A Family Madness (3 page)

“Charlene,” the slight girl told Delaney now as introduction.

“I'm Terry Delaney,” said Delaney.

“Birth sign?” she said, closing her eyes and seeming to grasp in the air for the images of the zodiac.

“Libra. But that's all bloody nonsense, love.”

She opened her eyes so quickly that Delaney thought his pot-enlarged senses could hear them click apart.

“You say so, Delaney?”

He stood up. “Mind my pew and look at Diamond Head, and I'll get us one of those crook beers each.”

“Crook,” she said. “Crook?” She chuckled.

When he returned with the two cans from Chicka's brimming tub, the girl was still sitting by the window, was obediently watching Diamond Head, though he'd supposed that to her, since she was a native, the sight was ordinary. Before he went she'd seemed to him such a drifty presence that he expected her to have washed away by now into the other room.

“You guys won the Super Bowl in football. Is that it?”

“We lost the grand final at the Sydney Cricket Ground. That's like the Vatican. The first time we ever got through that far.”

“You lost? What did they give the guys who won?”

“The blokes who won,” said Delaney, “are more used to winning. Winning to them didn't mean as much even as getting there did to us. We're working-class boys, see.”

“And what's the name of this game you guys play?”

Delaney shook his head. It had amazed him from childhood that there must be foreigners—220 million Americans, 280 million Russians, a billion Chinese—who had never seen this most delicious game. “It's called Rugby League,” he said.

“How many players to a team?”

“Thirteen.”

“On the offense or the defense?” the girl asked him fixedly, staring not at his eyes but at his lips.

“The same thirteen play all the way through. Unless someone gets injured.”

“The whole goddamn game?”

“That's right. We're bloody supermen down there. We're not like those poofters of yours who play two minutes at a time and all covered with padding.”

“Rugby,” said the girl speculatively.

“Rugby League,” said Delaney. “They reckon Rugby League is a game for gentlemen played by thugs and Rugby Union a game for thugs played by gentlemen. Rugby Union's full of doctors and solicitors.”

“Solicitors. You mean male hookers?”

“No. Lawyers.”

“Oh. Attorneys.”

“Dead right.”

The door opened and smiling Paul Tuomey the coach ran in like a man doing laps. He wore nothing and Delaney noticed the way his belly, in no way enormous, dis-proportioned him nonetheless. He turned left past the girl and sprinted through into Chicka's room. Soon he would reappear at the now permanently open door of Mansfield's room. It turned out he was running for a bet, an old footballer proving he still had mileage left in him. After a few circuits he was ignored. Delaney got used to the recurrent gasps which meant he was coming around again.

“What position do you play, Delaney?” the girl asked him.

“Five-eighth,” he said. There was a chance that if they didn't keep importing five-eighths from Queensland, Britain, or the bush he could play five-eighth in first grade. But he decided it would be too difficult to explain to the girl the concepts involved in that.

As he would assure himself later, he would have been content to spend the evening gently educating the girl within the limits of his interests. Instead she made some obvious pun about the word five-eighth—“Of a goddamn inch or what?”—opened his shorts, and, without warning, began to fondle him. The readiness with which her hands persuaded him was a surprise. Ten seconds before, he had felt on a less earthly plane than the two wingers and the Chinese-American guest, than naked Paul Tuomey. Playing cards on the far side of the bed, the lock and the fullback saw what had befallen Delaney and began to nudge and laugh.

“Watch it, Terry,” they yelled. “The dreaded bloody herpes, mate!”

He begged the girl to stop. Most of the third-graders were not expensive imports but Penrith boys whose mothers and wives met Gina in the street. He was also appalled by what the teaching brothers who had educated him would call the “immodesty” of the event. That did not mean he did not want this girl who lacked an origin or any name that meant anything. Nonetheless, he groaned for her to cut it out. “Not here,” he begged. He dreaded becoming one of the tour's unlikeliest stories.

