Nick
The Alterbar was in a converted church at the bottom end of the street, near the creek, its name emblazoned above the entrance in a red neon font that mimicked Stace’s Eternity, running liquid in the rain this night, splashing gaudy reflections on the wet concrete path that led towards the building’s twin ecclesiastical doors. A surprising number of people inside, collected around old wooden tables, their only common factor being, perhaps, a vaguely bohemian vibe, loose-fitting clothes, a certain studied ease, none of which was any indication – Nick had discovered this about Winderran – of financial status. A three-piece band playing on the small raised area where the altar had once been, singer, piano and saxophone. The place, with its high-raked ceiling and lead-light arched windows, a bit funky, condensation collected on the glass, an exhibition of somewhat garish paintings strung up between them. A bar down one side where he ordered a craft beer from the gay man with significant piercings who asked if he was a member.
He wasn’t, hadn’t even realised it was a club.
‘It’s all good,’ the barman said, offering him a book to sign.
A quick glance around the room confirming she wasn’t there, that, in fact, while he vaguely recognised some faces, he knew no-one. Taking his beer to a small table in the back corner and hunkering down, swiping the screen on his phone to see if anyone wanted him. The singer a long thread of femininity in a deep red cocktail dress, lipstick to match, vamping it up to the mike on standards, projecting sexy innuendo over the top of the noisy crowd. Winding up the set with an extended version of I’m Your Man.
He’d barely touched his beer when a woman approached.
‘Nick,’ she said. ‘It’s Marie. You remember, we met at Guy’s place for dinner, oh, it must be weeks ago now?’
Sliding into the chair opposite, or rather, half onto the chair, so as to communicate she wasn’t there to stay, well, unless invited. On that earlier occasion she’d been dressed in something flouncy that gave the unfortunate impression she was both uptight and a little fey. Tonight she was in jeans and a simple black top with shoelace straps, cut low enough to confirm but not flaunt that cleavage, her blonde hair loose, and in this guise she was more attractive, more real in fact, smiling at him from kind eyes. Resting a finely shaped hand, long fingers, on the table.
‘We’re so blessed in this town,’ she said.
Tilting his head in question.
‘With music,’ she said. ‘I mean, you don’t expect to hear musicians like these in a place like this, do you?’
‘No, no you don’t,’ he said. People in the town, he’d noticed, often found reason to congratulate themselves for living there, which was, he guessed, a good thing, although it didn’t always feel that way.
‘Do you want to join us?’ she asked. ‘There’s room at our table.’ Indicating a group of people further down the room, two or three grey-haired men, a couple of other women, one of whom was looking their way.
She was, he recalled, a potter. Hard to suppress an image of how those fingers, so used to modelling clay, might feel against the skin. Important to at least try not to see every woman as a possible sexual partner. She was not, anyway, so much offering herself – although there was a certain promise in her invitation – as the chance of company, conversation, laughter.
‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but I won’t tonight, I’m expecting someone.’
‘Well, in that case I’ll leave you be,’ reaching across the table to touch the back of his hand. ‘But if you change your mind, you know where we are.’
She stood up, almost colliding with a young man coming in the door. Nick watched as she wove her way back through the tables. A nice shape to her hips. Miles had said something to him one night in reference to women, how they no longer exerted power over him in the way they once had. Women, he’d said, had become just like other people now … he could relate to them based on who they were, on what they said or thought, as if they were nothing more than attractively shaped men. It wasn’t a concept Nick could even begin to embrace.
The young man had made it to the bar. Something familiar about him despite the raincoat draped over his shoulders. Gay, too, at least by the cut of his hair and the stovepipe jeans turned up high on the ankles. The barman leaning across the counter to say something in the young man’s ear with what Nick thought was unusual intimacy, although that might have been projection because, in response, the young man produced his wallet, clumsily, using only his left hand, flicking it open to show his ID, revealing, when he turned to face the room, that his right arm was in a cast. Making it all but certain this was Cooper, the boy he’d rescued in the hills to the west of town, except that this young man, for all the similarity, seemed thinner and had just legally purchased a Corona, from which he was now taking a sip, resting his good elbow back against the counter to survey the room with the confidence of someone much older. His reappearance, now, in the bar, inducing in Nick a sense of unease which the dinner with Lamprey and his wife and the chance meeting with Bain had done nothing to dispel.
