Who Sings for Lu? (18 page)

‘Best value cash raffle in Sydney, guys.’ Deano, to a bunch of workers in steel-cap boots, rolled down coveralls, shorts, singlets and teeshirts, and working men’s big beer thirsts, an eye for a punt. And his raffle did offer first, second and third prizes out of thirty tickets at ten bucks a shot. Two-fifty of the $300 went back in prizes, a real fair raffle, some would say plain dumb. But boy, it turned over rapidly, soon selling the next one.

Reached into their black-edged shorts and coverall pockets for a note to buy a favourite number or just said, gimme a ticket, Deano mate. Be lucky this time, he’d say. As for you, Tommy, you must’ve won five the last week? Six, Deano. Gimme three tickets, old mate.

Mate, old mate, buddy, pal, friend they called him and easily too, since they meant it, he had the charm easily spread over him like marge, he wasn’t a threat and, importantly, wasn’t out to rip or bludge off them. Mate, your raffle gives fair value and one in ten odds of a prize, everyone said. Buy a Lotto ticket and the mugs dare to hope at odds of five million to one. More chance of being struck dead from a nun playing a witch on a broomstick and landing on you when her juice runs out.

Three raffles an hour at busy times, two or just one the quieter times, pay the publican half the profits, it brought in $350 a night
average profit. Then there was the day trade, of night-shift workers and the soaks, it changed to a ten-ticket raffle at $5, one prize of $30, the publicans of the dozen establishments on the circuit taking no cut as old Owen steadily drank the modest profit of the day sales: all day he stayed on beer, downing a prodigious amount. Had a punt on the horses, about evened out, but never played the pokies, no challenge he said, just a replacement for social misfits and the company they couldn’t attract.

Then he went on to the cheapest whisky, still talking reasonable sense and sometimes real interesting stuff came out his rubbery lips, till about the hour striking 7 pm, then it was downhill to his being put to bed about 10 or 11, or just steered home and left to sleep where he slumped or fell.

The silly old bugger had taken to telling Deano he loved him like a son, and wasn’t their relationship turning into something good? Deano conceding it was.

‘You’ve got a bank account, you save two hundred a day, usually more, save your butt from prison —’ Always Deano insisted he didn’t take part in that, and always when Owen got drunk he reverted to saying he saved Deano from a life of crime. Over and over he’d repeat this, typical drunk.

Ice clinking in a glass around 5 am said Owen was up having his first pick-me-up — he liked a Bloody Mary but anything would do, a can of beer, shot of whisky, and after a few shakes and tremors, whammo. His brain back on full alert. Deano got up now and then to witness this, or just couldn’t sleep from too much thinking about it, the Chadwick woman incident and/or how his life had changed. Half the time Owen would go back to sleep for a few hours once he’d had his top-up, straighten-out, whatever he felt like calling it. Not as if they had a regular job to get to every morning except Sunday, everyone’s day off.

The ritual was, Deano cooked a big brunch, being Owen’s main and only meal of the day, bacon, sausages, lamb chops sometimes, fish, with eggs and sliced raw or fried tomato, white toast, washed down with beers for Owen and tea or instant coffee for Deano. They’d count the money from the previous day’s trading, keeping a $1000 float. Deano
got all the rest less some starting money for Owen’s drinking; on the way to their first pub he banked it in the O & D Enterprises Ltd account. Not a day when they didn’t have a good surplus, and a Monday morning banking for Deano could be as much as eight, nine hundred, once it was thirteen hundred. And he didn’t miss Jay and Bron one bit. Lu, yeah, like a sister.

At the pubs on their circuit he had near zero chance of running into any of them as the patrons were from another era, a different type of man and woman, whose own offspring were likely to repeat the limited pattern of their fathers’ lives, dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who had no notion of business risk nor wide sense of the future being one bit different or better or more interesting, let alone challenging. Unlike himself, Deano now realised. He’d hit rock bottom once, even twice, but now maybe he had the beginnings of a new life. Didn’t know what, just something different.

