SHE DID NOT AT FIRST recognize Burnside as the Kozinski retainer that he was. He had grown a sandy mustache which he hadn’t had in the old days, when Paul used to bring him aboard the Vistula for reasons which were part of Kozinski Constructions’ secret history. His belly had got looser too, but he still had his enormous shoulders—a weight lifter from before the time of the Nautilus machine.
In the bar he had taken off his suitcoat and his tie. The tie was folded into the top pocket of his striped shirt—all to falsely signify to the small crowd in the bar that he was just a drinker, that he had no other intentions.
Kate accepted him as a visiting salesman, but then identified him in a rush. Her flick of the head had diminished under the influence of the bounding dream, but it came back wildly now. She considered leaving quietly and finding Jack. But she went on stacking schooner glasses and answered the raised hand of a drinker at the far end of the bar, the man in Jelly’s corner, which was available for casual drinkers to flex their souls in by day.
She cherished, in a fashion, the way men raised their hands like that, never certain that anyone would take notice. Each hand raising a tentative claim on the universe. And once they knew you’d seen them, they pointed downward into the residual froth of their friend’s empty glass and then of their own. Who taught them to do that? Would Bernard have done that, in the end? And all without knowing where it came from?
Cleaning out two fresh schooner glasses—that too was set down in the liturgy of pubs: never the same glass twice—she set them on the drip tray and commenced the pour. She wanted the sweet, familiar act to be available to her for good, but there was every chance this was her last pour for Murchison’s Railway Hotel.
Jack appeared from the direction of the saloon, and Burnside stretched his big hand out across the bar, a brawny lad asking a question in class. She heard him ask Jack in his plausible voice whether Kate Kozinski was here. No, said Jack, in a style meant to finish the conversation. But Burnside amended his inquiry.
—What about someone called Kate Gaffney. Kozinski’s the married name.
Jack did not say: he had a sheet in his hand and was checking the bottles behind the bar for reordering. His manner was denial. Clear out. Who do you think you are interrupting people in the full routine of their business?
But Burnside pushed a card at Jack, which Jack took and placed on top of the reorder form and read fully, his eyebrows arranged crookedly.
Having finished her two perfect schooners, Kate delivered them down the bar and held her hand out to be paid. She wanted to stretch out each act to a great span of time. It was enough to strike time still, the idea that this man with a blond mustache who had once sunbathed on the Vistula with the children and Mrs. Kate Kozinski, might soon be dealing the Kozinskis’ names to her across the bar. The wonder was that he or someone like him hadn’t come and done it much earlier.
She had of course the bottleful of sleeping tablets to resort to but that wasn’t the possible journey anymore.
On the night, outside the desolation of her home, Paul Kozinski had justifiably screamed, Why weren’t you here? And she had agreed with that then and still did: she was a criminal through her absence. Just the same, even while voting for the idea with all her soul, she had come to sniff an air of ignorance about the proposition that her absence had destroyed the afternoon world. She had developed the idea that the Arson Squad chief inspector or the chief of Emergency Services might seek her out one day and give her something, an item, a plain sentence, to mute the blame. By one means or another, she must wait for that.
So would she slip away out the back where the nineteenth-century stables were, and flee to another town? Jelly might be confused by the suddenness of that. He expected a close of play, but a gentler one. To that extent she was a new woman. In the old state, she had been willing to leave Jim and Kate Gaffney without explanation. Yet the heart which had been torn out of her now had a bias to be kind to Jelly.
—What did you call her? Jack Murchison asked, still inspecting the man’s card, looking for some little detail in the corner that would invalidate it.
He would in fact have made a first-class site boss. Cement wouldn’t have gone missing. Likewise, people serving writs to the dogmen would have been sent to buggery.
Even head-thumping Burnside was careful of him.
—Kozinski. Married name. Gaffney, maiden. It’s no problem. I just have some information that’d benefit her.
