55

By now, on the strength of his ill-starred elevation to the top of the game, Delaney had a telephone in his flat. Gina must have expected as much and got his number from information, because one afternoon she called him. When he heard her he flinched, fearing the tightness of her voice, being intimidated by the correctness with which she offered her sympathies over the matter of his suspension.

As they went on talking, he felt an aggression growing in him. She should be saying, “Imagine what we could have done, as a team, with first-grade match fees! Imagine what a blow we could have dealt the mortgage!” It was unreasonable, Delaney felt, for her not to state that sort of natural regret.

“You probably didn’t hear about this,” said Gina. “It wasn’t on television like poor Brian. A girl had a baby in the fitting room at Fossey’s. The one in Main Street. An ambulance man delivered it.” Delaney began to shiver. He could predict the news that was coming. “It was your friend,” said Gina without any edge, any weight on “friend.” “It was Danielle. We were all on the street watching—thought there’d been a shooting. I saw her carried out on a stretcher. One of those paramedics carried the baby.”

Thanks were not the proper thing. It wasn’t right for him either to let the phone fall and rush to the district hospital. He asked her how her parents were. Cunning told him that that would quickly end the conversation. As it did. He hung the phone up and spent a little time trembling and distracted, forgetting where his car keys were. Danielle and his child were five minutes down the highway.

The air was full of the sound of protesting babies. The new generation, Delaney thought, of wronged women and sidestepping five-eighths.

He stopped at the desk by the maternity ward. Still, always, because of Greg’s training and his mother’s, he was an orderly young man. He could not discover her by bursting through doors. He wanted their reunion to be condoned by the hospital authorities.

He asked for Danielle Kabbel. The woman at the desk tossed sheafs of paper, looking for Danielle’s name. This nurse was a pretty woman in perhaps her early thirties, working for the marital mortgage, the first webbings of exhaustion in the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t find a Kabbel.

Delaney made a speech about how certain he was she was here, in Penrith District. Unless there were complications. (The idea struck him harder than it did the nurse.) “But she would have been admitted here,” said Delaney. “Two days ago.”

The tired mother of two again denied there had been anyone named Kabbel.

“But she gave birth in Main Street, Penrith,” said Delaney. “It all happened very quickly.”

“Oh, but you mean the Kowolsky child.”

“No. The Kabbel child. Danielle Kabbel gave birth in Fossey’s in Main Street.”

“No, not Kabbel. Kowolsky.”

“That’s the Polish spelling of their name,” said Delaney with a cleverness he did not know he had. “I went to school with her and with her brothers. They grew up in Forth Street, Penrith.”

These homely details captured the nurse. “That’s right. And they live in Kingswood now.”

“Yes,” said Delaney. “But I don’t know the new address.”

“Well, it’s that new townhouse setup, isn’t it?” said the nurse. “You know the one near the Toyota dealership.”

“Oh yes,” said Delaney.

“Are you the new five-eighth?”

“That’s right,” said Delaney. “I grew up with the Kabbels—I mean the Kowolskys.”

At least, along with all her fatigue and mortgage dedication, the woman knew what a good game of football was. She said, as if it were a service to a team humiliated since the late 1950s, year by year, “Well, you know the place. Those new townhouses down the highway. Turn left toward the railway line. The Gardens.” She referred to her notes of the recent obstetrical emergency. “Number seventeen. But she left within twenty-four hours, you know. A daughter—3.79 kilos. Tough girl. The brothers and the father wanted to get her home, you know. For once, I pity whoever was the father of the kid.”

“Kowolsky,” said Delaney. He could not believe that a few vowels had defeated him. He muttered his thanks and went off toward the parking lot.

The Gardens was one of those small villages of townhouses, well curbed and guttered, young trees standing along the pathways. By the time those trees were as large as the one Stanton cut down, Delaney computed, the place would be a slum. For the moment though it had a little style—brick, aluminum windows, shiplap carports. Its internal streets were in the form of a T, and anyone with a child—looking at it and remembering how fast people drove in some suburban streets—would consider it a safe place.

