Nick
The memorial service for Doctor Miles Prentice was held in a marquee at the showgrounds. Neither the community centre nor any of Winderran’s seven churches would have been large enough to accommodate the crowd and, besides, Miles had never willingly entered a house of religion in his life. Even then many were left standing along the sides of the tent, holding the flimsy Order of Service over their heads to ward off the sun.
It wasn’t just the marquee, though, that gave rise to the idea of some sort of party. The crowd were turned out in summer clothes, hardly a shred of black in sight, the deceased himself represented by a large flower-bedecked photograph – flowers upon flowers, because in the picture Miles was wearing an Hawaiian shirt with a lei around his neck, smiling broadly, as if he’d just arrived in Honolulu, the photo in fact snapped at a themed party, the giveaway being the piña colada he was holding up to the camera, replete with tiny paper umbrella.
Joy had pulled together a committee to organise the event. Even now she was bustling around in a too-tight black satin dress (in this heat!) making sure the right people were sitting where they needed to be. Placing nervous Nick on the row of chairs at the front for the speakers, facing back into the crowd, horribly exposed. He could see few faces he recognised, this being the thing about Winderran, you thought it was small but there were thousands of people in and around the town you never met, living undisclosed lives. An older demographic, generally, here for the service, but one that cut across all barriers: amongst the retirees and tree-changers were also men with craggy farming faces in sharply ironed short-sleeved shirts and moleskins; frocks on the fleshy women, fanning themselves with programs.
He watched as Guy Lamprey came bobbing his way through the crowd towards him, dressed in an open-necked shirt and washed blue jeans, genuflecting right and left with the air of a politician on holiday. ‘I see they’ve roped you in as well,’ he said to Nick, lowering himself onto the white monobloc chair beside him.
He welcomed Lamprey’s arrival with mixed emotions, relieved that at least someone he knew had joined him at the front, while at the same time being reminded by his presence of the call-out to Spring Creek a few weeks before. They had not spoken since. The more he’d considered it the more uncomfortable he’d felt about his failure to follow up on what had happened to Cooper, at having accepted Aldous Bain’s compromise.
Disregarding such thoughts he held up the folded piece of A4 on which he’d typed some notes for his speech, ruefully admitting to Lamprey that he took no joy in public speaking – by way of an understatement – there being, even then, a sharp terror in his bones.
‘Few do, God knows,’ Lamprey said, ‘but here’s hoping I get a better reception than I did talking about the fucking dam. Perhaps even this lot can manage to put aside their differences for a funeral.’
The casual obscenity somehow made more crude by Lamprey’s refined voice, its use at an event like this slightly shocking, although who knew what was correct anymore? Funerals, it seemed, had become untethered from ritual, the attendees adrift on a sea of ideas stretching from the traditional mourning of a death to the curious mish-mash celebrations of a life so favoured by the secular or multi-faith brigades. Such musings not helped in this case by the choice of music: Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones playing ‘Time Waits for NoOne (and it won’t wait for you)’.
‘Things would be busy at the practice?’ Lamprey said.
‘Just a bit.’
The place in chaos. He’d had to cut short his trip to Canberra to try to sort it out.
‘Helen and I were hoping you might join us for a meal tomorrow evening.’
‘I’m a bit swamped at work,’ Nick said.
‘Nothing special, we have a few friends coming over, you don’t have to stay late, but at least that way you’ll get a decent feed.’
‘I’d be delighted then.’
‘Good, very good,’ Lamprey said. ‘I wanted you to come, if only as a way of thanking you for what you did the other night … I understand the young man’s on the mend?’
‘I assume so,’ Nick said, ‘I’ve not heard specifics.’
The crowd filling the rows of plastic chairs. Even at a time like this Nick with an eye for the women. Irredeemable. But then some of them, a man couldn’t fail to notice, had seen the occasion as an excuse to dress up, to show some skin.
‘But I really don’t think I need more thanks. I’ve rarely been thanked more profusely for anything in my life.’
‘Really?’
‘Well, I happened to bump into Aldous Bain when I was down in Canberra. Then, when I got back, there was a case of wine on my doorstep with a note from someone at Mayska Coal & Gas.’
‘I hope it’s something good.’
‘Embarrassingly so.’
‘Well you deserve it.’
‘It’s nice of you to say so, even if it’s not true. I’ll bring a bottle with me tomorrow. Better than anything I’m likely to buy.’
‘I look forward to it. Peter has an excellent cellar. So, tell me, how was Aldous?’
Nick not sure how to answer, Bain and his cronies being hardly his favourite people, an opinion their brief meeting had done little to alter. Noting Lamprey’s familiarity with Mayska and his cellar. ‘He didn’t recognise me at first,’ he said.
‘Aldous is normally pretty good at that sort of thing,’ Lamprey said. ‘The politician’s gift. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was here today, his constituency, pillar of the community and all that.’
