‘You’re going to shoot the ocean?’ Luke smiles and shakes his head.
‘Shoot it to bits!’ Tom gives him the thumbs up before opening the door of the old bomb and climbing in. Luke walks over with a look on his face that tells Tom he’d like to come along too, if he could.
‘This for work?’
‘Yeah.’ Tom slips the key in and starts the engine. ‘So, Dad, what’s up with you and Nanette?’ He’d walked in on them having one of their rows again the night before.
But Luke only shrugs as he lights up a fag. ‘Ah, dunno.’ He takes a deep drag.
‘Something about Mum?’ Tom asks curiously. He was only half listening but Nanette was raving on about not having dignity in front of Anna. Something like that anyway.
‘Your Mum is bringing Nellie and Ned down this weekend.’
‘So?’ Tom sighs in exasperation. ‘Nanette objects?’
‘She wants to move in properly and get married.’ Luke sighs. ‘Suppose that’s at the bottom of it.’
Tom waits but Luke doesn’t expand on this. He feels for his old man and wishes he could say something helpful to him like, So tell her what she wants to hear. But the fact is, he actually doesn’t like Nanette much and hopes Luke doesn’t marry her. Tom revs up the rust bucket, turns on the lights and give his father a quick toot. Then he backs out of the yard and heads off down the street.
Once he’s at the beach he locks the car, walks down onto the sand and starts looking about. Not much is happening, but he doesn’t care too much. He loves waiting for the moment. Sometimes he thinks it was what he was born for. The sky is mottled, mostly heavy grey, and the sea is a black monster roaring back and forth as he walks along the sand. A sharp wind makes him wish he’d remembered his beanie.
Half a kilometre along, Tom stops to load film into the camera. Then he screws the camera to the tripod and keeps walking. It won’t be long now. He’s praying for the clouds to break a bit so there will be something to see. He breathes in the cold salty air, thinking of his father and then his mother. Neither of them is happy any more and he wonders why. What really pulled them apart?
Ah, here we go! His prayers have been answered. The sky is breaking up, leaving tiny patches of pale translucent blue between the long threaded beads of dark cloud. The light comes through them like long straight spikes of gold. Slowly, very slowly, it gets stronger and the top of the black waves start to come alive too, shimmering with gold and pink bubbles of light. Moments pass. Or is it minutes? The clouds are cracking now and the big red sun is coming through like a victory flag. Wow! Where is the music to go with this? A majestic drumbeat, maybe, or some famous singer belting out a Verdi aria. The water is on fire with a million glowing flames. Tom sets up the tripod quickly, parks his eye at the viewfinder and begins to shoot.
Corny? Of course it’s bloody corny. It’s a sunrise for Christ’s sake! If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen a million. But at the beginning of any shoot you’ve got to get the obvious out of the way before you can go on to anything else. It’s a way of settling down, of getting into a rhythm. You’re out there hunting for images, but you’re hunting for what’s inside too. It doesn’t come all at once. It happens on a deeper level than words. If you wait for the perfect shot to come along then odds on nothing will happen. But by setting up the camera and shooting a bit here and there you gradually move into another place in your head. It happens by degrees, ever so slowly, and after a while it’s like being in a trance. Nothing else exists except the light and the form between the four edges of the viewfinder. The camera becomes an extension of his hands and eyes. Tom is in another realm entirely.
He keeps walking for a bit and then stops to watch a van pull up. Three guys get out and pull on wetsuits. Tom laughs, imagining how freezing the water will be in that cold Southern Ocean at this hour. Their idle chat and spurts of laughter come back to him on the wind as he lines up the shot. A jogger suddenly pulls into frame in front of the surfers, making her way towards Tom. Against the sea she looks good, blonde hair blowing back, absolute determination on her face. Now she is on her own and behind her, against the amazing sky, three gulls wheel and spin in the wind. Tom catches all of them facing different directions in the frame; the woman’s face down in the left-hand corner looks spooky with those weird birds above her.