Cramped over his erection, he led the girl to his room. Stanton had once told him that space shuttle personnel suffered enormous hard-ons, stiffies untrammeled by gravity. Delaney felt crippled by such a space shuttle special. But he survived the walk across Mansfield's room and down the corridor, the small static of derision from the cardplayers and from red-faced Tuomey, whom they met in the corridor and who asked if they wanted him to come too.

Delaney spent two hours with the girl. Occasionally one of the team would come and knock drunkenly on the door. At last Chicka told a chambermaid that it was his room and he'd lost the key, but all he found beyond the door was Delaney and the girl resting and enjoying a sage conversation. When the Parnassian calm of Maui Wow-ie wore off, he would remember Chicka's intrusion with a shame incisive enough to wake him in the middle of the night.

He would remember too, as a rider to his guilt, that he had discovered only one concrete fact about the girl—that she was a waitress.

Stanton had a good wife. He was always saying so. Yet in Denise Stanton's face a heaviness could be seen, a weariness, particularly noticeable, Delaney thought, as she waited in line for communion at St. Nicholas's on Sunday mornings. It seemed to Delaney that two elements were aging her—shortage of cash and Stanton's wildness, his capacity for mad adventures with strange and troublesome women, dangerous ones, the sort whose friends or husbands carried weapons or received stolen goods—liaisons she could not have known about in detail but which she sensed. A dangerous woman and a knife had been involved in Brian Stanton's resignation from the New South Wales police force. Stanton had told Delaney the story, but Denise herself knew only about the knife and the dozen scar marks on Stanton's body.

The Stantons lived in a little timber house—the rental agent said it had been built before Federation—in Emu Plains. Emu Plains was famous in legend and folk song as a penal station during the days of convictism. There was still a prison farm there—the prisoners lived in little yellow brick cubicles which were said to be very hot in summer. These days so many of them were wealthy embezzlers that most of the cubicles were air conditioned. The sad and poor of the convict world occupied those sweltering cells which were not already taken by the prison gentry. Nothing very violent had ever happened at this prison farm, except once, when two escapees from another jail had called in there looking for weapons and had killed a guard. That had been twenty years past, but Stanton would still sometimes worry about his women—Denise and the two girls—alone at night in the little cottage, a mile across the paddocks from the prison farm. They were letting so many bad bastards get away with murder these days. So many bad bastards were buying soft options for themselves, paying off prison officials.

At dawn Delaney drove behind Stanton westward to the plains. They could see three separate bush fires burning on the long escarpment above the river. It was hoped that the day's wind would turn them back on themselves and that an afternoon storm would douse them.

Stanton's little house looked hot. When Brian and Denise had first bought it a large cyprus pine, another survival of the nineteenth century, had shaded it. But that had made the place too cold in winter—the rheuminess and vapors of the old tree seeming to spread into the hallway and bedrooms. Leakage of detergents from nearby drains had begun to kill it, and the past August Brian Stanton had been pleased to rent a chain saw and, with a few ropes and some help from mates, dismember and fell the tree and stack it for firewood. The lawn looked parched without it and the little house, surrounded by hard-lined brick bungalows, looked naked and bereaved. The tree and the old house had been planted together. Delaney was aware of that, and he wondered why Stanton wasn't and had cut up the pine so willingly.

The house had settled in the earth, so that the path to the front door seemed higher than the interior of the place. In the middle of the path stood a tricycle left there the dusk before by the younger of the Stanton children. From the front door you entered straight into the living room, where Stanton's two daughters were watching a Japanese cartoon on TV. The younger one, the tricyclist, Sharon, bounced on the springs of the old threadbare couch while fixedly watching a dragon push a skyscraper over. Denise Stanton had taken this one to doctors so that they could find out why she bounced all the time—in bed, on the couch, apparently on the seat of her school desk as well. The doctors called her “hyperkinetic.” They said the condition often went with high intelligence.

This child, seeing Delaney, launched herself directly at him from the sofa and landed in his arms, holding on with knees, and with hands around his neck. It was so instantaneous a vault that Stanton and Delaney laughed. The elder daughter, Donna, was not distracted from the apocalyptic cartoon. She watched a tidal wave swirl people and animals away and down some vast whirlpool.