On the night he’d arrived Nick had gone around to the restaurant late to say hello to Abie, taking a seat at the bar and ordering a drink, not a little surprised at the place’s popularity. He’d always believed in his ex-wife’s capability as a chef but here it was now, writ large, her bistro, Eatery, still full to the gills with noisy prosperous Canberrians, waiters in long aprons weaving their way between tables, some sort of party going on in the back room.
Someone alerted Abie to his presence. She came out from the kitchen still wearing her apron and sat with him, drinking from a tall glass with a splash of wine at its base, talking about their lives and the children and what he might do with them over the next few days, as if the two of them were civilised people, old friends working out schedules, which in many ways is what they were, the vitriol of their last few meetings – when Greloed, and what Abie saw as his inability to keep his dick in his pants, had been the subject of her not insignificant scorn – papered over for the occasion.
They’d moved on to the topic of her elderly parents when they were interrupted by Aldous Bain who, it seemed, had emerged from the back room to speak to Abie about some detail of the meal, the same tall pomaded creature he’d met in Winderran at the house concert. He glanced at Nick as if trying to place him and failing. Nick, in turn, felt disinclined to help but then, fuelled by a simmering resentment for the position he’d been put in at Spring Creek Camp, held out his hand and introduced himself.
‘Ah yes, of course. Different contexts. How delightful to see you again Doctor. What brings you to Canberra?’
‘Nick’s my husband,’ Abie said.
‘Hah. A small world, eh?’
When he’d finished with Abie he turned to Nick again. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’ve been hoping to catch up with you … have you got a moment? Could we go outside? I’d like a cigarette.’
‘I’m talking to Abie.’
‘Well, another time, then.’
But Abie insisted she had to return to the kitchen, so Nick followed Bain out into the Manuka night, to stand beneath the trees while he lit a cigarette, drawing heavily on it, as if he’d been waiting some time for this moment. He asked Nick if there was any news about Cooper, but without, Nick thought, real interest in the answer.
‘I just wanted to say thank you for what you did, that’s all,’ Bain said. ‘We very much appreciated your discretion.’
The man had, for all his loathsomeness, a certain force, as if, not physically powerful himself, he was yet accustomed to command respect, or, failing that, obedience.
‘I did want to ask, though.’
‘Yes,’ Nick said.
‘I was wondering if you had mentioned the incident to anyone.’
‘I’ve not. Only because I’ve been so busy, it’s slipped my mind.’ No advantage he could see in letting Bain know how much the incident had disturbed him. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, no reason. It’s just, we would be grateful if you didn’t mention it to anyone. These things have a way of getting out of control.’
‘What things?’
‘Oh, you know, the family matters of people like Peter Mayska.’
‘Were you able to apprehend the perpetrators?’ Nick asked. That weird bureaucratic language again, emerging from nowhere, as if Bain provoked it.
‘We did,’ Bain said. ‘And they’ve been dealt with, not so much the boys themselves as those in charge.’
A certain satisfaction rising at the thought of the thug being brought down.
Their meeting had a curious coda. As they re-entered the restaurant the place fell silent, as if to mark their arrival. The cause of the interruption was, however, not them but the emergence from the back room of Stanley Lonergan, Leader of the Opposition, flanked by his entourage, all well wined and dined, the room appearing to part before them as they made their way through the tables. Nick had never seen him before in person. He was older than he appeared on television, shorter, too, a nuggety bloke, walking with his arms away from his sides like a boxer. Hard not to be awed by him, even for someone like Nick.
‘Were you and Miles close?’ Nick said, tilting his head towards Lamprey while scanning the faces in the marquee.
‘Not really, but we’ve known each other a long time. Mind you, Miles knew everyone, it went with the territory.’ Lamprey’s long thin legs spread out before him, taking up space. ‘I get asked to do this sort of thing all the time. Often enough I can get out of it, but no chance with this one, I’m afraid.’ He pointed to Nick’s notes. ‘If you want my advice, the best thing to do with that is to read them one more time then toss them away. Almost certainly you know what you’re going to say by now anyway. If you get the order wrong who cares? No-one else will notice. Pick a person in the crowd and talk to them. You’ll find it easier.’
One of the other town doctors taking the seat on the other side of Nick, leaning across to shake both their hands.
At the same moment Joy stood up to the lectern and tapped the microphone. ‘Welcome everyone,’ she said, ‘on this sad occasion.’
Four or five speakers before him. Telling stories about the deceased that made people laugh. Every joke another nail in Nick’s confidence. He could barely listen to what they were saying, sitting there with the sweat running in fine streams down the skin inside his shirt, no use telling himself it was just a question of speaking a few words at a funeral.
There’d been a time, it seemed, when Miles had been known as the Love God; this from having been found down the back garden at parties with one or another of the town’s wives. You know who you are, the speaker said, and everyone laughed; all of them, Miles, the man telling the story, presumably the women themselves, impossibly old for such a tale to stick, although perhaps not, perhaps this was one of the lessons he, Nick, needed to learn: that none of it goes away.
