13

“Listen,” Stanton said outside the Kabbels’ place at the end of a shift. The first frostiness of the season was in the air, and Delaney liked that, the arrival of daylight brought with it more the elation of survival. “Listen, you reckon that girl and her brother might be making it together?”

Delaney, gouging for car keys in his pocket, stiffened. He wanted both to hide his face and hit Stanton. Instead he heard himself ask why.

“I went for a leak,” said Stanton, “and the outside toilet’s buggered, so I used the one in the house. All these paintings of the two of them done by Warwick himself. She’s wearing the security company’s bloody baggy shirt and they’re staring at the bloody camera—or at the brush I suppose you’d say. And there’s a wave behind them. He’s bloody good at waves, gets the marbling exact.” By now Stanton was speaking more hesitantly. He could tell his theory had somehow outraged Delaney; he was abashed at having violated some sensitivity in his friend. Then he got peevish. “Christ, you might as well know these things.”

“In case of what?” There was an ashy dryness—disappointment and the rasp of jealousy—at the back of his throat. Later he would remember this as the first second he would think of himself as her deliverer.

“In case you … No, I’m not going to bloody buy in, Terry. I’ll show you my scars, if you want. This is the same sort of setup as the one that uprooted my life. It’s like playing Rugby League in France—you think you know the rules but you don’t.”

He would have liked to ask Stanton whether his love was so clear, like a mark on the forehead that Gina, her parents, his parents could read. But the question itself would be a giveaway.

In the opening chapter of The Tin Drum a man is running from the Prussian police in a potato field somewhere around the borders of Poland and Germany. Delaney intended at some stage to look up the location more exactly, but felt no urge to, preferred in fact for the young fugitive’s politics to be vague and for the location to be no man’s land, a land still to be invented. To escape the police, the escapee slides in under the skirts of the narrator’s grandmother, who at that stage of history is still young and is picking potatoes in the field. While the Prussian police run back and forth among the furrows, the hidden escapee exploits his privileged position by entering the girl/grandmother. She flushes as the police rage up and down the furrows. She has met her man.

This event recurred in Delaney’s sleep. He was running from the persecutors who inhabit dreams, the persecutors who require neither names nor motivation. In he rushed, beneath the succoring skirts. Under them lay Danielle Kabbel’s bird-boned yet ample flesh. To reach it was to reach home, a stranger home than he had ever known to exist.

These days he drove to work agitated, trying to get there before Stanton, usually succeeding. “The punctual Mr. Delaney,” she told him one night when she was already in the control room and he did not have to go through the boyhood thing of waiting for the particular fragrance of Danielle Kabbel, for that particular gait, a step both more familiar and less robust than Gina’s.

“The punctual Mr. Delaney. If my father had his way, you’d be managing director inside a month.”

“But you don’t have a managing director.”

“No,” she said, smiling deftly. “We only have the family.”

She had begun reading and writing notes in a new book, a slimmer one, Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. He knew the film—Maureen O’Hara aging elegantly and giving off a high-bred sexual radiance. He remembered the fun and trickery of the plot, and wondered what in her strangeness she thought of it. Later, out shaking doorknobs and shining a torch at mute panes of glass, he fell back on what he knew of the book as a sort of irrational proof of innocence. The atmosphere of the story was homely, humane: There were heroes and villains. Whereas in The Tin Drum there were escapees sheltering in weird and joyous places; a mother and an uncle loved each other; midgets could break glass with their voices; horses’ heads squirmed with eels; and a woman ate herself to death with fish oil. In the dark atmosphere of that book, adding its power to the dark wave in Warwick’s paintings—as reviewed for Delaney by Stanton—you could nearly believe in Stanton’s accusation. But not by the calmer light of Our Man in Havana.

One night when he arrived, the whole known Kabbel family were gathered in the control room around one of those little machines called scanners. Warwick the artist was tuning the controls with calm, delicate movements involving only his index finger and his thumb. Stammers of distorted conversation emerged from the scanner and faded back into static and noises resembling a saxophone played by an inexpert child. The family was so riveted around the thing that Delaney hesitated at the door and considered going away for five minutes. Then Danielle turned her head. She was frowning as if she wanted to help the circuits inside the machine with her concentration. Then her eyes focused, her eyebrows arched, and she smiled, making Delaney welcome to whatever the secret was. A second later Kabbel looked over his shoulder. His eyes glittered. He grinned and waved at Delaney to come closer. When Delaney had crossed the room, Kabbel slung his arm around his shoulder.