In the kitchen Stanton grabbed Denise from behind. “This is my bookkeeper,” he told Delaney. “They reckon I sleep with her.”

They halved a can of beer between them, and it was only as Stanton walked out to the car with Delaney that he began to talk about the questions raised by their encounter with Rudi Kabbel.

“Bloody marvelous. Here's a bloke who comes from a place no one's heard of.
Below Russia
. I watch the bloody
Eye Witness News
like a hawk, but I never heard of Below Russia. And here he is giving us lectures about bloody buffaloes, and employing blokes who all wear this bloody wog uniform of his. My people've been in this country four generations and never worked for themselves. Beats me how the bastards are able to do it. Straight from Below Russia into a business of their own.”

“They're better at business, that's all,” said Delaney.

But Stanton went on talking as if there were a secret he hadn't been let into, as if he'd been denied a vote.

Across the paddocks, from the direction of the prison farm, came the sound of a tractor. Stanton glanced away briefly at it, and when he looked back at Delaney the grievance in his eyes had grown.

“Makes me aware I'm a bloody fool,” said Stanton.

But when Delaney was on his own, driving home to Penrith, he understood that Kabbel had enlarged the night rather than narrowed it down.

3

It became a regular matter—perhaps four nights of the week but certainly three—for Delaney and Stanton to emerge from the laneway behind Franklin's supermarket and find Kabbel seated in his baggy uniform at the picnic table by the bandstand. A thermos and an array of rolls, slightly more than even a large man could eat at that hour of the morning, that security man's lunch hour, waited loosely wrapped on the table before him, as if for sale, as if Kabbel would—as Stanton said—really prefer to be one of those wog delicatessen owners. Eventually even Stanton let himself drink a full cup of Kabbel's coffee. It was full-bodied and very sweet, a strange robust sweetness. Delaney found himself considering the stuff distinctively Belorussian, a sort of proof-by-beverage of the validity of Belorussian claims to an identity.

“Security,” Rudi Kabbel used to say during these meetings, “is the wave of the future.”

Delaney noticed that Kabbel often talked in terms of waves, cleansing fires, earthquakes which would leave the earth vacant and pure. But before that great wiping of the slate, the future of security was enormous. Kabbel had been to a security seminar in Los Angeles and reported from that megalopolis that there security was an industry employing hundreds of thousands. A Beverly Hills mansion, for example, could provide three or four security men with employment. The same was about to happen here, for Sydney was no longer the innocent and distant city to which his father had immigrated. “The wave that breaks on the West Coast this afternoon breaks on Bondi Beach tomorrow morning,” Kabbel would say.

Delaney's father often echoed Kabbel, though Delaney senior would never meet the White Russian. Delaney's father remembered Penrith before there were traffic lights on the Great Western Highway. Property lay all night unprotected under the wide rustic moon—for in those days Penrith was considered to be beyond the western limits of the city. What had been in the childhood of Delaney senior the earth's most modest and least thrustful car yards, pharmacies, furniture stores now however required guardians.

Stanton continued hostile to Kabbel's Eastern European palaver, but Delaney enjoyed the meetings. Granted, it was not hard to interest a security man, who apart from a private in the infantry had the most boring job on earth.

“A good life, gentlemen,” Kabbel said one night in his perfect though vaguely accented English. “Society has achieved the point of decay where it needs our gentle services, but not to the extent that we cannot sit here by the bandstand in the true dead of night and eat our red cabbage and sausage. We carry weapons we never use unless, as happens with some security men, we take casual work holding up Westpac branches. But imagine this: The ice cap in Antarctica melts and raises the level of the sea by seventy meters, destroying the banks, which you notice are always coastal institutions. Foothills become beaches, currency has no meaning—it has no meaning now, for that matter, is kept aloft by a faith which makes belief in the Virgin Birth, say, a small matter. When this happens, no man can pose as Mr. Security.” He bit into a roll. Then he asked, “Do Castle Security let you take your guns home with you each day, gentlemen?”