Once up in the car park, he sees the surfers better. Three older guys and one little kid about ten, someone’s kid brother. He’s standing apart, looking on longingly as the others organise their boards. He wants to be part of it, but he knows he’s too young. One of the older guys moves across to talk with him. The big brother? Tom snaps them from behind, two black silhouettes against that bright streaky sky. The tall one puts his arm around the kid’s shoulders, and Tom catches the moment.
None of this is what he’s after, but he’s still trying to get into the rhythm. The little guy gets him thinking of his own brother, Ned, and the fact that he hasn’t seen him for two months. Ned took the brunt of their parents’ bust-up. Just twelve years old, he sort of closed-up around that time, his speech impediment got worse and his friends stopped coming over. By the beginning of the next year he was living a new life in the city . . . No one was paying him enough attention. Luke was walking around like a shell shock victim. His mother, Anna, couldn’t talk normally to anyone without shouting and/or crying, and Nellie ignored the whole situation by spending every waking minute out with her friends. Tom wasn’t any better, except that it wasn’t the divorce on his mind, but Lillian’s murder . . .
But you can always find some excuse to behave like a shabby mean selfish prick. Tom never asked Ned how he found his new school, or if he missed his home town and his old mates. He was too keen on getting away himself.
Tom catches the surfers as they are about to hit the water. He introduces himself and tells them the paper might use a shot of them on the front page the following weekend. They are immediately enthusiastic, so he takes down their names and a few other bits and pieces about where they work and why they surf, then leaves them laughing and jostling with each other about who’ll look the best in the photo. After all that, he moves on down the beach to see if he can catch them on a wave to complete the series.
Surfers on the water: black insects against the red and gold sky. The shots he gets are nice enough. In fact, he knows they’re just the kind of thing Steve wants. They’ll sit well on the front page. But Tom hankers to go better. It’s the way he’s always been. He’s running out of time this morning, but he’ll have another go tomorrow. He wants to get something really special.
A pile of scattered black rocks marks the end of the beach. Further around are the cliffs, steep and craggy and impossible to get to at high tide. He walks up from the beach, along the winding tracks through the grass and over to the old disused bridge across the river.
He and Jonty lit a fire here once at the beginning of Year Eleven, when they were both about sixteen. It was hot and they’d come down to the river with a couple of girls from another school that they’d debated against. The topic that day had been ‘Australia needs the American Alliance more than ever’, and Tom and Jonty had argued the affirmative. But the girls’ team had won and they teased Tom and Jonty about that mercilessly. Females are just so much superior, why don’t you admit it! They were nice girls, though, and the four of them had had a lot of fun, laughing and mucking about. Jonty had a small flask of Jack Daniels which they passed around. Then Tom had made a fire while the girls ran over to the supermarket and bought sausages and tomato sauce and a loaf of sliced white bread. Tom and Jonty stuck long sticks up the snags and held them over the flames to cook. The girls moaned and complained but in the end they all ate them, burnt on the outside and half raw inside. In fact, they all stuffed themselves, then took off their shoes and waded in the river.
Tom remembers how exciting it was to have girls to do things with. At about nine, the girls had had to leave, and Tom fell into bed that night mad keen to meet up again with the one he
’d fallen for. Louise. She had dark hair and blue eyes that danced around in her face when she smiled. But within a week he’d forgotten all about her. And they never saw either of them again.
That was before they’d even met Lillian. It is sometimes hard now for Tom to remember what life was like back then. Eight o’clock already. Shit, he’s been out on the beach for over an hour. Better get back, have a shower, change his clothes and get to work. But he doesn’t move. He sits on one of the rocks wishing the out-of-sync feeling that seems to have set up camp in his head since the courtroom would just piss off.
It’s not until he gets to the office that he sees that day’s edition of the Chronicle. There is a small article on page two, with a picture of Lillian’s face alongside the headline New lead on Wishart murder. There is a brief summary of the known details of the case and then a police spokesman claiming that the police ‘might only be days away from making an arrest’.
Tom’s heart jumps in his chest and his mouth goes dry. What the hell does that mean?
