‘Where you at?’
‘Just finishing up the McCordle job.’
‘Go okay?’
‘Small yappy dog kept getting underfoot no matter what the missus did.’
‘I hate those dogs. What’s their use anyway?
‘To get underfoot.’
‘Thank fuck it’s the weekend.’
‘Got the Vanderkirk’s tomorrow.’
‘Shit, that’s right.’
‘Could use another back.’
‘He’s really doing it then.’
‘Done and dusted. Tickets bought. Passport and visa are on his bedside table. Though he’s still not packed.’
‘It’s a good thing. He’s young. Needs to try. Hell, take twenty years, I’d be on the next plane.’
‘You, me, both, mate.’
‘When you boys thinkin’ getting here?’
‘Don’t know ‘bout Quint.’
‘Gotta bring ‘em. People expectin’.’
‘He’s got plans. I’ll try, though. Say, thirty.’
‘Shit, I’ll be under the table in thirty.’
‘Goddamn dog. Think it broke skin.’ Quint pulled up the leg on his blue coveralls.
‘There’s Savlon in the first aid.’
‘I mean what’re they good for? Fishbait’s ‘bout it.’
Roger watched his son uncap the tube of antiseptic. He watched him squeeze a dab on the pads of his first two fingers and rub it around the anklebone. There was that intent look Quint got when concentrating on things of meaning. Reeling in a catch from the beach, a larger-than-average trevally or a coral-coloured snapper. Or manoeuvring a trolley loaded with boxes around a newly painted corner or down a flight of steep stairs. Or reading under the bedside light at night, usually second-hand or bargain-binned, always science fiction. He watched him pull the coverall leg down over his scuffed work boot.
He was going to miss him.
‘There’s a get-together at Darb’s,’ he said, because he knew his son didn’t like surprises. Even as a boy. He’d brood, seem confused, tight-lipped and frowning, like it took a moment for the shock to settle, to eventually be acknowledged and allowed in.
‘I got plans.’
‘They want to say their goodbyes. Good luck and all that. It won’t be long. Hour, max. They wanted this.’
Quint bit his thumbnail; he was prone to it. He hated goodbyes. Maybe it was a holdover. He took her passing and kept it deep. They talked about it only a few times. Both understood that neither could handle what too many words couldn’t explain or begin to soothe.
His son sat quiet next to him as he drove. Braking, shifting down, Roger knew he’d come. He was a good boy. He was a good man.
They sat at the light.
‘What you doing tonight?’ It felt strange in his mouth. He knew his son was private, said little, shared less. Quint was like him in that way. When he did, it was usually important. Like when he told him. That admission still sat present and foreign in Roger’s heart, a sharp-edged rock flipped under a heel, but what could he do? He didn’t understand, maybe never would. Maybe that was why Quint was leaving. Maybe Roger had failed him.
Fortunately, the light turned green.
‘Mason and the others.’
‘Giving you a send-off?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’ll only be an hour.’
He lifted his coverall leg, inspected the red pin-scratched mark against the hairy bone-white anklebone. ‘Goddamn dog,’ he said.
Bryce wasn’t under the table but he was surely well on his way to being pissed off his stool.
There was a small cluster of balloons and a Bon Voyage banner stretched limply across the rack of liquor bottles behind the bar. There were shouts and congratulations. Quint’s lean back, wet through from lugging down box after box while dodging a pesky little dog, was slapped. Wide shoulders, hunched over the fuss created were persistently patted. He held his own. He smiled. Shook hands. Hugged. Kissed the soft aunty cheeks that were aunty in name only. Laughed at the reminiscent uncles’ jokes. The company was family.
Quint did him proud.
Bryce had two beers. One was for him. He sidled up next to his mate at the bar and took a deep quaff. When it left his lips, he thought he sighed.
‘You look done in, mate.’
‘Young man’s game.’
‘Boss’ll put you behind a desk. You only have to say.’
Roger took another drink that pretty much finished the pint.
‘Another,’ he said.
Bryce simply nodded. Waved Kara for another.
‘Hey, Rog.’
Kara was a single mum, early-thirties, maybe. She was a strawberry blonde: red-gold shoulder length hair, eyebrows and lashes the hue of honey. A faint scattering of freckles speckled across the bridge of her nose. Her lips were full, her hips even fuller. She was quick; she was pretty. She was out of his league. Though it didn’t stop him noticing.
‘So Quint’s crossing The Ditch.’
‘Greener pastures.’ He watched her pull him a tall one.