More people came up for service. The young man made his way to the back of the room. Nick took up his drink, went to stand next to him.
‘It’s Cooper, isn’t it?’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Nick Lasker.’
‘Doctor Lasker,’ Cooper said, ‘great to see you.’ Sounding genuinely pleased but looking discomfited, nervously glancing around the club, confirming Nick’s suspicions that he had, indeed, failed him. Not really anything he could do about it now but say he was sorry. Cooper holding up his plaster to indicate he couldn’t shake hands, his beer in the other one, bending his head in close with a curious, perhaps embarrassed, smile on his full lips. ‘But you could call me Martin tonight, if you don’t mind.’
‘I could,’ Nick said. ‘But why would I want to?’
‘That’s who bought my drink,’ Martin/Cooper said.
Which made it possible that Cooper’s disquiet was nothing to do with him and all to do with having a false ID, not that it let Nick off the hook. He should have followed through. He’d allowed himself to be got at, plain and simple.
‘But it’s good, hey?’ Cooper said. ‘I’ve been wanting to say thanks, you know, for what you did.’ Giving him a broad nervous smile. Something disarming about him, both boyish and knowing at the same time; Nick had noted it before, here it was again.
‘How’s the arm?’ he said.
‘Getting better.’
‘And everything else?’
‘Well, there’s still a bit to go …’
‘I’d been wondering how it went for you after that night,’ Nick said. ‘I didn’t think I’d run into you here, though.’
The pianist coming back on stage, a middle-aged man who looked more like a banker than a musician, fiddling with the dials on his equipment then launching into a solo over and around the noise of the crowd.
‘I’m up here seeing my dad. Staying at his house. My mother has this thing about maintaining connection. Who knows? It’s quite possibly part of their settlement. Like if I don’t come to see him she won’t get paid.’
‘He lives here, in Winderran?’ Nick said.
‘He visits. Dad has houses everywhere, you name it: London, New York, a fucking island in the Whitsundays.’
Casually disparaging his father’s wealth. Some memory of the family arrangements as told to him in the car seeping back into his consciousness. He’d never been any good at retaining the details of other people’s lives, even of those as exotic as Cooper’s. The precise nature of the illness or injury of a patient stuck with him but the names of the significant others or the nature of their relationships fell away like once-used phone numbers. It was a trait Abie had hated, seeing it as proof of an endemic narcissism.
When they’d been in the car Cooper had been on morphine. His speech slow and clumsy. In the club he was speaking quickly, almost too fast for clear comprehension, particularly with the music; information delivered in a rush, as if none of it was of any more value than the rest, never mind its personal nature.
‘What about you? What are you doing here?’ he said, turning his attention on Nick.
‘It’s a bit odd really,’ he said, about to go further, maybe even as far as to mention Eugenie, but catching himself in time. Not sure what could possibly possess him to tell an unknown sixteen-year-old about his fixation. Was he really that far gone?
‘It’s pretty noisy in here. D’you want to go out for a minute?’ he asked.
It was still raining but the porch provided a small dry area. A bench on either side, a bucket of umbrellas by the door, dripping onto a sand-filled can for cigarette butts. Posters tacked on the wall announcing that on Saturdays there were farmers’ markets in the grounds, that this or that band was playing last Thursday night.
The wet grass glistening in the streetlights. A car slowing to a halt, its indicator flashing wetly as it turned into the street beside them. Cooper took a seat on one of the benches and leant back against the wall, his legs extended, looking as if at ease, albeit a bit younger under the harsh light.
Ease was far from what Nick felt. ‘D’you see your father often?’ he asked.
‘This is the first time since this happened,’ Cooper said, indicating his arm. ‘Tonight was supposed to be the night, you know, for the big talk, but when it came down to it Dad – quelle surprise – had some crisis going on with his latest takeover. He spent the whole of dinner in his office on the phone to Brazil, left me with my older brother, Michael, who’s, like, already old enough to be my father and incredibly straight. He thinks it’s his duty to dispense wisdom. I escaped out here. So, yeah, we haven’t yet had the conversation. That pleasure awaits us.’
‘Who’s your father taking over this time?’
