‘But you still can’t make more time for us even when you say you will.’ She stubbed out her cigarette angrily. ‘God, this is all so messy, so dangerous. You could lose everything over this.’
‘That doesn’t have to include us. Let me put this tape back in my safe. Then we can call it a night. We don’t get much time together. Let’s take the times we can. They’re the best part of my life.’
‘Then why do you ration them?’ she asked, raising that eyebrow again. ‘You can promise me something before we do anything, Paul.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Don’t lock me out of this. You said it yourself, this information is dangerous to know. Well, I do know it now and you’re right, it is dangerous. You can tell me what’s going on from now on. Especially if you’re in there watching it.’
‘Grace, I can’t give you the details of a confidential investigation. You know that. You can’t tell me about your work either.’
‘I’m not asking for anything you have to keep confidential. Just enough information so I know where you are and what’s going on. That way I can protect myself.’
‘You can rely on me to protect you. Don’t forget that.’
‘I still want you to make me this promise. If I’m going to deal with this, I need to know what’s happening.’
‘Then you’ve got my word. I promise.’
It had always been like this. She wrung things out of him no one else could; their relationship kept surviving by a whisker. Harrigan thought that survival in these terms must have been his particular gift. It was the story of his life.
Later, in the quietness, she lay in bed beside him with her head against his shoulder.
‘How did you get away from them?’ she suddenly asked. ‘Your twin nightmares. Your father and the Ice Cream Man. You escaped. How?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’m putting you together in my head. Am I allowed to do that?’
‘It was my aunt,’ he replied after a short silence. ‘She was my father’s sister. She hated him. She used to tell my mother there was no way I was going to end up like Jim. I always did well at school without trying too hard so she decided I was going to St Ignatius Riverview whether I wanted to or not.’
‘Why there?’
‘Because she thought it was the only school in Sydney. She paid the fees to get me in, which was pretty much all the money she had. Then my mother worked two jobs day and night for the next six years to keep me there. She was a pantry maid at Balmain Hospital in the morning and a cleaner in the city at night. She started work at 6 a.m. every day. She got up at four in the morning. It didn’t matter what else she had to do, she always left me a clean uniform, ironed to an inch of its life, waiting for me to wear.’
‘Oh my God,’ Grace said. ‘You had to succeed under that kind of pressure, didn’t you?’
‘I had no choice.’
She lay there without speaking.
‘Have you put me together?’ he asked.
‘Maybe a little,’ she said, her voice drifting in the soft light. ‘It’s time to sleep on it.’
She curled up and slipped away. He turned out the light and lay awake a little longer. In the dead hours of the night, he woke. Some dream was troubling him, some half-remembered image that faded from his mind as soon as he opened his eyes. Nothing. Nada. His first whispered thought while he stared into the shadows. Instinctively, he touched Grace to see if she was still there or whether he had washed up on some blank shore in the land of the dead. He felt her ribcage rising and falling with her breathing, imagined he could hear the sound of her heart. He slept again.
5
In the partial darkness of his kitchen, Harold Morrissey picked up his telephone and dialled a number he rarely called unless he had to. While he listened to it ring, he glanced out of the window. Dawn was beginning to break along the low undulating skyline, a clean transparency edging against a darker, fading blue. Once more it would be a clear, fine day. Finally his call was answered.
‘Yeah?’
‘Stewie. It’s Harry. You’re still alive.’
‘Of course I’m fucking alive. What the hell is this? Don’t you know what time it is?’
‘I just heard on the radio there’s been a shooting up at Pittwater. Four people dead. They didn’t say who they all were, just that one of them was Natalie Edwards. I wondered if maybe one of the others was you. Wasn’t she the woman who was here with you and that other bloke last week?’
‘Let me tell you something, Harry. If anyone asks, none of us were there including Nattie. If you tell anyone we were, I’ll say you’re fucking hallucinating. I’ll take you to the law. Then you’ll lose everything you’ve got. So keep your mouth shut.’ Stuart put the phone down.
Harold hung up, thinking that he should have expected as much. In its own way, the early morning call had summed up the relationship of the two brothers to perfection.
Harold left his farmhouse to start the day’s work, stepping into a still faintly cool air. An oleander bush bloomed a hot summer pink near the back door, while the house fence was covered with gnarled wisteria and thick-trunked grape vines planted by his grandmother eighty years ago. These days, the vines were almost leafless, some of them already dead. Like the land around him, they had been stripped bare by the drought and the heat. The only green came from a stand of old well-grown pepper trees stretching along the south-western side of the rambling wooden farmhouse, their bright foliage almost shocking in the dryness. On the north-eastern side, the sole shade was given by a self-sown sugar gum growing too close to the veranda, its white trunk arching over the bull-nosed roof.
In the pale light, Harold walked out the gate into the main yard, heading towards the kennel where his dog, Rosie, had spent the night chained up. Her enclosure was sheltered by an old moonah bush that was still holding out in the drought. Some twelve years ago his father had walked this same distance, unexpectedly falling into infinity when his heart had stopped mid-step. Since then Harold had supposedly shared the management of their property, Yaralla, with his older brother, Stuart. Almost as soon their father’s will was read and they were pronounced joint owners, Stewie had said, ‘We can mortgage the place now.’ ‘Like fuck we will,’ Harold had replied instantly, knowing through bitter experience that whatever money they raised jointly, Stewie would never repay his share of it. Instead the money would disappear on one of his scams. It would make money; Stewie’s scams always did. It was just that neither Harold nor the farm would see a cent of it.
Since that first day, he and his brother had grappled each other to immobility. Nothing could be done on the property without the agreement of the other. There had been no improvements other than those Harold had been able to pay for out of his own cash flow or smaller personal loans. Without sufficient credit, no substantial work could be done. Everything cried out for repair but now, in the drought, there was no money at all.
Harold opened the gate to Rosie’s enclosure and unchained her. She didn’t need feeding, there was still some dried food in her bowl. Meat she got in the evenings. Right now, she was anxious to stretch her legs. She trotted after him to the machinery shed where he parked his ancient white ute and leapt up into the cabin beside him.
Harold started the engine and drove out onto his property, some ten thousand acres on the edge of the Riverina. The landscape was so stripped of its vegetation, it had become an X-ray of itself. Out on the horizon, scattered trees shimmered in a dark line between the soil and the immense sky. This morning, Harold was following his routine of hand-feeding his stock. He was heading towards his north-eastern boundary across the paddocks that stretched around him as a barren patchwork. There was still water in the dams in that part of his property and he was pasturing his stock there before he faced the question of what to do when even this water ran out. The tray of the ute, where Rosie usually rode, was loaded with feed he could barely afford to buy. When worked, the red soil on his property broke down into dusty clumps; it varied in colour across the landscape from a pale dirt-pink to a dark and hot iron-red. For three years, he’d had no crops out of any of it. The future was as bleak and unending as the blue skies that rolled above him every day. He had stopped believing it would ever rain again.