The Way It Is Now

by Garry Disher

‘You don’t think you will, or you don’t need to, or you don’t see the benefit?’

  ‘All of the above.’

  ‘But you are here now, Charlie. Make the most of it.’

  He nodded. ‘And I’m going to quit the police.’

  If he’d announced that to anyone else, they’d have said, ‘No. Why?’ or ‘Think about it for a while,’ but Fiske said, ‘What will that be like for you?’

  Charlie laughed, recalling a retirement function he’d attended years back, for an inspector who had always kept to herself, didn’t sleep around and had never attended a booze-up. A superintendent who didn’t know her read from her service record and presented her with a plaque, two colleagues struggled through a handful of embarrassingly tame stories, and barely anyone went to the pub afterwards.

  None of that for him. ‘A relief,’ he said.

  ‘Retiring from the police will be a relief?’

  ‘I don’t want to be like my father,’ Charlie said.

  Where had that come from?

  ‘What would that entail, being like your father?’

  ‘When he retired he seemed to shrink,’ Charlie said. ‘Mentally and physically. For years he’d worn a dark blue or grey suit and carried a badge, and without those he was nothing. Exposed, laid wide open. Floundering. My stepmother’s lovely, they’ve been together for years, and he’s probably got heaps of superannuation, so he won’t struggle financially, but in other respects he’s defenceless. He feels…irrelevant.’

  ‘You don’t want to be like your father, who you say feels irrelevant.’

  Charlie flared a little. ‘You keep quoting me back to me.’

  She was unmoved. ‘Tell me more about your father.’

  ‘Right now, he’s ill. Underlying health issues and he caught that Chinese virus. And now that my mother’s been found, the Homicide Squad will go in hard.’

  ‘Charlie,’ Fiske was sublimely attentive. ‘Do you think he’s guilty?’

  It was as if the air in the room had become charged with unheard testimony. ‘Do you think so?’ he asked. ‘Does it point to that?’

  Then he caught himself. She didn’t know. How could she? It was a tactic; she was teasing out his thoughts.

  ‘I wish I knew,’ he said. ‘I wish someone would tell me what to think.’

  A kind smile. ‘Maybe you’re not finished with me after all.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Charlie said, gloomily contemplating the floor.

  He looked up. ‘Do I challenge him about it?’

  ‘Challenge. Interesting word.’

  ‘Fuck off, doc. Do I accuse him?’

  ‘Would it help?’

  Charlie winced. ‘He can be a slippery sod.’

  ‘Slippery.’

  ‘I mean, he never gives much away.’

  ‘Go back twenty years. Your mother’s disappearance. Tell me about relations between you, your brother and your father in the aftermath.’

  Charlie shook his head in a kind of wonderment. ‘Nothing was said. Ever.’

  ‘About…?’

  ‘About what might have happened to her. Liam had nothing to do with Dad by then anyway, and we weren’t living in the same house anymore. As for what might have happened to Mum, I thought her lodger knew something about it, and Liam thought Dad did it—he still does—but it was never talked about between us. It was up to me to do all the agonising and investigating over the years.’ He cocked his head. ‘I’m exaggerating, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘I do. But is it possible your dad and your brother were agonising and investigating too?’

  ‘I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it.’

  ‘But you, at least, continued to think about it over the years? You speculated, investigated?’

  Obsessively, according to Jess. To the detriment of their marriage. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What will you do if your father is tried and found guilty?’

  ‘Appeal. Keep digging.’

  ‘You’re torn between his guilt and his innocence, aren’t you?’ Fiske said, head tilted back a little as if she had no stake in it. Which she didn’t.

  Charlie stared at her mulishly, wanting to snarl; knowing it would be unreasonable, reining himself in.

  Fiske read it in his eyes. ‘Let it out, Charlie.’

  ‘This is unlike any therapy session I’ve ever been to.’

  ‘You’ve only ever been to one, as far as I know.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Charlie said. He slouched, arms folded, legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles. ‘Is this what typically happens? Therapist and client read each other and develop an intimacy?’

