Holding Out for a Hero (6 page)

Ella blinked. A girl? Her brother had the communication skills to converse with a girl? “Really?” She sat down next to Jake. “How’d that go?”

Rosie grinned. “Kind of silent this end. He did a lot of nodding.”

No surprise there. Cam usually only stretched to more than grunts and one-syllable words when absolutely essential. Ella had a glimpse at what it must have been like for Neanderthal woman and wasn’t surprised they all died young. Probably from sheer boredom.

“Any more thoughts on a plan of attack, dear?” Iris asked.

Ella came out of her thoughts and smiled sweetly at lovely Iris for changing the subject. “Not really, Iris. What do the cards say? Anything hopeful?”

“I’m sorry, dear.” Iris shook her frizzy head. “It’s all very unclear.”

“Problem?” Jake asked.

“They’re trying to shut Ella’s school down,” Rosie said. “Mob of moronic beaurocratic fuckwits.”

Simon raised an eyebrow at her and Rosie chewed on her lip contritely. “Sorry. Some situations require the F word.”

“I can’t believe they’re actually going to do it.” Ella grimaced. “These kids don’t have much but at least they’re getting an education.” She turned to Jake. “At least at school they get to escape from their home life for a while to a place where they know that people care about them. Who’s going to feed the Breakfast Club kids if we close our doors? Their parents certainly won’t. And what about the school-based apprenticeship scheme that I busted my ass to get up and running? It was giving them a real alternative. Something better than shelf-stacker or the dole queue.”

He watched Ella worrying a linen napkin between her fingers. Had it been paper it would have been torn to shreds. He liked that she’d become a teacher—it was fitting. And it was apparent that it was more than just a job. The school and its students obviously meant the world to her. They were clearly more than just numbers.

He listened as the women threw ideas around in the smoke-filled bubble that ranged from the whacky to the dubious. Simon, who had been silently assessing the situation too, squinted through the haze of smoke and locked eyes with Jake.

“I’ve got it,” he announced with a snap of his fingers.

Everyone turned to face him. Even Cerberus, who had plonked himself down next to Simon and was gratefully accepting the odd smuggled spoonful of curry. The other dogs, lounging far away from the table, knew better.

“Does the school have a football team?” Simon asked Ella, absently patting Cerberus’s head.

She frowned. “A group of kids who play touch on the oval at lunchtime.” It was about the only time she could guarantee that Cam would be at school. She shrugged. “There’s no money for extracurricular things like that. We don’t even have enough PE hours in the budget for all the kids to have their mandatory one lesson a week.”

“What if you formed a football team and entered the BSFC? No way would they shut down a school that took away that prestigious sucker.”

Ella blinked. Enter the Brisbane Schools Football Competition? A competition schools trained for years to win? She stared at Simon and wondered if he’d been dropped on the head as a baby.

Jake, whose shoulders had tensed, relaxed. Ella looked like she was about to have a stroke. Or at the very least a seizure. And he thanked God for her pathological dislike of football.

“Cameron would love it,” Daisy commented.

“Just like that. Just win a comp like that?” Ella asked incredulously.

“Well, I’m not saying it’ll be easy. But you do have a secret weapon. You have a first-rate retired rugby league player under your nose. Probably the best fullback this country has ever seen.”

Ella turned and looked at Jake. “He means you, right?”

Jake glared at Simon. “No.” Jesus. The last thing he needed was this kind of hassle. He was retired. He was running a pub and drinking beer. Life was one long happy hour.

“You could coach them,” Simon pressed.

“Ohmigod, yes.” Rosie clapped, bouncing in her seat. “It’s perfect.”

“No,” Ella and Jake said in unison. They looked at each other.

“I’m retired,” Jake said, looking back at Simon.

“He’s retired,” Ella repeated.

“The winner gets to take on the private school boys for the Schools Cup,” Simon continued, looking straight at Ella. “Win that and you’d be untouchable. Maybe forever.”

Ella hated to admit it, but Simon was right. Slavish devotion to football started early and the inter-school football comp was extremely high profile. The temptation was massive but even so, she couldn’t believe she was considering it. The irony cut too deep. Could the one thing she’d despised more than anything—football—be the one thing to dig her out of the hole she was in?

