A Woman of the Inner Sea (36 page)

When she got there she forced Gus to give her explanations through his smashed nose. That was how daunting her innocence was. She thought she was still entitled to every piece of information her brother-in-law could give her!

On the road between Bourke and Schulberger’s Gus knelt by Kate—so her uncle would later tell her—and he kissed her on the cheekbone, and in front of the hardened police of what could be called his home town, wept and said he’d never do anything to
harm her. Uncle Frank had an eye for this sort of thing, but did not consider him a soul imperiled however. Kate was the soul imperiled, so convinced of it that she had begun swallowing her tongue. Uncle Frank did not understand the signs. The senior constable was trained that way though, and dragged her clenched jaws apart. He brought forward that same tongue which Chifley had cursed with language.

The police remarked that Burnside’s blood was visible on Chifley’s hind paws, the long opposed toe with the savage claw.

Though Gus was required further by them, Kate was not. Around sad Gus however there hung very little atmosphere of condemnation. He was simply asked about Jelly, and then about the beasts, and finally, the morning after he shot Chifley, released on his own recognizance.

Kate was not in Bourke to see this however, since Uncle Frank took her
home
—as Uncle Frank himself chose to call it—quickly in O’Toole’s helicopter. The killing media would pass her coming the other way in their light aircraft and in helicopters of their own. For what a story! Heiress divorcée of Kozinski, mother of dead children, thought once to have drowned in a flood of Myambagh, succored by Frank Pellegrino, involved in kangaroo injury to the notorious Burnside. Time for the kangaroo court of their own bludgeon headlines and frightful cameras! Imagine her destiny if they had found her in Bourke, with nothing to protect her except her conviction that she could no longer breathe!

—I wanted to warn Burnside, she would have pleaded with them. But he kicked me in the stomach, and I didn’t have the …

—Sorry, Mrs. Kozinski. We’re out of film … the batteries are flat … the light’s wrong … a plane’s going over … Could we just do that bit again?

For the flight home, she was stupefied with legal drugs, full of medicaments normally prescribed for epileptics, though probably she wasn’t one. Something heavy had to be used to distract her from her belief there was no air.

Gus was left to do all that press stuff, and he did it in grief, having lost his beast and his companion. But he was a dutiful interviewee. His directness won him support during the next week, while Kate lay drugged in a leafy, plain private sanatorium near wooded Kuringai Chase, beyond the normal range of scrutiny of Sydney’s frenetic press.

During her stupor, Murray visited her. So did her parents and, filling in his bail period and curing her soul, Uncle Frank. He was the one she noticed. In a brief wakeful period in which she did not speak, she was aware that he carried an airline bag, as if he had a gift for her. But he put it by the wall. He wanted her to be clearheaded to receive it.

Gus, since he did not even try, had the basics to become what the media call a folk hero. When he refused to sell his story to any newspaper, it made them double the price.

He served as a catalyst too. Feature articles appeared about Burnside and his repute for terror, and his long retainership to those prize Australo-Poles the Kozinskis.

In sympathy with Gus, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals raided the Wagga entertainment park which had featured the
tableau vivant
and served writs on the man from whom Gus had retaken Chifley and Menzies. People queued in newspapers and on television and radio to say they didn’t think Gus’s was the sort of prosecution on which taxpayers’ money should be expended.

His life has made him a practical, play-the-cards-you’re-dealt sort of man. His
known
Kate was the Kate of Murchison’s steak kitchen and front bar. His Kate was Jelly’s Kate. Not a woman of whom so many bewildering things were said: heiress (an old-fashioned term Gus had only ever encountered in books of a certain kind), Kozinski Constructions, shopping malls in California, tragedies on the Northern Beaches. Events on a yacht called
Vistula
.

He causes so much distress to the half-conscious Kate Gaffney that Mrs. Kate takes him aside and tells him it would be better if.

He is aware too of course that he has had his choice. He has chosen saving Chifley rather than take any notice of Kate’s idea of where her breath and phantom joy come from. A true lover, he accepted, waited out, served, handled gently all the beloved’s mad ideas, especially those about air and the uselessness of the human lung at certain points of history. But then, despite all that, he shot Chifley.