Tom gets home at about six that night to find his father already in his work clothes, covered in dust and grime, clearing out the shed. Unusual. Luke is usually not home until seven or eight, and he hardly ever gets around to cleaning anything. Tom calls hello, goes inside to put his camera away, then comes back out again.
‘So what brought this on?’ he asks.
‘Ned is bringing his bike and surfboard,’ Luke grins. ‘Thought I’d better make some room for him.’
The place is packed full of rubbish: rusty bikes, cans of paint, packets of unopened tools (every so often Luke likes to pretend he’s a tradesman), three old lawnmowers and piles of cardboard boxes. There is also a 1958 DeSoto car that Luke plans to restore one day and about a dozen model aeroplanes, many with wings off or broken, scattered about like disintegrating dead insects.
‘When are they coming?’ Tom asks, throwing an old bottle in the bin.
‘Tomorrow at about midday.’
‘Will Nanette be here?’
‘No.’ Luke raises his eyes to heaven. ‘She’s staging a protest.’
‘What about?’
‘Not being married, especially in front of my ex-wife!’
‘Jeez, Dad,’ Tom shakes his head, ‘sounds like you two are really made for each other!’
‘Yep,’ Luke laughs, ‘getting on like the proverbial house on fire.’
‘So who is the house and who is the fire?’
‘What do you reckon?’
Tom doesn’t question him any more. His mother and Nanette are always civil to each other, because Anna knows she wasn’t the other woman. Even so, it’s usually pretty strained.
‘Flatten these out for me, will you?’ Luke hands him a pile of boxes. ‘Then take them down to the drum.’
‘Okay.’
The drum is where Luke burns stuff at the end of the yard. Apparently it’s against the law, but that doesn’t worry him. He gets the cleaning bug about once every two years and it’s usually a matter of keeping out of his way until it’s over. Tom begins pulling the boxes apart.
‘You see the paper today?’
His father stops hurling small cans of old paint into a metal rubbish bin. ‘All piss and wind,’ he says shortly.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Well, I don’t, but . . . I’d bet on it.’ Luke picks up another can and aims it at the bin. He misses and the can clatters along the concrete floor of the shed.
‘So why are they doing it?’
‘Jonty will have rung them the way he rang you and me,’ Luke says. ‘He can’t leave it alone.’
‘But if there is nothing in it . . .’
‘Look, Tom, they want Jonty,’ Luke says matter-of-factly. ‘They believe he’s guilty and want to haul him in like a fish on a line.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Get him talking and maybe he’ll give something away.’
‘They want him to confess?’
But the old man won’t answer that. He just shrugs, hands Tom some more boxes then heads off down to the other end of the shed, making loud sniffing noises.
‘Has Jonno rung you again, Dad?’
‘Nope.’
‘Are you going to ring him?’
‘Nope.’
‘You’re his lawyer!’
‘That’s right. I’m not his mother! He’ll call when he needs me.’ Luke sniffs dramatically a few more times and opens one of the side windows. ‘This place has got stuffy.’
‘Did Alice say anything?’ Tom asks after a while.
‘Nope,’ his dad says.
‘Did you talk to her about it?’
‘Not my place.’
Tom feels like asking his father if he’s having second thoughts now about employing Alice, but doubts he’d admit it if he did. As far as Tom’s concerned this turn of events proves his own instinct was correct. Luke is Jonty’s lawyer and so Alice Wishart shouldn’t be working in his office. End of story.
‘Can’t be much fun living with old Phyllis,’ his father mutters conversationally. ‘Cantankerous old bitch!’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I used to do all her legal work,’ Luke stops to laugh, as he shoves a full wheelbarrow towards the door. ‘Jeez, that old bird has got a head on her for money! No two ways about it. She’s canny. She moved to another firm when I started representing Jonno, and I was bloody glad she did. More trouble than she was worth.’
‘How come?’
‘She was in and out of my office every week, changing her will!’
‘Yeah?’
‘And she queried every bill I sent.’
‘Did she pay them in the end?’