  ‘The smart ones read me—although there are those I’d rather not have crawling about in my mind. And there are those I wish I couldn’t read,’ Fiske said. She paused. ‘Ever thought of doing a counselling course? Police Veterans are crying out for volunteer support officers.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘Become someone’s buddy,’ Charlie muttered, thinking of Allardyce and his meltdown.

  ‘Worse things to be.’

  But Charlie was looking at Dr Fiske without seeing her, an image of Fay in his mind. Had she started steeling herself, expecting to return from the supermarket one day to find Rhys hanging from a beam in the garage?

  Was his father depressed? Why hadn’t he asked?

  What about Mark Valente and Noel Saltash and all the other old-timer cops? Were they anxious, depressed, controlling, violent, suicidal? Did they need a buddy?

  ‘Charlie?’ Fiske said.

  He blinked. ‘Yep?’

  ‘Have you been working up to leaving the police, or has it only just this minute occurred to you?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  Her shrug could have meant anything.

  No point second-guessing. He said, ‘I think I’ve been considering it for a while now.’

  She nodded. ‘Give some thought to what I said. Do a course. You’re empathetic—sorry, another buzzword. Help people.’

  ‘I can barely help myself.’

  ‘Well now, that simply isn’t true,’ Dr Fiske said, and Charlie heard that little bit of bucking-up, soaked it in, and felt his incapacity shrink a little.

  40

  ‘HE’S DOING WELL,’ Fay said, the second week of February. ‘Out in a few days.’

  Her face, still haggard, filled the tiny screen. ‘Meanwhile I’m going crazy here.’ She looked about her at the walls closing in. ‘They bring me things to read—magazines and sex-and-shopping novels mostly—and the food’s good, but I miss the sun and the air and the company.’

  Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop. Curiously, he’d been googling the virus when she’d logged on. ‘But you don’t feel ill?’

  ‘I feel fine. It’s funny we both had it and it hardly affected me at all, yet it put your poor dad in hospital.’

  ‘Can you Skype with him?’

  ‘We tried a couple of times. It’s easier to talk on the phone.’

  ‘What does he look like? Is it taking a toll?’

  ‘Let’s just say he’s aged a little,’ Fay said. She hesitated. ‘How are you doing? Is the counselling helping—can I ask that?’

  ‘It’s helping.’

  ‘You can’t talk about it, I understand.’

  ‘I’ve only had two sessions.’

  She smiled; it eased the strain in her. ‘Oh well, either she’s busy or she’s no help or you don’t need much curing.’

  ‘The curing part remains to be seen. The urge to shove authority figures arse over tit hasn’t entirely left me.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’re more like your father than you think.’

  Was he? Charlie peered back down the years, looking for his father. His varying and variable father. An amiable—mostly amiable—ratbag when it was just the four of them at home. A man who could make you laugh, a grabber and tickler. But whenever he was around Valente and his other police mates, Charlie r
ealised, he was different. The smiles more forced; the eyes watchful. In time the ratbaggery faded altogether and he met another woman and the family split apart and his wife disappeared…

  It struck Charlie for the first time that you could draw a causal link between those events, and that’s what everyone had done. He gave a mental shake of his head: Only taken me twenty years. He eyed Fay, who was frowning at him, concerned. He had no doubt that she and his father made each other happy. He’d seen them laugh together plenty of times. But it wasn’t the kind of laughter—cheeky, irreverent—that he remembered from his childhood.

  Suddenly his mother’s voice was in his head, making that same observation: You’re so like your father.

  ‘I’m better looking than him,’ he told Fay now, ‘and I can use Skype.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t get me started.’

  After a pause, Charlie said, ‘Fay, they’re going to come after him.’

  ‘He knows that. He doesn’t seem as bothered as he ought to be.’

  ‘He needs a lawyer.’

  ‘Do you know any?’

  ‘Yes. Her name’s Jenna Baird.’

  ‘Is she good?’

  ‘Very.’ Charlie had already lined her up, in fact. He’d contacted three defence lawyers he’d encountered in court whose style he liked—not relying on humiliation, denigration or wearing down of victims—and who had an eye to justice, not the big bucks. Baird was the best; she was available. ‘She’ll meet with Dad when you get home.’