Jack appointed the saloon bar as the place Burnside could wait. It was empty in the daytime, since no one came to the Railway for confidential lunches, and the ordinary clientele considered drinking there a waste of money. Jack himself opened the door of the saloon for Burnside to go through. It was somehow meant to let Burnside know that there were stringent limits to what would be permitted to happen.
Burnside having passed through, Jack came back behind the bar and approached Kate like a parent who has just heard dubious news about the child’s behavior somewhere else, beyond the normal reach of fatherly purview.
—Okay, Kate.
He passed Kate the card.
—Do you know this feller?
Kate hung her head. It was partly shame of course, given that Burnside was from the Kozinskis’ hemisphere where her shame was well established. It was weary loathing of Burnside.
—He works for my husband, Jack.
—Wish I had a big dumb bugger like that working for me.
He went on looking at her. Had she given any sign, he would have taken her away and hidden her.
But of course she knew she had to face him. He was someone from the Kozinski world she could meet without peril to the new woman Shirley’s steak and white bread was making of her. She was grateful to Paul for not coming in person. That would have been impossible.
—Sure? Jack insisted on knowing.
—Oh yes.
She took the card with her as she went through into the saloon.
He sat with his back to her. She walked round past his great shoulders and saw that he had one eye raised, as if she were a stranger, as if they had not floated together in the green water off the Vistula’s stern. His eyes were precisely as she remembered: those of someone who was used to terrifying people in a whimsical way. His arrogance came from the fact he thought himself a character, and because he had done good, frightening work for the Kozinskis, they told him that, the thing he wanted to hear. You’re really a character, Burnside. A legend in the building business. People either shat themselves with fear or with hilarity.
—Your boss gave me a big welcome.
Jack had given him a glass of beer, and he sipped it once while assessing her.
—I love a bit of hostility. Mother’s milk.
He showed his teeth. He thought all this stuff was subtle, but he looked melodramatically feral.
—Let yourself go a bit, love, haven’t you? That Murray bloke who fancies you mightn’t fancy you like this.
—Good, she said.
—No, I was just commenting, Mrs. Kozinski. I can get you back to where you were.
This stupid promise left her less frightened.
—We met a few times, I think. On that boat of Mr. Kozinski’s.
—Pleasant days.
She would have made it sound sarcastic, less neutral and more edged. But she did not want to cause him to take one attitude or another.
He said, I’ve been honored for a long time by association with your husband’s company, Mrs. Kozinski.
—Paul’s mother is Mrs. Kozinski. She was endowed in that high office by the Blessed Virgin Mary of Czestochowa and by the Holy Father. Ask her and she’ll tell you.
—But you’re Mr. Paul Kozinski’s wife.
—I reverted to my maiden name.
—Understood.
He’d begun nodding and was playing at being conciliatory. He had produced a thick envelope from the pocket of the vast suit coat slung on the back of the chair.
—Mr. Paul Kozinski asked me to give you these documents.
—Well, yes. These are for signature. Maybe you’d like to look at them.
She did not take the envelope. She let him put it down on the table. There it lay. She would have been happy for it to get beer-glass rings on it.
—Mr. Kozinski’s very appreciative of the fact that you’re not seeking anything as marriage settlement, or at least he presumes that, since he hasn’t heard anything from you. But he realizes he has a responsibility to you. Some of the papers to be signed are to do with relinquishing directorships in a number of Kozinski subsidiaries. It doesn’t seem likely you’ll want anything to do with them anyhow. And you’ll see he hasn’t been ungenerous. There’s a letter of agreement in there which will entitle you to a two-million-dollar settlement payable in six monthly installments, the first within fifteen days of your signature.
—Yes, she said. Very nearly anxious, she distracted herself with the aftertaste of the delight in bounding over plains with Chifley. She relished the echo of that happiness.
High above the town, somewhere between the apex of the Railway Hotel and the roots of time, there was a prodigious, proud, languid bark of thunder. It seemed to her that Burnside blinked.
—God, listen to that. They get floods here, don’t they?
—It’s all they talk about.