‘They’re branching out. Finalising the purchase of CoSecOr. Radical diversification.’
‘CoSecOr?’
‘Uh … like, the largest private security service in the world. MCG pays a fortune for their protection at mine sites, but they also do corrective services. You know, prisons, as well as pretty much any kind of general war-making on demand. It’s Michael’s plan. He figures it would be cheaper simply to own them. Made a case for it to Dad. I guess you could say the rich are getting richer and they’re not all completely fucking stupid. Despite appearances.’ Laughing. ‘Dad, for example. He’s read history. You get massive inequality and sooner or later you get revolution. But hey, if you already own the means of production, why not own the means of protection? That way you can repress the masses for at least a couple of cycles. At least as long as you’re alive. I mean, why not make money out of the threat while you’re at it? Sell protection to your mates as well. Hell, sell it to the State at the same time. You know how it is … if the State’s not going to look after your privilege you have to do it yourself.’
All this coming out at the same speed, three hundred words to the minute or more, a great flow of pissed-offedness at his heritage, a distancing from it, delivered to a near stranger outside a club.
‘So is MCG your future?’ Nick asked.
‘Nah. Not my field.’
‘Which is?’
‘Gaming.’
‘Right.’ Stretching the syllable out. The best response he could come up with.
‘It’s okay,’ Cooper said. ‘Most people don’t get it. Dad and Michael don’t. They think it’s for nerds. They don’t understand what you can do with computers. I do. We’re moving into a new age. People born today are going to live inside them. I mean it, literally. Screens with greater visual acuity than the human eye. Think about what that means. Augmented worlds of extraordinary sophistication. Don’t get me started. Whoever owns that is going to own the world.’
Cooper pausing for an instant. Taking a sip of his beer.
Nick wondering if what he’d said was remotely true, about games and security firms, rejecting the possibility, if only because he didn’t want it to be so. Noting that for all Cooper’s disparagement of his father’s wealth he appeared to harbour his own dreams of world domination.
‘So, if you don’t mind me asking,’ he said, ‘who’s Martin?’
Cooper put the beer aside and leant forward to dig out his wallet, flipping it open perhaps a little too proudly and handing Nick a student card from The University of Queensland. A photo of himself next to the microchip. In the name of someone called Martin Gere. It looked real.
‘He’s got a Medicare card, too,’ Cooper said, passing it across. ‘That’s as far as I’ve got. I’d like to try for a passport. That’s the holy grail.’
Boasting.
‘Is this someone’s identity you’ve bought?’
‘Hey! No. He’s me. I made him. Well, technically, he was once alive, died when he was three years old. Around the time I was born.’ Watching Nick for a reaction. ‘It’s a speciality of mine.’ That smile again. ‘It’s pretty simple, really. I mean it takes time. I’ve been doing it for a while. You need to be, you know, a bit obsessive. Martin’s my favourite. I mean, just the name, hey?’ Looking out into the darkness again, caught out searching for praise.
‘But why would you want to?’
Cooper picking up the beer and tipping the last of it down his throat.
‘Sorry, stupid question,’ Nick said.
‘It’s not for that,’ Cooper said. ‘Drinking’s just a bonus. The internet’s a vast place. There’s bits of it you don’t want to go into as yourself.’
The music leaking out through the doors. Nick finishing his own beer and putting the bottle aside while Cooper talked. The day catching up with him. Even at the best of times the explanation the young man was giving of Tor and VPNs and Block Chain technology would have had his eyes glaze over.
Interrupting him. ‘Can I get you another drink?’ he said. ‘I mean I shouldn’t, should I? Corrupting youth.’
‘It’s just a beer, Doctor Lasker. My ID’s watertight.’
‘Okay. But you can call me Nick.’
He went back inside. Entering the heat and noise and wash of music. The saxophonist working up through a riff. A small dapper man with a narrow face, wearing a neat little hat, a trilby – the name rising up from some forgotten archive in the brain – tilting back from the waist as he blew into the instrument, climbing the scales, producing a remarkable sound. Several people turning their heads when he’d opened the door, including the woman, Marie. Seeing, with a flush of embarrassment, how this must appear, his refusal to join her table, and then to go outside with a boy half his age. Nothing he could do about it. For all that Cooper was precocious and over-eager he suddenly felt he’d prefer to be with him than in here, trying to fit into a new town, to get to know strangers, to appeal to their better natures.