Try as he might, Sandy Tulloch could never summon up the feeling he was master of all he surveyed from the top of his twenty-three-storey building. The massive sprawl of lights all atwinkle headed towards the uninhabited black, and then the Blue Mountains, visible in the day and on rare nights with a full moon outlining them. Suburbia. Jerry Springer territory he called it, full of urban dwellers in their seething, struggling ordinariness. Trash. But even that didn’t convince him of his own superiority.

He just felt this permanent sense of a sadness that ranged from slight to worryingly intense, a qualification that hung over all his money and the money that kept pouring in, the lucrative deals which, by definition, only came to him if they were a steal, made big chunks of cash profit; he acquired stakes in companies that had short-term
cashflow
problems the main trading banks wouldn’t look at but his capital and firm management could and did fix, charged higher than
bank-rate
interest and took a minimum one-third ownership or he’d walk. He owned a whole raft of diverse companies, had inherited a business he’d sold for an offer he couldn’t refuse, and then last year with the world in economic chaos the purchaser came back willing to sell at half the price. Sandy’s best offer was a third of what he’d been paid, take it or
leave it. They took. He had it all. And yet …

And yet no man has anything. At least I know that.

It wasn’t happiness he sought at any rate, thought it a ridiculous notion to have as a goal, a bit like a certain marque car that, once acquired, was meant to reflect he’d made it. Bullshit. It was about the money game, and fancy toys just kept score.

Of his children — two sons and a daughter — Sophie the only one showing a business leaning, but up against her father’s prejudice, she called it. He called it statistical argument — about women not being naturals at business. Big business. However, if she proved him wrong he would be delighted. Stupid feminist outlook. As if rational men were blind to when women did actually achieve intellectually or in business, at anything. He loved women, for Chrissake.

The view of Darling Harbour, the artistic form of the Anzac Bridge lit up, those support wires strung from the straddling concrete pillars a splendid sight. This west view was the one he preferred, but he had a two-hundred and seventy-degree choice, and the north claimed the fabled Opera House. Sometimes he changed his mind, would stand like this late at night taking it in, contemplating. Planning. Fighting off what felt like melancholy. Or something worse.

Now refilling his wine glass with a 1989 Grange Hermitage, a further reminder that life was never as good as it seemed: here he was, drinking one of the world’s premier reds, and this Wally-no-mates was all alone in his castle. Might as well be drinking from a cardboard cask.

But the world was never as bad it seemed. If he could only convey that to Riley Chadwick. Sure, it was understandable the man wanted to engage private detectives to find his daughter’s violators; Sandy would feel the same. But private dicks were failed dicks, far as he was concerned. Sly types who wanted to work half the hours a cop did for four times the pay, lazy shits. The publicity this case had would surely spur the cops on to catching the culprits, eventually.

Poor Riles in some bad head space not to have made a single telephone call, let alone a visit, in outrage at losing his property. Stupid bastard, letting emotions take over his life. Gave a man no choice. The contract said quite clearly that should any partner act in a manner that had adverse effect and/or risk to the business, then the takeover clause
applied. He’d get a pay-out, just on different terms.

The investment itself was neither here nor there. In the foreground Sandy could see two buildings he owned that were worth three times his fifteen-million-dollar stake in Galahrity Estate — before the worldwide economic crisis, five times. It was the principle: nothing of a man’s private life must interfere with or adversely influence his business. The show must go on no matter what. Learned that from his father, who would roll right over his own children if they got in the way of running his business.
Old bugger would be proud to see me extract $400 million from the business he founded, and going from strength to strength.

The stud farm was a relatively hands-off investment of hobbyist interest, rather than being about money. He loved race horses. Beautiful creatures, works of living art. He also loved winning. And owning things. Ego was part of it, of course. Why the hell not?

Reminded now of Anna Chadwick.
Good kid, Anna, with a bright future — still has, if she’s got character.
Felt for her, by hell he did. But objectively thinking, a rape, even sodomy and assault, were not
life-ending
.

Sorry, kid, but they aren’t. Ask the Jews who went through the Holocaust. There’s shit happens, and BIG shit happens. Then there’s DEAD shit.

Sandy went to clear his telephone messages, found one from —

Riley. Well, well, well.

‘Sandy, I signed the contract so I know the clause you invoked. Nothing to say right now, the space I’m in. I just trust, still, you’re a fair man.’