—So … you’ll see the documents of resignation. And you’ll see also an annulment petition to the Archdiocesan court. Sign that, and you don’t have to mess around with the buggers any further. Then the settlement document for when you’ve signed all the rest. There’s a cross and a penciled K.K. where you sign each document. Katherine Kozinski. You mightn’t want to sign them Kozinski, but you’d better, because that’s the legal requirement.
She didn’t care enough for all this to tell him the Kozinskis could take their settlement to hell. Why should she say something for the entertainment of the muscular servant of the Kozinskis? Who would add it to all his other smartarse stories of divorce in the private investigator business? For he was, it seemed, a licensed private investigator. At least his card said so. And she didn’t want him to be able to classify the story. She would like him to be left with so little he didn’t have a story at all.
Anyhow she knew her part-change, her mid-transmogrification, would be his story.
—Jesus, should see how she’s let herself go.
Damn him.
—You’ll be able to afford to leave here, he said. Of course, Paul wouldn’t have wanted you here in the first place.
—Very kind of him. But this is where I am.
Burnside frowned since it all seemed to be going so easily. Something professional in him mistrusted the ease.
—Probably just as well if you sign now, he nonetheless urged her. You’ll probably go on thinking about Paul Kozinski and the whole sad business while ever these papers are around.
—Don’t mention the sad business!
—I was just saying …
—Don’t say! Don’t fucking say! Don’t say!
—All right. Whatever you want, Mrs. Kozinski, but it doesn’t look as if you and Paul will get together again. So why not sign? And the annulment … I believe your family’s very Catholic too, and you’d want a Church annulment. So the document in there initiates the process.
—I know. You explained that.
—None of this divorce and annulment stuff is a big deal. Not for people like the Kozinskis.
—Old Andrew Kozinski is a Papal Knight.
—That’s what I mean. So that document needs signing with the others. It’ll go through like grease. Would you like me to open the envelope now?
—I wouldn’t.
—Just that if you signed them, I could drive back to Wagga and catch the eight o’clock plane. We all have families …
But then a pallor, she saw, an awareness of having made a gaffe crossed his face.
—Oh Jesus, I know what happened … that business out at the beach … Please forgive me, Mrs. Kozinski. I didn’t mean …
You could give forgiveness cheaply to someone like Burnside.
—We all have our families, she affirmed.
He thought she had let him off the hook and he was pleased to be able to resume his main argument.
—Listen, as I say, why not open these now?
He decided to be forceful, and picked up the envelope and was working at its flap.
—Leave them alone. They’re my papers.
—That’s right.
—Then leave them alone.
—Sorry. Look, I wish you’d—
Again a great elemental cough of thunder. The Railway Hotel itself seemed to move. The heavens ground their way across Myambagh like a river over gravel.
—You leave them with me, she said.
She didn’t know why she’d want to delay things. What he said was good sense. Get rid of them and of him. He had interrupted her sea change, her change of form in Australia’s most oblivious town. None of it could start up again until he left. If then.
Yet even at a cost to herself, she wanted to delay the Kozinskis’ purposes. She remembered old Kozinski’s story of the Pole and the lamp and the Chinese army. She had got to the level where relative balances of torment were what mattered, or where the lost took joy in minute gestures. She would utterly know her own shame, take it into herself, reinforce by decibels Paul’s scream on the night, if Burnside were to walk into Paul’s office and when asked if she’d resisted would be likely to say, No, there weren’t any problems.
—You’d better stay here, Kate advised him. You’ll get these in the morning.
—You know you’ll sign them in the end, love.
—It costs twenty dollars a night, and—for that—steak until it’s coming out of your ears.
—Since you know you’re going to sign them, I was hoping you’d save me the trouble.
—The Kozinskis will pay your hotel bill, I’d think.
—Well, of course they will …
—Stay here then.
—I don’t know what crowd you’re mixing with at the moment, Mrs. Kozinski. But maybe you ought to tell them I’m licensed to carry a firearm. If I’m visited during the night …
—Don’t be stupid.
