The Family Men (7 page)

“You'd be perfect,” Greta reiterated, uncommonly glamorous amongst the suburban shoppers in her white jeans, oversized tortoise-shell sunglasses, pumps, lacquered bouffant hair. “I can tell. I've got a nose for these things.”

The girl admitted she had some experience. The Eisteddfod, years seven and eight. She loved dancing. And two hundred dollars for two hours' work, that was a lot of money. You couldn't make that much at Big W, not even on public holidays. She was meant to be saving for a car; Mr Pyke from next door had promised to sell her his old Volkswagen Beetle if she could come up with three thousand dollars by Christmas (a bargain, it had only driven forty thousand kilometres), but at this rate she'd be lucky to have the money by the time school finished. With this dancing work though she'd easily be able to afford it. She might even be able to save enough for a security deposit as well.

Her mother thought she was going to the cinema then staying overnight at a friend's (Laura's, or was it Cassandra's? One of them. She always got them mixed up. It didn't matter; they were all basically the same in her view, average height, thin build, dirty blonde hair obscuring their insolent faces), choosing to accept it as the truth, the movies a vastly preferable occupation to the waitressing job her daughter had been banging on about, casual shifts with some nameless catering company. “Who staffs their evening functions with teenage girls? Serving themselves up as part of the dinner menu, because that's what it would amount to – you know that, don't you? – young girls in short skirts balancing t-bone steaks between their bosoms. Coffee, tea, me? Not on your life. As long as you're still young enough for me to forbid it then forbid it I will. And fifteen is still young enough for me to insist on a few rules around here. So no, you may not.”

“But Mum—”

“Will not! What would people think?”

And so the girl had lied. Mentally cycling through the dance sequences again, rehearsing the transitions, the hardest steps, the ones most likely to trip her up, no one caring much what she did otherwise, Greta saying at one of their lessons, as long as she smiled and vaguely kept up with the group. Secretly practising for weeks in front of the mirror at home, pouting and smiling as she looked over her shoulder, imagining the applause as she executed a pretty turn or bent over to adjust her stockings, it never occurring to her that there could be more to it, that afterwards she'd be doing anything other than banking her pretty cash.

*

It's what a father might have explained, if she'd had a father, the type to put her straight, to lay down the law. Or in Harry's case, a mother, Diana not being one to mince her words, much as at times he wishes she would, especially when he is acting as his parents' go-between. “It's your fucking ego,” she says down the phone, Senior's voicemail capturing the minute quaver, despair sublimated as disgusted fury. “Your unquenchable thirst for attention.” She's long refused to speak to journalists, can't believe Alan has fallen back into that trap, doing interviews again, worse than a thirteen-year-old girl, his susceptibility to flattery. “In all these years haven't you learnt anything? You tell that little shit not to bother me again or he'll be speaking to my solicitor, unless of course you want me to issue a comment, which I'd be very happy to do,” Harry dutifully passing along the message as Alan twitches around the garden in his shorts and gumboots, a smouldering fuse waiting to go off.

Parlaying his energy into weed pulling, spreading fertiliser, turning the topsoil, applying moisture-trapping mulch, but no end in sight. Bent over the parsley, dropping to one knee, winded, like he's taken a foot in the solar plexus, saying, “Goddammit, can't she leave it alone?”

Magical thinking of the first order. But that is the way his father has always been when confronted with the truth.

Harry has tried denial, telling himself that he doesn't buy half the stories bandied around about his dad, but in actual fact he does. Everybody does. That is the problem. Predisposed as he is to disclaim it, most of the time one barely has to dig, allegations about the drugs and the women and the alcohol lying about on the surface of his father's reputation like fabled nuggets during a gold rush. Beneath the scuttlebutt and scandal sheets, the denials and rationalisations, there is always something there. It might not seem like much, a speck, a skerrick, a flake panned from the cleanest looking riverbed, but it is rare that a story about his father finds its way to the public domain without having some weight (even Matt would back him on that). His father used to protest that they weren't true – the media loved to scapegoat him, he would say, to make up lies. The prostitutes, for example; why would he have spent so much money on hookers when so many women were happy to offer their services for free? A classic defence guaranteed to both exonerate and incriminate him in a single misfire (he was the victim here), but the rumours invariably had some veracity.

