The Family Men (4 page)

*

The girl ran up the platform just as the City train pulled in to the station. She was moving so quickly she nearly lost hold of her bag as she lunged for the carriage door, one strap slipping perilously off her shoulder as she attempted to reach for the handle before the train had fully stopped. At their last lesson Greta (her contact, the woman who'd recruited her) had warned her not to be late, the manager didn't like it, and now she wouldn't be, thank God. She was nervous enough already without having to incur the anticipated wrath of an as yet unseen boss.

The rest of her gear was well concealed in her overnight bag beneath her nightie and hair dryer. It was the kind of scam she and Cassie often pulled, covering for each other when alibis were required or confirmations needed to be given about time and place and who exactly would be going with them and to where, her mother having subjected her plans to the most cursory of examinations (nearly anything to sanction her leave pass for the evening, would forgive nearly any “acceptable” social engagement if it meant she and Ray, the fiancé, could have the house to themselves). Except that this time none of her circle had any idea where she was off to or with whom (they remained completely oblivious of Greta, the association having been kept separate from school life, confined to and around her part-time job). The girl was well aware that her mum would have a fit if she got wind of this current plan, even travelling on the train by herself being a major deal, men being on the lookout for girls like her, girls just like her, young, wide-eyed and alone, luring them with extravagant promises, before molesting them in some grisly basement or other then dumping them unceremoniously after slitting their nascent throats.

She touched her hand to her neck. A light perspiration dampened her skin as her pulse quickened, the anticipation that had been building for weeks peaking now that the end of football season was finally here. She was strangely cognisant that the train was a portal between two worlds, acting as a bridge of sorts between her old life, the one she had known so far (claustrophobic, suburban, dull) and this new one (cosmopolitan, exciting, cool), it being up to her whether or not she'd ever go back, the reality being that if she didn't make the effort to return, there was no natural way home, that from this point forward she could slip off the grid, lose herself in another realm altogether, and that she held the power to do this, that she was old enough finally to make herself disappear (if not literally driving away then perhaps securing a passage on the Indian Pacific, say, then finding a job in the west). The immensity of that fact gave her a moment's pause, knowing she was capable of anything, a feeling that she told herself was still excitement, still a happy feeling, dispatching the less seemly implications of the insight (the isolation, the loneliness, the feelings of those left behind) in a mother-like sigh as she glanced at her smudged reflection in the carriage window, scratched and penned as it was with the hastily scrawled graffiti of other teens' snatched attempts at garbled self-expression.
Bazza woz here. Mica hearts Steve. Boyz rule!
And diagonally across the top of them all in poorly executed 3D lettering,
MEGAN IS A SLUT
in thick red ink.

The train hurtled on, the skyline closing from station to station, transporting her into the waiting unknown.

*

As Sundays go, it is pretty quiet. Harry jogs along, skirting rubbish bins and kicking at the gravel, doing his best to lose himself in the activity, one foot in front of the other, like at training, the street a coastal idyll of gently swishing gums and chatty parrots, most of the young children still corralled inside for lunch as he fights the impulse to throw rocks through the windows of the quiet houses, the domestic lull setting off a torrent inside of him.

Again he asks himself how one day can look so different from the next. He doesn't understand. His brain feeling like a shaken Etch A Sketch. Rattly. Incomplete. He can hear his dad.
Bloody women
. Back in the day, his explanation for everything. That and needing a drink. Not that it is the girl's fault. Harry can't hold her responsible for his state of mind, however much he might like to blame her for it, the world feeling like it is closing in around him, getting smaller and smaller as he tries to shut himself off from everything she's touched, automatically ruling out possibilities as he attempts to control the spread, tying off the affected area as one might tourniquet a leg after a snakebite. No, he won't shake hands with boosters at the Members' Social. No, he won't go on the footy trip. No, he definitely isn't checking his email. Doesn't want to know what is being said about him online. All he wants is for everything to go back to the way it was before. Set. Straightforward. Family was family. The team was the team. Each day had its own rhythm and routine. If he played well he was happy, if he didn't, he wasn't. He didn't have to think about what it all meant or where he fitted in or what it was that he thought that he wanted. He didn't have to think about changing anything. He hates uncertainty. His whole life has been about following in other people's footsteps, sticking to a well-trodden path. He's spent so much time trying to march in lockstep, the last thing he covets now is being forced to determine his own direction.

