Whenever I see a telephone in a rich person’s house I want to sneak a call to somewhere far away. Dickie Del Mar has his phone in a cubicle inside the front door, like in the foyer of an expensive hotel. It’s wallpapered with covers from the New Yorker.
I watch him and Callie in the living room at the end of the hall, under the light of a tall standard lamp, talking about horses and breeding and Argentina. He’s lit her up a dark cigarette. Callie just holds it. She doesn’t put it near her mouth.
I pull the phone room door behind me, dial the long- distance operator and whisper the run of numbers. Dickie shouldn’t mind, I haven’t been expensive. It’s not like he put me through college. Darwin’s line is not connected. I ask her to try Leonie’s number at the pub. Leonie answers the phone in the bar; I can hear the din of drinking, the loud Australian laughter. When she realises it’s me she starts talking before I say why I’ve called. I want to tell her how I uncovered Dickie Del Mar.
“Darwin’s crook,” she says. “He had some sort of a stroke.” She talks quickly as if she’s saving me money. “I got him on a mattress in the back of the ute and drove him to Deniliquin.”
“How is he now?”
“Not so good,” she says. “Why are you whispering?”
Someone shouts Leonie’s name from the bar. “I gotta go,” she says, “there’s a whole crowd here. Come if you want to.”
I replace the handpiece quietly and stand in the dark. Dickie and Callie are still talking. She sits on the edge of the couch, he’s in a dark leather chair. His features haven’t softened with age. He must be over fifty. It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking by his expression, he always looks slightly amused. Callie watches her cigarette smoke as it rises faintly from the tip. I walk outside to be on my own.
I imagine Darwin’s body bumping along Muddy Gates Lane on the bed of a truck, the sun on his face. His dried-up tongue in his throat, his eye, Leonie looking back through the rearview mirror, taking him to the hospital.
Dickie’s garden is pretty at night, there are crickets. I climb a good way up a loose-barked eucalyptus and straddle a limb, let my legs dangle. I look out over the Pacific and wonder what it would be like to live here.
Callie comes out to see where I am. She whistles with two fingers, calls me up like a dog.
“I’m here,” I say from above her.
She looks up at my feet. “Should we call the fire brigade?” she asks.
“Why? Did you light one?”
The waves break on the beach at the bottom of the cliffs, they sound like traffic passing on a highway.
“Darwin’s dying,” I tell her.
“Did he call to tell you?” she asks. She knows what I’ve been up to.
I notice Dickie standing in the doorway, the foyer light behind him. I can see his shape but not the features of his face as I watch him through the leaves. Callie doesn’t see him there.
“Maybe Dickie’ll buy us airplane tickets,” she says. “After all, he is your father.”
“Who?” I ask, unsure which one she means.
“Dickie,” she says.
I imagine Darwin on a narrow hospital bed, hooked up with tubes and drips. I look over at Dickie behind the screen door.
“Perhaps Dickie’d like to come with us?” I say. The tip of his cigarette goes orange as he puts it to his mouth. “He could see where my mother is buried.”
“If he was so excited about your mother he wouldn’t have left her there,” says Callie.
“I loved his mother,” says Dickie from the doorway. He comes down the steps onto the lawn, picks up a sprig that fell when I was climbing, swats Callie lightly on the back.
“Then take us back there,” I say.