Swann woke with a bad headache. He’d only slept a couple of hours but that was enough for his neck to stiffen. He got up and padded into the kitchen, drank a glass of tap-water. It was midmorning and already the temperature was in the thirties. The honeyeaters had stopped singing and even the wattlebirds were silent in the trees. Only the whirring of cicadas and the chirruping of a mole cricket broke the heat-heavy silence of his neighbourhood. He pulled the blind and went to the kitchen table, began to prepare his daily injection. The phone started ringing and he let it ring, breaking the ampoule of chelate solution before drawing it into a fresh syringe. He tapped out the air as Marion had taught him and stabbed it into his upper thigh, pressed the plunger home.
The phone kept ringing. Swann rolled his neck and kneaded his upper shoulders, worsening the pain in his head. He went into the backyard and turned on the hose, sprayed it over the parched bushes beside the shed.
Last night hadn’t ended as they’d hoped. A few kilometres out from Fremantle, the radio crackled again and Gus Riley answered it. Whoever was on the line told him that the operation was a dud. Riley had grunted a reply and pulled to the kerb, executing a U-turn in the middle of the highway, catching Swann off-guard. Webb and Cassidy hid their faces and Swann drove past with his head down. Riley was so occupied with making the turn that he didn’t look at them. Swann then used Webb’s brick to call Kerry’s brothel, got Lee Southern on the line. Lee had inside knowledge of the APM nationalists, having worked as a Kinslow tow-driver for a spell. He told Swann that he didn’t think Kinslow would touch the M16s, or let them anywhere near his towing operation in Osborne Park. He was under Federal Police and ASIO surveillance.
Swann finished watering the garden and went inside. For the first morning in many months, he felt like he could eat something. He looked in the fridge and saw the leftovers from Marion’s dinner with their three daughters. Tuesday night dinner was a long tradition and Swann had taken over cooking for the past few weeks, but he’d missed it last night, something that he would need to make up for. There was a plate of mashed potato and some slices of corned beef. A few peas and green beans, some cabbage and diced carrot. Swann took it all out and sliced it up and mixed it together with some beaten eggs. He had grown up on bubble-and-squeak, especially on football mornings when his mother plied him with a heaped plate as fuel for the coming game. Swann spooned the mixture onto a heated pan and watched it bubble in the oil.
Swann’s mother had died many years ago, but he thought of her every day. He didn’t know whether there was an afterlife, and didn’t particularly care, but when he was laid up in hospital and didn’t know whether he was going to make it, Swann began to hope that there might be a place where the dead remained alive, if only so that he could see his mother again. She was a good woman who endured a hard life with a deal of grace, humour and generosity. He could hear her voice now, telling him to turn off the gas and put the pan under the grill, just like she’d told him a hundred times before.
The phone began to ring again and this time he moved to the corridor so that he could hear the message. The pan began to squeak and squeal under the grill but he could hear Tremain’s voice, telling him that the mystery man had called to ask if he’d made the delivery. Swann turned off the grill and headed down the hall. He lifted the receiver and began to speak, wiping away a little bauble of blood on his thigh.