The Bat (17 page)

“Bah, you Scandinavians are all alike. Can’t let go until you’ve poured so much booze down you you’re useless for … yeah, you know what I mean.”

Harry smiled at the lowered eyelids. “Don’t flirt with me, Otto. I’m a lost cause.”

“Hopeless hetero, eh?”

Harry nodded.

“Let me buy you a drink anyway, Handsome. What d’you fancy?” He ordered a grapefruit juice for Harry and a Bloody Mary for himself. They toasted and Otto downed half the cocktail in one go.

“The only thing that helps with love’s sorrows,” he said,
draining the rest, shivering, ordering another and eyeing Harry. “So, you’ve never had sex with a man? Perhaps we’ll have to do something about that one day.”

Harry could feel his earlobes getting hot. How could this gay clown make him, a fully grown man, so embarrassed that he looked like a Brit after six hours on a Spanish beach?

“Let’s make a tasteless and wonderfully vulgar wager,” Otto said, his eyes glinting with amusement. “I bet one hundred dollars that this soft, slim hand of yours will have felt my vitals before you return to Norway. Do you dare to accept the bet?”

Otto clapped his hands at the sight of Harry’s scarlet face.

“If you insist on handing out money, fine by me,” Harry said. “But my understanding, Otto, was that you were suffering from love’s sorrows. Shouldn’t you be at home thinking about other things rather than tempting straight men?” He regretted what he had said at once. He had never liked being teased.

Otto withdrew his hand and shot him a wounded glare.

“Sorry, I was just blabbing. I didn’t mean it,” Harry said.

Otto shrugged. “Anything new in the murder case?” he asked.

“No,” Harry said, relieved they had changed the subject. “Looks as if we may have to search beyond her circle of acquaintances. Did you know her, by the way?”

“Everyone who hangs out here knew Inger.”

“Did you ever talk to her?”

“Well, I suppose I must have exchanged a few words with her. She was a bit complicated for my taste.”

“Complicated?”

“She turned the heads of quite a few hetero customers. Dressed provocatively, sent long stares and smiled a bit too long if that could get her extra tips. That kind of thing can be dangerous.”

“Do you think any of the customers might have …?”

“I just mean you might not have to look too far, Officer.”

“What are you implying?”

Otto cast his eyes around and finished his drink. “I’m all mouth, Handsome.” He made to go. “Now I’ll do what you suggested. Go home and think about other things. Wasn’t that what the doctor prescribed?”

He waved to one of the stole-clad boys behind the bar, who brought him a brown paper bag.

“Don’t forget the show!” Otto called over his shoulder as he left.

Harry was sitting on a stool at Birgitta’s bar discreetly watching her work. He followed her quick hands pulling pints, changing money and mixing drinks, the way she moved behind the bar because all the distances were second nature: from the beer tap to the counter to the till. He saw her hair slide in front of her face, the quick flick to remove it and her occasional gaze across the customers to spot new orders—and Harry.

The freckled face lit up, and he felt his heart throbbing in his chest, heavy, wonderful.

“Friend of Andrew’s came in a while ago,” she said, walking over to Harry. “He visited him in hospital and wanted to say hello. He asked for you. Think he’s still sitting here somewhere. Yes, there he is.”

She pointed to a table and Harry recognized the elegant black man at once. It was Toowoomba, the boxer. He went over to his table.

“Am I disturbing you?” he asked, and was met with a broad smile.

“Not at all. Sit down. I was sitting here to see if an old mate of mine would show up.”

Harry sat down.

Robin “The Murri” Toowoomba continued to smile. For some reason one of those embarrassing pauses sprang up that no one admits is embarrassing, but which actually is.

Harry said hurriedly: “I was talking to one of the Crow people today. What tribe do you belong to?”

Toowoomba regarded him with surprise in his eyes. “What do you mean, Harry? I’m from Queensland.”

Harry could hear how foolish his question sounded. “Sorry, that was a stupid question. My tongue has a tendency to move faster than my brain today. I didn’t mean to … I don’t know a great deal about your culture. I was wondering if you came from a particular tribe … or something like that.”