She looked at him. Watching. Wondered maybe at the meaning behind his too-chipper comeback. She didn’t say anything as she waited for the head to fall so she could top it up. He appreciated her for that.
‘What’re you still doing pulling here?’ he asked, feeling his oats, pleased a younger woman was conversing with him.
‘Waitin’ for the right proposition,’ she replied just as quick. She smirked, which half-mooned a crisp dimple on that side of her face.
He held her gaze. He took the beer she handed.
‘I don’t think I can feel my legs,’ Bryce said.
‘Thirty minutes?’
‘I’m a quick study.’
‘You’re a fucking drunk.’
‘Perspective.’
Down the bar, they watched Kara pull another.
‘She likes you.’
‘Is this college?’
His mate blinked in a slow exaggerated way as if he was trying to clear the fog of three pints and three decades since school. ‘Ask her.’
‘You’re stupid when you’re pissed.’
Bryce looked into the head of his beer as if it was a crystal ball. ‘I see … I see … ’
‘You see shit.’
‘I see a prick that can’t stay up.’
‘Dickhead.’ But he was grinning.
Bryce shook his head as if grief lay heavy on his brow.
Roger turned, leaned his lower back on the bar, actually sighed at the pressure against a stiffening muscle. He watched his son.
In the crowd, he was head-bowed. Beer at his side, he was grinning at something the circle around him was saying. He looked like her. She always said it was him he looked like. But he had her hunter-green eyes, her set of chin. He saw himself in him, too. His narrow face, his wiry build, his likelihood for hirsuteness. He watched him. He could visit. Perth was not that far away.
He sipped his beer. The crowd was loud; voices pounded upon his eardrums. He watched him.
‘Can you drive?’ Quint asked.
‘I can drive. Are you ready?’
‘I don’t want to take you away.’
‘I’m ready.’
Then someone told a fag joke. It was a stranger, someone less acquainted amongst the group. It was like a fart in church.
He turned to the slur.
‘Don’t,’ his son said.
Hands were fisting and his stance was widening.
Bryce was beside him. Quint was beside him. They faced him towards the door.
‘Take him home,’ Bryce said to Quint. Then, ‘Can you drive?’
Quint steered him out the door.
The pavement was still warm from the day. Passing headlights flared then faded. Electric pollution all the way from Wellington curdled the purpling sky. Roger could barely see the stars. Alpha Centauri, Beta Centauri, the Southern Cross. If you didn’t know to look, it would only be haze.
‘Can you drive?’ Quint asked again.
‘I can drive.’ He dug for the ute’s keys in his pocket.
‘It doesn’t matter, you know.’
‘It matters to me.’
‘It’s arseholes talking.’
Roger opened his door then slid to flick the passenger’s. He turned the ignition. Gripped the steering wheel with both hands.
‘It matters to me.’
‘I need a shower. I stink,’ his son said, sniffing his underarm, ending this line of talk.
‘What you and Mason doing?’
‘Party at a mate’s.’
‘Got the Vanderkirk’s in the morning.’
‘You want … ’
‘No, sleep in. You aren’t even packed.’
‘Flight’s not till late. I can pack later.’
Friday traffic was still heavy. People on their way home from late work or early happy hours pressed and pulled like lodestones, attracting sometimes, repelling at others. A couple of cyclists pedalled beside them. Up a ways, a jogger, shirtless, stop-started, crossing the busy street.
Out of the corner of his eye, Roger watched him notice. A quick head flick then back, appraising, possibly. He saw himself, earlier, in that quick glance. Kara as she wiped down the bar top. He had appreciated her, the curve of her, the figure-fitted contour of pants and three-quartered buttoned top of her. She had a look he liked. He followed the receding shine of the jogger’s back and wondered what kind of look his son liked. He recalled. There was that mate a few years back. When they were still living in the Waikato. He and Quint were thick for a while. Something with a D. Danny, maybe. He wondered often since Quint told him. Maybe Danny was ginger, lanky, had a chipped front tooth. Was he partial for those things? Or didn’t it matter? They passed the jogger. There was no second glance. So Roger dropped it. It didn’t matter. Yet it did. But he dropped it.
‘You want one?’
He was in the fridge. Down the corridor, Quint was turning off the shower.
‘Sure,’ was the yellback.
A bundle of fish and chips were on the table. In a towel Quint came in dripping, took the offered Speight’s then replaced him in the fridge. Standing back up, tomato sauce and butter were in his hands. Roger brought the white bread over.