Laurie calls the house again. This time he doesn't bother leaving a message, he just says his name and hangs up. Matt calls too, from LA. Doesn't say his name but of course Harry knows immediately who it is, can imagine the palm trees visible outside his hotel window, the neon bright cocktail sweating in his other hand. “Call Laurie, you prick. He knows you were home this morning. He saw your car. For fuck's sake, if he messages me one more time I don't know what I'll do. I've already told him to leave me out of it. I'm not your fucking keeper. Get your shit together. You're embarrassing me.”

So butt out then
, Harry would like to say. But why bother? His brother has always done whatever he likes, whenever he likes. Which often as not involves telling Harry what to do. Or telling him what he thinks others want him to do. Anticipating messages from the coaching staff, as though he has some special insight into the workings of his younger brother's sensitive soul, the only person who can effectively motivate him – “Jim's going to tell you to pick up your defensive pressure in the forward half” – the other boys getting good mileage out of it. “Can't think for yourself, Squeak?”

“Need your brother to give you a helping hand?”

“No, that part he can manage,” says Nick. “Right, Goodfa? No trouble putting the elbows to work.” The lads making plenty of sport out of it, so that next time Matt comes within spitting distance, Harry snaps: “Do you want to play or do you want to coach?” Everyone knowing the best coaches are often average on the ground.

Not that Matt gives a stuff. “I don't care if you've got your period, change your tampon and get on with it.”

Harry thinks he detects the wail of a police siren in the background, the distant drone of authority. His brother's soundtrack? Or is that Laurie's?

“Screw you both,” he mutters.

He deletes the message without a second thought.

Harry assumed it would have been easier with most of the boys out of town but it doesn't make any difference. He still expects to see them everywhere, catches himself planning his movements, devising ways to avoid running into them when he goes out.

Rosie is hankering for a thickshake. At McDonald's, the drive-thru line snakes all the way back to the corner. “Let's get out of here,” he says, dreading the idea of inching along for another twenty minutes, plenty of time for fellow punters to figure out who is behind the wheel and then heaven knows what. But Rosie is adamant.

When they finally pull up to the order station her housemate, Katia, is behind the microphone.

Rosie leans across to say hello.

“Who's your date?” asks the voice, knowing damn well.

As Rosie makes the introductions, Harry catches a whiff of her BO, a sharp acrid smell mingled with the old-lady scent of lavender talcum powder. “What do you want to eat?” she asks him as she continues to peer up at the microphone, her head hovering above his lap as she orders.

During the season it isn't uncommon for him to devour two or three hamburgers in one sitting, especially before a game, but now it is the last thing he feels like, just as footy is the last thing he feels like along with anything remotely related to it, such as contracts or the other players or the women who are drawn to them. “I don't know, some fries,” he says, partly to appease her, anything so they can move along.

“Fries?” she repeats. “That's all you want?”

“You heard me.”

“Did you get that?” she says in the direction of her friend. And then back to him. “You're a barrel of laughs.”

They drive to the Esplanade and eat staring at the swell, Rosie winding down the window but quickly raising it again as seagulls descend on the car, lured by the aroma of hot chips. “Careful,” he says, despite himself, as one dogged bird lunges at the grease-smudged glass. Could it happen? Could they join together and drag her from the vehicle? He allows himself the fantasy, her skirt billowing about her hips, plump legs kicking at the sky as her body is transported aloft by a mass of marauding wildlife.

Rosie is unperturbed, diving into her nuggets with the enthusiasm of a fox raiding a poultry coop. “Look at this one,” she says, holding up one of the pieces.

“What?” he says, thinking maybe she's found one resembling the face of Jesus or Robert DiPierdomenico, that distinctive moustache (his mother is always looking at crap like that on eBay), but it is nothing as illustrious.

