Helga's Web

Also by Jon Cleary

Remember Jack Hoxie

Season of Doubt

The Long Pursuit

The High Commissioner

The Pulse of Danger

The Fall of an Eagle

A Flight of Chariots

Forests of the Night

The Country of Marriage

North from Thursday

Justin Bayard

The Sundowners

You Can’t See Around Corners

Monday, December 9

“She’s not a Catholic,” Brigid Malone had said. “She’s not even an Australian!”

“At least she’s white,” Scobie Malone had said. “I could . be marrying a black Zambian Methodist.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you,” said Mrs. Malone, conceding nothing. “What’s a Zambian?”

“Someone from Zambia. In Africa.”

“Oh, one of them new places-” Dismissing three and a half million Zambians of all denominations, even the Catholics, Mrs. Malone turned back to her ironing. She never read the cable pages in her daily newspaper. The rest of the world was turning upside down day by day, but she neither knew nor cared about it; what mattered was only what turned up on Sydney’s doorstep and when it did she would read about it in the home news pages. She had given up reading the Catholic Weekly because lately it seemed to be full of nothing but what was going on in Rome.

“Well, is it still on tonight?” Ialone said. “I mean, can I bring her home to meet you?”

“Bring her home for tea,” said Mrs. Malone, slamming the iron onto one of Scobie’s shirts as if he were in it.” But don’t expect me to whip up any of that foreign muck for her. It’ll be chops. And I’ll make a trifle.” Which was something, Malone thought: it could have been rhubarb tart.

“I’ll bring a bottle of wine.”

“Please yourself. Don’t expect me to drink any of it.”

Malone grinned at his mother behind her back. At least she was consistent: her prejudices extended to everything. She had lived all her life here in this same terrace house in a narrow street in Erskineville; she had borne him in the same bed where she herself had come into the world. No, not the world: her world. Long ago, long before she had married, she had drawn her boundaries and he would never know why. There had never been any desire to escape from this tenement district, to come to know what was outside and to understand it. And when the Italians and the Greeks, foreigners, had moved into Erskineville in the immigration years since the war, she had shut the front door of her house, which in Scobie’s childhood had always stood wide open, and retreated still further into the iron lung of her bigotry. Malone had learned that the only way to tolerate her narrow, myopic outlook was to smile at it. Sometimes the smile had to be forced, but it was better than getting angry with her. He did not want her to shut the door against him.

“I’ll see you tonight, then.” He looked at the shrivelled back of her neck bent over the ironing table and wondered what she would do if he kissed it. He was an only child, but he couldn’t remember when he and his mother had last gone through the usual gestures of affection. Her prejudices ran even to a hatred of demonstrative sentiment. She kissed her rosary three times a day without embarrassment, but he had never seen her kiss his father.

“Six o’clock. Your father likes his tea on the table when he comes in.”

Malone wondered how Lisa would like that: dinner at six o’clock. In the month she had been back in Sydney she still lived to the pattern that had been established for her when she had been private secretary to the Australian High Commissioner in London: dinner at eight, wine on the table, conversation over the coffee cups. She was in for a shock tonight when his mother grabbed the plates as soon as the last mouthful of trifle had been eaten. Any after-dinner conversation in the Malone house was held at the kitchen sink above the rattle of dishes and the clink of cutlery.

“You can pick up your ironing tonight.” Every week he took his washing to a laundromat, then brought it home to be ironed. He had once objected that he was imposing on her, but his mother had only got angry and grabbed the washing from him as if it were hers and not his. Since then he had come to recognize that it was some sort of bond between them, just as was the weekly visit to clean out his flat at King’s Cross. It was the only way she knew of showing love.

He went out of the house, got into his car and drove away from the memories that still clung to him so stubbornly. When he had been growing up in this street there had been only one or two cars parked outside the terrace houses and those had been third- or fourth-hand, bought cheaply and made to go only by the ingenuity of their new owners. Now the street was lined with cars, none of them older than his own 1964 Holden and some of them looking brand-new. Not everyone in Australia was affluent, but hire purchase at least allowed some appearance of it; most of the population was infatuated with prosperity, even if it could not afford it. Con and Brigid Malone, both of whom had been brought up to believe that the hire purchase man was a relative of the Devil, were the only couple in the street without a car. When Malone came occasionally on a Sunday to take them for a drive, Brigid Malone boarded his car as if she were heading for a wedding or a funeral: it was an occasion. Con Malone, more exposed to the world than his wife, would get into the car with no show of expression at all; but the impassivity of his face was intended for the neighbours and not for Scobie. It was bad enough having a policeman for a son; it would not do to show that he was even on good terms with such a wayward bastard.

As he drove down the street this morning Malone was aware of women and one or two men standing at their front doors staring silently at him as if he were a plague-carrier. Maybe I should turn in my badge, he thought, and start carrying a leper’s clapper. Even the Italians and Greeks living in the street, not knowing him, never having spoken to him, had learned to suspect him. Cop-hating was a good starting point for assimilation in Australia. We have our uses, Malone thought; and clashed his gears as he slowed to round the corner of the street. The people at their front doors only smiled and shook their heads: the bloody coppers didn’t even know how to drive properly.

Now, an hour later, Malone sat in the detectives’ room at Sydney’s Y Division and once again wondered why he had become a policeman. His mother had prayed that he might become a priest, but God in his wisdom had recognized a religious no-hoper when he saw one: the Church had enough to worry about without recruiting a fellow who had trouble staying on his knees longer than two minutes. When Malone had come home and announced he had joined the police force, his mother had retired to her room and her rosary and his father had gone up to the local pub and got blind weeping drunk. In those circumstances it was difficult to believe that he had been driven to his decision by any sense of vocation or spiritual message visited upon him by the Police Commissioner. It had been a job and nothing else.

“Why did you join the force, Russ?”

Russ Clements looked up from his betting calculations. “I won another hundred and forty dollars Saturday. I’m beginning to wish I’d never become a cop. I’ve won fifteen hundred bloody dollars on the horses this past three months. Who’s gunna believe I’m not taking something under the counter?” He shook his big crew-cropped head, anguished at the thought of being a wealthy cop. Twenty-six years old and six feet two, he wasn’t yet old enough or strong enough to carry the weight of public opinion; Malone had noticed that it was the old and the atrophied who best stood up to public abuse. They had learned the uses of indifference. “Why’d I join? Christ, I dunno. The bird I was going out with at the time, she didn’t talk to me for a month after.”

“You still going out with her?”

“After six years? You’re kidding.” Clements shook his head again, staring at the blackmail note in his hand: three winners, all at good odds. “It buggered up my social life completely. That was why I took to betting on the nags and dogs, just for something to do. I’d rather be in bed any day with a bird. People will take that, it’s natural. But a cop with a bank account with money in it, they won’t go for that.”