He turned around. ‘Fucking keep still, will ya?’
Turned back to the wheel again. She was starting to get prune-mouthed about the brat, too. It was okay at first, told him she knew Troy could be a handful, encouraged him to use a bit of discipline, but now she’d turned a hundred and eighty degrees and last weekend she’d ordered Baker into the bathroom and pointed a quivering finger at the brat: ‘Those marks weren’t there yesterday, he’s my son and I’ll deal with him,’ etcetera, etcetera.
The traffic was stalled again. Baker cranked down his window, letting in a blast of Sydney traffic fumes. It cleared his head but he badly needed a hit of something, speed for preference. He could try that bloke in the side bar of the Edinburgh Castle; he was generally holding.
That’s if Carol had put forty bucks in the kitty, like she’d promised. He’d check when he got home.
Which would mean doing the shopping at some no-frills supermarket, generic tins of spaghetti and meat sauce for dinner, and another tirade when she got off work this arvo.
Baker flicked the turning indicator as he approached the next set of lights, signalling a left turn. He had to hold the lever in place or it would jump out. He couldn’t actually hear the ticking sound so he had no way of knowing if the thing was working or not. Just another item in the list of little helpful things Carol thought he might get around to doing for her one day, along with taking Troy to school all this week.
Something made Baker glance in the rear-view mirror. Some bitch in a Volvo was behind him, flashing her headlights. She had a pointing finger pressed to her windscreen and she was mouthing things at him.
‘So, the turning light doesn’t work,’ he muttered. ‘So fucking what?’
Still she kept shaking her finger at him. ‘Well, what?’
Baker said, talking to her image in his mirror. He shrugged elaborately, lifting empty hands in the air, signalling what? to her. Fucked if he knew what she was on about. As for Troy, he’d turned around and was looking out through the rear window at the woman in the Volvo.
‘Hey, Troy, whyn’t you give her the old finger?’ Baker said, little puffs of amusement escaping him as he accelerated toward the corner, yanked on the wheel, and steered the barrelly Kingswood into the street where Troy went to school.
The thing was, the Volvo woman stayed with him. Now the bitch was tooting her horn, stabbing her finger at him, flashing her lights. Her face was twisted with outrage and after only a few seconds of that Baker thought: Right, slag, I’ll fucking have you.
There was no one about. This part of the street had a deserted factory on one side and a wrecker’s yard the size of a football ground on the other. The school was another kilometre away. Baker pulled over to the kerb. The Volvo pulled in behind him. He stayed where he was: let her make the first move.
In the wing mirror he saw the woman get out, close her door carefully, stand watching him. After a while she seemed to make up her mind. She walked toward him, her image growing in the mirror: plenty of bouncy hair, Reeboks, red tracksuit. Baker knew her type. Young mother, plenty of money, full of fucking opinions.
He got out and leaned on his door. ‘Got a problem?’
She actually stamped one foot and stood there shaking in the grip of a powerful emotion, bent forward at the waist. ‘That child should be properly restrained.’
Restrained? ‘Speak English, lady. What are you on about?’
She pointed. ‘Your son-’
‘Not my son.’
‘Your ward, then. He should be strapped into a seatbelt.’
‘So?’
‘What if you have an accident? What if you have to stop suddenly? He could be seriously hurt.’
Baker uncoiled from the door. ‘Any of your fucking business?’
That got to her. Her little fists were clenched and her eyes were fiery. ‘Yes, if you like, it is my business. When a child is at risk it’s everybody’s business.’
Baker closed the distance a metre or two. ‘Listen, slag.’
The woman retreated a couple of steps but wasn’t backing down. ‘It’s against the law for a child to be unrestrained like that.’
‘I’ll give you unrestrained,’ Baker said, and he hit her hard, just once, dropping her like a stone.
He watched her. She shook her head as if to clear it. When she touched her mouth and saw blood on her fingers, she yowled and scrabbled away from him, dragging her backside along the street. Baker imagined that she wasn’t wearing much under the tracksuit. He caught up with her. Surprisingly, she curled into a tight ball. He hesitated, weighing it up.
‘Who gives a shit,’ he said.
He stepped over her. Yeah, he knew it. There was a little kid in the Volvo, strapped in the back seat, singing to herself. Little satchel, dinky little dress and socks and shoes. ‘Precious koochy koo,’ Baker said. ‘Daddy’s princess.’
He opened the driver’s door of the Volvo and grabbed the woman’s purse. Eighty bucks, wacky doo. Enough for a hit, plus he could treat Carol and the brat to Pizza Hut tonight.
He folded the money into his back pocket and that’s when a car came out of nowhere and two guys in plain clothes pinned him against the flank of the Volvo. One of them, a blocky character in need of a shave and a mouthwash, got in a few punches before cuffing him. ‘You’re nicked,’ he said.
Eighteen
Wyatt walked down through the mall, heading back to Battery Point. He glanced about him as he went, automatically looking for the face, the gait, the conjunction of person, place and body language that would tell him he’d been found. But the little downtown streets were benign in the sun, so he went on half-alert and did what he sometimes liked doing, visited the place as if for the first time.
He noticed the school-leavers in the mall, kicking their heels and shifting place constantly but never going anywhere. They had nowhere to go. There were no jobs for them. Wyatt looked beyond them to the pedestrian traffic. No Asian or Indian faces; no blacks, no Pacific Islanders. It was a mono-featured city.
He saw plenty of young men wearing beards, jeans, walking boots and red, green and blue check shirts, and guessed that they had a four-wheel-drive or a utility parked nearby. And there was another kind of male, stamped with old money and long breeding. They walked tall along the streets, braying and impervious, fathers and sons with straight backs, costly English tweeds and an air of entitlement radiating from them. They would have been out of place and out of joint anywhere but on the streets of Hobart.
But, more than anything, the city breathed wholesomeness and conviction. Perhaps that was the central factor- everyone here knew their place, except the kids in the mall.
He kept walking. The dental clinic was in a lane off Elizabeth Street. He was five minutes early and was kept waiting for twenty. At eleven o’clock he walked out with a new filling in his jaw.
That afternoon he was on a bus to Devonport, and by evening he was on the overnight car ferry to Melbourne. He slept badly: a bunk bed in a steel tomb below the waterline; young men, intoxicated to desperation point, stumbling in from the discotheque; all the unknowns ahead of him.
At dawn he showered, got dressed and climbed the stairs to an upper deck. He ate breakfast in a dining room in which the carpet, curtains and fittings were the colour of the vomit that streaked the iron steps outside. Toast and coffee, as bad as any he’d ever had. After that he stood in the open air, choosing a point near the bow where he could watch the ferry’s progress toward the narrow entrance to Port Phillip Bay. He could see land on either side: hills, flat country, white beaches and a couple of fishing towns. Then a lighthouse and the ferry was pitching through The Rip.
Wyatt remained on deck, breathing the cool air, as the ferry skirted the Bellarine Peninsula and cut up the centre of the bay. A year ago he’d travelled these waters alone in a stolen motorboat. Having shot a man who’d sold him out, he’d been on the run. He usually was, in those days.