He ordered another couple of bottles, taking note of his sudden relaxed attitude towards teenage drinking.
‘What would happen if you went into these places with your own name?’ Nick asked. ‘I mean this is what I don’t get, all this anonymity. I prefer people to be who they are. People behave better when they’ve got their name attached to what they’re saying. At least some of the time.’ Thinking, as he spoke, of Cooper’s older brother, abandoned by him for the crime of imparting wisdom. ‘I must sound horribly straight,’ he added.
‘No, you’re right. We would be. It’s just that privacy’s been compromised, hasn’t it? Government agencies watch everything, particularly this sort of shit.’ Tapping his wallet. ‘Don’t be fooled it’s just metadata. If they can get more they do. Never think twice about it. Not just them, of course.’
‘God, but they must have to wade through some shit.’
‘Just think about your browsing history,’ Cooper said. ‘They have.’
Paranoia and conspiracy being, Nick thought, both enticing and infectious. Like ghost stories, providing shivers of scary pleasure; only now it was government.
Cooper clearly deeply in their thrall. Leaning in again, ‘But if you want to find out what’s really happening, the things people don’t want you to know, well you need to come in sideways. It’s the one reason I don’t mind being at Dad’s house. He has a direct line to fibre, superfast, for currency trading. One gig per second. Fantastic encryption. With speed like that you can get around some things you couldn’t otherwise avoid, it gives you that edge.’
Nick having come out on the off-chance of meeting a woman and ending up sitting on a porch in the rain talking to a teenager with false ID about gigabits. Which he’d be happier about if the business of Bain had been sorted. Not sure how to bring it up.
‘Everything’s sort of fine the way it is, now,’ Cooper was saying. ‘But when it starts getting nasty, when they start rounding people up, it would be good to be someone else, wouldn’t it?’
‘Who’s they?’
‘The government. The church. My dad.’
‘Your dad?’
‘Well, Mayska Coal & Gas. That’s what buying CoSecOr’s all about.’ He took a sip of beer. ‘You interested to hear what happened to the people who beat me up?’ he said.
‘I am, yes,’ Nick said, more interested than he was prepared to admit. Here it was then, coming back around.
Cooper looking straight at him, no escaping his gaze. ‘Zip,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Nothing. Zilch. Zee-ro.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Martin’s been doing a bit of research,’ Cooper said, giving that cute smile again. ‘You know how it is, beat me up and what do you know? My curiosity’s piqued.’
‘It’s probably my fault,’ Nick said, getting it out there, coming clean. ‘I didn’t report it. I should have. I was going to, if that makes any difference, I’m sorry. Bain asked me not to. He said your father wanted to avoid publicity and they’d sort it out.’ Then told him later it had been sorted, that the thug had been punished. Foolish, he guessed, to ever trust a politician.
‘Bain?’
‘The local member? He’s in the Shadow Cabinet.’
‘Oh, you mean Aldous.’
‘Yes. You know him?’
‘He’s a friend of Dad’s. I’ve met him several times. He’s a creep. A Christian creep, if you can get creepier than just being a creep.’
Dismissing Bain with a word. The ruthlessness of the young.
‘I shouldn’t have listened to him.’
‘Don’t worry about it. Seriously. It’s not your fault. If Dad didn’t want people to know about it, nothing would have been reported anyway, didn’t matter what you did or who you told. That’s the way it works. I thought you did good up there at the camp, fronting Jaz like that.’ Putting on a deep voice, ‘“You’re in shit so deep you don’t even know it.” Hot stuff.’
‘What was that place anyway?’ Nick said, a little pleased despite himself. This was Cooper’s gift, he was only sixteen but he could turn things around without trying.
‘It’s one of those ReachOut schools. If your parents can afford it and are into that sort of thing you do time at them instead of Year 11. You know, rope courses, orienteering, canoeing, cross-country skiing in winter. They operate all over the country. You get assigned to a cohort and move around together for a year. Wouldn’t be so bad maybe if they weren’t church-based. Hymns at night time. Twice on a Sunday. The Bible is the word of God made manifest. I mean, seriously. Our lot had the misfortune to end up with that bastard in charge.’
