Harry Curry: Rats and Mice

by Stuart Littlemore

  ‘All perfectly true, Harry, I’m sure. But if Nancy Surrey has difficulty with committing her girls to schools down here — and she’s a teacher in the system — how could we be more confident than she is?’

  He looked quickly at her, then returned his gaze to the road ahead, twisting through the huge forest trees, almost totally dark now. ‘There’s always boarding school in Canberra.’

  ‘I might be English, Harry, but if there’s one aspect of bourgeois English parenting I won’t accept, it’s packing off children of six to boarding school. It’s barbaric — why do people have children if they’re going to hand them over to strangers to look after?’

  Harry bristled far too quickly. ‘As in women barristers giving birth and immediately engaging nannies, you mean?’

  Arabella shook her head, but said nothing. They drove for fifteen minutes without speaking before she got her BlackBerry out of her handbag and looked at the screen. ‘I always forget there’s no reception out here.’

  ‘Another advantage of life in Burragate,’ said Harry. ‘Are you expecting something?’

  ‘My matter doesn’t start until Tuesday, but there’s still one witness to track down.’

  Harry chuckled, relieved that the tension had apparently passed. ‘No employee of the State Crown is going to be chasing up witnesses on a Saturday, Bella. Give the poor phone a rest.’ He negotiated a hairpin bend, and looked through the trees at a last flash of the sunset reflecting from the river far below. ‘How goes it with the Crown Solicitor’s, anyway? Have you patched things up?’

  ‘Hardly. This is probably my last brief from them — my two faux pas can’t be rehabilitated, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Those being?’

  ‘Heterosexuality and winning a case I was supposed to lose.’ She put the phone away. ‘The phone’s a sort of addiction, I admit. You’re afraid of missing a message … or I am, at any rate.’

  ‘I’m on the bus.’

  She looked at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Whenever I’m in Sydney, and I catch a bus, I keep count of the phones that ring, and every time they do, the question’s obviously “Where are you?”, because the answer’s always “I’m on the bus.” I hate mobile phones.’

  ‘If you weren’t so young, Harry Curry, you’d be a grumpy old man.’

  ‘Don’t get me started. We managed perfectly well without the stupid things before — but now it’s socially unacceptable to walk in the street without one welded to your ear, or to have a meal or meeting without making calls or taking calls or texting. People have much better phone manners in Italy, you know — if their phone rings in a restaurant, they excuse themselves and go outside.’

  ‘This happens even down here in the country?’

  ‘Yes, even down here. They ring when they’re late for the three o’clock conference as if they can redefine punctuality. I always tell them it’s fine with me, but I’ll be charging from three o’clock, and — if I’ve got another conference after them — I won’t be running over time. Their problem.’

  ‘I withdraw my earlier qualification. You are a grumpy old man.’

  ‘Not tonight, and not tomorrow. You’re going to enjoy it.’

  ‘Boastful.’

  Harry almost blushed. ‘I didn’t mean that — I meant Kameruka.’ Having reached RonLyn, he stopped the car and got out to open the gate. As he swung it wide in the LandCruiser’s headlights, Arabella upbraided him. ‘I could have done that,’ she called through the window. ‘You didn’t give me a chance.’

  ‘Pregnant women don’t have to do gate duty,’ he said as he climbed back in. ‘But you note that it’s a new one since last time you came down?’

  ‘So it is. Who did it?’

  ‘I did. A hundred and twenty dollars from the Wyndham General Store. Plus the hinge and pivot, of course. Took me all day to hang it, and it’s not perfectly level, I admit, but I’m quite proud of it — first time I’ve done such a thing.’ He kept driving. ‘We’ll leave it open for tonight.’

  Once inside with the lights switched on, Arabella was struck yet again by the difference between Harry’s housekeeping of the weatherboard farmhouse and what she’d observed at his insouciantly neglected Victorian terrace in Erskineville. This kitchen was neat and tidy, with a clean tea towel hanging from the handle of the fuel stove. There were no dishes in or on the sink, and the linoleum floor had been mopped. In the uncluttered living room, small sawn logs of dry eucalypt and kindling were neatly stacked on the tiles beside the slow-combustion wood heater, in which yellow flames were licking gently against the glass door, and the carpets had been vacuumed (including the small faux-Persian hearth rug). Harry had assembled Ikea shelves and set out some of his books on them. There were still cartons of books stacked around the walls, but he’d made a start.