Having spent so long to find the house, Delaney did not now want to approach it too fast. He parked his car in the ill-curbed and guttered ordinary street which ran past the entrance to the development and walked in. Number seventeen was in the head of the T. It was quiet around the corner. Everyone seemed to be a considerate neighbor. A man of about Delaney’s age was kicking a plastic football to his toddling son, who—wearing a frown—picked it up slowly with hands splayed from the wrist. At number eleven a man with slicked hair, wearing both the well-scrubbed after-work look of someone who perhaps labored in a foundry as well as the prosperous look of someone who cops plenty of overtime, was washing a new Camira. Delaney recognized Rudi Kabbel’s Toyota, pride of the fleet of Uncle Security, standing in front of seventeen. He stood for a while contemplating it, then he turned in past it to the front door and knocked. By his left shoulder were the kitchen windows, but their blinds were pulled down. It was Delaney’s intuition that they were down at this hour, when anyone would want them up to catch the last of the afternoon sun, for defensive reasons. The Kabbels were inside, he knew, and they knew he could tell it. He did not need to knock again. Someone was sure to answer. Peculiarly, he believed he would only know what to say if it was one of the boys.

It was one of the boys. It was Warwick. He opened the door carefully, as if there had been trouble with the hinges. He said hello in his polite, deliberate way. It reminded Delaney of the deliberateness with which the man’s son, a few seconds before, had picked up the football.

Delaney asked him how he was. The house had what Delaney thought of as a cold breath, as if the Kabbels had switched off all lights, all radiators, refrigerators, blenders, lest light and warmth and whirring give Delaney delusions of welcome.

“Warwick,” said Delaney, “I’d like to see the baby. And I’d like to talk to Danielle too.”

“Well, that’s all very well,” said Warwick, frowning. “Danielle doesn’t want to talk to you though.”

“Is Rudi there?”

“Rudi’s busy.”

“Look,” said Delaney. He had none of the eloquence he thought he would have when first seeing a Kabbel again. “Let me see her. And it’s my daughter. Not yours. Let me see my daughter.”

“A second,” said Warwick.

He closed the door on Delaney. There would be a Kabbel conference, a busy affair, a hushed one. Delaney stood in the last of the sun and could hear nothing. When Warwick came back, he believed he would tell him, “I hope you gave Danielle a vote. I’m voting for the child.”

Warwick opened the door again. He carried a shotgun in his hands, the breech opened and pointed to Delaney so that he could see both barrels were loaded. With that workmanlike calm of his, Warwick closed the breech and pointed the barrels at Delaney’s chest.

“Now listen, Terry,” said Warwick. “None of us want to see you. We want you to stay away. You know what I’m capable of, eh?”

Even threatened like this, Delaney was still straining to gauge the air of the house, the nuances of scent. Later he would tell himself it was his long experience of teams calloused by defeat which now helped him pick up one of the strains—the acrid trace of faith lost. He remembered now his source at the Newnes pub, the single, never since repeated fully loaded visit of the Kabbels to their canyon.

Without any fear, but out of a conviction that there was a balance inside the house which could easily turn on the baby, Delaney himself reached for the door handle and shut the door on the gun. If the balance was disturbed, armies couldn’t save the baby girl. Delaney walked past the carport and out onto the pavement with a confidence that the thing could be done. Warwick’s politeness would help do it. Social workers and child-care people could negotiate that politeness.

As he passed the man with the Camira, the well-scrubbed man of number eleven, Delaney saw him wink.

“Come to cut something off, mate?” the man asked him. Delaney did not understand. Because of vibrations in his legs, he would have liked to sit for a while at the man’s feet. But a Camira owner might be appalled by that sort of behavior.

“They’ve got nothing left on,” said the man, nodding toward the Kabbels’ place. “Telephone disconnected, electricity. I reckon someone will cut their water off pretty soon.”

Delaney went to turn back to number seventeen, to take up this matter with Warwick.

The Camira man wanted to be fair though. “Nice enough people. Dress well. You’d never know there were four people in the place. Five including the baby. And they like the baby O.K. Give it a fair bit of sun.”

“But no heat,” said Delaney.

“I suppose they bundle up,” said the man.