Kate, cleaned by experts and stunned medically in a sanatorium bed! She knows she is dead, but is never awake long enough to actually set her compass in that direction. It is clear to any observer
that her ideas about air are utterly crazed and that she will go on living.

Kate now tends to see the same person in the room whenever she wakes. It is never her mother and father. It is never Murray, who is rarely allowed to be alone with her anyhow because of his part in her injuries. It is always Uncle Frank. It is clear that Uncle Frank waits on after others leave. He is looking for the moment that his airline bag can have its part.

But he always speaks to her too. He speaks at greater length than she has consciousness for. He understands that that is effective. She will sometimes answer him without knowing it, her mouth will clot with the few words she has to play with. She doesn’t know at any stage what she has said. Somehow she knows what Uncle Frank says though.

What most of his talk is about is still that he has never bribed anyone. Since it is his chief claim, the claim which in his mind qualifies him as comforter and guru, he is as desperate to tell her this in her sanatorium as he was amongst the pepper trees outside Queen Victoria’s remotest police station in Bourke.

SP (Starting Price) bookmaking. It was as old as the anarchic island continent and as ancient as convictism. It was harmless too, in some lights, part of the unofficial democratic rights of the Australian working men and women. Except that there were some rough boys and even some gobshites involved. The intention upon coming to Australia to serve the diocese of Wilcannia-Forbes and then the archdiocese of Sydney had been pure and he had involved himself in it. But he loved the races. If he hadn’t had a vocation—he still thought of himself as having a vocation, a better one than His Eminence Fogarty—then he would have certainly been a trainer or at least an owner.

And then love. He hadn’t come to Australia from loveless Limerick for love. Yet love was something he was not ashamed of claiming. The late Alderman Kearney had been in SP bookmaking since boyhood. When he died too young and left his widow, she appealed to her friend the not-so-Reverend Frank to help her to run things.

Kate probably knew—and if not he certainly told her during her convalescence—that you needed to be able to get phones on quick if you were a controller, the central figure of an SP network. You
needed a bank of a dozen phones at least in a series of given locations. Just in case the authorities, with nothing better to do with citizens’ taxes, became concerned about the number of calls being made from an individual number or string of numbers. It was something they checked on. Hard to believe. But they did. So you needed a dozen or so in each place to bear the volume of traffic, and then alternate locations in case of raids.

If one of the controller’s offices came under threat—and say there was a friendly local inspector and he said, Frank, Fiona, I’m under pressure from above …! Or if Telecom investigators got close, using their spying methods … you moved your office to a new place lying ready, phones already installed. That was Frank’s idea. The eight hotels (or as some press reports said
ten
) were eight locations under Fiona Kearney’s (and Uncle Frank’s) control. They even had subcontrollers who rented the locations from them. And the central controlling office itself could be moved from hotel to hotel at will. So it depended on getting new telephones put in quickly and on having plenty in place.

And Uncle Frank could attend to that. He had friends who would do it for nothing, and thus—in his mind—it was clean business.

He had friends in the banking business too who would, if he asked them, as he sometimes did, let him use their own addresses as a home address on various accounts. To Uncle Frank these accommodations were the normal accommodations of friendship. She came to appreciate in her stupor that though he was a saint he had a profoundly criminal soul.

Again she would have liked to have argued with him over his peculiar idea of what corruption was. In his world it did not exist if it were amongst the friendly and the loyal and was a token of love. He was not ashamed, in fact shamefully unashamed, to ask for favors based on crucial words of consolation he had offered in some presbytery front parlor or at O’Toole’s. She was reminded of the minor graft of O’Toole’s hearse-helicopter. What it said was that government was a joke and deserved to be laughed at through the exhausts of cerulean helicopters, as through batteries of book-making telephones.