‘And?’
‘One of their big things is solidarity with the team, you know? They divide you up and then you compete and whichever team wins gets rewarded, the one that loses gets punished, gets given extra work, cleaning the toilets, that sort of shit. Jaz pumped it up, gave no quarter – longer runs, higher jumps, less sleep, pushing us all the time. My mistake was to be not as interested in winning as everyone else. Not being as interested in being a pillock. Being prepared to tell my team mates what I thought about them.’
‘So they beat you up?’
‘In a word. I was the impurity needing to be purged, the weak link. I’m sorry, I’m not as good at shutting up as I might be. I guess I didn’t get how bad the others had it. Not a mistake I’ll make a second time.’
A curious understanding of his tormentors, as if he bore them no ill-will. ‘I don’t get it, though. Why hasn’t your father come down on them?’
‘Jaz is too useful to them.’
‘In what way?’
Cooper’s way of talking being to dole out portions of information. You had to keep asking for more. In the car it had seemed obvious what had provoked the other boys: a level of intellectual brilliance combined with flamboyant sexuality, both of which were even more on display at the Alterbar, but also combined with something else: a level of confidence that came, perhaps, with being the son of a billionaire. You couldn’t ignore this last. The cynicism about wealth was most likely just a teenager trying to get out from under his father’s influence – which in this case meant taking philosophic objection to the military-industrial complex, the whole teetering system. What Nick wondered was how long it would last. At what point Cooper would notice his own wellbeing was intrinsically tied to it.
‘He’s part of their grand program for CoSecOr and the rest.’
A couple of men came out through the high doors, bringing a wash of music with them. Said hello and proceeded to light up, filling the small space with their smoke and their conversation. The rain still coming down so they weren’t going any further outside.
‘Maybe it’s time to go back in,’ Nick said.
Only the vaguest possibility of further communication inside, what with the band. They stood at the doorway together. Nick leaning in to yell in Cooper’s ear.
‘What were you going to say, before about CoSecOr?’
Cooper cupped his hand over Nick’s ear and spoke directly into it, but even then Nick couldn’t quite get it. The music seemed to have got louder. Cooper waving his hand at him. ‘I’ll tell you another time,’ he said, stepping back and indicating he was going to the bar.
Nick nodded, let him go. The disconnect between what they’d been discussing outside and the lively bar was simply too great. Added to that was the sense that whatever the punchline of Cooper’s story had been going to be it wouldn’t have justified the events that led up to it; the story was the thing itself. This thought, in turn, pushed aside because, in casting his eyes around the room, he saw that Eugenie was sitting at a table in the corner with a couple of other women. There was, he saw now, another entrance just past the bar, an EXIT sign over the door, which most likely gave direct access to the car park.
Nothing for it. Before he could prevaricate further he went over, putting on his effusive self, the one that could stand in front of a group of women and bluster, make an inane comment about the music and offer to buy them a drink, while simultaneously alert to the subtlest of signs, reading the body language they exchanged as they came to an unspoken consensus about the idea of having him join them – his focus on Eugenie, watchful for any indication of interest.
If there was some she wasn’t giving it away.
The other women were known to him. Ann was the nursing Sister from the hospital, Ruth was a physio in town. As always in small communities the medical profession hanging together. ‘Don’t worry about the drinks,’ Ann said. ‘There’s plenty of time for drinks. Sit. But no talking shop. This is a work-free zone.’
He squeezed around to sit next to Eugenie, coming down hard on what proved to be a former church pew, backed up against the wall.
‘Jesus,’ he said, leaning in so as to be heard. ‘Well here’s a blast from the past. I haven’t sat on one of these since school.’ Putting on his mother’s sternest Scot’s voice. ‘There’ll be no slouching here, understand me now, girl!’ Which raised a smile, at least, but seemed to lock him, with this approach, into a pattern of humorous remarks that were a long way from what he was feeling.
‘My father had us to church every Sunday, rain hail or shine. We had to traipse across Parramatta Road to the Presbyterian Church in Johnston Street. The Stanmore churches were too soft for him. Or Catholic,’ he said, adding, as if addressing them from the pulpit, shaking a fist for emphasis, ‘Idolaters!’
Shouting it out in that instant of silence at the end of a song.