“But we’d have to win,” she said to Simon. “That’s … impossible. We’d need a miracle. We’d need more than Jake. We’d need God’s gift to football.”

Simon looked at her. “He
is
God’s gift to football.”

She looked at Jake and he shrugged and grinned. Well, now, how unfair was that? God had favored Jake Prince with one too many gifts. She glanced at Simon. Then back to Jake. She didn’t want to want this. She didn’t want to need this. She didn’t want anything to do with football. And certainly not anything to do with someone from Huntley, and least of all someone who was such an integral part of a past she’d spent nearly two decades trying to forget. But unfortunately she also knew what Simon was saying was right. The Schools Cup was extremely prestigious and highly sought after.

Iris, who had been setting out a spread of cards, pursed her lips. “The cards are favorable.”

Ella sighed. Well that was that, then. If the cards said so then both Daisy and Iris were already committed.

“The cards are telling me it could be very good for Cameron,” Iris added.

Ella looked at Iris, shying from the force of her mental arm twisting. She’d never questioned Iris’s gift. Rosie had had her convinced of her aunt’s ability even before they’d arrived in Brisbane and she’d been privy to its accuracy on more than one occasion.

“Do they say we’ll win?”

Iris gave one of her mystical smiles. “You know they don’t deal in absolutes.”

Ella looked at Jake speculatively. Maybe she could use Australia’s criminal devotion to sport in her favor? Make the bloody game work for her? Work for good. And besides, what else did she have? Apart from sleeping through the upper echelons of the education department?

Jake shook his head. “No.”

She gave him a reproving look.

“I’m retired,” he said, exasperation in his voice as everyone stared at him.

“So you have plenty of time on your hands,” Ella reasoned.

“I run a pub.”

She almost faltered at his vehement rejection. She glanced at Iris again, who nodded at her. It sounded crazy. A stupid, hare-brained whim, but it beat the hell out of a dozen or so sexual favors with a bunch of men who looked like Menzies had been PM the last time any of them had seen any action. She was pretty sure they hadn’t even discovered the g-spot back then.

“Challenge too big for you, Jake? Not up to it? Prefer to fritter away life drinking beer and signing women’s body parts?”

He snorted. “Hell, yeah.”

Ella rolled her eyes. “This is important, Jake. More important than beer and women.”

“Nothing’s more important than beer and women.”

“Margarita land every day for you, huh?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ella swallowed. “Please, Jake.”

Jake shook his head. “A public school has never won the Schools Cup in its ninety-year history.”

Ella started. She looked at Simon. “Is that true?”

Simon nodded. “Doesn’t mean yours won’t be the first.”

If there was one thing Ella hated more than football it was the whole elitist sport bullshit that went on at private schools. The temptation to be the ones to change that—poor,  under threat Hanniford High—was amazingly enticing. Oh God. Was she that desperate?

She turned to Jake. “We could be the ones.”

“You told me not even an hour ago you despise football.”

Ella nodded. She did. But. “I’m prepared to tolerate it.”

Jake looked at her, exasperated. “Don’t you have a plan B?”

Ella shrugged. “Sleep with the entire education review panel.”

Jake smiled. “There you go, then. Problem solved.”

Cameron chose that moment to enter the fray. Ella’s heart contracted as it always did when she saw him. He looked so much like Rachel. Sure, he was a big kid, solidly built from his thick neck to his broad shoulders down to his tree-trunk legs. He obviously took after his father—whoever the hell that was. But his face; some of his expressions were so like Rachel it was uncanny.

He ignored everybody, reaching for the iPhone he’d left on the table.

“Hi, Cam,” Ella said trying to sound casual and friendly. Cameron grunted at her. “Can you let me know when the footy’s finished? I need to talk to you.”

Cameron rolled his eyes. “Shit, Ella. Nag, nag, nag. That’s all you do,” he said glaring at her as he grabbed his phone.

“Cam,” she called after him as he turned to go back inside.

“Fuck off,” he threw over his shoulder.

Jake blinked at Cameron’s profanity, shocked by his utter rudeness. He looked at Ella and saw her complexion pale as her knuckles grew white against the back of the chair. Then her cheeks turned pink as everyone at the table sat in uncomfortable silence.

He felt a white hot welling of anger bubble up inside him. No wonder Ella had looked so strained earlier. Her brother needed a serious attitude adjustment. But amid the heat simmering inside him was a kind of primal recognition.