At the oval, galahs congregate on the cricket pitch, picking over the newly sown grass seeds, their coarse screeching carrying across the field, competing with the low hum of the cars from the main road. He circles the pitch slowly, watching the way the birds stick closely to one another, never straying far from their flock.

A beat-up old kombi van burns past the ground, its speakers blaring. He looks to the galahs, expecting the flock to alight, a great spray of pink and grey feathers shot against the pastel sky, but the birds scarcely look up.

Complacent bastards, he thinks. He finishes tying his laces then gets up and makes directly for them, running hard right down the centre of the pitch.

He keeps running, past the primary school, past the units where the paddock used to be, and then instinctively turns left in the direction of Dean's. That's what he needs, the easy company of an old friend. Someone he's known his entire life. And he's known Dean for as long as he can remember. They went to pre-school together. His mother has pictures of them as kids sharing a bath, he in plastic sunglasses, Dean wearing his “frog” shower cap. Dean looked like a cockhead even then. The same lopsided grin. But that is a person you don't have to explain things to. Like why your phone is off or what you're doing with your life. Or the reason you don't want to talk to your coach. And why you don't care if it pisses him off. Laurie is a big boy. He'll get over it.

Dean's house is at the top of the road. As Harry slugs his way up the rise he doesn't immediately notice the song, his thoughts still tangled up with his confusion, the argument with his mother. He is supposed to be on holidays, isn't he? What difference does it make how he spends his time? But as he turns into the street the music catches up to him again, the insistent up-tempo beat, thrumming, never far away now, persistently refusing to let him put the incident out of his mind.

Loosen up my buttons, baby …
like the singer is asking for a favour.

The venue had been so close they could have walked there from the hotel, a large fancy establishment at the top end of the city with champagne in the minibar and thick white robes hanging on hooks inside the bathrooms. Harry and Matt had adjoining rooms, each with a king-size bed, a suite if they'd wanted it to be, separated by a locked connecting door.

Harry tried it a couple of times to be sure, then got his kit off and lay down on the floor (a wheat-coloured short-pile, soft under his skin), too late realising he hadn't drawn the curtains, the flicker of fluorescent-lit office windows visible even from his supine position. The ceiling was off-white with a texturised finish and copper fire sprinklers. He briefly entertained the fantasy of setting them off, of igniting a match beneath the smoke alarm and evacuating the building, envisioning the damp huddle of people in partial undress congregated on the footpath below, the disappointed actors of who knows how many trysts.

His tuxedo was sheathed in a plastic suit bag hanging in the empty wardrobe. He felt like an imposter as he slipped it on, the sleeves a margin too short, the legs a fraction too long. “We can have it adjusted,” Michelle had suggested, she could put in a word and it would be ready that same afternoon, but with a bird in the hand, Diana demurred (she didn't like to gamble on other people's largesse), insisted no one would be able to tell.

He scanned the refrigerator – Toblerone, pretzels, juice, wine, spirits – contemplated a shot of whiskey for courage, then slipped an unopened Jack Daniel's miniature in his pocket.

Time called on second thoughts.

Matt banged on the wall when he was ready to go. Harry took one more look at himself, checked the position of his tie, then headed out. They met in the brightly carpeted hallway, game faces on, more acquaintances than relatives, their only obvious familial commonality the infamous pedigree of their shared last name.

