Bleak Spring (13 page)

“Thanks, ladies. And we apologize for leaving our car on the footpath. It won't happen again. If you have any more trouble with Hamill's, if they beat up your husband again, let the local police know. They'll straighten 'em out.”

“Are you kidding? The cops come down here, everything would be quiet for a day or two, right, Cheryl? Then one day we'd come home to find our house had been burned down. They're real bad buggers, I tell you. Stop it!” She swept her hands round, clipping the fighting toddlers, not missing a head. “You wouldn't like to run this lot in, would you?”

“Hardened crims like them? No way.”

The two detectives got into their car, drove along the footpath to the corner and bumped down over the kerb into the road. As they waited at a traffic light Malone said, “I'd say Hamill's run a stolen car racket. They do some servicing, a few legitimate clients as a front, but I'd bet half those cars we saw in there were stolen.”

“Do we mention them to the Motor Squad?”

“Not yet, but we will. Give us a day or two, we want to keep tabs on Kelpie. So long as he doesn't pinch my car, he's more use to us where he is. I don't think he's going to disappear, he's too shrewd to give us any suspicions.”

“There's a lot today who have Ferraris and Porsches who'd be glad to have them pinched, have 'em written off for the insurance.”

“Not Mrs. Bodalle, though. I'd say she and Will Rockne were two of the legitimate clients.”

Clements
looked sideways. “But?”

Malone looked sideways in return. “Like you say. But . . .”

II

Jason and Claire sat in a booth in Brick's milk bar and coffee lounge, the meeting place before and after school for the boys from Marcellin College and the girls from Holy Spirit. Jason wore jeans and a blue and white striped shirt and Reeboks. Claire was in her school uniform: green and blue plaid skirt, blue shirt and blue blazer with the school emblem on the breast pocket; her felt hat, to be replaced for summer with a straw one, was on top of her schoolbag on the seat beside her. Holy Spirit did not believe in self-expression, at least not in wardrobe.

Brick, who owned the place, was an overweight ex-rock musician in his late thirties who wore his dark, oiled hair in a ducktail and had an array of T-shirts all with the same message: Elvis Lives! The walls of the coffee lounge were hung with framed blow-ups of record covers of Presley, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and other kings of the ancient past. Brick (no one knew if he had another name) knew he was an anachronism, at least to most of his customers, but he also knew where his dreams were, still back there in the past. Something he would never have confessed to any of the kids who came in here every day of the week.

He brought Jason and Claire two caramel malteds. “There, build you up for the day. Sorry about your dad, Jay. I dunno what the world's coming to. When's the funeral? I'd like to send some flowers or something.”

“The end of the week, I think. They haven't released his—his body yet from the morgue.”

“You going to school today?”

“I'm taking the week off.”

Brick went back behind his counter. He ran a well-ordered place and the police and those parents who knew their kids came here never bothered him; he had two kids of his own and was said to be a stern father. It was not his usual practice to bring orders to the kids in the booths or at the tables; but
life
wasn't all rock'n'roll and the shouted lyric, there were moments when you offered to send flowers to a funeral and you didn't want the world to know. He turned down the taped music, wished he had put on something else but the Beatles doing “Roll Over Beethoven.” He had never liked them, anyway.

In the booth Claire said, “You sleeping okay?”

“You sound just like my mum.” He grinned and put his hand on hers. “No, I'm okay, hon.”

“Hon? I'm your honey?”

“That slipped out. No. No, it didn't. I guess I really like you, Claire. You know how a guy really feels when something like this happens. I've really looked forward to you calling me every day.”

“You'd do the same for me.” Then the horror of what she had said struck her; her eyes opened wide and she shook her head. “Oh God, why did I say that?”

“I guess because your dad's in danger every day, practically. Cops are, it's part of the job, I guess. It wasn't for my dad,” he said wonderingly. “Jesus, I still can't get it through my head the way he died!”

“How's your mother?”