Lamprey strolling to the microphone when it was his turn, taking it out of its stand and holding it like a motivational speaker; no notes; tips of the fingers of his free hand tucked into the pocket of his jeans which, it must be said, hung loose at the back. ‘Miles Douglas Prentice, MD,’ he said, and paused, looking out over the audience. ‘You’d have to excuse a man for being a Love God, wouldn’t you? Who amongst us, in our heart of hearts, wouldn’t want to be one of those?’ Letting the laughter settle. ‘But jokes aside, today is not just a sad day for Winderran. It’s an important day. We should note it well. It marks a great loss to our town, not in the shape of a doctor, even though this was a particularly good one …’
Nick reluctantly admiring Lamprey’s poise and timing, thinking, nonetheless, that he’d rarely heard such a load of old cobblers; Miles, whatever else he was, hadn’t been a good doctor. Perhaps once upon a time, but these last few months Nick had been picking up the pieces behind him – the badly read tests, the missed calls, the late mornings. It was possible, of course, that this was what funerals were for, papering over the cracks in someone’s life, saying good things about them because they’re dead and no longer pose a threat.
‘No,’ Lamprey continued, ‘with Miles’s passing we’ve lost an unofficial register of the health of this town, a walking codex of our community’s history.’
Giving an account of the three generations of the doctors-Prentice. ‘Miles took up the baton sometime in the seventies. These men, grandfather, father, son, overlapped in the practice. What this means is that there’s hardly a man or a woman born in these parts in the last hundred years who wasn’t brought into the earth by one of them. Hardly anyone who has not, or whose loved ones have not, received their care.
‘Miles didn’t marry a local girl (which is not to say he didn’t try on a few for size) …’ More laughter.
Nick folded his speech one more time and stuffed it in his back pocket. Struck by the phrasing, brought into the earth. The solidness of it. The certainty of it. He’d not been aware of the history, should have figured it out from the photos hanging in the surgery.
Several years earlier he’d done a course at the hospital in Canberra. Everyone was obliged to do it during their internship; a modern innovation intended to increase their empathy for patients, bravely setting out to teach them how to start to feel all the stuff they’d been so effectively taught not to during their training – either by design or necessity – the anger, guilt, sorrow, which were the currency of any day in a hospital.
The first lesson was titled What You See Is Never What You Get. The trainer suggesting they tattoo it onto the inside of their forearms. By the end of the course, several months of lunchtimes later, he’d come to agree with the sentiment, never mind that it was too hard to practise on a daily basis. The message had been directed towards patients anyway, not fellow doctors. Miles had been older and an alcoholic. What were the chances of seeing behind that screen? And yet there he’d been, every day, day after day, perhaps someone not so unlike himself, after all.
When it was Nick’s turn he stood behind the lectern, looking out across the mass of faces, taking Lamprey’s advice and searching for one to speak to. His eyes finding the nurse, Eugenie, standing at the back of the marquee in a frock and a wide white hat. It shouldn’t have been a surprise – some part of him had been searching for her the whole time – but the proposition of speaking directly to her robbed him of whatever it was he’d worked up the courage to say.
‘I’ve had the privilege,’ he managed, ‘to work with Miles these past few months. Now I have the odious privilege of stepping into his shoes.’ Should he risk a joke? On no account. ‘I can’t imagine,’ he said, rising to the occasion, ‘that even if I worked here for the next twenty years, for the rest of my life, that the whole town would come out to honour me.’
Everyone invited to partake of refreshments prepared by the Ladies Auxiliary, laid out on trestle tables in a tin shed next door to the marquee. The music starting up again, whether by design or chance with ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, with its lilting rhythm and haunting harmonica, it’s curious chorus: Warehouse eyes and Arabian drums. Nick was hoping to escape unnoticed but was waylaid by the appearance of Helen at Lamprey’s side, adorned with a kind of turban as cover for her naked scalp, gently placing porcelain fingers into Nick’s proffered palm by way of greeting, the curious garb somehow aligning her to Dylan’s music, as if it had been for her he’d sat up all night writing the song. Should I leave them by your gate? She had, he saw, been crying. It caught him by surprise, a further reminder of Miles, the man. Wondering if she had been one of those wives.
‘That was well done, Guy,’ she said, looping her arm through Lamprey’s, her slightness exaggerated by her husband’s bulk, not that he was big, just that she was almost wraith-like, quite possibly not long for the world.
Lamprey putting his own hand over hers, for some reason generating in Nick a deep pang of envy; the longing for a relationship in which both partners support each other, are made larger by being together.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to Nick, wiping her eyes. ‘This is all a bit personal for me. Miles was, as I’m sure you know by now, my doctor. He spoke very highly of you.’
‘He did?’ Nick embarrassed at the obvious note of surprise in his voice. Casually searching amongst the crowd for Eugenie. He’d gone to the trouble during these last few weeks of finding out who she was, but no more; just a little backgrounding. Married. Reason enough to leave her alone.
He located her in a small group of women, plastic wine glasses and finger food in their hands. All in their finery, as if it was a race day carnival. She met his eyes for an instant (had she been looking out for him?) before turning away. Enough to stop him approaching. Instead he stood awkwardly beside a tent pole, and was thus collared by an older man with a stooped back, whose health he made the mistake of asking after, a retired veterinarian who launched into the history of arthritis in several generations of his family, a man who should have known better.