Cameron Lucas was a product of Huntley.

As he had been.

Cameron Lucas was him—before football.

“Okay,” Jake said.

He stood to leave. If he stayed he may be tempted to give Cameron the whopping he deserved right now instead of making him pay for it on the field.

“I’ll be there Monday at three o’clock. You got yourself a coach.”

Iris wrestled the official-looking envelope from Genghis’s mouth on Monday morning. She didn’t need her psychic powers to know that anything with Brisbane City Council on it was not going to be good news and she almost gave it back to Genghis for annihilation by slobber. One of them might as well get pleasure out of the damned thing. Unfortunately she didn’t think the council would accept “the dog ate the notice” from a grown woman.

She hurried up the stairs with the dogs at her heels. Her metal bangles, thinner every year, jingled with the rhythm. She could feel an edge of anxiety, never far away, kick up a notch—her psychic ability came hand in hand with a fretfulness she’d never quite mastered and to say she felt uneasy right now was an understatement.

Her recurrent dream didn’t help. She woke most mornings desperately trying to hold on to the wisps of a vanishing dream that her intuition told her was important. But it always slipped from her grasp and she was left with just two words—yellow gold. Important words.

If only she knew what they meant.

Fortunately, her sensitivities had not been replicated in her twin and Iris couldn’t wait to offload the offending envelope to Daisy. “It’s from the council,” Iris said, rounding the corner of the verandah, dropping the letter on the table the second she drew near enough to hit her target.

Daisy grunted and didn’t bother looking up from rolling the day’s supply of cigarettes; some things were more important than envelopes with windows. She ignored the multiple packets of filters, lying among the debris of newspapers and magazines on the Formica table top, that Ella and Rosie regularly bought for them. The girls’ hearts were in the right place and the sisters made a point of using them in the evening when the girls were home, but they’d been smoking rollies since they’d been eleven and were too old to start looking after their health now.

Iris picked up her pack of tarot cards and shuffled them, eyeing the letter, then put them down again. She looked out over the yard, watching Cerberus scratching at the hard earth beneath the middle wattle. He seemed to have adopted that tree since arriving and had chosen well. Of the five wattles, it was the one that produced the most stunning display of yellow each season. The others always seemed to struggle in comparison. She called him away, not wanting him to kill their best flowerer with his digging, and turned back to Daisy. Her lips were pursed in concentration as she loaded tobacco onto the paper and Iris felt her anxiety raise another notch. She picked the deck up again and rubbed her thumbs over the top card, taking a measure of calm from their familiar texture.

“Daisy.”

Daisy looked up from licking the edge of the cigarette paper and momentarily resisted the reproach in Iris’s gaze. Being one minute older had it advantages. But even after sixty-two years on earth together she was still a sucker for her twin’s emotional vulnerabilities.

She passed Iris a rollie and picked up the envelope.

“What does it say?’ Iris demanded the minute she’d taken her first fortifying, unfiltered drag.

Daisy scanned the letter and then scrunched it up and threw it to Genghis. “Asbestos.”

Iris felt her heart stop momentarily in her chest and she coughed several times as the acrid smoke swirling in her lungs irritated her airways. She stared at her calm sister. “We have asbestos?” she gasped.

“Nah,” Daisy said in her gravelly voice, lighting a cigarette. “They’re just fishing.”

Iris shuffled the cards. “They’re sending someone, aren’t they?”

Daisy shrugged. “They have to get past the dogs first.”

Iris flicked ash off the end of her cigarette into the overflowing ashtray. “When?”

“They didn’t specify. Sometime in the next few weeks.”

Iris pressed her lips together, squinting through the smoke at her sister, still shuffling her cards. “What if we do have it?”

“If we do have it then we’re probably all doomed anyway.”

“It’ll cost a fortune to get rid of.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“It’s not just the asbestos, Dais. Look at this place. We can fill it up with as much modern stuff as we can win but it’s still a ninety-year-old house falling down around our ears.”

“So?” Daisy took a deep drag of her cigarette, looking for calm amid her twin’s rising panic. “We’ll remortgage it.”

Iris snorted. She felt a flow of energy in her hands and pressed the deck between her palms for a moment before laying out a three-card spread.

