‘Twelve years, nearly thirteen.’
‘This the first time you’ve been allowed out?’
‘It’s the first time I’ve been allowed out as you put it, yes. It’s not the first time I’ve been out.’
‘You’ve had affairs with men before?’ I arranged my face to make sure she knew I was joking.
‘Affairs and… honourable stand-offs.’
‘I won’t even ask what that means. Are you going to trifle with my affections?’
‘Probably.’ She slid her hand under the sheet. ‘I’m certainly going to trifle with these.’
It went on like that until close to dawn. I slept for a while, and when I woke up I was alone in the big bed. There was a small wardrobe in one corner of the room, an upholstered chair with clothes thrown over it, a low table near the bed carrying a stack of books-no other furniture. The heavy curtains over a big window were only half-drawn and light was coming in strongly through the gap. I got up, jerked the curtains apart and was hit in the eye by the view of Elizabeth Bay. The sky was an intense blue and there was a light swell which kept the boats moving at their moorings in a slow, rhythmic dance. From this distance the Darling Point shoreline looked green and unsullied. I went back to the bed, pulled up the pillows and sat and looked at the dancing boats.
Helen came in carrying a breakfast tray; she was wearing the silk thing again and it only looked better for a few creases. As I watched her it struck me that her features looked very different in the natural light. Her nose was still nicely crooked and her dark eyes deep with the fine lines ready to appear; but a tightness was gone, and the pugnacity was reduced. Sex and a little sleep seemed to do her a power of good. Her hair was spiky and sticking up irregularly; I wanted to smooth it down, groom her like a cat.
‘I thought you’d be a coffee rather than tea man-toast not cereal, honey not jam.’
‘Right three times.’
We settled the tray on the bed, kissed briefly and got into the food.
‘Did you tell me anything about the job you’re on last night? I have this weird memory; I forget almost everything I’m told immediately and remember it all much later.’
‘No, I didn’t tell you.’
‘Are you going to?’
‘What’s the point?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, I can react all right at the time I’m being told. My understanding’s not impaired.’
‘I’ll decide according to the quality of the coffee.’
I drank some and she looked at me expectantly.
‘Well?’
‘The coffee’s good-that means I don’t have to tell you. It’d be a punishment to be told about it.’ She punched me lightly, but a light punch from her was a fair tap.
‘All right, all right, I’ll tell you.’
‘It’s just that I saw the gun, you see. Do you really need to carry a gun around with you when you work?’
I shrugged.
‘I’ve never fired a gun in my life’, she said.
‘You’re not missing much. I thought all country women kept guns in the kitchen. By the stove. Dumb place to keep it, come to think of it.’
She’d drawn away a bit on the bed and she drank some coffee before answering. ‘I’m not a country woman, originally. I grew up in Sydney and only moved up there when I married Mike.’
That’d be when you were about twenty-two.’
‘Twenty-one; so you really are a detective?’
I grunted. ‘So-called. Mostly I go along with people when they move money about, or do things like you saw me doing the other night. I look for missing people, too. That’s what I’m on now, sort of
‘You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want to.’
‘No, I don’t mind. He’s not really missing. I saw him last night in fact. He’s the son of the guy who took me away from you at Roberta’s. Remember?’
‘I do. I wasn’t pleased. I met him, Mr… Guthrie?’
‘Yeah. Well, he’s hired me to find out what’s gone wrong with his kid. There’s something bloody funny about it, that’s for sure. I followed the kid and the people he was drinking with last night, and that’s when I ran into the two unfriendly guys I dropped off at your front door.’
I put my cup down, took hers and put it down and gently cased across the bed. I licked my finger and smoothed down her hair.
‘I’m not a gunman’, I said. ‘I’m not a thug.’
‘I know.’
‘Once in a while things get very heavy in what I do-not very often, not even once a year. I haven’t got a thing about guns. I got a bellyful of guns in the army.’
She grabbed my face, squeezed and kissed me-she was a very physical woman. ‘We’ll leave the army for later. I don’t think I could remember any more.’
She lifted her arms and I pulled the robe up and off. We remembered some of the things we’d done in the night and tried out some new ones.
Later I showered and dressed, and wandered around the flat scratching at my heavy beard. She made a few phone calls, and her movements suggested that it was time for me to be on my way. I helped her pull up the bed; we stood on opposite sides of it and looked at each other.
‘You’re smiling’, she said. ‘You don’t do that all that often.’
‘Wait until you know me better. Sometimes I smile all day. Do nothing else.’
‘I’d like to see that.’
For her, that was a commitment. I felt I could presume just a little. ‘You’ll see it. What’re you going to do today?’
‘Going out-lunch.’
‘What’s a good time to ring you?’
‘No special time. I’m busy being free. Why don’t you give me your number? Let impulse rule.’
I wrote the number down for her. and she let me out of the flat and the building. I could feel myself smiling again as I walked down the sunny street.
I took a good look along Greenknowe Avenue and around a few corners before I approached my car. It was after 10 a.m. and the parking ticket was fluttering on the windscreen. There was no one watching the car that I could see. I drove to St Peter’s Lane and left the car where it costs me ten bucks a week to park rather than twenty-five a night, and went up to my office. I was still smiling and even whistling-something that gives pleasure to no one but me-as I climbed the stairs.
No water view here, no high ceilings with plaster roses and soft, off-white paint. The office has cream-coloured walls which are trying to turn green of their own accord, and a ceiling so stained and dirty it looks as if it could once have been the floor. The filing cabinet has a typewriter sitting on it with a cover to keep the dust out; nothing keeps the dust off the windows or the desk top. You have to pay for a view and plaster roses and clean paint-the dust is free.
I wrote out a cheque for the parking ticket, put it in the envelope provided, and felt virtuous. I entered the fine in a notebook under ‘expenses’ and felt businesslike. There weren’t many entries under ‘expenses’, and I couldn’t decide whether to feel economical about that or non-industrious. I took the spare electric razor from the desk drawer and went down the hall to shave and clean up. A quick wash and mouth rinse, and I was ready to add something to the expense list.
I sat in my swivel chair that has given up swivelling, put my Italian shoes up on the desk and thought about Helen Broadway. I wanted to ask her what part of Sydney she’d grown up in, and what she’d been doing on 11 November 1975. I wanted to know if she played tennis and if she’d read The Great Gatsby. I wanted to know what she liked to eat besides toast, and drink besides coffee and scotch. But right now Paul Guthrie was paying and I’d have to wait until I was on my own time.
Primo Tomasetti, the tattooist who rents me my car-parking space, has a dark room in his place of business. If walls could speak those of his darkroom would tell Z-rated stories. I walked into the tattoo shop, held up the film cassette from the miniature camera and Primo nodded. He was working on the very large forearm of a biker who was watching the work, with his lips moving. The needle buzzed, like a tormented bee.
‘What’s that, Primo?’