  ‘Charlie, thank you.’

  ‘Another thing: can you run past Dad the idea of a memorial service for Mum? Maybe a few days after you get back. It could be weeks, months, before we can have a funeral.’

  ‘Leave it to me.’

  ‘You won’t have to do anything. Liam and Ryan are all over it.’

  After that, Charlie waited through the mid-February days, walking, pottering, surfing. Good surf was sometimes predicted at Point Leo, but usually he found himself waiting patiently, just one of the hopeful regulars—tradies on their way to work, retired guys Mark Valente’s age, a couple of maternity-ward nurses from Mornington, kids who should have been at school. They variously sat, chatted, lay prone, paddled further out, attempted with little heart but no disappointment to catch the wave that would surely break. Charlie had read enough surf writing to know what a wank it could be, but if you pinned him down he might confess to feeling cleansed when the sea rose and rolled. You went with it, not against it. If you went against it you weren’t a surfer. You shouldn’t be within a thousand kilometres of the sea.

  But it was as if he didn’t know what he was waiting for—only that he wanted something that would open up the world somehow, not cramp it. Then one afternoon, on their semi-regular Skype, Fay said, ‘We’ve been cleared to come home.’

  Charlie peered at the screen. ‘You in a different part of the ship?’

  She laughed. ‘No, thank god. Tokyo. An actual hotel.’

  ‘Good to get out?’

  ‘You have no idea.’

  ‘When you know your flight details, let me know, I’ll pick you up at the airport.’

  ‘Oh, no, Charlie, we can get an Uber or a taxi.’

  ‘I’m picking you up,’ Charlie said.

  Fay seemed to accept that. Next day she texted him: Arriving Cathay Pacific 6.30 am Feb 19.

  41

  CHARLIE LEFT HOME at 5 a.m. and was waiting in arrivals by 6.20. He found it curiously distracting—a little sad, a little heartwarming—to see the hugs, kisses and handshakes enacted all around him. These people had social and familial contexts.

  Did he? Who would welcome him home from Japan, or anywhere else?

  Emma didn’t have a car, and didn’t, as she often told him, do mornings. Anna? He hoped so, but it was new between them, and at the moment still fragile. He would not presume. Anyway, right now her leg was in plaster…

  He found himself looking for travellers who had no friend, family member or lover waiting. They strode head-high through the crowd as if to disdain ordinary human connection. A mask for regret or dejection? Probably. At least that’s what he’d feel in their shoes.

  Lost in these thoughts, a little sorry for himself, he didn’t immediately realise that the crowd had thinned, time had passed, and Rhys and Fay were the last to totter out from behind the screen.

  He barely recognised them. It wasn’t that Fay had altered by much, it was that she was steering a wonky trolley heaped with luggage, accompanied by a woman in uniform pushing a wheelchair in which was his father. He had altered.

  Fay saw Charlie first. She gave him a spirited wave but he could see the deep fatigue in her drawn features. And then Rhys was being deposited at Charlie’s feet, they were hugging, and the wheelchair was being whisked away, Fay calling, ‘Thank you!’ forlornly to the airline woman’s oblivious spine.

  Clasping his father, feeling the bones move beneath his hands, Charlie said, ‘They finally let you into the country.’ Fay gestured negligently. ‘They were very blasé. We could have been riddled with the virus.’

  ‘Took us a while to get through customs,’ Rhys said. ‘I had a bit of a dizzy spell. How are you, son?’

  ‘Fine, but you don’t look too good.’

  The old Rhys would have had a comeback. This one’s eyes lost focus. He looked around with a peevish expression that eased when his eyes came to rest on Fay.

  ‘I’m in the short-term carpark,’ Charlie said, grabbing the trolley handle. ‘You both okay to walk it? Should I get another wheelchair?’

  ‘Forget it.’ Rhys was sharp again. ‘More hassle than it’s worth.’

  ‘But let’s make it an amble, not a mad dash,’ said Fay.

  ‘I can do ambling,’ Charlie said as they made off. He grabbed to save a small bag as he manoeuvred the trolley onto the roadway. Rhys, behind him, said, ‘Was that his duty-free Roku gin I heard breaking?’