—It’s just there’s some big bastards out in that bar. The publican himself is a big bastard.
—Yes. But he doesn’t have your malice. Just stay here and shut up and I’ll see you in the morning.
She remembered one last thing.
—You’re not to eat with me. You’re not to eat what Jack calls tea. Not with me. There are plenty of other men here you can eat it with.
—I understand, he said in an ironic way. In his general delivery, he had mixed objectives: sometimes he desired to sound like a cop, sometimes like a company law barrister. He was trying for the barrister tone now.
It came to her again that of course he would tell everyone where she was now. They would all come after her. Worst of all, her solicitous parents. So that perhaps all she wanted through her stratagems was one more night numbly embayed in Jelly’s plentiful, radiant flesh, another evening to practice the two-pour schooner, another chance of the perfect marsupial dream.
Burnside. Capable of driving a few hours down the highway and catching a plane, of getting back to the place where people would ask, How was your visit to the bush? She had prevented that. He would stay, with his envelope full of consent forms which Kate would likely sign in the morning, and he would be thickened a little, coarsened by Shirl’s spuds molten with butter and by plentiful custard. Given that, Kate thought, something might happen.
Since it was a night so blinded by rain that the police might have stayed home, Jelly took the risk of driving them home to his place.
It was vastly cold, the way a town in the plains can be. Jelly was sure the police would not be out tonight with their little breath kits.
He wanted to know, Who was that big bugger?
—Burnside. My husband sent him.
—What with?
—Divorce papers.
Closing one eye, he measured the significance of this.
As he drove, he kept saying, This could develop. Jesus, this could develop.
The rain he meant. Myambagh’s streets looked negligible beneath it.
—They’re all under their little iron roofs, murmured Jelly, and he stared out as if considering counting the thick beads.
Without asking more about Burnside when they got home, he slept for an hour in the dark. But she didn’t. She enjoyed his bulk beside her. It still glowered from the night’s intake of rum. When she woke him, he stirred in an uncomplaining way.
He said, Jesus, what in the bloody hell?
But these were purely token sentiments. In Jelly, genuine anger seemed to have been choked out by temperament, weight and history.
—What in the bloody hell?
—I want to put on the light, Jelly.
—Light?
Unlike city people, those in Myambagh were very particular about turning on lights at inappropriate hours. She noticed that they kept their houses black all night. No light burned in the Railway Hotel either, not even to deter a thief. The grandparents of the Myambagh people had seen the coming of electricity to the town’s hearths. And a tribal memory told them, in the meat of the night, not to be flippant with light.
—The way it’s raining, she explained, there might be a power failure later. I want to show you something, Jelly. While there’s still power.
There was one bulb in the room, the overhead one. The bedside lamp she’d seen on her first visit was empty. No prodigality in Jelly’s world. One source. One light.
She found the shoulder bag she brought to Jelly’s every night and took her wallet from it. She knew the photograph was in there, though she had not looked at it since the catastrophe. She knew the picture would put the question and evince a guilty plea from her.
—There you are.
When she became the different woman, of course she would be able to look at the thing and meet their soft hopeful demand. She might even find tears, and be average maudlin at their faces.
She extracted the picture from the back pocket of the wallet and offered it to Jelly as the rain scarified his metal roof.
—Those are my children.
Taking the picture, Jelly shook his head to jolt his vision into the right mode—inquisitive, respectful, ready with the apt word of praise.
—I’ve lost them.
—Lost them? Their father take them away?
—Yes.
—Jesus. Why’d he do that?
—He argued he was a fitter person. His mother argued that too.
—Jesus.
After thought and still looking at the picture, he said, Lovely kids. I know there couldn’t’ve been any cruelty, not with you.
—He said there was.
She told him that just to end the story.
—But I bet there wasn’t. Was there?
—Nothing deliberate.
She saw him frown. He wanted the simpler answer, the motherly reassurance. She took the picture back out of his hands whether he was ready or not, replaced it, put the wallet back in her bag, and then went and switched off Jelly’s melancholy light.
