The Family Men (21 page)

Humming. Someone is humming. Does he recognise the song? He tries to listen but they grab at his ankles and he braces for the tear, the searing agony, recalling something he's heard about psychopaths, their inability to feel fear, their brains being wired differently, dulling any capacity for anticipation or dread. Of all times to consider it, that at least he isn't crazy. Not that kind of crazy – blood-chillingly oblivious. No, he is a living checklist of normality: accelerated heart rate, rapid breathing, uncontrollable sweating. Terrified. And yet for all the horror of it a part of him is grateful, acknowledging (even long after he has woken) that it feels right, this debasement, that at last he is getting what he deserves.

Neither Harry nor Dean remembers falling asleep. They're roused at around 5 am by a sharp rapping on the rear window, followed by bright torchlight shining in their eyes. It's still dark outside, the soft smudge of dawn another hour away. For a second Harry doesn't realise any time has passed, thinks they might still gather themselves as planned and head out to a club, but then the penny drops, about the same moment he registers the throbbing pain behind his eyes.

“Right then boys, out of the car.” His head feels foggy. He heaves himself out of the back seat, bracing himself against the body of the vehicle as he inhales deeply, trying to clear the confusion.

Above them, thin clouds blot the stars; the Southern Cross, usually so distinct, is barely a smear in the night sky. The cops want to know what they're doing there, no funny business they hope, examining their driver's licences then double-checking the vehicle for drugs, just in case. They immediately twig to Harry as soon as they can see his face, local royalty, excited by the opportunity for a one-on-one, now that they're clear he hasn't been dealing amphetamines or fucking some minor or both. “We should get you down to the station some time,” says the shorter of the two, a stubby choirboy in regimentals. “Give the squad team some pointers.”

“Sure,” says Harry. “Be glad to.”

Theirs is the only car still in the car park, a lone bucket on an empty beach.

After a bit more small talk Dean pulls out his keys, makes noises about heading home, but there's no way the cops are letting him back behind the wheel until he's had a couple more hours of shut-eye.

“I'm fine to drive, really,” insists Dean. “Look at these hands.” He extends them palm upwards. “I could do brain surgery. They're steady as a rock.”

The cops ignore him. “Jump in,” they say, gesturing to their back seat.

The vehicle smells of Chinese takeaway. Harry's there of his own accord but he feels like he's been arrested as he tentatively digs for the belt clip between the seats, leery of what else he might find. It's almost like being in a taxi with its radio crackling on the dash, if not for the uniforms sitting side by side up the front.

They swing past the pub which looks forlorn now that everyone's gone home. There are a couple of houses with lights on, young kids gearing up for their paper rounds, hospital staff on the early shift, but mostly the streets are empty.

They drop him off first, pulling the patrol car right into the driveway, extracting a couple of autographs before he leaves. He signs his name more loopily than usual, paying undue care to its legibility as though it were a test to demonstrate his sobriety. He can't get out of there fast enough, trying not to look like he's running away as he beelines for the front door, the headlights spotlighting him on the porch as they reverse back out onto the street, before departing with a gentle toot.

Afternoon arrives on the heels of yesterday, the sky a drift of patchy clouds, Senior's tomatoes fire-truck red beneath the greying blue. It's not what Harry thinks of as “December”, a sunny blur of beachside Saturdays, but that applies to another time and place – childhood summers long past, or more recent holidays spent overseas amongst a community of like-minded revellers drawn together by their distance from home; a season bookended by a late return in time for Christmas, a couple of hangovers, and then it's the new year. Father Murphy comes by to drop off a pair of tongs and some other bits and pieces still lying around from the sausage sizzle, the parish van backfiring as he reverses into a park. “It could have waited 'til Alan was home,” he says, indicating the missing car, “but it was a good excuse to say hello. There's been a lot of talk. How's it all going?”