He sucked on the straw in the caramel malted. “She's taking it much better'n I expected. Or anyway, she's hiding it better. She's in, you know,
control.
You think you know someone and then—”

“Then what?”

“Do you know your mother and father? Really know 'em?”

Claire pushed the malted aside. “I'm dieting . . . Jay, I don't think I know
anyone,
not really. Oh, I know Maureen and Tom, but they're only
kids.
I don't know
you.
When it comes to Mum and Dad and
adults
. . .” She shook her blonde head at the unknown tribe of an unknown country, one the map of which she had been allowed only to peek at. “I think school should make it a compulsory subject for the HSC, the study of adults.”

He smiled, really enjoying her company. “Do you have to go to school?”

She sighed, pressed his hand. “I wish I didn't have to . . .” She wanted to kiss him, he looked so lonely, but if the word ever got back to Holy Spirit that she had been seen kissing a boy in public, and she in her school uniform for God's sake, Mother Brendan would kill her. “I'll see you here this afternoon.”

“
I'll miss you, hon.”

He watched her go out of the coffee lounge, the only good thing in his life right now. He got out of the booth, paid for the malteds, said goodbye to Brick, a good guy, and headed for home. He passed Randwick police station, wondered if soon they would have a poster in there asking for information on the murder of William Rockne. There had been half a column in yesterday's papers, but nothing this morning; he wondered if it would be worthwhile starting a scrapbook, just in case. But that, he decided at once, would be really bloody ghoulish.

He stopped halfway down the hill of Coogee Bay Road and looked ahead to the ocean stretching out to the horizon and beyond, to Tahiti and South America, to places he would see some day when they collected his father's five-and-a-bit million. He suddenly felt better, though ashamed by the reason for it.

When he turned in the front gate at home his mother was backing her Civic down the driveway. “Where are you going, Mum?”

“To aerobics.”

Aerobics,
for Chrissake!

“What's the matter? You don't think I should be going? Jason, I'm trying to take my mind off what's
happened
! I can't just sit inside the house and
think
all the time!”

“Okay, Mum. I didn't mean anything—”

But he turned away from her and went into the house, wondering what she expected him to do to stop thinking about what had happened. Shelley had gone to stay for a couple of days with Gran Carss and, as he walked in, he all of a sudden felt how goddamn lonely and empty the house was, like a bloody mausoleum, though he'd never been in one of those. As he walked into the kitchen to get a Coke from the fridge, the phone rang.

It was Jill Weigall. “Jay? I just wanted to speak to your mother—”

“She's out, Jill. She—she's gone shopping.”

“How're you feeling?”

“
Pretty lousy.”

“Me, too. You're not going to school, right? How'd you like to come and have lunch with me here at the office? I can't leave it, just in case. We can get some hamburgers—”

“Great! I'd like that.” Suddenly she was as clear in his mind as if she were standing next to him; he wanted to see her. “How about twelve thirty? I'll bring the hamburgers, okay?”

He hung up, wondered at the excitement rippling through him. She couldn't be
interested
in him, surely? Sure, she was an older woman, but . . . The phone rang again and he grabbed it, wanting to hear her voice again.

“Jason? It's Angela Bodalle.”

It was a let-down, a drop right from the rooftop. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Bodalle.”

“Jay, why don't you call me Angela? I'm a friend of the family, all of you. I'll be seeing a lot of you from now on.”

He ignored that, said, “You want Mum? She's out. She's gone to her aerobics class.”

“Where?
Aerobics?” He said nothing, there was silence on the line, then she said, “You don't approve, do you?”

“You don't, either, do you?” He had stepped into adult territory, talking as man to woman, an older woman.

Again there was silence; then: “I don't think it's my place, Jay, to approve or disapprove.”

“You're a friend of the family, you said.”

“Are you cross-examining me, Jay?” He could imagine that goddamn smile of hers. “All right, I disapprove. But only because of what other people will think. Most of them don't understand how your mother feels.”