In the darkness, Jelly said, I don’t know what to say, Kate.
But by his voice, he intended to go into the subject. She got in beside him. He felt deeply warm, but the surface of his flesh was cold.
—Don’t start talking.
Her lips brushed something facial.
—But, listen …
—What were you going to say, anyhow? Something that would fix everything up?
—Jesus. I have a hard time fixing a fuse.
—There you are. Shut up then.
And indeed he seemed grateful to be acquitted of the task.
—Send her down, Hughy! he murmured on the edge of sleep.
An imprecation to the Australian god of weather, the god both of drought and of swollen streams. A prayer to the god of downpour from the god of the bar.
When she woke again, the light was gray-blue in the room. The rain was still in the same high voice. She was cold. Jelly had left her, and she had never been in his bed alone. She saw that he stood across the room, sighing his way into an enormous pair of waders.
—Jesus, I’ll look like Donald Duck in these. You didn’t hear the knocking at the door, eh? The sodding river’s over its banks, and there’s a tide of water on its way cross-country from Narromine. I’m signed up as an evacuation official. They need me on the books over at the old Palais Theatre. The Palais’s built up a bit high, you know. Sorry, love.
She smiled at the curiosity of it: that he did her the courtesy of speaking like an ordinary lover, one who had a normal duty to rest at the beloved’s side till dawn at least.
—You ought to get back to Jack, he said. I bet in no time they’ll have you out at the racecourse filling sandbags.
He had negotiated himself into the waders at last. He looked slick and authoritative now, liberated from his daily duty as pensioner and servant of the bar. A temporary rescuer, and looking like it! She could visualize him saying to an old lady, Don’t worry about the house or the dog, love. Water mightn’t even get over the doorstep. Take this cup of tea, and the helicopter will be here any second.
—There’s something I want you to do, Kate. If I bring the stuff in here, I want you to take it over to Jack’s.
She looked at him a time, not knowing what stuff he meant. He thought her solemnity meant agreement and was gone before she could ask.
She began to dress, and was into her shoes, which were still wet from the night before, when he came in slicked with rain and carrying a small Esky, the standard accouterment of picnics as enjoyed by homo australiensis.
Jelly was gasping somewhat in his glittering rain gear.
—It’s not volatile, he assured her.
—You’ve got dynamite? You’ve really got it?
—Jesus, of course I bloody have, Kate. I told you.
He picked the Esky up again and did a demonstration of carrying it for her, creeping across the room and placing the thing softly on the bed.
—Carry it by the handle, see. You could drop it without any problem, but better not. The detonators are in there too, safe as you like. Wrapped up in foil. The blasting box I’ll bring later. In this downpour, I don’t want to overburden you, love.
—And where do I take it?
—Oh. Sorry. When you get to the Railway, you know upstairs? A whole walled-off section they open up in what they call civil emergencies. Just put it in there. Tell Jack. He won’t mind. I’ll be along later in the day.
Kate touched the handle experimentally. He thought she was terrified of the potential detonation still, so he explained further.
—See, if I leave it out the back it’ll get drowned. Once it gets wet, you have to ask the police and the bloody army in to dispose of it.
He shook his head at the prospect. It was intolerable that his mission should close with such low comedy.
—I’m not worried, she told him.
Though she did want to live long enough to sign the Kozinskis away, and to see Burnside move out into an air blinded with rain.
Kate settled into her wet shoes now, ready to go. Not washed or rinsed, she presumed the day itself would look after that.
She lifted the Esky and found that it felt quite natural. Carrying it, she followed Jelly into the corridor. The front door was juddering in the wind. Jelly turned to her, a yellow frog king.
—That big bugger, said Jelly, a big bugger himself in some ways. The inquiry agent?
—Yes.
—All this flooding … he might get stuck here now.
—Damn him.
—Yes, said Jelly precisely and delicately. In fact he broke the word neatly off the body of language in a way he rarely did. It might be a sign that he was not finished with serious advice.