Toowoomba patted him on the shoulder. “I’m just teasing you, Harry. Relax.” He laughed quietly and Harry felt even more stupid.

“You react like most whities,” Toowoomba said. “What else can you expect? It goes without saying that you’re full of prejudice.”

“Prejudice?” Harry could feel himself getting irritated. “Have I said anything—”

“It’s not what you say,” Toowoomba said. “It’s what you unconsciously expect of me. You imagine you’ve said something wrong, and it doesn’t occur to you that I’m intelligent enough to take into account that you’re a foreigner. I don’t suppose you would be personally offended if Japanese tourists in Norway didn’t know everything about your country? Such as your king being called Harald.” Toowoomba winked. “It’s not just you, Harry. Even white Australians are hysterically cautious about saying something wrong. That’s what’s so paradoxical. First of all, they take our people’s pride, and when it’s gone they’re scared to death of treading on it.”

He sighed and opened his large white palms. Like turning a flounder, Harry thought.

Toowoomba’s warm, deep voice seemed to vibrate on its frequency, rendering it unnecessary to speak loudly to drown all the noise around them.

“But you tell me something about Norway, Harry. I’ve read it’s supposed to be very beautiful there. And cold.”

Harry talked. About fjords, mountains and people living between the two. About unions, suppression, Ibsen, Nansen and Grieg. And about the country to the north that saw itself as enterprising and forward-looking, but seemed more like a banana republic. Which had forests and harbors when the Dutch and English needed timber, which had waterfalls when electricity was invented and which, best of all, discovered oil outside its front door.

“We’ve never made Volvo cars or Tuborg beer,” Harry said. “We’ve just exported our nature and avoided thinking. We’re a nation with golden hair up our arses,” Harry said, not even trying to select an appropriate English idiom.

Then he told him about Åndalsnes, a tiny settlement up in Romsdalen Valley, surrounded by high mountains which were so beautiful that his mother had always said that that was where God had started when He was creating the world, and that He had spent so long on Romsdalen that the rest of the world had to be done posthaste to be finished by Sunday.

And fishing with his father on the fjord early in the morning, in July, and lying on the shore and smelling the sea—while the gulls screamed and the mountains stood like silent, immovable guards around their little kingdom.

“My father’s from Lesjaskog, a little settlement further up the valley, and he and my mother met at a village dance in Åndalsnes. They always talked about moving back to Romsdalen when they retired.”

Toowoomba nodded and drank beer, and Harry sipped at another grapefruit juice. He could feel the acidity in his stomach.

“I wish I could tell you where I come from, Harry. It’s
just that people like me have no real connection to a place or a tribe. I grew up in a hut under a freeway outside Brisbane. No one knows which tribe my father came from. He came and went so fast that no one had time to ask. And my mother doesn’t give two hoots where she comes from, so long as she can scrape together enough money for a bottle of wine. Being a Murri will have to do.”

“And what about Andrew?”

“Hasn’t he told you?”

“Told me what?”

Toowoomba withdrew his hands. A deep frown settled between his eyes. “Andrew Kensington’s even more rootless than I am.”

Harry didn’t question him any further, but after another beer Toowoomba returned to the topic.

“I suppose I ought to let him tell you this himself, because Andrew had a very special upbringing. You see, he belongs to the family-less generation of Aboriginals, the Stolen Generation.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a long story. Everything revolves around a bad conscience. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century the politics surrounding Indigenous peoples has been governed by the authorities’ bad conscience about the terrible treatment we’ve received. Just a shame that good intentions don’t always lead to good results. If you want to govern a nation you have to understand it.”

“And the Aboriginal people haven’t been understood?”

“There have been different phases, different policies. I belong to the forcibly urbanized generation. After the Second World War the authorities considered they had to change earlier policies and try to assimilate rather than isolate Indigenous inhabitants. They tried to do that by controlling where we lived and even who we married. Many were sent to towns to adapt to European urban culture.
The results were catastrophic. Within a very short time we topped all the wrong statistics: alcoholism, unemployment, marital break-ups, prostitution, criminality, violence, drugs—you name it, we were there. Aboriginals were and have always been Australia’s social losers.”