He watched his son unwrap the newspaper parcel and lay it flat, tucking the edges under so as to make it easier to get at. Once done, before sitting, Quint grabbed a couple of chips, popped them in, then open-mouthed a hushed hot hot as he tried to chew. He always did that with chips.
They levered the caps from the brown bottles of beer, a succession of hissed staccatos in the kitchen. Quint made a buttie with the white bread and butter. He layered the chips like boxes on a trolley before squirting a stream of tomato sauce then folding. He had it gone in three bites.
‘Aunty Kay texted,’ he said, swallowing the rest washed down with a swig of Speight’s.
‘What she say?’
‘Just checking on times. When to be at the airport; where they’ll be when I get there. If I have everything. All my papers.’
‘She fusses,’ he said, then stopped because it was getting too close to the substance of her. She had doted, too. On him, on both of them. It must’ve been a trait learned as sisters under the same roof, or else carried within their blood, that thousands of kilometres of distance couldn’t dilute. He saw that trait in Quint, too. He knew Quint didn’t get it from his side.
‘Keely’s back.’
‘On leave?’
‘Sounds like for good. He’s not re-enlisting so Aunty says. Think she’s relieved for that.’
‘What’s he gonna do?’
He shrugged, peeled the batter from a piece of tarakihi, a flake falling onto his chest hair. He licked grease off his fingertips.
‘How old’s he, now?’ She was the one who used to remember all that: birthdays, wedding dates, baptisms and first communions. He managed to retain their anniversary. Even now. It would’ve been twenty-five years this March.
‘Three years older than me.’ He found the flake, picked it off, ate it from a bitten-to-the-quick thumbnail. ‘Twenty-two.’
‘Twenty-two.’ He took a pull on his Speight’s. Twenty-two. Young, with a stint behind him in Afghanistan already. Uruzgan Province. Part of the Aussies’ decade-plus Operation Slipper. Kay had kept them informed, as much as was possible. He had tried to stay in touch since. Made an effort to keep connected for Quint’s sake and to keep a part of her, for his. Over the last couple of years, it ended up being Quint who took that responsibility over. Like she would have.
‘You two were close. Remember those times he stayed over the summer hols?’
‘We went north that one time. Ninety Mile Beach.’
‘You two rode the boards down the dunes.’
He grinned a boy’s grin, remembering a boy’s fun.
They sat and ate, remembering.
‘I wonder how he’ll be?’ his son then asked.
He thought he meant the years since, then the army and Afghanistan.
‘Something like that. It must change a person,’ Quint added, the bottle empty in his hands, the newspaper greased and scattered with bits of crispy chip bits and tomato sauce smears.
‘It must. But it’s what happens after that matters, too. When you’re back and safe and home. It requires those around to know he’s been through something that no one will ever know but he’s back and safe and home.’
They looked at their empty bottles for a few moments more then stood and together tidied up.
He was on the sofa in his boxers, dozing off and on since Quint had left with Mason. Some mindless DIY reality show was on mute. He would’ve done the renovation differently so he wasn’t invested. And his body was tired. He tried not to dwell on the recurring dull twinge that resided in his lower back. At forty-seven, pulls and strains didn’t seem to recover as quick. He knew he needed to step up. Lose the gut. Start running again. Add a hundred more crunches, fifty more push-ups. Maybe that was why he was still taking jobs, still lifting and hauling with young guys half his age and not pushing a pen or logging invoices in a computer like Bryce and the others in the office. It was a way of proving, or refusing.
She had known that about him. Forgave when it made him bull-headed and inflexible; recognised it had a flipside, that it made him stick to what he thought was right and true and keep doing what needed to be done for his family. She said she admired his pride but it also drove her crazy at times. Wasn’t that marriage? He had asked her that once after the dust had settled. As usual, it was over not having much money or one of those nails-on-the-chalkboard misunderstandings that couldn’t be ignored this time. She just shook her head before leaning over to kiss him goodnight. He didn’t know what that meant. He watched her go from across the room. She was always beautiful to him.
He hadn’t been able to believe his luck when she said yes. The wedding was small. Neither of their parents could help out much so they did it on a shoestring. A few of his mates, a few of hers. Parents and only close rellies. He thought the judge was a lesbian so she had whispered he’d better mean it then or else. She had tilted her head and raised an eyebrow to indicate the thought of a switch could be there for her. She laughed at his gobsmacked expression.