“That developer has his finger in everyone’s pie. He’s obviously decided upping his offer isn’t good enough and is stepping up his plan. He has to have friends in local government to be able to pull this trick,” she said, indicating the letter being patiently masticated by an ecstatic Genghis. “Our bank manager is probably on his payroll.”

Daisy shrugged again. “We’ll find another bank.”

“Daisy, have you forgotten this house has already been mortgaged twice? We don’t exactly have a good track record. We’re in debt to our eyeballs.”

Daisy eyed her twin, cursing her tendency to get a little strung out over trivialities. “Forget? No. But I don’t regret any of it either. Gypsy-Rose and Ella got the best education at one of the country’s finest universities and little Stevie’s coming up to his five-year anniversary since the experimental treatment in California.”

Iris nodded, feeling churlish. She’d never for a minute regretted their choices either. The girls’ education had been a no-brainer, as was second cousin Larry’s plea for his baby grandson’s life. Family was sacred. But she’d had a real itch up her spine for weeks now. Something big was going to happen. Something cataclysmic for them all. And nothing would be the same again.

Daisy took a long drag of her smoke and reached for her sister’s hand. “What do the cards say, Iris?”

Iris blinked and looked down, surprised to see the three-card spread before her. The Tower card stared back at her in the future position. The very foundations of their lives were about to be shaken. A rude awakening lay around the corner for them all. She looked up at Daisy. “Is it too early for a drink?”

Daisy looked at her watch. It was barely nine. She stubbed out her cigarette. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” She smiled and poured a slug of the ever-present sherry into their empty coffee mugs.

*

Jake’s mobile jangled in the dark, quiet room like hell’s doorbell. He woke with a start, groping around blindly for the offensive item, the noise like a hot needle in his temple.

“This has better be good,” he growled as he punched the answer button.

“Good, you’re awake.” Pete’s chipper voice grated along cerebral nerve endings that already felt like they’d spent the entire night on the rack.

“What the hell time is it?”

“Two.”

Jake turned his head toward the sliver of light he could see through a gap in the heavy black-out curtains covering the window. “Two pm?”

Where the hell was he? An air-raid shelter? A dungeon? A coffin? As much as it hurt to think, he searched back into the abyss that was last night. There was poker. And drinking. And a girl. He reached out a hand and came in to contact with a warm naked thigh. The woman attached murmured something and rolled toward him, draping herself across his chest, her hand sliding down to the flat of his belly.

Crap!

“Uh huh. You have to be at the school in an hour.”

Jake groaned. He wanted to crawl into a dark corner somewhere and die. He did not want to run around a football field with a bunch of rag-tag high school amateurs. At the moment, getting out of bed seemed way too big an effort. But then a picture of Ella’s strained face at Cameron’s insult the other night floated through the ninety-proof quagmire of his brain. He sighed.

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

“Cool.”

Jake squinted into the darkness. “Er, Pete? I don’t suppose you happen to know where I am?”

Pete laughed. “Well, sure. I dropped you and fan-girl back at her place last night. Would you like me to come pick you up?”

Fan-girl’s hand moved lower and he grabbed it before it reached ground zero. “Hurry.”

*

Jake winced as he climbed into the passenger seat of his car and was greeted by an unbearable blare of noise that was the musical equivalent of fingernails down a blackboard. He reached for the dial and turned it down. “Jesus, Pete.”

Pete grinned. “Did we practice safe sex?”

Jake glared at him. “What are you, my pimp?”

“Actually, Jake.” Pete laughed. “I think I am.”

Jake contemplated murder as Pete’s laughter ricocheted like jackhammers inside his head. “I should have left you on the streets,” he muttered.

Pete laughed even harder. “We’re late. Ella’s going to be ticked.”

Well, Ella could get in line. He was pretty annoyed at himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d written himself off enough to cause amnesia. Maybe two years ago when the club had given him his marching orders? Had he practiced safe sex? Hell, had he even
had
sex? He’d woken up with his clothes on and somehow he seriously doubted he’d have been capable … Christ, he’d never not been capable.

Jake shut his eyes, his head throbbing double-time the harder he tried to remember. Unfortunately not even the combination of closed lids, an ultra-dark window tint and his aviator sunglasses was able to block the stab of harsh afternoon sunlight filtering through the smoky glass directly into eyeballs. They felt as if they’d been ripped out, stood on, rolled in shell grit and then stuffed in back to front.

