34

“Let me tell you in confidence, Terry,” said Kabbel, serenely chewing. “I am pleased you have chosen to go back to your wife.” Beyond the windscreen it was drizzling coldly. Even Kabbel couldn’t sit by the bandstand in this weather, playing windproof and waterproof Belorussian, exposing his Belorussian certainty to the weather.

Delaney, sitting in the passenger seat, a cup of the usual Kabbel peculiarly fragrant coffee in his hand, said nothing. He still had no idea what in the hell leaving Uncle Security meant—the first move in separating Danielle from the family or a move back to Gina. He didn’t want to strengthen Kabbel by arguing with himself about that point aloud.

Anyhow it had made Gina something like happy, it had produced in Delaney’s white and papally blessed house in Forth Street an atmosphere of dull misery in which Delaney was able to sleep beside his wife, to regret occasionally sending his hand down the line of her back as if he were settling a Labrador. He knew it was all criminal but believed it gave him time to think. Thinking wasn’t possible. Everywhere—it seemed to Delaney—the air discouraged it.

“You would have had to go back in the end,” Kabbel went on, crowing. “Danielle sees herself as so inseparable from the lads and myself … She did tell you, my friend, she was more or less married before, didn’t she?”

“She told me about some séance in Melbourne.”

Kabbel started to laugh. “Jesus Christ!” It was a rare expletive with Kabbel, and Delaney knew why he came out with it, to get Delaney on his side in laughing at the way women exaggerated. “I wish she wouldn’t use that term.”

“What should she have called it?” Delaney asked, refusing to join in any “Oh, women!” stunt.

“That’s the trouble,” said Kabbel. “It was the sort of burning family experience you could never understand, Terry, even if I tried to explain it. I don’t mean you aren’t intelligent and I don’t mean you aren’t ‘a good bloke.’ I mean it would be like a foreign language to you.”

Delaney felt his face redden before Kabbel’s glistening confidence. “Why don’t you give up this mystifying bullshit, Rudi?” he yelled. “Why don’t you let Warwick and Scott find Australian girls with big tits and sunny bloody temperaments? Why did you have to force Danielle to go to Melbourne to see bloody ghosts? They’re zombies, those poor little buggers, you’re like a bloody pillow over their faces. Get rid of the bloody explosives manuals, Rudi, and let in some bloody fresh air!”

Kabbel leaned over in his seat and looked frowning into Delaney’s face. “Is this a declaration of hostilities, Terry?”

“I don’t know what in the bloody hell it is. Listen, Danielle has not once mentioned my wife.”

He understood straightaway that it was a mistake to mention that, even a betrayal. What he meant it to be was an accusation against Kabbel, because he kept them so locked up that they didn’t see anyone out there beyond the edge of the Kabbel clan campfire.

“So you wish Danielle would nag you about Mrs. Delaney?” asked Kabbel, with that shrewdness again which made Delaney want to hit him. “Adultery occurs everywhere and in every age and in spite of women’s sisterly concern for each other. You are actually complaining, Terry, that Danielle does not weep hypocritically for your wife?”

“I’m complaining that you stunted the poor little bitch!”

Rudi Kabbel sighed, laying his head back against the rest, the extension of the seat which was designed to prevent whiplash injuries. Returning from setting booby traps, the Kabbels would be safe from spinal damage.

“Sometimes, Mr. Delaney, history does make its claim on people. In places like Los Angeles and Sydney people try to live in an eternal and very base now, without any memory of the dead. The barbecue and the sun are all. Games are all—a game is all to you. But you have to face it: Sometimes—I restate it so that you will know—sometimes even here history can’t be avoided, history comes up and grabs people. Outside coffee bars in Auburn where Armenians wait with knives for the Turks to come out—there it can kill people. What I say is Don’t try to marry Danielle. It will never work. She belongs to forces you can’t negotiate with, Terry. I tell you that as a friend. I too wish it were otherwise. But there can’t be any Aussie coziness in life for her.”

Mouth open, Delaney was considering making the challenge, yelling, We’ll bloody see, and all the other worn terms of a struggle between a lover and a father, when Kabbel changed direction.

“I was going to tell you, anyhow. I’m selling out, Terry. The business and the house. I want to buy property—forests, escarpments, meadows. The line can no longer be held, Terry. The line against barbarity.”

“And poor damn Brian Stanton?” asked Delaney.

“He’ll work for the new owners. I have to get out, Terry. There is a valley beyond Newnes—two and a half hours away from here if you drive sedately like me.”

“Farming? Or a bloody munitions factory?”

“The bottomland can be farmed and carry livestock. There are great sandstone gorges, made by glaciers when God was young.”

The mention of glaciers signaled Delaney. “This is all for the sake of that Wave you crowd talk about!”

“Everyone knows it’s on its way, Delaney. Every cretin restocking the shelves in supermarkets from Tasmania to Finland. Everyone knows it’s on its way.”

“So you don’t live now, like sane people. You live for afterwards, you stupid prick, Rudi.”

“Said like a good Catholic, who doesn’t enjoy fucking now, if you will excuse the term, so that he can fuck without worry in heaven.”

“God,” said Doig over the heads of mystified parishioners one Sunday, “is glorified by the love with which you treat your own body. This includes drinking wine at the right time and putting the cork back in the bottle at the right time. This includes feasting in season and dieting in time to prevent a coronary.” (“Man thinks he’s bloody Pritikin,” said old Greg Delaney outside.)

“So you cork up the gorges to stop the rest of us getting in,” Delaney observed. “You put up a gate and anyone who touches it gets the Stevo treatment. The gates of bloody heaven, eh? And the unworthy get their mitts blown off. You know what shits me about you, Rudi? You look at me, a professional player but that means sweet damn-all—a poor stupid bugger who’s worked well and taken deep bruising at the bloody chicken house for you—and you think, Pity about poor Delaney, he’s done for, might as well write him off. I’ve been inside your daughter, you old sod, and it doesn’t mean a thing, I’m just another one of the damned. And what will you do out there with Danielle, in bloody Newnes, in Kabbelburg? A woman, Rudi, a really lovely and healthy woman? Will you give her to Warwick so they can bang out a few cross-eyed kids while you’re waiting for the bloody surf to break over the Blue Mountains?” He noticed Kabbel was regarding him in a strange deliberate way and understood with delight that the man had lost his temper. But it was not the hot loss Delaney had hoped for. There was no chance of punches or screaming. The Kabbels never gave you that.

“Give me your gun, Delaney, and I’ll sign it off. Call for your pay and bring your uniform in tomorrow night. Though you do not think so, I give Danielle her freedom, so it is her matter whether you meet in the future. I don’t think we should meet again.”

There was nothing Delaney could say without losing ground. He put his beeper and his .38 on the seat beside Kabbel. Still struggling for a fit last word, he opened the door. As he stood up outside the car astringent rain struck the back of his neck. It brought him something like a satisfactory answer.

“You’re a bloody fool, Rudi,” he called, “and you’ll die unhappy.”

Kabbel shrugged, nodded, and drove away.