When he saw Eugenie rounding up two young girls he broke into the man’s monologue.
‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘Sorry, pager’s ringing.’
Taking a shortcut across the oval, through the parked cars, catching her as she reached her dusty soft-roader, calling out ‘Hello,’ in a tone he hoped expressed the normality, the innocence, of a casual meeting.
‘Doctor Lasker,’ she said.
‘It’s Eugenie?’
‘Yes,’ she said, tucking her sunglasses up onto the brim of her hat. Blushing.
Really very lovely.
‘Nick. Please, call me Nick. I just wanted to say hello. I’ve been away. I had to go down to Canberra.’ Starting to tell her this as a way, perhaps, of explaining why he hadn’t pursued her, then realising what he was doing and cutting himself off mid-sentence so as to avoid having to include the bit about seeing children, ex-wife, and all the rest, but thus rendering what he’d said almost senseless, a clumsy non sequitur which he sought in turn to cover by observing she had managed to find a space inside the marquee.
‘I thought you spoke rather well,’ she said.
‘You’re very kind. And a liar. I’m not a public speaker. That I came on after Guy Lamprey made it even worse.’
‘Well, I’d have to disagree there. But then I’m biased.’
Smiling internally at that, a little surprised that she should be so forthright as to say how she felt about him. The force of her amongst the reflected glare of the parked cars, in the flesh, confirming the feelings he’d had during the days after their meeting. Guessing, now, that she must have felt something similar, if only by the way she stayed to listen to his ramblings despite the presence of her daughters, tugging on her arms. Cursing himself for not having thought of something to say before he chased her across the showgrounds. Standing gormless before this little family.
‘So, you’re going to take over the practice?’ she asked.
‘I’ve not decided. I’ll stay for a few months anyway. See how it goes. There’s a lot to keep up with.’
‘I’m sure there is. Miles was very popular.’
‘You knew him?’
‘A little. He wasn’t very …’ she searched for a word, settling on available.
For himself he might have chosen sober, but then it was probably best not to speak ill of the dead. ‘I didn’t know his history,’ he said. ‘He kept to himself. I meant what I said, though, about not expecting to take his place.’
‘You’re not likely to in a country town like this,’ she laughed. ‘There’s history wherever you look. I should know, my husband was born here.’ Communicating her status. Warning him off.
‘I should let you go,’ he said. ‘I just thought I’d say hello.’
‘You said that,’ the elder daughter said, looking up at him.
‘Sandrine!’ Eugenie said, squeezing the girl’s hand hard.
She could not have been more than twelve, and was dressed as if for a ball, in elbow-length white gloves and a long flowing dress, her hair elaborately braided.
‘Do you get out much?’ Eugenie said.
Toeing the ground. ‘Not really, I’m afraid.’
‘Gosh but that must sound rude. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that sometimes, on a Friday night, we go to the Alterbar for pizza, listen to music. You could join us.’
Not specifying who ‘we’ was. Perhaps husband, children and all.
‘I’d like that. Get me out of myself a bit.’
‘Good,’ she said, herding the girls into their seats, the gloved one turning to look back at him, letting him know she had his measure.
He’d been at McDonald’s with Josh and Danielle when the call came through. The end of a long day, doing things: the museum, a walk around the lake, a film, then hamburgers. As if buying their happiness with wall-to-wall entertainment. Danielle still of an age where she wanted to make it work. Josh of an age where he didn’t, having brought along some game device from which he was impossible to separate, even to eat the food of his choice. (Abie wouldn’t have taken them to a McDonald’s in a fit. He’d had to make them promise not to tell her.)
When the hospital rang he all but leapt to answer his mobile.
‘I should get this,’ he said.
Josh shrugged his shoulders.
It was the Sister.
‘Nick,’ she said. ‘Doctor Lasker, I mean. I’m so glad I’ve got you. It’s Doctor Prentice.’
Tears in her voice. An unusual sound in the presiding nurse, a middle-aged woman of remarkable efficiency, equipped with a lovely dark sense of humour, a trait not to be discounted.
‘He’s been in an accident, a road accident.’
‘Is it serious?’
‘I’m afraid he’s dead, Doctor Lasker.’
Nick in a plastic booth in the antiseptic homogenised overly lit brightness of the take-away franchise. Danielle watching. Even Josh with one ear cocked, as if such a message might be communicated to everyone proximate without the need for words. Or perhaps it was just they were the children of a doctor, primed for the calls that would take him away.
‘What happened?’
‘His car went off the edge of the Range. On his way home, we think,’ she said. ‘Rolled a long way down. Someone saw it happen, otherwise nobody would have known. They had to winch it out.’
