I slept until mid-morning, too drunk to be disturbed by the shoulder, and woke up feeling that to even make a start on this day was a mistake. My bladder insisted though, and I came down the stairs to find Glen sitting with a cup of coffee in the living room. She’d folded up the monkey suit and put the whole rig neatly on a chair.
‘Good morning,’ she said.
‘I doubt it. Excuse me, Glen. Nature calls.’
‘There’s coffee in the pot.’
I’d pulled on an old, torn T-shirt and crumpled, stained tracksuit pants and when I looked in the mirror I saw a face that matched the clothes. My eyes were bloodshot and there were asymmetrical bruises and swellings on both sides of my nose. I still wore a smear of lipstick, now with aggressive black beard bristle poking through it. I washed and tidied myself as best I could, but when I went back in with a cup of black coffee I still looked and smelt like a bum. Glen was in a crisply ironed white blouse and blue skirt. She was neat and well-ordered from head to toe, giving her a decided advantage.
I sat down and drank some coffee. ‘I’m sorry about all this. I’ve been very stupid. I’ll get the car fixed.’
‘I don’t care about the bloody car!’
‘No.’
‘You’ve been fucking someone.’
‘Once and once only. Not again.’
‘How’s that? I thought one-night stands weren’t your thing? Tell me about it. I want to know.’
I told her in some, edited, detail not putting myself in any worse light than I needed to, but not making too many excuses either. When I got to the mention of her name and the sudden change in mood it had triggered in Vita she looked shocked. ‘She must be unbalanced. You pride yourself on your ability to spot crazies. What went wrong?’
‘Bad judgement. That’s when your car got smashed. It was lucky it wasn’t both of us as well.’
‘Bad judgement, is that how you account for it? You wouldn’t root the first woman who offered just out of bad judgement, Cliff. Something was festering, feeling all wrong to you, eh?’
I nodded. ‘We seemed to be… separate. I don’t know. I suspected your south coast tour was more than just a job.’
‘That’s more like you. Suspecting stuff, looking below the surface. Did you snoop, open my mail?’
‘Of course not. I’m sorry, Glen. It was just a pile of little things… I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. You were right.’
‘What?’
‘You’re right. I thought I might be able to string it out a bit longer while I tried to sort my feelings out, but the old Hardy nose was onto it.’
I shook my head and drank the rest of my coffee. It was stone cold but it didn’t matter. The taste was in my mouth, not in the drink. ‘So, it’s something serious. Are you going to tell me about it?’
‘Bugger you! Why don’t you jump up and hit something? Why are you being so fucking rational? How much does it matter to you?’
I held up my right hand and showed her the scabby knuckles. I lifted my left arm as far as it would go-not quite shoulder high. ‘I’m too damaged to hit things. Talk’s violent enough for me right now. If you tell me you love someone else… If you tell me that… we can take it from there. Glen?’
‘I don’t know. I just bloody well don’t fucking know!’
‘Who is it?’
‘Not it, he!’
I stared at her. Some of the carefully brushed and pinned brown-blonde hair had come astray. There was a light film of sweat on her upper lip and she’d splashed a few small drops of coffee on her pristine white blouse. The skirt had creased where she’d plucked at it and she was unconsciously rubbing the spot on her arm where the bullet had gone in and torn the tissue. It would trouble her always, she’d been told. It was certainly troubling her now. I wanted to reach out and put my arms around her, but the word-created barrier between us was like a three metre cyclone fence.
I said, ‘He, then. I guess he’s a policemen. That’s not so bad. Some of my best friends are policemen.’
‘Fuck you, Cliff Hardy. I can see any wounds I might leave healing up already.’
‘Don’t you believe it.’
Glen got up and began to walk around the room. She stopped at the chair where she put my clothes and stared down at them. ‘I was going to tell you, of course. I knew you’d sense it anyway. Shit, I’m repeating myself.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘You bet it’s all right,’ she flared. ‘I come back and I find you’ve been slipping it to some nutty flower power bitch who’s probably a lezzo anyway. Why should I feel guilty? You’ve never made a commitment, never wanted children…’
Neither had she, as I recalled. But all things must change and this sounded like the big one. I sat in my chair with my aches and pains and I realised that what she had said was true-I was looking past this, into a future where the actors and the script and the story would be different. I tried to pull back to the here and now, to feel the intensity of the moment. I couldn’t do it. Hardy, the great survivor. I sat mutely while she paced and talked with none of it really reaching me. In fact, my thinking started to slip sideways-towards my fleeting impression of the man I’d seen getting into the Mercedes outside the casino and what that might mean, towards Scott Galvani’s job and what it would be like to do it, towards my professional connection with Gina, which seemed to be growing more complicated and more distant.
Glen was gathering up her things, a bag, sunglasses, keys. ‘You’re not even listening. You don’t give a shit!’
That got me out of my chair. I was suddenly aware of a gap, a yawning empty space, not between us, but in me. I moved towards her, reaching out.
She dodged and headed for the front door. ‘I’ll call you, Cliff. I’ll call you soon.’
I stood in the middle of the room listening to the sounds of an empty house-the refrigerator hum, the banging back screen door, the creaks and rattles. Glen’s cup sat on top of a book that balanced precariously on the arm of the chair she’d been sitting in. The book was Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore. I’d lent it to Glen with a strong recommendation. I realised that she’d brought it back and left it behind. I had an almost physical need to discuss the book with her, to learn what she’d thought of it. I didn’t even know whether she’d read it, and it looked like I never would. There was something bleak and final about the empty cup and I took it through to the kitchen and rinsed it, losing it among the other cups and plates and cutlery I’d rinsed or half-washed over the past few days.
I stood at the sink and let the emptiness take me over. I’d felt it before-when Cyn walked out on me, finally, and when Kay Fletcher had relocated to New York, and when Helen Broadway had gone back to her husband and child. The moment had an unmistakable smell, taste and feel to it, and each time it came, I never knew whether it was painful or somehow welcome. Frank Harkness, the eye doctor who I’d bodyguarded a few years back, had told me that the only antidote to one woman was another. But he’d found the ultimate cure in his wife, putting him a long way ahead of me.
In my brief discussion with Oscar Cartwright the night before, I’d negotiated a working agreement for the conditions to apply to my temporary appointment. They included very flexible hours, the right to continue working on cases I already had on hand and a relaxed dress code, very relaxed. In return for these concessions I agreed to scale down from a BMW to a Commodore. I’d made a crack about the chiefs driving foreign cars and the Indians driving Australian-made. It got a sort of a grin and Oscar said he’d consider changing the policy.
‘It’s a contra-deal situation,’ he’d said.
I asked him not to use language like that and got a laugh. I was a laugh a minute that night. These thoughts kept jumping in my head as I shaved and showered and got ready to go to the first regular job I’d had in almost twenty years. My arm was stiff but I exercised it brutally and at the end of the session in the doorway and on the floor I was sweating so much I had to shower again. I ran the water on the shoulder as hot as I could stand it and then cold and the equipment felt looser when I finished. One area of improvement.