  ‘It looks lovely, Harry.’

  He held the kettle under the kitchen tap and filled it for a cup of tea. ‘Take a look in there,’ he said, indicating with a small jerk of his head a closed door across the living room. Arabella went over and opened it.

  The little bedroom had been outfitted as a nursery. Pale grey-blue walls and white woodwork. Not faultlessly painted (too hard to keep the lines quite straight where the blue met the white), but fresh and optimistic. A new cot (Ikea again) with a soft blanket and an unopened packet of charming animal-patterned sheets and a matching pillowslip resting on a new mattress. A changing table and a little cedar chest of drawers, freshly wax polished.

  ‘Harry the romantic. Who’d know?’ She crossed to the doorway and put her arms around him.

  He hugged her back. ‘I got the chest in a junk shop in Bega. Stripped off the paint — imagine some yokel painting over red cedar! Wax polished it for a day to get it like that.’

  ‘Are you betting on a boy? The blue colour?’

  ‘Not at all, Bella. I liked the colour, and it was on special. Not that there’s any shade of pink that I would’ve chosen.’

  Arabella loved it, and said so. ‘But we’ll need curtains.’ There were two windows, both bare.

  ‘D’you think so? There are no neighbours.’

  ‘No, not for that. To make it dark. Babies sleep during the day, you know.’

  The kettle started to whistle. ‘There’s a great deal I don’t know about babies,’ Harry said, going back to the kitchen to make tea. ‘We have that in common.’

  Arabella took one last look around the little nursery, and turned off the light. She gently closed the door and went back to the living room, where Harry handed her a cup of tea.

  ‘A cup and saucer! How genteel. What happened to the mugs?’

  ‘Mugs are still here, but the cups are for special occasions. Such as now.’ They sat on the sofa and drank their tea in silence, happily gazing at the fireplace, hypnotised by the flames. After half an hour of affectionate small talk, Harry got up to replenish the fire.

  Returned to the sofa, he picked up a book from the side table. ‘I dug out my copy of The Magic Pudding. Remember, we talked about it when Dave and Nancy were here?’

  Arabella asked if he was going to read it to her. ‘I’m sure it sounds better with an Australian accent,’ she said.

  So Harry turned to the beginning and started to read. After about ten minutes, when he got to:

  ‘Albert, Albert,’ said Bill to the Puddin’, ‘where’s your manners?’

  ‘Where’s yours?’ said the Puddin’ rudely, ‘guzzling away there, and never so much as offering this stranger a slice.’

  ‘There you are,’ said Bill. ‘There’s nothing this Puddin’ enjoys more than offering slices of himself to strangers ….’

  Arabella asked, ‘Would it be acceptable,’ reaching over and shutting the book in Harry’s hand, ‘if at about this point this pudding offered you a slice? You’re not even a stranger.’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Harry, lifting her easily from the sofa and taking her to bed.

  On Sunday morning, they drove to the Kameruka estate. Arabe
lla was charmed, right from the moment they turned off the road onto the broad, tree-lined gravel drive that swept up to the neatly painted white gate and the cottage beside it with its rhododendrons in flower — if it was the gatekeeper’s lodge, he and his family were blessed, she thought. Harry continued at low speed on the undulating drive along the crest of a hill, past giant eucalypts and grassy meadows on both sides, past what looked like a museum of nineteenth-century agricultural buildings, perfectly preserved, and then down a gentle hill to an oval, encircled by trees and a low white rail fence, overlooked by a traditional shearing shed. Scoreboard, pavilion and turf pitch — recently mown and rolled. An auspicious start, with Arabella expressing disbelief that such an estate could exist in twenty-first-century New South Wales, but laughingly predicting that if the ensuing cricket match was intended to absorb and reflect the harmonious setting and therefore improve working relationships, it would probably be a failure.

  The police arrived at the oval in their second-hand four-wheel drives and circled the wagons, far from the position adopted by the first of the solicitors’ BMWs and (for those who lived on acreages) shiny new LandCruisers. The police, used to the obligations of shift work, had all shown up on time — at or before ten o’clock — but their opponents straggled in, and the game didn’t start until after 10.30.