An image of a sloping stretch of road at night super-imposing itself on the present surrounds, wet tar reflecting the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, men in hi-viz waterproofs hauling the battered ute up the bank out of the rainforest, all of it imaginary of course, and yet profoundly unsettling; the immediate thought being that Miles had done it deliberately, although why Nick should have thought that, or why Miles would want to have done so, he couldn’t have said. He’d been so pleased at the prospect of having a few days away from him. Last seen sitting behind his desk in chino shorts and long white socks, as if he were going on safari. Brogues on his feet.
‘I’ll come back,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
Both children now looking at him. Wanting an explanation. Their father gone for months at a time. Visiting them for just a few days. Hardly there and now announcing he has to go back north again.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘But you must see, it’s an emergency.’
‘Does this mean you’re going to stay up there?’ Josh asked, straight to the point, using a tone that suggested Winderran was the ends of the earth. Perhaps it was.
‘I’m not sure. I’ll be needed for a little while anyway.’
‘Aren’t there other doctors?’ Danielle asked.
‘Well, yes, of course there are. There’s quite a few in town.’
‘So why’s it your job?’ His second child no less alert than the first.
Ticking off the points in his mind. ‘Because Miles is … was … my employer, and there was just the two of us in the practice, and we have the hospital emergency.’
‘What’s going to happen to us?’ she said.
‘I’ll come back down again. Soon. And you could come up and stay with me during the holidays.’
‘You’ll be working then, too,’ Josh said.
‘You can visit with Uncle Matt and Auntie Rosie when I am, and do things with me when I’m not.’
‘Right,’ Josh said. He hadn’t stopped looking at his machine, in fact was still pressing buttons even as they spoke. Multi-tasking.
All day Nick had resisted telling him to put it away. ‘Couldn’t you stop that for a minute?’ he said.
No comment.
‘Josh.’
‘I’ll just finish this level.’
‘I don’t want to go to their place,’ Danielle said.
‘I thought you liked it there. They’ve got a swimming pool. And a boat.’
‘Denise is a bitch,’ Danielle said.
‘Don’t say that about your cousin.’
‘She is.’
‘It’s not nice.’
‘It’s true,’ Josh said, putting the gameboy thingy down to look out the window at the circling cars. A big four-wheel drive having trouble with a reverse park. ‘Denise won’t let Danielle play with any of her things. They’re all spoilt.’
As if this wasn’t something he’d thought himself, with the house on the canal estate and the big motorboat, the cupboards full of discarded toys and sporting equipment from forgotten enthusiasms. But then he’d thought the same about his own children, too.
‘I don’t want you to go away again now,’ Danielle said. ‘This is supposed to be a holiday together.’
‘Okay,’ he said, sweet-talking his own daughter, ‘I might have to see what I can do. But listen, Honey, Daddy’s got a problem he needs to sort out. It’s kind of serious and I can’t be with you in the way I want to be. Not right now.’
Danielle folding her arms, adopting a resigned expression. ‘It’s all right Daddy,’ she said. ‘I can see you’re busy. You’ve got people to look after, haven’t you?’
This being, of course, the doctor’s dilemma and excuse, both. The perfect reason for not being available, that he was too busy, had sick people who required his presence. And yet, if he was even remotely honest, there was still time for other things.
There were a lot of darks in the Lampreys’ house; black kitchen benches, cupboards and tiles, black bookshelves to show up the many-coloured spines of the thousands of books, a broad ironbark table with dark-wood chairs set on a mixed-species hardwood floor. Places laid for eight; guests gathered near the windows with champagne flutes in hand, talking and laughing a little too noisily, nervous at having been invited to share the great man’s table.
Lamprey introduced him to the company: the portrait painter Ian Illchild, a bald thick-set individual whose forehead, with its coruscating ripples of flesh, acted as a canvas for his emotions; accompanied by his wife Arlene, mid-sixties Nick would have guessed, but made-up so heavily, like a geisha – bright red lipstick on a stark white base – that it was hard to tell. She, less well known than he, but apparently respected for pieces made from found objects, a woman full of bawdy anecdote and raucous laughter. Balancing them one of Miles’s ex-patients, Harry Barkham, a great block of a man with thick grey hair and schoolmaster’s eyebrows, dressed in loose-fitting beige linen, in possession of both a booming voice and opinions, one of those Winderrians Miles had categorised as suffering from what he liked to call PIPS, Previously Important Person Syndrome; accompanied by Deirdre, his wife, stick-thin and sharply styled, dressed to match the furniture, giving tight-lipped knowing smiles but saying little. Finally a slim blonde of indeterminate age with, it must be remarked – for they were much on display – formidable breasts, introduced as a potter, something slightly loose about her, as if she were coming apart at the seams; invited, no doubt, to make up the party with him. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Here might be the reason for the late invite, for surely it had been an afterthought. Nick not certain he could deliver the level of conversation required but forgetting his reservations after a glass or two from Mayska’s bottle and the late appearance of Helen, emerging from the rear of the house in purple silk, resembling nothing so much as a Buddhist nun, the lack of eyebrows adding to what must have been already a pale and ethereal beauty.