“Warwick’s been engaged in counterespionage,” Kabbel whispered, not wanting to be so loud as to cloud anything definite Warwick could get from the scanner. “Like his grandfather the chief of police.” Dressed as a Telecom technician, Warwick had managed to get into the office of Rooster Time, the company at war with Golden Style. He’d even been permitted into the garage, where, left alone for a few minutes, he broke into the managing director’s BMW and took the number of his car telephone. Kabbel had reason to suspect that the managing director made contact with those who were breaking Golden Style’s windows and spray-painting its brickwork and parking areas with offputting slogans like “Chicken Poison” and “Shit Food,” while he was driving to and from the office.

“How do you know he isn’t already home?” Delaney asked. “Watching Country Practice with his kids?”

Kabbel winked, a broad Slavic wink, heavily supported by the rest of his features. “Scott put a bug in his office a month ago. Ten minutes ago our gentleman called his wife and told her he’d be home in half an hour.”

Delaney frowned. Electronic subterfuge disturbed him. The family looked sinister with their intent, genetically echoing postures around the scanner.

Kabbel increased the pressure on Delaney’s shoulder. “Don’t start fretting. I’ll never use you for any of these rascal activities.” And then, as if he could spot the growing question in Delaney’s eyes, “Nor do I ever use Danielle. You and she are both too good at what you already do, and that’s fair enough with Rudi Kabbel. Warwick, Scott, and I are the partisans, the guerrillas, the outlaws.”

Warwick said aloud, “Twenty-five minutes to his place from the office. He’s been on the road for a quarter of an hour so far, and not a word.”

Young Scott, blond as his sister, murmured, “Might have to bug his house.”

Danielle caught Delaney’s eye and smiled opaquely at him. It wasn’t as if she condoned the talk of bugs. It was as if all her brothers’ hard muscular utterance was beside the point. All at once the scanner conveyed the sound of dialing, of a telephone pealing distantly, and broke into clear speech. “Hello,” said a female voice. “Sweet William,” said a male. (The managing director’s name, Delaney would later discover, was William Tracey.) The woman called him darling, and in an aspirating voice he asked her about her honeypot, her nectar, and began to use the sort of cheap images you found in letters at the front of Penthouse.

“His girlfriend,” said Warwick. “I don’t think we need listen to this.” But what he meant was that he didn’t want Danielle to listen, perhaps didn’t want Delaney to listen in Danielle’s presence. He picked up earphones, put them on. The sound of William Tracey’s part-time desire was lost to all but Warwick. Everyone waited in silence for that call to finish, and as it did and Warwick removed the phones, Stanton entered and found them all intent and listening to nothing.

The Kabbels got nothing further out of William Tracey that evening. Later, on his own, driving, shining his flashlight, hoping that no open window or faultily wired alarm would distract him from his torment, he wondered would one of the Kabbels penetrate Tracey’s home. He hoped beyond reason that, even given the squalor of Tracey’s spirit, they would not try it.

FROM THE MATCH DIARY OF TERRY DELANEY

Penrith v. Manly, home game. Good crowd because Manly so full of internationals and fancy imports. Everyone likes to see them get beaten too—they have this reputation for being wealthy, aristocrats of League, and they live on the beaches and so on. Old Roy Masters when he was coach of Wests dubbed them The Silvertails, and the name’s stuck. We were scrappy first half—lots of dropped ball. “I won’t tolerate this bloody dropsy,” Paul Tuomey said at half time, passing round the Stick-it. I still use resin—that’s what Brother Aubin always made us use, and beside him Paul Tuomey isn’t a coach’s bootlace. Second half our forwards tore into them and I started to combine really well with Skeeter Moore and Eric Samuels in the centers. Faulkner scored a ninety-yarder down the sideline with ten minutes to go.

Penrith 32–Manly 7.

Slaughtered us in reserves and firsts though. Came on last ten minutes of reserves, but they kept me bottled up. Sent up a few good bombs, but the bounce doesn’t suit you when you’re being walloped. First grade: no defense from the forwards, no nip from the halves, no penetration from the fullback and centers, and the wings didn’t see the ball. Another sad post mortem at the Leagues Club. Old Dick Webster the copper put his arm around me and yelled, “Why don’t you give this young bloke a run in Firsts. At least he bloody tackles.”