What happened to Deke? He’d resigned. Where had he gone?
Villani shook the thoughts away, rose, showered, dressed, went into the big room and switched on the radio.
Bruce Frank, the morning man on the ABC, was talking his usual drivel, he had a voice that shifted in tone, from gruff to shrill in the same sentence. Villani sat in an armchair with the battery razor, head back, eyes closed, the machine wasn’t up to the task but it was soothing.
He registered the word police and thumbed the shaver off.
…leader of the Opposition Karen Mellish on the line, she’s called in. Up bright and early, Ms Mellish.
I’m a farmer’s daughter, Bruce. And a farmer’s wife. We don’t loll around in bed. There’s work to be done.
A case can be made for a bit of lolling in bed, surely? I mean the birthrate isn’t what it should…
No frivolity please, I’m ringing about your caller’s comment that my party takes pleasure in knocking the Victoria Police. That is absolutely and completely wrong and…
You’ve said a few hard things about the police recently, haven’t you? Bit more than a few.
Bruce, our job is to speak out against incompetence where we see it. And we see it everywhere under this shoddy government. But take pleasure in denigrating the police? Never. No. We want to see our police force given the numbers and the leadership to do what they are quite capable of doing, which is to make this city and this state the most inhospitable place on earth for violent hoons, drug dealers, career criminals…
A big ask that. I have no doubt the government…
To wake without the hangover feeling took a holiday of at least a week. The first two or three days were detox, twitchy, irritable, aware of feeling tight in the shoulders, in the neck, in the back. The second week, he lost interest in organising.
Two weeks? Not since Corin was fifteen.
Surfers Paradise was going to be a week alone, the two of them, kids in safe hands. He thought they could patch things up, start again. That Laurie suggested going was hopeful, the matter of Tony’s friend’s mother was still close.
Catering customers, television people, offered their holiday unit. Laurie’s company was by then catering for lots of shoots.
She went ahead. Villani remembered almost missing the plane, falling asleep before take-off, finding a taxi, standing on the narrow balcony of the beachfront tower looking at the sea, the beach far below in deep shadow, lace-frilled waves unrolling, people walking on the wet sand.
He fell asleep on a sofa in the sitting room while Laurie was on the balcony, talking on her mobile. In the small hours, a cramp in his left calf woke him. He could not believe the pain. He thought: the deep-vein thing. He put his feet on the floor, frantically massaged the muscle, pummelled it, tears came to his eyes, he stood up, shook his leg, stamped his foot.
The pain gave way to numbness. He slept for a few hours, woke in the dawn, hungry. Nothing to eat in the place, he smoked a cigarette on the balcony. There were a few dozen surfers out, scattered, it was playschool, the wind in the south-east, nothing happening, two-footers.
Villani took the lift down, left his shirt and towel on the sand. Walking out through the warm shallows with two young women surfers, girls, he eyed himself unhappily, pale chicken-breast skin, flab on his hips. It was a long swim to where he could catch a wave, the girls were ahead of him, paddling, in no hurry.
He wasn’t the world’s greatest swimmer and he hadn’t been to the gym for a while. He had to push himself, the girls looking back at him-pityingly, he thought. When he reached the deep water, he was winded. Hundreds of thousands of people swam off this beach every year and he found himself alone.
Joe Cashin taught him to surf. Cashin was junior to him, a reserve about Cashin, a little smile, no friends among his peers. At Carlton, they became friends, both much smarter than most of the people around them. When they were not working in daylight, they went to Rye or Portsea in Villani’s Falcon. It was tame for Cashin, he’d surfed since he was a kid, he mucked around, walked up and down on his board, turned his back to the shore. But he put up with it until Villani was ready for proper surf, ready to be trashed in the breakers at Bells.
At Surfers, Villani floated on the swells, back to the shore, trying to get his breath, then he saw the first wave of a set. He rose with it, with the bigger second one, turned and swam for the third. Head down, arms threshing, he caught it, hunched his shoulders. He felt its power take hold of him, enter him, he was not propelled by the wave, he was the wave, he was the power, arms tucked in, body arched, he was the lovely bouncing force.
Then the wave obeyed some secret command, betrayed him. It hollowed, it dumped him, his forehead hit sand, he thought his neck was broken, the force rolled him, rolled him, tumbled him, pulled down his Speedos, he swallowed water, water went up his nose, he did not know where up was, he was drowning.
His head broke water and it was over, nothing special, he was in the foam, bodysurfers copped dumpings like this as a matter of course-they snorted out half a glass of salty snot and swam out for the next round. But he was done.
He walked in, looked down and saw the blood drip from his chin onto his chest, into the sand stuck to his shiny black stomach hairs. Putting on his shirt, he saw the bleeding burns on his forearms and elbows.
Laurie was up when he got back.
‘Jesus, what happened to you?’
‘Nothing. Got dumped.’
‘You need something on that.’
No concern in her voice, she knew blood, she ran a big catering kitchen, they cut themselves all the time, bled into the yellowfin tuna, the Wagyu beef, the swimmer-crab meat, the twice-cooked duck, they added blood of all groups to the finger food, an exquisite coin-sized portion cost five dollars.
In the shower, he studied his knees, his forearms, his elbows. He found antiseptic cream in the medicine cabinet, put it on, winced.
They had breakfast at a café-cold scrambled eggs, cold bacon, cold toast, lukewarm terrible coffee. They read the papers, talked about the kids in a listless way, he remarked on things, she wasn’t interested in his views. She had been once. He tried to remember when that was. They bought food at a supermarket, at a delicatessen. Laurie suggested the beach. He said no. One humiliation a day was enough.
She changed, went down, and he sat on the balcony and switched on his mobile-a dozen messages. It took more than an hour to sort things out. He switched off, dozed in a chair.
Laurie came back in the early afternoon, she hadn’t taken a key, she rang. He opened the door. She was in shorts and a T-shirt, skin pink beneath a film of sweat, oil, nineteen again.
She looked and his right hand moved to her cheek.
She pulled her mouth in distaste. ‘God, you look like you’ve been in a fight,’ she said.
As his hand fell, he knew to the millimetre how far apart they were.
He turned away. The afternoon passed. Laurie went out twice, made calls. They started conversations several times, her mobile rang.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘If I can, you can kill that fucking thing.’
‘You think I don’t want to?’ she said. ‘Chris’s got the flu, Bobby’s on a job, there’s no one there knows what to do.’
In the hot, still afternoon, a north-easter came up, the horizon vanished and rain came in short, violent bursts.