Fair? Wasn’t he a scorpion, born to sting? Saw his reflection in the window.
You’re getting too large, Sandy Tulloch. Lucky money is a blindfold with the women. Damn you, Chadwick, you’ve got under my skin.
Sandy felt for what the man was going through. Hell, it wasn’t the Holocaust, for Riley Chadwick or his daughter. Still didn’t turn his whole heart to ice.

She looks in the mirror — every few minutes — and despairs. Wonders why she doesn’t remember Anna doing it. How could her big sister have avoided this awful place called Self in her own teenage years? Seems the best refuge is in sound, music as loud as she can bear. Katie doesn’t know why. Not as if she listens in ecstasy to every note or can hear and separate out the different instruments like Anna could. For a while she was confused about why they — sisters raised exactly the same, though with a bit of favouritism from Dad weighting Anna’s side — could be so different. Even the bloody sun shining had different meaning to each.

She’s in the endless forever of just being alive and no one understanding her, blind to everyone and everything, each and every one of those horses she’s been told she and her sis will one day inherit — as if she wants anything to do with the damn things, they’re scary, difficult, dangerous even to the experienced handlers, one false move and you’re seriously injured, could be killed. So Daddy spends over two million bucks on a horse and gives half its name and half each ownership to her and Anna. Whoopee. Like she wants to go and watch it race one day? Give her the million and she’d go to —

To some overseas big city and change myself. Maybe I’ll just have one big party with my friends that my olds don’t approve of. Mum says they’re common, Dad says they’re from bad bloodlines he’s seen the type, they’re
in every society, ‘bottom of the heapers and always will be’ is how he puts it. Well, really?

So who’s
not
following in her big sister’s footsteps and going to private boarding school in Sydney then? Her name starts with K. For Killer Bitch.
Fuck you all. I love my mates.

School sucked, always did. From about ten or eleven, realising it just wasn’t her. Lessons and teachers. Boring lessons and stupid, irritating teachers. But ‘Oh no, you must get an education, sweetheart.’ So said the olds. So they started sucking too. Life sucked.

If she had a handsome boyfriend it would be all right. Maybe. But who would want her, the ugly sister? A hundred visits a day to the bathroom mirror behind locked door just wouldn’t change the image she saw, or the one she wanted thrown back at her. Then came the growing breasts and hair down there. God. The big bleed. Double God. And a stirring that soon declared itself as sexual desire. But for what — a penis in her? Like Raimona in a mare? Disgusting. Yet a wanting just the same. Self-discovery too, and
Please please God don’t let anyone know I’ve been doing it to myself.

All this stuff and she feels half asleep, but then again so alert her family might think she’s on something. Like pills or smoking shit. Her dislike of her parents grows into hatred. Even Mum. Can’t share that with big sis whenever she comes home, can she? Can’t tell Anna that maybe she was born, like, a gothic personality. Or at the very least born an artist, even though she didn’t draw, paint, sculpt or take an interest in arty things. Just the state of being an artist, like different, original, even special in a peculiar kind of way.
Sigh
.

Plunging into loud,
sexual
gangsta rap, sticking posters of
hip-hop
stars all over her walls, seeing Mum’s silent disapproval at all this wild niggah flesh depicted in muscled ebony and sneering, glowering gangsta attitude, here Downunder, from New York City, Detroit, Chicago to a town not bigger than one blink in your hidden little valley. Widden they named it — should have been called Hidden. Where the horses outnumber the humans five to one. As she, all alone, mourns for Biggie and Tupac, the murdered gangsta stars, like they’re her late long-lost cousins — no, soul brothers. Truly how she feels.

Not just male black rappers from America either. Dancing — or
trying to — like Kat Deluna, in her bedroom to the recorded video of the marvellous singer–dancer, doing okay but how can a white girl from Saddlesville compete with a city ghetto-raised Latina fed dancing and music and rhythm as mother’s milk?

She downloads songs from American rap artists that further alienate her. Yo pooty, yo fine ass. Cruises the music channels for rap videos. And when she knows ain’t no one in da house she pulls up on YouTube a video of Snoop Dogg or Usher, John Legend, and she masturbates.
Oh God, Snoop, Ush, Johno,
do
me
.