Several people turning to look.
‘Stanmore?’ Eugenie said.
‘Aye,’ he said, embarrassed, although not quite ready to relinquish the Presbyterian minister, as if sticking with the charade might make sense of it to those around, speaking to all three of them under the assumption they might be interested in his origin story, even though the others across the table were unlikely even to be able to hear. ‘Mum wouldn’t come with us. She’d stay at home to make the Sunday roast. Her father was a minister. She said she’d had enough o’ the kirk. Hadn’t banked on marrying my father I suppose.’
‘I lived in Stanmore,’ Eugenie said.
‘In Stanmore? As in Stanmore, Sydney?’
‘Well, on the border. My nan told everyone we lived in Petersham because she thought it was more posh, but it was Stanmore just the same. My pop worked in the mill.’
The coincidence allowing them to play the game of exchanging places held in common: the swimming pools in Petersham Park and Leichhardt; the small corner shops; the Academy Twin for films on a Saturday afternoon; the schools. She’d been at St Michael’s (a Catholic! After what he’d just said), he’d gone to Fort Street. Mapping the two suburbs for each other.
‘My parents still live there,’ he said, still talking too much, unable to stop. ‘They bought a little one-storey in Lincoln Street before I was born. Paid, I don’t know, ten thousand dollars. It’s worth a fortune now. My brother wants them to sell and buy up here but they’re not interested. We have everything we need right here, my mother says.’
‘My grandparents’ house was in Denison Street. I went to live with them there when I was eight,’ she said.
Talking on over the top of her until the significance of what she’d said, grandparents, not parents, dawned on him; necessitating questions which she brushed aside.
‘I’ve not been back for a while,’ she said. ‘My nan’s in a home and my pop’s dead. I used to go down all the time but it’s harder now that David’s away so much, me with the girls and all.’
Listening hard to her beneath the noise of the music so as not to miss a thing, at the same time interpreting every word from the point of view of spending time with her. The husband was apparently often away; although what the existence of a husband might mean, he’d have to say, was immaterial at this moment with this woman here, beside him on the hard wooden seat in her striped matelot top and jeans, her wonderful wide open face, clear clear eyes, talking to him.
‘I love this song,’ she said, turning to listen to the band.
The singer, with her husky voice, embarking on ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’, which just about summed him up.
When he went to the bar for drinks Cooper was there, engaged in his own repartee with the barman.
‘Doctor Lasker,’ he said. ‘You seem to have landed on your feet.’ Inclining his head towards the table with the women.
Nick didn’t reply, studiously watched his drinks being assembled. Oddly vexed by the suggestion. As if Cooper had assumed too much intimacy.
‘Sorry,’ the young man said. ‘Maybe I don’t need any more to drink.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Nick said, waving it away. The band as loud as it ever was. ‘You were going to tell me why the people who attacked you didn’t get into trouble.’
Cooper, coming in close but speaking loud, giving the answer as if it had been waiting there, primed, on his lips. ‘Because that’s what the program is. It’s designed to pick out the bully boys and girls, not to punish them. They want them.’
‘What for?’
‘Think about it.’
‘It’s not helping.’
‘There’s always going to be a need for people who don’t mind hurting other people, isn’t there?’ Cooper said. ‘I mean, if you’re running a security firm. Especially one that might, potentially, have to police an unruly society – one that doesn’t agree with the direction in which you’re taking it. But you have to be able to identify who they are, don’t you? You have to be able to figure out which are the lunatics and which the useful ones. Camps like that, they’re fertile ground. They do it in schools too, of course, they’ve always done it. But a camp like Spring Creek, full of the children of the converted … it’s all hyped up … you’ve got young people squashed together, physical stress, religion, competition, you get to see their baser natures.’
Hot in the bar. Humid. Men and women from a broad spectrum of ages in loose multi-coloured clothes enjoying jazz-rock fusion, drinking glasses of micro-brewed beer and pinot grigio.
The barman lining up the drinks, asking for money.
‘And that’s just the start of it, of course,’ Cooper/Martin said.