There were two miscarriages before Quint. Each one killed her a little bit. When Quint came along, pink and wrinkly and screeching like a hungry cat she had kept him close as if he might vanish if she didn’t hang on tight enough. She doted on him. He wondered if that caused it. She’d have said he was being thick and ended it at that. He knew it was nothing she did. And on good days, he knew it wasn’t him, either. It just was. She never knew. Or maybe she did. She carried him, nursed him, sat beside him when he had pneumonia and his first hangover. She’d’ve known. She knew everything. Except the cancer. She didn’t know that it lived and bred inside her until it was too late. They tried. She tried. But it was stronger. Stronger than her. And that was probably what stung the most, what lingered longest. That it was stronger than her. And he could only sit by and watch her fight and fight and fight and eventually give out.
The call came on his mobile. Rubbing his face to scour the sleep from him, he felt disembodied, context-less like waking up in an unfamiliar country’s sounds and smells. His bearings free-fell, then, when he answered. It was someone at the hospital calling.
As the mobile became slicker as he held it to his face he knew he had let her down. He had failed her. He had not watched over him like he had promised. But then he heard Bryce’s name mentioned and it became a different, though not less, kind of thing. He said he’d be there.
He hadn’t had anything else to drink since the fish and chips so he was good enough. He pulled on his work shorts and boots and a T-shirt that was mostly clean, grabbed his keys from the dresser top and was in the ute and down the drive.
When he got to Emergency a kind but harried nurse asked if he was family. Roger said he was family enough and was shown through.
Closed curtains contained purposeful activity, some frantic, though always unseen and seemingly routine. Doctors and nurses in steel-blue scrubs wandered in and out, asking questions and giving directions. He heard Bryce off to his left, his words and tone, slushy, as if gravel landslid around his mouth.
‘There he is,’ Bryce said when Roger stepped around the curtain.
‘Jesus, Bryce.’ He turned to the attending male nurse. ‘What happened?’
Though cleaned up, Bryce’s face still looked as if it’d been through a ten-round bout where he might’ve lasted but still lost in the end. The front of his shirt was blood-soaked and had been cut away to determine if the bleeding was elsewhere, also. Somewhere he had lost a work boot. A horn-nailed toe poked from a hole in his sock. The nurse said he was found unconscious.
‘I heard some prozzie stayed with me till St. John’s came. Can you believe it?’
When like this, Roger knew not to encourage his mate. He talked to the nurse.
‘We’ll have to admit him. It’s standard procedure after a fall, when there’s trauma to the head that leads to loss of consciousness.’
Roger nodded but Bryce wasn’t going to have a bar of it. He wanted to go home. He wanted Roger to take him home. He struggled to get up from the bed.
The nurse looked as if he could bench press both Bryce and Roger combined. He was Polynesian, possibly Tongan, with youth and authority on his side. All he did was step back, maybe to emphasise his muscle, his youth and authority. Fortunately, his mate was on the homestretch to sober. He saw sense. Whether it was the nurse’s words or presence or his situation in the Emergency ward with his shirtfront cut open and his pale beer belly exposed and missing a work boot somewhere, he saw sense. Bryce lay back down.
For the next four hours, until Bryce was finally admitted and given a room and a bed for observation and the night, Roger sat with his mate and waited.
‘Where were you last night?’ Quint asked while cracking a couple of eggs in a bowl to scramble. He set a cup of black coffee on the table for him.
‘Thanks.’ He took a big slurp, felt the sweet scald on the back of his tongue. ‘What time you get in?’
‘After two.’
‘Good party?’
‘Not really. I was ready to leave sooner, but Mason was my ride.’ He added salt and pepper to the eggs in the pan.
Roger saw he was in a hoodie and work shorts. The Vanderkirk’s. Shit.
‘So where were you?’ he asked again.
‘Bryce’s in hospital.’
‘Shit, what happened?’
‘No one knows for sure. St. John’s found him unconscious. He was beaten up pretty bad. They’re gonna do tests on his head. See if anything’s wrong. But then it’s Bryce. Wrong in the head comes with the territory.’
The toast popped. Quint took it quickfingeredly, spread butter and Vegemite, cut it along the diagonal and set it on a plate with a pale yellow scoop of eggs. He placed it in front of Roger. ‘Were you there all night?’
He dug in, nodded. Quint sat opposite. Dug in, shook his head.
‘Thanks.’ He indicated the hoodie and work shorts with a look.
‘Said I would. You good?’
‘Nothing a hot cuppa and shower can’t fix.’
Quint bit into a corner of the toast. Chewed. ‘We can see if they know more after. Besides. Can’t leave without saying goodbye.’
They sipped their coffee.
He was going to miss him terribly.