She
loves
those big bad black men talking of nothing but sex, doing it in every position no lady ever knew possible till he, whoever has the stage, came along. Including putting the big It there. Anal. Puddit ever’where, in the jargon.

Then the real thing comes along and it’s her sister on the receiving end. She comes home a totally changed person, raped there and there, beaten up, robbed. And Katie watches her, sits beside her bed for hours on end, as Anna slowly wastes away in this state of haunted silence.

Came home robbed of her personality. They took her beauty, her voice always showing her intelligence and her kindness and considerate nature, and dumped her back in her bedroom a broken stranger who, whenever Katie entered the room, would turn on her side and say not one word. If she’d looked she’d have seen her little sister weeping for her.

When the shit went down with Dad, even Katie felt sorry for him. What had he done? Sure, he had been in Sydney at the time and staying at his usual hotel across from Anna’s music school — and her attack took place right opposite in the Botanic Gardens, of all the things. Katie’s memory of Sydney came from a visit her parents had made her go on, including a visit to her future high school, stupid posh place.

But our dad didn’t hurt you, sis.
He would never do that, to either of us
. Hearing that glass Anna threw at Dad shattering against the wall. What if it had hit him?

The twin process of watching sister and father deteriorate, it was instant growing-up stuff all right. Her mother in contrast showing strength, trying to hold everyone together as well as the business just dumped by her father, as if all the preceding years of hard work had not taken place, as if his loyal staff meant nothing, not least Straw
Mathews, who was family. He had even walked away from Raimona, his mating programme for next season by now usually Riley’s entire focus till late every night and with early morning starts. What was he doing in Sydney? Engaging private detectives to do his own search for Anna’s attackers, it came back. Fat chance of finding them that way: that was what the police were for, they had the resources.

Her posters were coming down. And the music with the hard-core sexual lyrics? Well, how appropriate was that now? Seeing the fallout from such a crime against her only sibling, one she adored even if she’d not actually conveyed that to Anna, and suddenly her entire brain process changed. Before she knew it.

Katie hated horses. They turned on people for no reason, even those they’d known since they came out of their mother’s womb, ungrateful shits. Why would people invest so much money and time in them? Why would her father dedicate his life to raising them, study in every detail going back several generations, even if it did eventually make the family rich — or one stallion did? Tamed by, who else, but the child horse-whisperer herself. Her whole short life the younger sibling heard like a mantra, of Anna the miracle girl. Like, who cared? Katie didn’t. Or so she thought. Till she found out she loved her sister more than anyone, realised she had always admired Anna’s courage for how she boldly approached the exceptionally wild younger horses, admired everything about her.

With misunderstanding of why her father and Anna got on so well, because of her own different temperament and personality, Katie hadn’t really stewed over her sister’s status as favourite. Someone had to be. She had no need for extra parental attention; from young she had fantasised about her mother and father being tragically killed and she going to live with foster parents of a far more liberal outlook in Sydney or Melbourne, where there was action too, not this deadsville. Determined she was going to run away rather than be sent to a Sydney boarding school: to hell with that, she hated those snotty girls, the way Anna’s friends spoke you’d think they were from upper-class England. This was Australia for God’s sake.

Couldn’t stand her mother’s repressed ways, of never but
never
losing her cool, never shouting nor even raising her voice. Had never
seen her mother drunk, not even tiddly. God, she was straight. Katie hardly ever saw her father; he was out in all weathers on the farm, or in his office on the phone or buried in his pedigree books and files, out of town on business. But with rules around the house that felt so unfair, unnecessary and just plain stacked against her, she believed she lived in a household that had it in for her.

Now
that
Katie was dead.

The idea came after yet another session of sitting vigil in Anna’s bedroom, gagging on the stench even though their mother cleaned the room every day, the smell of a person going downhill, of a body losing weight, maybe rape smelt like that. Found herself wondering what would shake Anna out of it — oh, but of course. Had an idea that might just work, might just start Anna’s healing.

Claire’s own worries set aside to focus again on her elder daughter. Out there in the coming dusk with Anna in front on a farm buggy, in the free, the air still hot and lovely if alive with flies and dust and negative thoughts — and facts — trying to get back in the door. Feeling the child’s rigid reluctance, her protest back there not of voice but of struggle, the physical struggle Claire had to get her on to the damn vehicle and get her the hell out into fresh air instead of festering in her fetid own.