‘A funny thing,’ Nick said to Eugenie as he squeezed back in beside her. The two of them isolated by the music, become a small unit, obliged to be close to hear each other, the subject matter irrelevant, the important thing become how to keep it going, employing anything and everything to make her laugh or think him worth the effort of staying where she was. ‘I don’t know if you remember the first time we met …’
She, nodding, glancing across at the others, flicking her eyes back to his.
‘I came in with a young man with a broken arm? Don’t look now, but that’s him up at the bar. Cooper.
‘I did say,’ he said, ‘not to look now.’
Bringing herself back to him. Smiling.
‘Isn’t he too young to be drinking?’
‘In theory.’
‘Which theory is that?’
‘Well Cooper seems to be about twenty years older than he appears. Do you know anything about him?’
‘No.’
‘Before you arrived I was talking to him outside. He gave this remarkable spiel, conspiracy theories abounding. I mean, he is extraordinary for his age, articulate, confident, possibly brilliant. And gay, of course, which shouldn’t make any difference but I figure was why he was hassled at the camp in the first place. The thing is he said no charges were laid against the people who beat him up, never mind that his dad’s highly influential. The reason was … well, this is what he said … is they’re training thugs up there in the bush.’
‘Who is?’
‘Yes, well, there you have me. It wasn’t clear. A multinational security firm? The government? Someone else? The trouble is, while he was talking, it seemed, you know, believable.’
Telling her what he knew about Peter Mayska, which wasn’t much more than everyone knew but mentioning the case of wine delivered to his door as a way of illustrating his wealth. Considering the possibility of offering to drink a bottle with her but figuring that was a step too far; a too-open declaration of intent.
‘And you accepted it?’ she asked.
‘I shouldn’t have?’
‘Do you know how much it’s worth?’
‘No idea, it’s not the sort of wine I’m familiar with.’
‘So it was by way of a bribe?’
‘I didn’t see it that way,’ he said, reminded of Bain in Canberra, that pall of discomfort descending again. ‘I just thought if you were a billionaire and you wanted to give someone a gift as a way of saying thank you then you’d look pretty cheap if it was Jacob’s Creek.’ Distressed as much by the ethical dilemma as that the topic was taking them away from the central focus of the moment which was each other, trying to bring it back, saying, ‘I was just considering asking you to try some with me.’ Which was hardly innocent repartee even though it seemed to work, but then maybe they were already past that stage because, at the end of the set, Ann stood up saying, sorry to interrupt you two love-birds, but she had to be getting home.
Eugenie standing up abruptly, as if she’d not been aware of time passing, flushing pink around her neck and shoulders, glancing at Nick and giving him a slightly wan smile before saying that she, too, had to go; everyone finding coats, the three women kissing each other goodbye, making arrangements, starting towards the exit near the bar.
Nick saying he’d go, too. ‘I live up next to the hospital,’ he said, ‘I walked down.’
‘In this rain?’ Eugenie said. ‘I can give you a lift, if you like, I’m going past that way. Save you getting wet.’
Working his way through the tables behind her, Cooper no longer in evidence. Maybe gone home. A driver come to get him.
The musicians were outside, having a cigarette under the cover of a small tacked-on piece of roof. Eugenie stopping to kiss the saxophonist on the cheek, the other nurses going on ahead, waving at them as they ran to their cars. Nick hanging back.
She waved him forward. ‘This is my father,’ she said, ‘Jean-Baptiste.’
Nick shaking the saxophonist’s delicate hand and complimenting him on the music which he’d hardly heard all night, realising, a bit slow on the pick-up sometimes, that the man was French. Not knowing enough yet to put the pieces together.
‘It can rain for weeks at this time of year,’ Eugenie says in the car, apologising for the state of the interior, the children’s mess, dog hair; winding the blower up to try to clear the windscreen, Nick glad not to be out in the rain for all sorts of reasons but mostly because he is now being driven by this woman who half turns in her seat as she backs out of the parking space revealing a delightful litheness in her upper body, a taut swelling of breast against her shirt, an expression on her face suggesting both nervousness at being in control of the car and defiance about it at the same time, a kind of I-can-do-this sternness around her lips, communicated by a tight little lift in the corner of her mouth, everything enhanced, as if he’s taken a drug, which, of course, in some ways he has. His drug of preference.
‘I don’t want you to read anything into this,’ she says, taking the turn out of the car park onto the road, wet tar gleaming in the streetlights.