“It looks like an egg,” she says, amused at the irony. “Which came first, the chicken or the nugget?”

Which came first, the air or your head? he thinks, knowing it is mean, puerile, the stupidity making him grin. “I don't know,” he says, glad for once for the distracting thrum of his mobile, repulsed by the idea that she might think they have shared a joke, that they have something, however small, in common. He is glad and then he isn't.

It is Margo trawling for gossip. “Do a girl a favour, give me something. It's a slow news week.”

“What kind of gossip?”

“Let's start with Sportsman's Night. Jack and Eddy are back, they suggested I talk to you.”

Rosie, her mouth full of chicken nuggets, is wiggling her thin pencilled eyebrows, a wordless attempt at asking who it is.

“Why? What did they say? I told you there is nothing.”

“Come on Harry, this isn't my first rodeo. Why won't you tell me what happened? They always haze the rookies. Club initiation. Whatever they call it. I know there would have been a strip show, but I'm getting the impression there was something else. What did Jack mean by saying they had to ‘blood' you? In my notes I've got, quote, ‘We had to blood the young fella,' end quote.”

Those motherfuckers. He remembers stepping off the lift that night smack into the middle of a Probus tour group on their way out to dinner, thinking maybe he should just keep going, home, right through the middle of them – the shortest path between him and the street – the muted atmosphere of artificial lighting and mellow muzak already getting under his skin. He'd wanted to be outside, to breathe fresh air, but Matt grabbed his arm before he could get any purchase on the idea, pulling him back like he was a wayward child on a tear at the supermarket. “Steady on. The taxis are this way.”

“But it's just around the corner.”

“You're not walking. We're not walking.”

The taxis were lined up next to the fountain, barely twenty metres from the exit. Even so, the doorman summoned one with his whistle. “Have a good evening, sirs,” he said, holding the door for them.

The vehicle smelled of air freshener, a small sachet swinging from the rear-view mirror, the same overwhelming floral scent as in the hotel, or so it seemed to Harry, wondering how the driver could spend an entire shift in the car without wanting to throw up.

Margo presses him again but Harry shakes his head. “No. It's not true. They're just fucking with you. You know what Jack and Eddy are like. They're probably still stoned on something they took in Phuket. Anyway, I'll have to ring you back. I can't talk.”

“Sure you can. Come on. Did they make you dance with the girls? Did they treat you to a special lap dance?”

“No, really. I can't.”

“Don't brush me off, Harry. We're mates. There must be something.”

“Bye, Maggie.”

“Who's Maggie?” says Rosie, the second he is off the phone.

“Mind your own business, okay, Big Ears?”

“I was only asking. There's no need to be so shirty.”

Rosie is fond of aphorisms.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
.
What goes around comes around
.
Actions speak louder than words
. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me,” she adds.

“Good. Drop it then, alright?”

In geometry, an oval or ovoid comes from the Latin word
ovum
, meaning “egg”. Off the top of his head he can list the basic properties of ovals – smooth, closed curves that don't self-intersect, with at least one axis of symmetry. It is one of those factoids he picked up at school (science), that and a couple of useless grammar rules (English) – “I before E except after C” (so much for “science”). No wonder he can't spell.

A football oval, like the ball itself, has two axes of symmetry.

“Turn around,” he says to Rosie, forcing her cheek against the glass. “I want to try something.” He puts his left index finger against her shoulder blade and attempts to trace the outline of a playing field in a single gesture, a complete rotation without lifting his hand before returning to the start point. As he presses his fingers into Rosie's back, he wonders if perhaps this entire episode hasn't been a set-up designed to land him in a shit sandwich. Jack makes no secret of his enmity for the Fureys, that's what happens when you're always cast as second best, but to drop him in it like this –
had to blood the young fella
– what an arsehole. Though what did Harry expect? Good blokes, my arse. Ted could stick that in a pipe and smoke it. Jack was a fucker. So was Eddy. He didn't care if they were always first to volunteer for the Good Friday Appeal. There was “giving back” and then there was giving something back. The real question was, had he said enough to make Margo go away?