—Look, I’ve been meaning to say. You can’t just expect to disappear, you know. It’s not just enough to come to some dead place like Myambagh. I saw posters for you. Your family has put up posters all over the place. They decided not to call you a missing person, but they sent a poster to every police station. A photograph. Asking them to be so kind as to put them up at the Town Hall and the Post Office … A friend of mine who’s in the police here brought them to me and says, Isn’t this your friend? And I say, Yes it is. And he asked me if I think you want these posters put up. And I say I reckon you don’t. He knows you’ve got no record, because he checked. So he just gave the posters to me and I disposed of them. There are pictures of you hanging all over New South Wales, except in Myambagh. Myambagh always wanted a distinction of its own, apart from floods. Well, this is it. The only bloody place with a council chambers that doesn’t have your picture. Imagine!
She felt flushed with gratitude, though, and it was partly to herself. She had chosen her protector so infallibly.
The timidity she’d harbored about carrying dynamite across Myambagh vanished now. She imagined the detonators neatly packaged away from the explosive. The two lovingly insulated from one another. Instruments of high office.
Jelly left ahead of her, lumbering away into the murk. She had dropped the Esky to cling to him for a while before he left, and he’d said, Thank my friend the copper. He’s took a bit of a risk. Though I suppose he could always say they were mislaid.
She closed the door but did not lock it, since Myambagh people feared not looters, only the flood. In the quiet, drenched streets she was delighted by the weight of the plastic-handled load, by the way Jelly’s scheme had claimed her. Her gnarled shoulders ached and itched, as often when she carried weight. This message of pain from the old world could be examined for a while and connected by a thin filament to the new.
Burnside was waiting for her in the dining room at the Railway. He looked well settled in, as if he’d had a pleasant breakfast with the other guests and had diverted them with tales of the construction industry. Shirley had just finished cleaning up and wiping down the filigreed plastic tablecloths. The place was still. Even today all the Monks and Escapees were scattered around households and public buildings in Myambagh, repairing for time-and-a-half the water damage of the past flood even while this one brewed and threatened.
Burnside rose, leaving behind his coffee, and stepped toward her.
—Been on a picnic? he asked, but did not wait for an answer. I could get stuck here now if you don’t …
—I’ll get your papers. Wait there.
First she carried Jelly’s Esky up the stairs and onto the upstairs verandah. Jack boasted that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century graziers, cowcockies, drovers, sawyers and bullockies used to play cricket up here. The fieldsmen in slips and covers had to catch the ball clean to prevent it soaring over the balcony, into the street or onto the railway lines. A young Aboriginal was always employed therefore to stand in the street below and retrieve hoiked balls. Thus on the Railway Hotel verandah, and on other hotel verandahs in the antipodes, a three-dimensional game of cricket had been devised, height coming into the equation as well as length. A sub-fieldsman scouted the road and the steel lines, looking for the ball in thickets of paspalum grass by the goods yard, while upstairs the batsmen ran run after run and the fieldsmen leaned over the balcony screaming, Get it, you black bastard!
On this broad roof, the rain sounded like riveting guns. Kate found that someone had been into the annex—perhaps Shirley, who in between her high-cholesterol mode of cooking cleaned and set up rooms as well. Mattresses had been laid on the boards. Blankets and sheets were folded onto each mattress. On the orders of Jack and dark-eyed Connie, an emergency dormitory had been made. Kate wondered if Jelly knew matters at the Railway had reached such a degree of preparation?
A cupboard stood at the far end, suitable for the explosives. But Jelly had contemplated a vacant verandah. Nonetheless, for the moment, she decided to be obedient. He had said it was not volatile and it was his place to know. He must know of all these blankets and sheets, of the coming population of Murchison’s Railway Hotel’s normally unpeopled verandah.
Now she went to her room and closed the door. The air was cold and a dim blue, but she lay uncovered on the bed for a time and revived the flavor of her habitual Chifley dreams. No fur in the dream, though. No feather. Just motion above Australia’s absolute surfaces.