“And Andrew?”

“Andrew was born before the war. At that time the authorities’ policy was to ‘protect’ us as though we were some kind of endangered species. Therefore opportunities for owning land or looking for work were limited. But the most bizarre legislation was the law allowing authorities to remove a child from an Aboriginal mother if there was a suspicion that the father was not Aboriginal. I may not have the world’s most pleasant story about my origins, but at least I have one. Andrew has nothing. He has never seen his parents. When he was born the authorities collected him and put him in a children’s home. All he knows is that after they had robbed his mother, she was found dead in a bus shelter in Bankstown, fifty kilometers north of the children’s home, and no one knew how she had got there or what the causes of her death were. The white father’s name was withheld until Andrew no longer cared.”

Harry struggled to absorb all of this. “Was that really legal? What about the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?”

“None of that came until after the war. And don’t forget that Aboriginal politics had the best of intentions. The goal was to preserve the culture, not to destroy it.”

“What happened to Andrew then?”

“They realized he was academic and sent him to a private school in England.”

“I thought Australia was too egalitarian to send children to private schools.”

“All this was administered and paid for by the authorities. I suppose the intention was that Andrew should stand
as a shining example of a political experiment that had otherwise caused so much pain and so many human tragedies. On his return, he went to Sydney University. That was when they started to lose control of him. He ended up in trouble, had a reputation for being violent and his grades suffered. My understanding is there was an unhappy love affair somewhere in the picture, a white woman who left him because her family was not very enthusiastic, but Andrew has never shown much interest in talking about it. It was, nevertheless, a difficult period in his life, and it could easily have been worse than it was. While he was in England he learned to box—he claimed that was how he had survived boarding school. In Sydney he took up boxing again and when he was offered the chance to travel with Jim Chivers he dropped out of university and got away for a while.”

“I’ve just seen him box,” Harry said. “He hasn’t forgotten much.”

“In fact, he’d only thought of boxing as a break from his studies, but he was successful with Chivers, the press began to show some interest and he carried on. When he boxed his way through to the final of the Australian championships, there were even a couple of professional agents from the USA over to have a look at him. However, something happened in Melbourne the night before the final. They were at a restaurant, and it was claimed that Andrew tried it on with the girlfriend of the other finalist. His name was Campbell, and he was with a nice-looking North Sydney girl who later became Miss New South Wales. There was a fight in the kitchen and everyone there, Andrew, Campbell’s trainer, the agent and another bloke, smashed everything in sight.

“They found Andrew hanging over the washbasin with a split lip, cuts to his forehead and a sprained wrist. No one was reported—that’s probably why the rumor spread he’d made a pass at Campbell’s girlfriend. At all events, Andrew had to withdraw from the final, and afterward his boxing
career seemed to flag. To be fair, he did knock out a couple of good boxers in some tournaments, but the press had lost interest and the professional agents never showed up again.

“Bit by bit he stopped boxing at tournaments—another rumor had it he had started drinking, and after one tournament on the west coast he was asked to leave the Chivers team, apparently because he had inflicted serious injuries on some amateurs. After that he disappeared. It’s been difficult to get out of him exactly what he was doing, but at any rate he was drifting aimlessly around Australia for a couple of years until he went back to university.”

“So boxing came to an end?” Harry said.

“Yes,” Toowoomba replied.

“What happened then?”

“Well.” Toowoomba signaled that he wanted the bill. “Andrew was probably more motivated when he went back to studying and for a while things went well. But it was the early 1970s, hippies, party time and free love, and he may well have been taking various substances which weren’t helpful to his studies, and his exam results were so-so.”

He chuckled to himself.

“So one day Andrew woke up, got out of bed, looked at himself in the mirror and took stock. He had a terrible hangover, a black eye—God knows where from—probably a growing addiction to certain chemical compounds, and was over thirty without any qualifications. Behind him lay a ruined career as a boxer and before him, to put it mildly, an uncertain future. So what do you do then? You apply to Police College.”