“Fine, Father. Thanks. Yes, good.” The master of the one-line response. Harry's about as interested in gasbagging with Father Murphy as he is in visiting the police station, less so, but he knows the priest is concerned about his dad and that if he doesn't greet him now he'll just come back another time. He steps outside and ushers the priest around the back, opening the shed as the minister talks.

“Fine. That is good, it's one of my favourite words. ‘The boys will be fine this year,' I said in round four, and look, you came home with the flag. Can't get much more fine than that.”

“No, that's right,” says Harry. “Can't argue with that.”

“‘It's fine. I'll be fine.' That's what I said to myself when I quit the seminary, years ago now. I didn't want to do it anymore. Or did I? I didn't know. Which was why I had to walk away, to find out. All fine.”

“But you're a priest now.”

“Yes. I went back. Nearly three years later, I went back. But I didn't know that I was going to do that until right before I did. I nearly ended up an English teacher.”

Harry laughs.

“You're right to laugh. Imagine that, me at a desk marking essays. But it was okay. I had a knack for it. Putting the words in the right order, the commas and full stops. If I'd stuck with it that would have been ‘fine' too. That word again. ‘Fine.' Whatever I'd ended up doing. All fine. That's the thing, Harry. The ‘what' doesn't matter. What's important is the doing. I'm not talking about going to church. I know you're not a believer. What matters is the process of finding out what you want to do. I understand it can't be easy, everyone telling you your business, everyone thinking they know what's best. But there's no right or wrong way, no law that says it's this path or that path, now or never. All there is, is your path. Only your road. That's your job. That's what you've got to worry about, to find your way. In your time. When you're ready. And when you do, the people who love you will still love you. And you'll still love them. That's all that matters. Understand?”

Harry nods. He wants to. He could use a little faith.

For the first time in months the surface of the kitchen table is clear; no
Tower Bridge
, no
Dawn
, no
Ducks at Lakeside
. In the hall cupboard there is an unopened two-thousand-piece jigsaw of the Palace of Versailles, a Christmas gift from the Tiptons, but Alan is saving it, he doesn't say for what. Harry scans the room as he stirs the spaghetti sauce – notes his father's tooth glass on the window sill, his favourite mug on the dish drainer, the clean blue checked tea towel folded beside the sink, his 2007 Rotary calendar, already opened at January, hanging from the nail on the back of the door – his mind closing around each object as he clocks it, a brief experiment coming to an end.

They eat dinner on their laps, the two of them kitted out in matching black
MADCITYSPORTS
tracky-dacks, the hush broken by the clank of forks on crockery as they clean their plates. Senior picks up the remote control and adjusts the volume on the telly, stiff fingers stabbing the tiny arrows. They sit quietly watching as Peter McKenna delivers his fifth goal for the half, taking Collingwood to a 65–22 lead.

“Tell me what happened that night,” says Harry as the crowd starts counting its chickens. He hadn't planned to say it but now that he has he is relieved, voicing the question he sees now he should have asked a long time ago.

“You know what happened.” That night. The night in question. Alan doesn't need to ask which one.

I ain't seen nothing
.

“Yeah, but not from you.”

Alan turns down the sound. “Then read the bloody articles again. I'm fed up with talking. I've been over it with you a thousand times.”

“No you haven't. You say you have, but you haven't. I don't want to read about it. I want you to tell me.”
The nothings you can never put into words.
“I want you to lay it out for me, the way it was for you.”

“You want me to tell you?”

“Yes. I want you to tell me. Your words. I don't want to read someone else's version of events. For once I want to hear it from you. Clean. Straight from the horse's mouth.”

Alan mutes the television and looks at his youngest son. “Why? What difference does it make? It's the same outcome. It doesn't change anything.”

“It does to me. I want to know the truth. Just once. No bullshit.”

His father laughs.

“What's so funny?”

“Right there, that's bullshit. There's always bullshit.”

“Well, your bullshit then. Tell me a story if you have to.”

“You want me to tell you a story? Once upon a time … like that? A fairy tale. Where do you want me to start?”