‘Too right she paid!’ Luke laughs again. ‘I once held over an important document until she paid three or four unpaid accounts, and she didn’t like that one little bit.’
‘What happened?’
‘We understood each other after that,’ he said, smiling at the memory. ‘She stopped playing games with me when she knew I meant business.’
‘So what is Alice like . . . at work?’ Tom asks, trying to sound as though he doesn’t care one way or the other, when in fact his heart has begun to pound just saying her name.
‘Very good,’ Luke sighs, and looks around for the next job. ‘Methodical, bright and hardworking, but she must be lonely living up there in that great big mausoleum.’ He stops and looks at his son, frowning. ‘It’d be nice if you befriended her a bit, Tom. That kid has had a tough time. When you go out with your mates, you could ask her to come along. I get the impression she doesn’t get out much.’
‘I already have,’ Tom says bluntly. ‘I invited her to come with us to that concert.’
‘And?’
‘She wasn’t interested.’
‘Why not?’
‘How do I know?’ Tom snaps. ‘She’s not exactly friendly.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that!’ His father frowns. ‘She’s very friendly at work. Seems to really enjoy it and . . .’ He chucks down one of the model planes. ‘Why don’t we go and have something to eat now? We’ve made a bit of room. I’ll come back out again later and finish up.’ He throws the broom aside and winds up the side window. ‘What do you feel like for tea? There’s steak and eggs, steak and potatoes or steak and onions.’
‘All of the above,’ Tom smiles, ‘with tomatoes!’
‘What? You want steak with eggs, potatoes, onions and tomatoes?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Demanding brat!’ On the way into the house he puts a hand on Tom’s shoulder. ‘Something is worrying you. I can tell.’ Tom shrugs. ‘It’s the Wishart thing, isn’t it?’
Tom shrugs again and moves away from his father into the kitchen.
Luke washes his hands at the sink and dries them on a tea towel. ‘Try not to worry,’ he says conversationally, ‘this business will come to nothing. You won’t have to be embroiled in it all over again.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
Tom slumps down in a chair at the table and flips the Age back to the front page. Another gangland murder and four Iranians found with explosives on their way to a London airport. The world goes on.
‘It will be Jonno up to his old tricks,’ Luke continues quietly. ‘There’ll be no evidence, no trial. He can get on with his life and same goes for you.’
‘What about Alice, Dad?’
‘What about Alice?’
‘She needs to know who killed her mother!’
Luke sighs and goes to the fridge, pulls out the eggs and some salad things and then two huge pieces of choice rump. ‘Can you eat all that?’ he asks, holding one of them up.
‘Half,’ Tom says, thinking that they must teach dodging the issue in Law School. His old man would have come top of the class. He watches as his father cut the meat and switch on the griller.
‘I don’t know about all that stuff,’ Luke muses, ‘really I don’t. The Yanks are into this “victim vengeance” caper and where does it get them? What good will it do for her to know who killed her mother? It’s hardly likely to bring the poor woman back, is it?’
‘What?’ Tom lets his mouth fall open for effect, but Luke only laughs. Tom can see that his father knows he’s committed a clanger and is trying to laugh it off. ‘I fucking can’t believe you just said that!’ Tom shakes his head to underline the point. ‘I really can’t.’
‘Language, Thomas, language.’ Luke is slightly more shamefaced now. ‘Well, you tell me why I’m wrong?’
‘So justice doesn’t matter anymore?’ Tom declares derisively, as he starts breaking up lettuce for the salad. ‘That’s truly pathetic! You’re a lawyer and you think justice doesn’t matter!’
‘Hmmmm.’ Luke rubs his chin then bends to re-position the meat under the grill. That done, he looks up at Tom. ‘Yeah, of course justice matters, Tom,’ he says seriously, ‘but you get older and you care less about the big ideas. Somehow even doing the right thing by the people around you is hard enough.’ His apologetic smile tells Tom that he doesn’t want a serious argument. ‘That kid has to have a lawyer. It might as well be me.’
Somebody's Crying Page 19