She asked him – they were seated together at one end of the table – to explain why he was in Winderran, of all places, as she put it. A question he would normally have let pass but which, when issued from her bleached lips, provoked a version of his history that included Sydney, Canberra, marriage, children, and now divorce; a catalogue that sought to avoid, in the way that a man will when talking to a beautiful woman, no matter her availability, any mention of the other women who surely stand as the stations of the journey, except that Helen’s way of listening was so direct he was unable to entirely excise them, and, thus, hearing himself, brought his tale to a halt.
‘I seem to be doing nothing but talking about myself,’ he said.
‘Nonsense,’ she replied. ‘I’m asking you. I’m always curious as to what it is brings people here. More often than not it seems, in one way or another, to involve love. I think it’s something about the place. There’s always a story, you see and, at the moment I don’t feel as if I have one. I’ve slipped into a kind of limbo. Just me and my cancer. Too much body,’ she said, laughing. ‘And I particularly don’t want to talk about that today with you, of all people. So, continue. You say you have a brother living down on the coast?’
Blaming Matt for his presence in this part of the world. Telling Helen about his brother’s excessive lifestyle, which, he said, he wants instinctively to criticise except that all his injunctions fall away in the face of the family’s happiness, the way that he and Rosie always seem to be laughing, always have time to play games with the children, to go out fishing in the motorboat moored in the canal next to the house.
The meal being served by a woman in her mid-thirties with slightly Italian features, introduced as Nina, a distraction in herself, delivering dishes to the table in a no-nonsense manner; far more interesting than the fey blonde (who made the mistake of thinking he might be interested in the various modalities she was employing to maintain her health, techniques apparently unknown to, or ignored by, modern science); serving them a whole roast fillet of beef, the meat charred on the outside and cut into thick bloody wedges, the centre all but raw, no contingency for those who might like it otherwise. Helen picking at hers in the way of convalescents, taking tiny mouthfuls, pushing the already small portion around the plate.
Nick dragging his attention away from Nina’s short black skirt, bringing the conversation around to Helen. ‘What will you do now, without Miles, I mean, as your doctor?’
‘You know about my case?’
‘I’ve looked into it, briefly.’
‘Well, I have oncology in Brisbane. I’m down there two days a week. They’re monitoring me.’
‘Which is not the same as having a local GP.’
‘No, it’s not. But then we weren’t going to talk about my health, were we?’
‘It’s my fault. I’m sorry. I haven’t worked out how to be a doctor in a small town yet. I’m either too involved or not enough.’
‘It has crossed my mind,’ Helen said, pausing for long enough to get him to raise his eyes to meet hers, ‘to see if you would … if you had the time … take on my case.’
Nick realising how affected he’d become by the wine. So much so that he hadn’t noticed their exchange was by way of a job application. Not an afterthought at all. Interviewing for a position he wasn’t at all sure he wanted. Too late now.
‘I’d be honoured,’ he said.
She put her thin hand on his. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I know it’s not the most attractive undertaking. But I like you. And I can see why Guy has taken an interest. Unusual for him to pick a doctor, but clearly his good taste hasn’t entirely deserted him.’ This last said as if to herself rather than him. As if she was fading, which was possibly the case because the next moment she excused herself, standing up from the table, balancing herself with her hands on the hardwood. Trying to brush it off with a laugh. ‘All this excitement,’ she said.
He went to come around the table to her. ‘No, no. You stay here, sit, please. I’m all right. Enjoy yourself. I know that Guy will want to talk to you.’ Slipping away, back to from wherever it was she’d come.
After dessert they changed seats. The women gravitating towards one end of the table as in an English novel of manners. The men at the other, with brandy. Nick refusing the latter despite the insistence of his host. ‘I’ve already had too much wine,’ he said, ‘I have to drive.’
‘So, Lamprey, how’s the campaign going?’ Barkham asked, settling into his chair, that large over-expressive face, folds on folds – you wondered how he ever managed to shave – hovering beneath those extraordinary eyebrows, looking to steer the conversation into an area of interest.
‘You mean our ongoing shit-fight,’ Lamprey said in a sour tone.
‘I hope you’re not going to let that meeting get you down,’ Barkham said. ‘I thought you handled yourself pretty well, all things considered. You didn’t have a chance against a mob like that.’
‘Did you hear that woman?’ Lamprey said, ‘Water tanks. I mean, Jesus wept.’ Leaning forward. ‘It’s typical Winderran. What this town does best in all the world is split into opposing tribes. I’ve remarked on it before. Everyone huddled in their little groups just waiting for an issue to emerge so that they can take up positions and throw insults at each other. Everything gets blown out of proportion.’ Sitting back, point made, but then, rallying, rising back up again. ‘Actually, this might interest you. I’ve been doing some research. She got her figures wrong. Mixing up gigalitres and megalitres. Easy to do I suppose. You’d need six million houses, not sixty thousand, to store that amount of water. But who can be bothered with facts, eh?’
‘Guy here,’ Barkham said, pleased with himself, as if he’d scored a point by assisting Lamprey to score one, explained for Nick’s benefit, ‘performs an essential service in our culture, pricking the wind from those who would set themselves above us.’