Guthega had argued one night that the way a kangaroo’s lungs hung down behind its ribs and the flab of the belly meant that the very motion of bounding sucked air in. Making light of the earth, or as Guthega had it, traveling like shit, itself caused the lungs to fill. There was never a gasp. All kangaroos, said Guthega, were marathoners.
Her throat closing up with desire, Kate imagined that state: the more you flew, the more you breathed. Flight made of you one continuous body of air.
After daydreaming about breath and flight then, she got up and took Burnside’s envelope from the dresser. Blindly she signed every document, canonical and civil, wherever there was a penciled cross. She did not read them. She knew what they said. She was relinquishing all control, equity in and claim against Kozinski Constructions, Kozinski Development, Kozinski Building Services, Kozinski Industrial Waste Corp, Vistula Trust and Cleaning, and so on. On the letterhead of the annulment document, St. Patrick trampled on a snake. She signed that document very quickly, loyally remembering Uncle Frank, his well-canvassed hatred of canon lawyers.
She put all the documents back into the envelope, stuffing some of them so that their neat creases were erratically rearranged. She carried it all downstairs. The malign exactitudes, she imagined, stung the flesh of the fingers.
Burnside was standing waiting for her. He smoked but he was not utterly at ease. She offered the envelope to him with a speed he didn’t expect, so that he half fumbled it, clamping the cigarette in one corner of his mouth by contorting his lower lip. Opening the thing, he looked at every page, quickly. Seeing the repeated signature—she had even consented to sign the papers with her married name—he was pleased. But it was against policy to tell her.
—Wish you’d seen your way to sign them yesterday. Even if the highway isn’t bloody blocked, I’ll get stuck in Dubbo. Radio says the airport there’s closed.
—It’s a small inconvenience, she told him in a tone which implied he shouldn’t think of making further complaints. Because signatures could be revoked at this stage. Envelopes could still be whisked out from under his elbow and documents ripped up.
She said, Don’t forget to ask Jack for your bill before you go.
He stared at her, nodding his head as if reaching a new assessment.
—Whatever in the fuck did Paul Kozinski see in a slut like you?
But he held the envelope tightly in both hands. He would get a commission of some hundreds of thousands of dollars, and could afford to be offensive now he’d assured himself of that. She had an idea he was even wondering whether he should punch her.
—You should live with better people than this. Paul would be surprised to see you living here. I realize it’s the shock of what happened, but …
She turned away, leaving him. It was time for her to begin her last short season at the beer taps.
She felt usurped to find dark-eyed Connie behind the bar.
Connie said, You settled things with that big bugger out there?
—Yes. He’s leaving.
Jack emerged from the keg room. He said with a crooked smile, Connie’s taken over the beer taps.
—Too early to start handing out free beer to flood victims. Jack’d start now if I let him.
—Darls! Jack appealed, offended to have his business sense so discounted.
—Australians don’t understand business, Connie stated. That’s why the country’s in such a bloody mess. Jack’s a sentimentalist. With my father’s money.
Anger overcame Jack. His neck turned red and a stammer broke from his lips.
—Darls, I’ve never wasted a dollar of your old man’s …
—Because I watch you, that’s why.
Her bruised eyes were permanently wakeful.
—Man’s got his pride, Jack reminded her.
—There won’t be any business anyhow today, Connie said almost leniently. Better get going on the sandbag filling, if that’s what you want.
Jack kissed her, whispered something to her and then went to dress for the outside world. The bulk of Connie’s argument as he left the public bar was to tell those kids to stop that or she’d bloody well stop it for them.
In the dining room, pulling on the gumboots from Dunnegan’s Country Stores while Connie’s children stared at the big television set, Kate looked out under the long verandah across the pavement she or Connie hosed every morning but which was now hosed free of charge. Burnside was backing his car and turning its head eastward, very confident in that solid downpour. It seemed unlikely to Kate, though, that behind the veil the highway had sustained itself all the way to Dubbo. On the other hand, she could imagine him swimming the flooded sections, the envelope held in his teeth.