  ‘Behave yourself,’ Fay said.

  Across the lanes of traffic and into the parking structure. Charlie pushed the lift button and, as they waited, he took closer note of the diminution in his father. Thinner. Pale, sweaty, short of breath. He kept touching the flat of his hand to his chest and coughing weakly, with tight, dry little exhalations.

  And he’d zoned out again. He was facing the lift doors, uncertain of his bearings. Charlie, shooting Fay a look, saw her mouth the words, ‘Brain fog.’

  ‘Straight home and straight to bed, Dad,’ Charlie said. ‘Take a load off your feet.’

  ‘Taking a load off is all well and good,’ the old Rhys said. ‘The problem is, as soon as I get up again I have a dizzy spell.’

  ‘He had a fall, in fact,’ Fay said. ‘During our stopover in Sydney.’

  ‘Felt like a bloody idiot,’ Rhys said, as the lift doors opened, and they shuffled aboard.

  It was new to Charlie, his father being vulnerable and acknowledging it. This was a man who always liked to say he didn’t have time to be ill. Who had told his sons, laid up with a cold or the flu, ‘It’ll pass.’

  ‘The virus really knocked you around,’ Charlie said.

  ‘You could say that.’

  Charlie glanced at Fay. ‘Rafferty’s Rules, it didn’t affect you much at all.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  The lift rose two floors and they filed out again, shuffling through dim concrete halls to the Skoda.

  They struck morning traffic on the ring roads, and Charlie sensed a nervy agitation in his father, who sat slumped against the door, his chin dipping and tilting as he seemed to alternate between napping and monitoring Charlie’s route. A notorious backseat driver, the old man. Charlie, intent on circumventing that, said, ‘What’s Japanese hospital food like?’

  Rhys snorted. ‘Couldn’t taste it, couldn’t smell it. It was fuel, that’s the best you could say for it.’

  Fay leaned into the gap between the seats. ‘Lovely food on the ship, though.’

  A conversation bound t
o stall sooner rather than later. Charlie was hunting around for another topic when Rhys said, ‘Homicide’ll want to talk to me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rhys didn’t follow up. Charlie glanced at him. Asleep?

  From the back seat, Fay said tiredly, ‘Don’t worry, he does that. He’ll wake soon.’

  ‘I am worried. He’s cured of the virus, right?’

  She reached a hand past Charlie’s headrest. Patted the side of his neck. ‘We both are, dear. But he’s finding the after-effects hard.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘I didn’t really have any to begin with.’

  Charlie caught her gaze in the rear-view mirror and asked, ‘What did the doctors say?’

  He saw her look into her lap. ‘I’ve got it written down.’

  He waited while she rummaged in her handbag.

  ‘Here it is. One of the doctors had very good English. “Nonspecific multisystem post-viral symptoms,” that’s what he said.’

  ‘Sounds…well, unspecific.’

  ‘It’s supposed to be short term, but I don’t know, I wonder if his heart’s been compromised.’

  ‘His heart?’

  ‘We didn’t want to worry you—he didn’t want to worry you—but in the past year he’s had a couple of little episodes, and since coming out of hospital he’s been complaining of chest pains. Can’t breathe in properly, irregular heartbeat, that kind of thing. He gets sweaty, one arm feels strange, he said, and he’s simply exhausted.’

  Charlie checked the mirror. ‘Jesus, Fay.’

  ‘I know, I know. Let’s just get him home and I’ll ask the doctor to call in this afternoon.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we take him straight to hospital?’

  She was gazing out of her window. ‘Try telling him that. Anyway, he’s not getting any worse.’

  ‘Second opinion.’

  ‘Like I said,’ Fay snapped in her worry and fatigue, ‘try telling him that.’

  Rhys in the seat next to Charlie said, ‘Settle down, you two.’

  ‘Dad, it couldn’t hurt to get a second opinion.’

  ‘How about this, son—like Fay said, we’ll get the doctor to pop in.’

  ‘Didn’t know they did house calls anymore,’ Charlie muttered.