands of dollars to you.”

  “They won’t take provocation as an excuse,” said Delaney. “They’ll say, ‘All right, he gouged you, but you broke his jaw.’ I don’t have a medical certificate for my eyes. He’s got a beauty for his jaw!”

  “Look, what I’m urging, it’ll reduce the period of suspension—if any.”

  “If any,” said Delaney. “This isn’t like a court of law. I know these blokes. If I say, ‘He hit me first, Your Honor,’ they’ll remember that for years to come. They’ll despise me. Officials, players—anyone who ever wants to needle me in years to come’ll mention it.”

  Vickers turned to the urinals as if to seek another human to appeal to. There was no one. He turned back again.

  “So your only defense is that it was a reflex action?”

  “It was a reflex action,” yelled Delaney, and then became ashamed of the noise he’d made. “Look, Golder doesn’t want me to point the finger. It’s not the sort of thing you can do to a bloke whose jaw is wired up, even if he is a mongrel. I’m very grateful to you and to him, but I know he doesn’t want me to do Lynch in.”

  “Do you ever want to play again?” asked Vickers.

  Delaney considered himself in the mirror above the wash basins.

  “I don’t think I do,” Delaney said, shocked at the answer. “If it wasn’t for my responsibilities.”

  “Same for all of us,” said Vickers. “I’d rather be windsurfing.”

  It was time to go back to the judiciary. Delaney answered the members’ questions. It was a reflex action. It was the heat of the event. Lynch had found room up the middle—the forwards just weren’t catching him. He had to be stopped by any legal means. “You notice,” said Delaney, hating the guilty tremor in his voice, “that I started to go in low and changed my mind. I wanted to stop the pass, not break his jaw.” So he pushed his one defense. “It’s a matter of inches between a good pass-smothering tackle and a broken jaw. I made a mistake. It wasn’t a deliberate one.”

  Vickers’s speech was an eloquent one for a windsurfer. The game by its nature required a certain degree of needle and tiger. It would be possible for members of the judiciary to look at the earlier stages of the particular game in which Lynch had been injured and Delaney sent from the field, and to find instances of Lynch’s activities which could credibly be considered incitement. But his client did not want these incidents mentioned. The press, the administration, the coaches, the public admired hard contact, praised needle, welcomed a dash of tiger. Sometimes, said Vickers, turning Delaney’s argument metric, the distance between tiger and mayhem was a matter of a few centimeters. There were risks inherent in the n
ature of the code, and it was these inherent risks—rather than an enthusiastic defender named Delaney—which had brought damage to Lynch.

  Delaney and Vickers left again and sat in one of the quieter corners of the upstairs bar. The gentlemen of the press stayed over near the Phillip Street windows, drinking light ales and averting their eyes. It was forty minutes before they were all called in to face the judiciary again. Old Bernie Bell’s breathing was audible now as he told Delaney they were suspending him for six months, that the tackle could not be considered on the evidence to be a mere reaction lacking in intent, but that if his demeanor at the hearing had not been so appropriate the period of suspension would have been longer still.

  54

  The press galloped from the judiciary room to alert their photographers and cameramen downstairs for the prescribed shot of the guilty player striding abashed down the Phillip Street steps. Among those faces—to whom he was a cipher, a jaw-breaker, tomorrow’s victim of editorial comment—he was pleased to see that of Steve Mansfield emerging from the back seat of a taxi. Mansfield yelled, “Mr. Delaney! Your car, sir.” Inviting the press to bugger off and get stuffed, he dragged Delaney into the cab. It was full of people. Eric Samuels, best man from that era when the Delaneys got married, sat in the front beside the Greek driver. (The Greeks ran the cab business these days.) In the back were crammed Borissow, Gorrie, and Steve Mansfield himself.

  “Told you,” said the Greek. “Can’t take four in the back.”