So prison would be futile for Uncle Frank, in a different way from the futility which applied to habitual criminals. It would not cure Uncle Frank of his tribal premises. She wondered where he
had got his confidence in her: his belief that she would see the reason of his argument. As if in her childhood too she had seen the Black and Tans go by in their armored vehicles. As if she had not in fact spent her childhood in the Harbour’s utterly equitable sunlight and come to believe in law and order.

These questions lay idly and flat between Uncle Frank and herself though. They were not living issues for him. She did not have a living issue.

Whenever she woke, she was always amazed after an early flutter of breathlessness that the air went in, turned itself sour, was emitted again just as with any living beast.

Her skin felt altered, and she washed it with a tissue dipped in a water glass and found traces of cosmetic there, applied by her misguided mother.

She stayed awake long enough to greet Mrs. Gaffney as she came visiting:

—No cosmetics, she told her mother.

—Just to freshen you up.

—No. No cosmetics.

But then she lost her hold on the argument.

Once she woke and found that Mrs. Fiona Kearney was there, smiling. Kate thought, Yes, in some lights, a handsome and generous woman. A hostage Frank had taken back from the Black and Tans. A soul saved from the straitlace and the narrow way.

Kate found with regret of course that she was waking hungry. Instead of asking for food she might ask where Gus was.

—He’s been on television, said Uncle Frank as if that exempted her from further regard for him.

—You’ll be on television too, Uncle Frank.

—Yes, darling. But dead against my will.

She told him she wanted to see Murray, and she wanted to see Gus.

—Both at the same time? he asked her, trying to confuse her for the best of motives.

So Gus’s flower-bearing visit first:

He was anxious that there might be a scene, and he wanted to show her as fast as he could that he knew himself disqualified, that he understood it all without rancor.

—I might be going home soon, Kate.

—Nothing to stay down here for, she agreed.

—Well, I started going out with a widow. She’s one of those … animal liberationists. Not one of the mad ones though.

He smiled madly and touched Kate’s wrist.

—One of the ones that believe roos shouldn’t box, anyhow.

Gently he talked her into drinking a cup of tea with him. She looked around for something to give him. There were only two novels, which Jim Gaffney had brought and left there, believing that she would achieve focus imminently. It wasn’t going to happen.

—Will you take these, Gus?

He made all the polite refusals, but it was established he
would
take them, and would handle them reverently on the bottom of the sea beyond the Darling.

—We were just stumbling along, eh? Lost bloody souls.

Before kissing her goodbye. It was the last multisyllabic thing she would hear him say in the flesh.

Murray’s visit then. He came on the first day that she realized what day it was. She realized it was a Saturday. It was race day, but Uncle Frank was banned from all race tracks and so was there as well. He tried to linger in the room. Kate surprised herself by managing a warning look, something of more vigor than the mere warning looks that occur in most novels, one which threatened riot and exasperation.

After Uncle Frank left, Murray kissed her slowly and gently in the middle of the forehead.

—Has my mother put makeup on me?

—Oh Kate. How are your shoulders? How are your burns now?

—I don’t know. I haven’t referred to them.

He chose to take this as a little joke.

—For an hour or two, when the flood was on …

—I know, she said. I know.

He held her hand and seemed to get much from the experience. She herself felt little of it all. Her hand might have been a curio somewhere in the room. He had decided wantonly to cherish it.

—Kate, he said, I’m so pleased to have the chance to speak to you. I’m talking to you as a friend now. Your mother and father are all in favor of suing the Kozinskis to the limit. They’ve spoken to me of settlements in excess of twenty million. It isn’t greed.
They want to see Paul pay for his bad behavior. In my opinion, you shouldn’t be persuaded by that. There’s a kind of intimacy about court hearings which you will find painful. And you know what they say: if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. In my opinion, you should settle with the Kozinskis for an immediate amount now, payments spread over a strictly limited period. There might be nothing left of Kozinski assets by the time you’ve been through the courts. They’re in considerable trouble with this inquiry into the building industry. Both father and son could face charges over improper practices of various kinds, from false prospectuses to extortion. As a matter of good sense and of self-respect, settle with them as soon as you can.