“Just drive.”

His head sank back gratefully into the spongy luxury of the leather interior as the powerful engine of his Saab surged forward. Thankfully, Pete didn’t try to communicate any further and the construction crew in his head downed tools for a while.

He wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed when the Saab glided to a halt but he knew he was going to need a hell of a lot more to even begin feeling human again. He peered out the window at a poorly maintained oval. The grass was patchy and mostly weeds. Large areas were totally bare. The goal posts had rust stains. A large crowd milled around run-down wooden bleachers. Bloody hell—he only needed seventeen for the team.

“How do I look?” he asked, taking his glasses off and turning to Pete.

Pete shook his head. “Like crap. And you stink of booze and cigarettes. Here.” He rifled around in a backpack and passed over a can of deodorant.

Jake lifted his shirt, the action turning the bolts in his temples a little tighter, and sprayed. The car filled with a truly sickly smell, like Old Spice and Brut had a fight to the death and they’d bottled the festering remains. “Jesus! What the hell do you call this?” Jake asked.

Pete dropped his voice an octave or two. “It’s Metrosexual Mojo.”

Jake half-laughed, half-snorted both at the name and the delivery and then instantly regretted it.

“Laugh away, boss, but the ladies go crazy for it.”

“This? This gets you laid?”

Pete winked. “Never fails.”

Jake pushed his sunglasses back on, wondering what the hell was wrong with women these days. “Were the women of your generation born with malfunctioning olfactory centers?”

Pete laughed and sprayed some more deodorant in Jake’s general direction, ignoring his boss’s protest. “It sure as hell beats the Eau du Alcohol Poisoning you’re sporting at the moment.”

Jake wasn’t entirely sure about that as the sickly aroma intensified in the closed confines of the car. “Let’s just get this thing done.”

*

Ella was torn between kissing Jake for showing and throwing the stupid football at his head when he finally arrived. This morning at assembly the student body had greeted her BSFC announcement with the kind of skepticism only those who had been continually let down by life could perfect. She’d spent all day assuring her students that yes, they were fielding a team in the comp and yes,
the
Jake Prince was going to coach it.

Most of the two hundred and eighty students had headed to the oval at three daring to hope for once that maybe something good was about to happen. The weight of utter depression as each minute slipped by without Jake’s presence had been hard to bear. Some of them had already left, their opinion that adults lied and life sucked resoundingly confirmed.

Ella heard the car door slam and strode towards Jake. He was looking better than any man had a right to in his standard tight blue jeans, tight black T-shirt and a growth of overnight stubble that’d leave one hell of a beard burn.

“You’re late,” she hissed as he approached, nodding at Pete.

Jake winced. While her tone wasn’t loud it was just the right frequency to twang his already fragile neurons. And frankly, it irritated the crap out of him. He was here, feeling like death warmed up, doing her a favour, saving her ass.

A little gratitude wouldn’t go astray.

He squinted at his watch through the dark tint of his glasses, blinking his bleary eyes. “Ten minutes.”

Ella shook her head. “These kids don’t give you ten minutes.”

Jake looked over her shoulder at the motley collection of students. They were watching him curiously but there was a wariness to their gazes he wasn’t used to seeing. Usually, crowds surged forward, smiling and talking all at once. They slapped him on the back, shook his hand, shoved autograph books at him. These kids hung back and looked at him with a guardedness that was beyond their years. Jake rubbed his temple. “Tough crowd.”

“You have no idea,” Ella muttered.

Even through the pound at his temples, Jake couldn’t mistake the dejection and disappointment in Ella’s voice and his self-loathing raised another notch. “Hey,” he said, lifting a hand to cup her face. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Ella was curiously touched by the gesture and was suddenly pleased to have her back to her students. She almost succumbed to the urge to cover his hand with hers and maybe if Pete wasn’t right there witnessing the scene she would have. But he was. Along with a sudden truly terrible stench.

“Oh my God, Jake. You stink!” she said, stepping back, his hand falling away. She’d thought a decade of teaching smelly, teenage boys double-maths after they’d run around all lunch hour had practically immunized her against odour. She’d been wrong.