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Lamprey said, ‘a windy prick am I.’
A call from the women down the other end to quieten down. ‘You men’re too noisy,’ Arlene said.
‘It’s just our powerful bass notes, reverberating,’ Illchild said deeply, ‘you need to lift your game ladies, sing out the higher registers.’
At which Arlene made a fist of ululating and, having started it, was joined by Barkham’s wife who, against all expectation, giving possibly her only contribution to the evening, took the vibrating wail to grand new heights, transporting the room.
Lamprey could not have been more delighted, clapping his hands with glee.
‘The thing about environmentalists,’ he said, when the noise subsided, ‘is that it’s become like a religion for them.’
‘What has?’ Illchild asked, possibly a hint of criticism in his voice.
‘You name it. Planting trees, for a start,’ Lamprey said. ‘It doesn’t matter where or what type as long as you’re putting them in the ground. You can see these fucking orange triangles dotting every hillside in the district like little shrines to their earth goddess. At the same time hardly a day goes by when you’re not assaulted by the moronic roar of the machines cutting the buggers down and chipping them up. There are teams of them working around the clock, can’t deal with the demand.’
Lamprey, it seemed, wrote an occasional column in one of the weekend papers based around propositions like this, as well as the doings of various politicians, a kind of public diary. Nick hadn’t read the column, this week or any other, and wasn’t about to start. What he found interesting, though, was how Illchild and Barkham, both significant figures in their own right, acted like a cheer squad, vying for Lamprey’s approval. He noted, too, a certain tension between them, as if they might not agree with each other on everything, or be content with their place in whatever mysterious hierarchy held sway, albeit being happy enough on this occasion to demonstrate to Nick who was on the inside and who the new chum. None of which was necessary; most of the time he didn’t know who or what they were talking about, hadn’t been to the meeting, didn’t even know the name of the woman who’d got up Lamprey’s nose.
‘I’ve been doing a little research on her,’ Lamprey was saying. ‘She was the union rep at the hospital down the coast for years. Which just about says it all, I’d have thought.’
‘Workplace Health and Safety’s got out of hand everywhere,’ Barkham said. ‘They’re a law unto themselves, right across the country. It’s got so you can’t do anything without filling in fifty forms. It’s not a wonder we can’t compete.’
‘You’d have come across a bit of that wouldn’t you, Nick?’ Lamprey said, attempting to draw him into the conversation.
‘Pretty strict in hospitals, what you can and can’t do,’ he said, non-committedly, hackles rising. He wondered what gave Barkham, or Lamprey especially, with such an ill wife, the qualifications to criticise hospitals. Clearly, at a dinner party general assent was the order of the day, but this was his field. What they hadn’t grasped about him – but then how could they have, he’d barely spoken – was that even if he didn’t know shit about local or national politics, he was Labor to the core. His father in the railyards at Enfield. ‘Not an easy job being a nurse,’ he added, ‘Underpaid, overworked and good at what they do, in my experience.’
Barkham started to harrumph his way into a contradiction but Illchild got there first, starting to tell a story about Arlene’s recent experience in hospital. Lamprey, however, wasn’t happy for the conversation to veer into the personal. ‘Don’t get me started on that chap who owns the land the dam wall’s going to be on,’ he said. ‘Supposed to be a scientist. Talk about crazy.’ Looking at Nick, as if to find agreement from him, which Nick would have liked to give except he once again had no point of reference. He’d been up since before dawn. Exhaustion was setting in. He was flattered to have been invited into this circle but doubted it was really a fit. Lamprey didn’t need his adulation or approval, he was superfluous to requirement, and yet, at the same time, there was a sense this display was all for his benefit. As if these men needed an audience.
They’d moved on anyway, discussing something Lamprey had said to his co-host on the book show he did on the television.
‘Never mind the flak you got for it,’ Illchild was saying, ‘it warmed my heart to hear someone say something honest on television.’
‘A rare thing from politicians of any stripe,’ Barkham said.
‘I’m not a politician,’ Lamprey said.
‘Yet,’ Barkham said.
‘Indeed,’ Illchild agreed.
‘I do wonder who you’ve been talking to,’ Lamprey said. ‘But you, Nick, we’re leaving you out.’
‘I was actually thinking I ought to be going.’
‘So soon? I was going to get you to listen to the sound system, wasn’t I?’
‘I don’t want to break anything up but it’s been a long day. I’ve an early start in the morning.’
Nina emerging from the kitchen at this exact moment, pulling on a coat. Lamprey held up his hand to the men around him.
‘You all done, Nina? Shall we call you a cab?’
‘Thanks Mr Lamprey. I’d like that.’
‘I could give you a lift,’ Nick said. ‘I was just leaving. Where are you going?’
‘Nonsense, Nick,’ Lamprey said. ‘I’ll call Nina a cab. I was going to play you some music.’
‘I really must go,’ Nick said. ‘I’m sorry. Do you mind if we do it another time?’