But you keep fronting …

“Shut up,” he says to the quiet road, briefly closing his eyes, curtains drawn against a dreary sun, meaning,
leave me alone, go away
,
stop
. Illogical, closing one's eyes to hush an imaginary sound; wouldn't covering one's ears make more sense? Hear no evil. Or is the seeing part and parcel of the hearing, all dimensions of the same memory? A single moment that has stripped him of his capacity for calm, his world having become a catastrophe of noise in that fraction of space in between the before and after. Why, why, why, why, what? Everything a question now, everything conditional. Prior to that night he hadn't spent too much time thinking about what he was thinking: he'd have an idea or not, he'd act on it or not. There was none of this friction, this battling within himself for a comfortable point of view – did he do the right thing, did he have any choice, what other options were available to him? – a commotion of ideas jockeying for prime position.

He feels light-headed. Almost there, he can barely catch his breath.

Half time in the changing rooms at the MCG, the whiteboard covered in a mess of instructions about percentages and marking contests, clearance rates and hard ball gets. “Think about your decisions and choices,” instructed Laurie, drawing an arrow between teamwork and execution, praising them for pulling together to close down the opposition's space, building momentum, not letting the home side play their game.

Johnno flung Harry another handful of snakes, the sweet candy smell briefly disarming, a pleasing juxtaposition of innocence met with experience, like the scent of baby powder on his crotch. “Be hungry, not greedy,” his teammate said, the two of them sitting towards the back as Laurie crapped on about the importance of finishing, the hardest part of the game, holding their nerve all the way to the end, sucking the sugary reptiles in and out, the sticky tails brushing their chins, competing to see who could cram in the most sweets in one go.

It could be like that when they were winning. The cracks papered over. Fun.

The more Harry presses himself forward the more enmeshed he feels in the past, a highlight reel of marks and interceptions, improbable goals and missed opportunities, scenes playing themselves back to him at random, thrown up from a personal catalogue that he pauses and rewinds, examining for something he might have overlooked, a useful detail, a clue, a way of fitting all his newly accented pieces together.

Playing pool, Dean breaking the rack, a crisp clean shot that scatters the triangle clean across the table. Harry seeing that he doesn't need everything to be perfect. He just wants a clear run at it for once, at whatever it is that he's pursuing. To be able to have a bash without all the annotations. But maybe that's all anybody wants; the secret to happiness, to be free of all the guff.

At the petrol station, on his way inside to pay he is twice stopped by women asking for autographs, smiling and giggling in their tight jeans, the types his mother calls baby home-wreckers, saying
pretty please, we're big fans
. The usual bunk. On and on until he gives them what they want. His name in Sharpie pen on the back of their t-shirts. He doesn't like it, is much happier talking to them when they don't know who he is (though when was the last time that happened?), the girls following him from the drinks fridge to the register, then back outside again. “He'll give you one too,” he says, indicating his friend scratching his balls by the cage of gas bottles. The girls laugh again, double entendre, as Dean happily steps forward and takes up the pen.

Where do they come from, these so-called fans? What is the point of this kind of devotion? During the season, female supporters gather around the gates after the matches hoping to catch the eyes of their favourite players as they exit the field. Harry has had more than one pair of underpants thrown in his direction. His brother could open a lingerie store.

Dean doesn't understand why it hasn't all gone to his head, the money and the women. “You have the best life. Tell me, how can you resist? All that desperate pussy.” But it has never been something that Harry has really focussed on, it has never felt like an end in itself, taking it all in stride – the one benefit of being in the family business, knowing it comes with the territory, like sprained fingers and blackened toe nails. And sycophantic fans who don't know when to back off. Though Dean doesn't know the half of it, not really, the lengths they'll go to in exchange for his conspicuous inarticulate company. “It's more like it's gone to
your
head,” Harry says, deflecting the question. “Your sick, twisted, fucked-up little head.” Thinking of his father again and that fateful evening, wondering if there had been music playing in his car, cocaine snorted right off the back of his hand, the sweet smell of too much Brut, and then back to Sportsman's Night, his girl,
Baby, can't you see?