‘No,’ he says. A maximum of three minutes, less, to get him home, in which to persuade her to stay with him, if not for the night then just a little while longer.
‘And in that spirit maybe I could invite you in for a drink, or a cup of something? A herbal tea?’ This last delivered as sardonically as possible
‘I don’t think so.’
‘A man can but try.’
‘He can, but shouldn’t. I’m married.’
Up the main street, past the medical centre run by the competition, around the curve where the houses had been built below the road, the lights of the new development on the hill glinting through trees. Her hands held at ten to two, very proper, fingers small and neat against the hardness of the wheel, the machine’s steel and plastic and glass, its implicit masculinity, accentuating her fragility, the delicacy of her construction.
‘Just up here,’ he says, ‘on the right, then the first house on the left.’
‘I know where it is,’ she says, easing the car in to the kerb. Leaving the motor running, looking at him, the game they’ve been playing all evening about to end.
‘I could come in for a minute,’ she says. ‘Just a moment.’
Nick’s delight tempered by his sudden awareness of the state of the house, not that it’s dirty, or even untidy, just the lack of furniture, the sense of the place as a home. Nina has been to visit twice and even she, with her no-nonsense, we’re-here-to-fuck manner, has commented on it, telling him to go and buy a bed, at least, which is fair enough, but when does he have the time? And who would help him avoid making the wrong decisions?
Opening the door and stepping aside to let her in and then having to squeeze past to lead her up the stairs because it’s a tiny hall and the downstairs is really just garage and laundry, the walls made of purple feature-brick. He can’t help seeing it through her eyes. The living room not so bad: a table and some chairs, a framed black and white photograph of a yacht tilting in the wind, a couch which he’d ordered online and didn’t disappoint too much when it arrived and, thankfully, didn’t require assembling. His laptop on the table surrounded by paperwork and mail. Apologising as he ushers her in and opens the fridge to see what, if anything, there is to drink, only a couple of beers and an expensive bottle of champagne bought to take to a wedding that he was called away from by work.
‘Champagne,’ he says. ‘Or there’s that wine I spoke of …’
‘Nothing more to drink, please. And I don’t know anything about wine anyway. Perhaps one of those cups of herbal tea? If that wasn’t a joke.’ Stranded at the end of the island bench in her knee-high leather boots and stretch jeans, her soft leather jacket, spotted with the rain, her thick hair pushed back from her face as if by a strong wind, her whole demeanour as if she is at that moment assailed by forces stronger than herself.
‘It’s okay,’ he says, jocularity dispensed with, come beside her at the bench, ‘it’s quite safe here.’
‘It is?’
‘What I mean is I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.’
‘But what if I do want you to? What if I want you to kiss me?’ So that she is, all at once, in his arms, her lips against his, no chance of taking even a breath, no room for thought, strategy, consequence, just her against him, his arms inside her jacket, the silk lining warm on the back of his hand, his fingers on the soft cotton of her top, the weight of her shifting beneath his palm, her tongue against his, the taste and scent of her, the complex subtle essence of some perfume sparsely applied hours ago, mixed with her, the musty sensuality of the skin on her neck, behind her ear, back to her lips again, his hands, now, inside the cotton, on skin that communicates the musculature of her back, her ribs, the curve of her spine, all pulled against him while her mouth breaks with his to draw air, to exhale a short sharp burst, almost a laugh, but, then, her hands coming onto his chest, pushing him away.
‘Oh fuck,’ she says. Looking at him directly. ‘I can’t be doing this. You know that, don’t you?’
He, retreating a millimetre, causing her to grasp his shirt and hold him from further movement, eyes locked.
‘I’m married fifteen years. I’ve never done this.’
One hand inside her shirt, on her skin, the other one on the benchtop. For stability.
What to say? That he was married once, too, but that was over? That he had strayed one too many times? A picture of dark-haired Nina and himself in exactly this situation in her kitchen coming involuntarily to mind. Tell Eugenie that this time it would be different? How would he know? Was the strength of this feeling enough?
Leaning forward to kiss her again, Eugenie’s hand finding its way down between his legs, feeling the swelling beneath the cloth.
‘Oh fuck,’ she says, again. ‘I’m going home now. I mean, now. Before it’s too late.’