Without her other daughter’s suggestion it would not have happened. Though Claire asked that if Katie had need to watch, she keep herself out of sight, or this meeting might look planned, contrived. ‘Pray it works, my darling, for your sister’s sake.’

Arranged access with Straw, since strictly speaking it was Tulloch’s property. Straw muttered that if Sandy himself happened along and ordered Claire and Anna off the property he would ‘break his fat neck’.

Claire pointing, naming horses, reminded of the sheer exhilaration of being near these magnificent animals. Even the paddock with the tired old specially loved mares on the slow die. And the memorably difficult. You remember Ophalion, how stroppy she got if you approached on her wrong side? No response from Anna and nor did she expect any. Hasn’t Luckdippity aged well? That’s her foal to Rai, the colt at the fence, big sook crying for mummy.

‘We’ll go and see Anna-Katie too.’ Anna-Katie, the indulgent
father’s purchase. ‘She’s almost ready to race, darling. She was a good buy, you’ll see. Did you know if you mate …’

Talking. Spill talk she called it, when you wanted to say something so much of such importance that the opposite spilled out. Spibble, a new word she invented right this instant.

An older mare in a paddock with the young fillies, a gelding in with the weanling colts, to have adult leadership, even discipline, in the immature company. Next to them, several paddocks in a row, yearlings in preparation for the sales. She loved this place, what her husband had built — no, not going there. Nor revealing to her elder daughter it was no longer theirs, the entire operation lost and her father with it. Why pour guilt on a girl in this fragile condition?

The prime mover, as some called him, regarded it as his paddock and intruders entered at their own risk. Straw and Millie, the trainer’s assistant, were exceptions, and even Riley knew he risked injury from the imperious stallion, though through sheer willpower he had managed to have a more or less equal relationship with the beast. The jockeys who had ridden Raimona to victory were not exempt from his vicious temper: he had no memory of his riders, just a hostile attitude to all but three people, and Riley on permanent warning never to turn his back. His disdain for man and fellow beast was part of what made him. Raimona. Alone in his kingdom, quietly grazing.

Claire surprised herself by crying out, ‘Look! There he is! Our snorting, foot-stamping, leave-me-the-fuck-alone super-stud!’ When she never swore in front of her children, hardly swore at all.

Wished she could lean right round to see if her daughter responded. Anna moved not. Emaciated thing she was, a mother could feel her bones through her dressing gown. Why?
Why
?

No, don’t go there. Stay being a mother.

Off she got, buggy idling, to unhitch the gate. ‘Oh, just look at him, Anna.’ At the big horse snorting, pawing the ground, readying to see intruders off his domain.

Drove the buggy through, got off and latched the gate. Could hear the thump of Raimona’s hooves nearing. Not at a gallop, at an assertive walk. His aggressive, territorial whinny. Before hell let loose.

Claire turning in time to see him stop. Sniff. Roll his head. Twist
his royal neck. Blow several times — could be a whale exhaling. A wild creature this certainly was, if somewhat tempered by the frequent handling in carrying out his stud duties. Claire had once overhead a stable hand remarking, ‘Big Rai has eighty-grand orgasms, while my once-a-week costs me a grand a month of the missus shopping!’ Too raw by half. But true.

Then came the whinny, an extended sound expressing nothing but pure love. Not dissimilar to a mother’s love. For the same Anna, now as if reduced to the six-year-old who had tamed him. Had Katie figured that her traumatised sister’s mind was not so different from that of the child?

Over he came, at a trot. Seven hundred kilograms of muscle and memory and horse smell and breeding purity of his own. Words not necessary. Hardly even breath.

Come to your soul mate, Rai.

With Rai’s private paddock a distance from the road, Katie had watched the scene unfold through binoculars. The unlikely sight of the quad bike driven by her mother in jeans and a billowy top, and that emaciated form who once was Anna at the front. Winding round the carefully planned pathways, stopping, Mother pointing, Anna not moving, on they went. To stop, eventually, at Raimona’s paddock gate, Mother unlatching it. Well, it was some sight. Even through magnified lens.