“Do
you
understand?”

“Yes, of course I do. You are forgetting, Jay—I deal with people almost every day of the week in situations like your mother's.”

She actually sounded sympathetic, somehow softer, dammit, than the way he usually saw her.
“
Well, yeah, I guess so. It's just—well, never mind.”

“I'd like you to talk to me, Jay. We have to help your mother.”

“Yeah, well . . . I'll tell Mum you called. You at your chambers?”

“Yes, I'm not in court this morning. I'll be here till noon.”

He hung up, went into the family room and turned on the TV and got, you wouldn't bloody believe it, a programme called
Aerobics Oz Style.
He lay slumped on a couch, sipping Coke, and watching the sweating bodies gyrate, arses out, boobs bouncing, and thought of his mother doing the same thing at that very moment, trying, she had said, to stop thinking. He closed his eyes to stop the tears.

He was still lying on the couch, still watching TV, this time an American soapie, when his mother came home. She came into the family room, looking young and slim and so bloody
healthy
he felt angry. “Mrs. Bodalle called,” he said and looked back at the television screen.

“Why don't you call her Angela? She's asked you to. Where is she, at her chambers?”

She went out to the kitchen. As soon as she disappeared he turned the sound right down on the TV and sat up, ears strained. He felt ashamed and embarrassed, just like the time he had lain in bed and listened to his mother and father making love. But, like then, he kept his ears wide open.

“Angela, don't tell me what I can and cannot do! I had to get out of the house, can't you understand that? It's all right for you, you're not surrounded by things that remind me of him. It's as if he's still
here
!”

Jason looked at the screen: two women were arguing, their mouths wide open in silent abuse. He wondered what Angela was saying that had his mother so much on edge.

“Yes, of course I'm going to claim it!. . . How can it harm me? We're entitled to claim it, it's in Will's name . . . Oh, for God's sake! Angela, are you losing your nerve? I'm the one who's under pressure . . . Okay. All right, darling, I know how you feel . . . No, I'll wait. It's just that it's such a temptation . . . Yes, you know I do...”

Jason heard her replace the phone and at once he turned up the TV sound again. He slumped back on the couch, but his limbs were as stiff as poles and his head abruptly began to ache. He looked up
as
his mother came and stood in the doorway.

He forced himself to ask, “What did she want?”

“She just wanted to know how we're coping. She's a
friend,
Jason, I wish you'd accept that. What are you doing, watching something like that? You should be studying.”

“I can't concentrate. Maybe I should've gone to school.”

“It's up to you. I still don't know when we can have the funeral. Angela is trying to find out when they're going to release Dad's—Dad's body.”

“Why is she doing that? Why didn't you ask me to do it?” He stood up, every inch of him aching, as if his goddamn bones had turned to iron.

She looked up at him, a slight look of puzzlement on her face, as if she were wondering whether she had lost all touch with him. “I just didn't think of it . . . Could you have done it? I mean, faced up to something like that?”

“Who's organizing the funeral?”

“Angela.”

“Jesus!”

Then the front doorbell rang. He pushed past her, almost roughly, and went down the hall and opened the front door. Inspector Malone and the other one, the sergeant, stood there. He was suddenly glad to see them: at least they were an interruption.

“Your mother home, Jay?”

He led them back through the house, out to the garden room, where his mother had retreated, where she stood in her electric-blue gym outfit, her hair tied back with an electric-blue ribbon, looking so young and healthy it was gross. He caught a glimpse of himself in the small mirror above the drinks cabinet and he winced, he looked so goddamn
old.

“I said we'd be back, Olive. A few more questions.”

“More?” She sat down, arranging herself in her convent-girl pose again. “Would you like some coffee? Jason, would you make some? The kettle's on.”

Jason
went into the kitchen and Malone and Clements sat down apart from each other, so that Olive would have to keep turning her head from one to the other to watch them and their reaction to her answers to their questions. It was an old ploy, but still a good one.