  “Come on, mate,” said Mansfield. He leaned over and stuffed ten dollars into the pocket of the Greek’s shirt. “We’re going to a funeral.” Steve Mansfield, like the other three, was stuck uncomfortably between commiseration and bravado.

  “Where we going then?” asked the Greek cab driver.

  “I told you,” said Mansfield. “Francesco’s at the Cross. One of those back streets. Forget which one.”

  “I know it,” the Greek begrudged them.

  In their various ways they consoled Delaney. Leaving the cab in Bayswater Road, Borissow murmured to Delaney that it was all a shithouse setup. Eric Samuels held him back a second as they were being led to their table. “What can I say, mate?” he asked. Later in the evening, halfway through their third bottle of wine, Gorrie stood at the urinals with him and told him to keep training, to show the buggers.

  “It was a reflex action,” said Delaney.

  “Of course it was,” said Gorrie. “Stands to bloody reason. No player would risk his match payments just for the joy of breaking a bloody jawbone.” When they had their coffee in front of them, their port or cognac on the side, Mansfield announced, “I know a bordello not so many steps from here. Nice girls. No smack addicts. We’ll all pay our own way and cover Terry’s costs between us. What about it, eh? Reckon the Pope will let you?”

  After the bottle of Hunter Valley white they had treated him to, the idea charmed Delaney. He made a little speech about how no man had better friends. He felt his blood begin to pool deliciously in that reach of his body beneath the table. Wine had made it remoter than Cape York.

  “Dear old Gorrie’s never been before,” said Mansfield. “Don’t have ’em in Gilgandra. Blokes out there have to use the livestock!”

  Borissow the center began to give Gorrie, the second-rower, straight-faced advice. “Some of these girls do so many blokes a night that their stomach muscles can just suddenly tense up, hard as a vise. I had a cousin it happened to. So tight he couldn’t get out. They have to take you to Saint Vincent’s emergency ward to separate you.”

  “Don’t tell him that,” said Eric Samuels. Though he too looked alarmed.

  Borissow said, “It’s the truth. What my cousin didn’t know was that all you have to do to release the muscles is just give the girl a punch in the stomach. She’ll thank you for it.”

  Everyone began to laugh, except Gorrie and Borissow. Delaney began to wonder whether it wasn’t the truth.

  “I’m just telling you,” said Borissow.

  It was a short walk from Francesco’s. Far too short. Delaney felt a rush of panic outside the brothel, a fear he might not know the etiquette inside and so make a fool of himself. The place was shuttered and painted a trendy brown. Its nature would be a mystery to the passerby except for the red light above its door.

  Delaney pulled Samuels aside. “You know how they run things in these places?”

  “No,” confessed Eric. “Play it by ear, mate.”

  They held on to each other on the pavement and trembled with quiet laughter about their innocence.

  “Just watch Steve Mansfield,” said Samuels. “He’ll know the routine.”

  And so Mansfield did. He knew, for example, that only in movies or in more hidebound cities than Sydney did you have to knock twice and mumble through an eyehole. He opened the door as if he were arriving home, and led the others straight into an orange-lit foyer where a sharp-faced woman in her thirties called them “gentlemen” and welcomed them with a false enthusiasm which made Eric Samuels continue to shudder with laughter. She motioned them past a barrier of potted palms and told them to take a seat. Three girls could be seen in soft light at the other end of the lounge. They wore party dresses and read magazines—Woman’s Day, Cosmopolitan. They raised their deep mascaraed eyes from pictures of royal children and questionnaires on the female orgasm to look at what the evening had brought them. One of them was Chinese. “Who gets the Yellow Peril?” asked Gorrie, sounding awed.

  The woman who first greeted them had followed them into the lounge. “Now, gentlemen,” she said. “We do not mind greeting guests who have dined well. But I’m sure you understand that we welcome only orderly clients, and that if you wish to be disorderly or loud, then we would be regretfully forced to ask you to go elsewhere.”

