Tony Pascoe kept his head down, hoping that the Esso cap he’d stolen and his long white beard would conceal his face. He proceeded down the nearest suburban street, heading away from the coastline and marina.
Pascoe made sure to walk like a civilian. He kept his gait open, like he was innocent of every thought beyond heading home to water the garden or feed the dog, or whatever suburban people did to fill in their time.
Pascoe was nine hours on the run, and the coppers would be looking. It was a risk to leave his hide in the yacht club, where he’d broken into a cabin cruiser off Capo D’Orlando Drive, down the furthest end of a long jetty. The cruiser was a sixty-footer named Easy Rider. As he’d hoped, the interior was layered with dust on the sheoak veneer surfaces. It was likely that the super-rich owner only used it occasionally in summer, if at all. There were drawn blinds on the windows and the cupboards were stocked with canned steak ’n’ onions, rice pudding, two fruits and baked beans. Pascoe was used to prison food and could eat the rations cold while sitting in the darkness. So confident was the owner of the yacht club security that there was a spare key hidden inside a biscuit tin. Pascoe didn’t know how to drive a boat, but he liked the thought of heading west when his job was done. The liquor cabinet was stocked with single malts and tequila. He could steam out into the great wide ocean until the fuel sputtered out, then drift, and drink himself to death.
The only things that Pascoe had taken off the boat were a fishing rod and an army surplus flare gun. He carried the fishing rod in his left hand, hoping to look like a typical old man returning from a day’s fishing at the Mole. It was a stubby boat rod and useless for land-based fishing, but he gambled that nobody would look closely. Pascoe wore the backpack heavy with the oxygen tank and the flare gun. He kept a steady pace through the flatter streets, trying to regulate his breathing. The vast open sky and the ordinary smells of restaurant cooking and car exhaust were intoxicating after so many years inside, and he tried to keep his eyes off the new-model vehicles and the fashions worn by the pedestrians headed into town. Even from a casual observation, it was clear that the cars had lost their sixties curves and gone boxy. When Pascoe had entered the prison in 1970, Japanese imports were limited to the rare Toyota Crown or Nissan Cedric – now the plastic bumpers and rice-burner engines were common. The fashions however hadn’t changed much. Men still wore their hair long, and flannel and jeans remained the norm. The few women he saw on the street who weren’t nonnas in funereal black wore pale blue jeans and permed hair, with bright lipstick.
Leaving the yacht club during the daylight hours was a risk but Pascoe needed a gun. Until the cancer had mowed him down, he’d been as handy as any other prisoner, but now any kind of physical confrontation meant that he was liable to collapse and die.
Pascoe tried to focus his mind on his breathing and his slow, even steps. Walking meditation. Fighting was a useful thing to let his thoughts drift across, however, now he was fighting to survive from day to day. He listened to his whistling lungs and the slapping of his thongs on the footpath.
Pascoe didn’t know how the new generation was being raised, but when he was a kid, a boy’s capacity to explode from zero to a hundred in a matter of seconds was required learning. Until young men mastered the necessary coolness of temperament that came with experience, it was always considered better that they learn how to overwhelm an opponent.
Pascoe had been that young man, but he’d matured out of it. He’d learned that fighting was a cold art, like calligraphy or flower arranging. Meditation had taught him many things about himself, and one of them was that he’d wasted an enormous amount of energy maintaining that explosive simmer throughout his childhood, teens and early manhood. It was exhausting and futile, when set against the clarity of mind that a trained fighter managed even in the heat of a life-and-death struggle. The Zen-trained samurai had it right – Bushido – the way of the warrior. Every time a man lost his temper to win a battle he was closer to losing the war against himself – the only war that really mattered.
Pascoe took backstreets, pausing twice to enter a quiet driveway and take a hit off the oxygen bottle. It was only a twenty-minute walk to the southern end of South Terrace, but he spaced it to an hour. The women’s trousers he wore pinched at his ankles, and the backpack was heavy. It was a long shot, but as soon as he rounded into Harbour Street he saw that it’d paid off.
Des Ryan’s old worker’s cottage was still there, five houses up from the Davilak Hotel. The sight of Ryan’s house near the hotel cheered him. Pascoe had grown up in the Davilak, running errands for Con Murphy, the pub’s resident SP bookie, watching the fights that spilt out onto the terrace so regularly that you could set your clock to ten minutes before the six o’clock swill. Sometimes the fights were between two men, and sometimes twenty, stopping traffic and the tram service that ran down to South Beach. Sometimes Pascoe and Des Ryan would leap into the fray, throw a few punches and run off laughing.
The stables at the head of the street were gone, replaced with a small park. When Pascoe had grown too big to be a jockey, he’d hoped to be a trainer, but that dream never eventuated. Instead, he graduated to petty crime and helping Des Ryan’s father with his sly-grog operation among the brothels of Bannister Street. The Ryans were a big family in the Fremantle racing, sly-grog and gambling games, but there was Des Ryan’s house, looking just as run-down as it always did. Piled on the porch was the same rusting BP sign, the same milk crate full of old horseshoes and the same spider webs in the sash-window frames – like the past nineteen years hadn’t happened.
Pascoe opened the creaking gate and stepped onto the porch. The front door was open. Inside, he could hear a transistor radio tuned to the racing channel. He put his face to the flyscreen and could smell bacon and cabbage. It looked like he was in luck.