“That'll do. Once upon a time there was this girl.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And she stood about so high,” he says, raising his hand above his head. “She had light brown hair, brown eyes, young, not even twenty years old.”

“And then what, Dad? Then what?”

His father shakes his head. “And then nothing. I'm tired. I'm going to bed.”

“Don't do that. It's way too early. Stay. Tell me the rest of it.”

“No. This is fucked. I'm done with stories. You want to judge me too. For me to tell you how I destroyed her, how she got in the way before I could move her out of it? That it was all too late, too late before it had even started. The misery of it, the slow dragging endlessness. An hour doesn't pass where I don't think of her, how kind she was, how sweet, how funny. You think I didn't do everything I could to get her to give it up? I even offered her money to stop stripping, to get off the drugs. The diaries didn't say anything about that. They don't say how hard I tried.”

“I think you could have tried harder. I think you could have done more.”

“Like what? What could I have done? I bent over backwards to get her right.”

“You could have left her the fuck alone.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes.”

Baby, can't you see.

Harry watches his father hoist himself out of his chair and make his slow rheumatic way to the door, recognising for the first time his father's sadness, seeing at last the truth of the situation, the tragedy of it, at 8.30 pm on New Year's Eve in front of a paused DVD of the 1970 Grand Final. Improbable as it was, she hadn't been just a girl. His father had loved her in his way, could admit everything except the fact of it, his havoc, what needed to be said.

A sign on the chemist window says
Free Ear Piercing Every Day with Piercing Stud Purchase
. Harry waits for Rosie outside, watches as she repositions her hair clip, puts on some lip balm, checks her teeth for food, turns off the lights and then locks up the shop. She is wearing her ankle socks over her stockings again; he can almost feel the sweat trickling down the backs of her knees, the pinch of the blisters forming between her airless toes. “What do you want, Harry?” she says, as he looks her up and down.

“I don't know. I thought you might want a lift home.”

She glances at the sky then opens the door though there is no hint of rain, the scent of perspiration and rancid perfume rushing at his nostrils as she settles herself in the passenger seat. He lowers the window.

They sit silently in the car, Rosie holding the pull strap, her feet planted on the floor in brace position as they round the eight blocks to her house, Harry aware that he can do this drive blind drunk in the dark, a skill he'd happily eliminate from his current catalogue. “Do you want to come up?” she offers when he pulls up out the front, a final rally. “Katia won't be home for at least an hour.”

The engine trembles, threatens to stall.

No, that won't be happening, thinks Harry as he taps the accelerator, shakes his head. “Not this time.”

“Okay, well thanks for the lift,” she says, sounding less than sure of herself, her face flushed despite the air conditioning; his thoughts leaping back to that time at the supermarket not long after they first got together, Rosie pushing past him and his mother in the freezer aisle, making a great show of bumping them with her trolley even though there was plenty of room to get around, the distinctive trail of her stale lavender scent, the family-sized tub of neapolitan ice-cream nestled beneath the packet of par-cooked white dinner rolls, Diana (with no idea then who she was to him) saying, “Now, they're breeding hips.”

“So is any of it true?” he hears himself ask as she opens the door. “Did you ever really think you were pregnant?”

“Did I ever think I was pregnant?” Rosie repeats slowly. “Is that what you said?” her response almost a pantomime, Harry glad at least she isn't wearing lipstick (already always picturing her with too much lipstick, a bright pancaked grin even if she's wearing none). “Of course I did. Is that why you came, to accuse me? What do you think I am? How could you says such a thing?”

How? It isn't hard, he realises. Not hard at all.

Fuck them! Fuck you!

But that isn't why he is there. Rosie clutches her bag with one hand, the other wiping at a stray strand stuck to her shiny cheek, her lips pressed tightly together. “Look, forget that. It doesn't matter,” Harry says. “It doesn't matter. I just wanted to say, it's done. It's not important.”

“But I was pregnant,” Rosie insists. “I did the tests, I went to the doctor. I didn't get my period for weeks. You know that. It was terrible. I didn't know what to do. You know that.”