  The little speech sobered everyone. She had demanded decencies of them, the way they did at school or in the Leagues Club. She introduced them to the three girls at the other end of the room. Karen, Lynette, Suzie. “All the Yellow Perils call themselves Suzie,” murmured Steve Mansfield. “You know, after that old movie. Suzie Wong.”

  Delaney looked at the one called Karen. Her eyes were bruised with shadow. For the first time in some weeks he felt honest lust. Three of the other girls would be along soon, the sharp-faced woman told them. Then they could make their choice.

  A middle-aged waitress appeared and asked them if they would care for a drink. They all ordered, Gorrie mumbling his desire for a Pilsener. “Geez,” he said when the woman had gone again to fetch their drinks. “She looks like she could be someone’s old mum.”

  “Putting her boy through Sydney,” said Steve Mansfield.

  Borissow gestured them all to lean toward him so he could tell them something that might be to their interest. “If nobody minds, I don’t want the Yellow Peril. They’ve got bloody fierce muscles in their abdomens.”

  “That’s jake,” said Mansfield. “I figure poor little Gorrie’s already sporting a hard-on for her.”

  How will I do it? Delaney was demanding of himself. How, when they all march up, will I be able to say I’ll take Karen? What if someone else wants her too? Someone like Eric Samuels. Best man.

  Three new girls arrived through a dimly lit door beyond a life-sized glossy statue of a panther. They all carried their handbags with them, as if they could not safely put them down. “Here we go, boys,” said Mansfield. “Hang on to your credit cards!” The girls came over and stood in front of the five clients. They said their names were Sally, Jenny, Brook. “If you’d like to make a choice of companion,” said an angular spokeswoman in a blue dress. Brook.

  “Guest of honor first,” said Mansfield, indicating Delaney.

  But Delaney said in a panic, “No, no. You first.”

  “Suzie, then,” said Mansfield, slapping his knees and rising. He moved like an habitué behind the swaying Suzie. So much at ease that in the doorway he turned back and said, “I’ll pick up Terry’s bill on my Bankcard, and you gentlemen can pay me
back later.” And for the information of the girls he pointed at Delaney, who suddenly felt a liquor headache, a seepage of color from his face, a lack of focus in his eyes. “It’s not that he can’t afford it,” Eric Samuels hurried to tell Lynette. “It’s just that it’s his, ah, his … birthday. You’ll read about it in tomorrow’s paper.”

  Lynette, who may have been twenty, was used to the in-jokes of male clients and did not want any explanations. She did not laugh or speak, yet it was somehow obvious that she—pretty chin, dark eyes, and cool agelessness—was the girl Eric wanted. So it’s no contest after all, Delaney realized. It’s all done by little signals that everyone else catches on to—your mates, the women. No wonder they call them professional women. Gorrie was already talking to the bony, lean girl named Brook. Discreetly freckled, she was hard-core Australian, a girl from the bush, from some hard-times town like the one Gorrie himself came from. Borissow spoke to a plump blonde, the most expressive of the lot. “I’ll take Karen,” said Delaney, his voice sounding ridiculous to himself, sounding in fact like a mimicry of some marriage ceremony.

  Karen, her handbag under her arm, led him at once into a cerise hallway where a refrigerator stood. From it she supplied him with another frosted glass and can of beer. She said she had to arrange the payment with him up front, so that they would not be distracted later.

  “I’m the one my mates are paying for,” he said.

  “That’s right. Then come with me.”

  At the bottom of the stairs she turned and smiled. “And how are you tonight?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. He had been banished from his game. He did not know where his love was. But you could not tell a strange girl these things. “Never been better.”

  “I’m not feeling so well,” Karen said, mounting the stairs before him. It was like the sort of excuse he’d heard sometimes from Gina during their courtship. The intimacy of the confession almost shocked him. “I went to a curry house,” she continued. “I’ve already been sick once this evening.”