Dark-haired, dark-eyed Nina beside him in the car, lit by the glow of the dash lights. The road following one of the ridges back towards town, sleeping houses on either side, hidden behind some of the yet-to-be-felled trees. His tiredness mysteriously evaporating.
She lived in one of the new townhouses down behind the shops, not far from the hospital. Ran her own catering business from there. ‘Gave up working for others years ago,’ she said. ‘It never works out. Do you want to come in?’
It felt like a long time since Greloed had gone her own way.
She offered him a nightcap, bourbon. Took out two glasses and placed them on the kitchen bench, added a splash of the brown liquid, viscous against the ice, clinked hers against his, looking at him over the rim as she took a mouthful, leant across to kiss him, her lips at once cold and sweet and fiery against his own.
Nothing to say. Her body neat and firm beneath his hands. Wanting to take it slow but responding to what seemed to be her need to have it happen right there, right then, clothes still half on, perhaps they were winding each other up, each responding to what they imagined the other wanted, to some play of what passion should be like, who knows, but within moments she was up on the bench, her legs wrapped around him, his hands somewhere up inside her clothes, and then he was in, just like that, she holding his face in both her hands while she kissed him, breaking the seal of their mouths to catch a breath.
‘Woah, boy,’ she said, as if talking to a horse or a dog, panting, her hands on his shoulders, laughing at the corniness of her own language, a deep, easeful laugh which made him laugh too, bringing with it a great wash of relief, a flood of emotion that carried with it all the flotsam of this last year so that he was, for a moment, all but unmanned, slipping out of her.
‘I didn’t say stop,’ she said, grabbing hold.
‘I’m not going to,’ he said. ‘But let’s get these clothes off.’
Undoing her shirt, her bra, cupping lovely small breasts in his hands.
‘We could try the bed,’ she said, leading him there, a woman who looked even better naked than dressed, this surprisingly feminine body joining with his, expressing a wonderful natural joy in the sheer physicality of it all, a woman whose name he barely knew, who he’d seen for the first time but a few hours before.
It was only when they were done, when she was in the shower that he could cast his eye over the ersatz pictures on the wall (a jetty running out into a quiet lake; a Buddha in the mist), the curious collection of stuffed toys on the dresser, the absence of books and the presence of, for fuck’s sake, a cat, who’d only then come in to see what the fuss was about. The thing with Greloed was that he hadn’t even really liked her when they got together. That’s to say he was attracted to her physically but not to who she was. It had happened because of the closeness of their work and the remoteness of their location, because of propinquity, she a Swedish nurse on secondment to Australia, he a doctor on the run from several different cages of his own devising, and it hadn’t been meant to mean anything, shouldn’t have meant anything, she wasn’t even his type, slightly plump and strangely adolescent when her clothes were off, with the small high breasts of a renaissance painting and shaved parts, as if her adult body hadn’t quite formed though she was almost thirty, practising what she liked to call emergency sex, because, she said, its intensity wasn’t just a response to the meeting of their bodies but also to the circumstances in which they found themselves. Putting sentences together with a foreigner’s exactness. Strange name. Difficult to get his tongue around, hardly the sort to inspire dreams and yet that’s what happens, skin rubs against skin enough times and even names as outlandish as hers take on resonance.
He thinks, in retrospect, that she was just trying him on. An unusual notion, but why it should be different for women than men he couldn’t say. A study in The Lancet suggested the contraceptive pill alters pheromones such that women give out false messages about who they are, to both men and themselves. He’d been out there, in the north-west, amongst the red soil and ghost gums, the tall bluffs and wide grasslands, thinking he was found, having meaningful interactions with this woman, the landscape, the people, but in fact he’d been as lost as ever, dropping into an infatuation with the wrong person, going out together in the Toyota to get away from the doof music of the settlements, parking for privacy at the end of long sandy tracks where old machines lay half-submerged on riverbanks like harbingers of another age. Crocodiles in the water. Bound to end in tears. His, as it happened. Trapped in another fantasy of his own making. And she, having tried him on, went her own way, taking her energetic little party-self off to some other poor fool on the other side of the world without a thought, without realising how much he had invested in the idea of her. Which was the thing, he no longer seemed to be able to just have sex. Perhaps it was something to do with age but these days this immersion in another seemed to quickly develop ties that bound. Too quickly. Now there he was, in another woman’s room, another woman with whom it was probably fair to say he shouldn’t be sharing deeply intimate moments, feeling strangely as if in doing what he’d done he’d betrayed the nurse, Eugenie, although clearly that was ridiculous, but evidence, if more was needed, that the process of weaving a fantasy about her had already gone too far.
Nina came out of the bathroom, naked, drying herself with a towel, stopped for a moment in the doorway for him to notice her, to see the water still caught in droplets on her skin, to see her breasts, her dark bush, holding the moment before coming to lay herself on her belly, her face next to his.
‘I was thinking I should go,’ he said, saying it because it was what he thought and because he felt certain she wouldn’t be troubled by it, but seeing in her eyes that he was wrong.
‘If you want to,’ she said, running the tip of her finger along his thigh. ‘But me, I thought we were just getting started.’