  Harry, correctly attired in whites and paint-spattered Dunlop Volleys, parked his unlawyerly worse-for-wear LandCruiser in no-man’s-land, halfway between the two camps. While Arabella went off to join the Surreys, he walked across to where the police families were setting out their gas barbecues, rugs and folding chairs under the trees near the scoreboard. Their children had started a game of their own at the edge of the field. Harry greeted the bald sergeant who’d been the replacement Bega prosecutor throughout Harry’s recent rats and mice session there, pitchforked into the fray when the appointed man got the new magistrate offside by persisting with the nonsense that he should be addressed as ‘the Crown’.

  The trouble was that Harry didn’t know his humiliated adversary’s name. He hoped that the two cans of beer in his right hand might work as a catalyst. ‘Great day for it,’ he said, holding out one can. And it was — spring had returned to the coast. The sergeant took the beer, bowing his head almost imperceptibly.

  ‘I hope you blokes aren’t going to take this too seriously,’ Harry said, opening his beer. ‘I haven’t played cricket since I was at uni, and I was hopeless even then. Not my sport.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Rowing. Rugby in the winter.’

  ‘One of those schools, then, was it?’ the man asked.

  ‘Afraid so. Cold showers, paedophiles, all the usual trappings of an expensive private education.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ the man laughed. ‘I was at the Christian Brothers.’ He held his hand out to his wife, who was setting up their chairs, signalling to her to join them. ‘Mary, this is Mr Curry, the barrister. He graced us with his presence at Bega last month.’

  Harry shook her hand.

  ‘Our son would have liked to meet you, Mr Curry —’

  ‘Harry, please. That’s if I may call you Mary.’

  ‘— he’s studying law at the ANU. And of course you can. Brian said you gave him a hard time.’ She smiled.

  So it was Brian. Thanks for that. ‘Not me, Mary. It was his detectives who dropped Brian in it. All I did was take advantage of the situation.’

  ‘Situations,’ Brian the prosecutor corrected him. ‘More than one of them. I had a word with that young prosecutor, by the way. He’s a clever kid, but a bit wet behind the ears. Don’t think you’ll have any more of that stuff from him.’

  ‘He wasn’t a problem for me.’ Harry and Brian both drank from their cans. ‘Anyway, that’s enough shop for today, isn’t it?’

  There were a few more minutes of conversation about the Kameruka estate. Mary asked Harry about its beginnings. ‘The original family made their millions in brewing, and managed to hang onto the place for close to one hundred and fifty years, but there was no one left to carry it on, and it’s been sold,’ he explained.

  ‘What was it? Not just a farm?’

  ‘It was a whole town in itself. More than 200,000 acres, a sort of utopian agrarian community, mostly dairying. Shrunk since then, obviously. I’ve been reading up about it on the web in my idle moments. They imported people from England, Holland, even America, to share-farm within the estate, and it had the oldest Jersey herd in the country. All gone now — I haven’t seen a cow anywhere. Apparently they won’t mind if you take a look around. This is the home ground for the local cricket club, so they’re used to people wandering around most weekends, looking through the buildings. I’m sure the kids would like to play in the shearing shed.’

  With Mary saying she might just do that, and Brian sitting down to put on his cricket boots, Harry went off to join his teammates. Arabella and the Surrey girls were reclining in deckchairs, Arabella beneath a broad Panama sunhat. Harry admired her from a distance as Warren, the lawyers’ captain, tried to work out a batting and bowling order, based on claims to schoolboy skill and the recency of that experience. Two solicitors had brought their teenage sons ‘to make up the numbers’, but it seemed to Harry and Surrey that the boys would certainly be of more value than they were. Surrey was placed nine on the batting order, and Harry ten.

  Warren won the toss and chose to bat, so they joined the women to watch their legal teammates’ wickets fall.

  ‘Are you drinking already, Mr Curry?’ fifteen-year-old Lily asked boldly. ‘It’s not even eleven o’clock.’

  ‘Doesn’t count, Lily. Diplomacy, offering an olive branch.’ He threw the empty can at a bin beside the white rail fence marking the boundary, but missed. ‘That augurs well for a run-out, doesn’t it?’

  The first ball was bowled by a tall, fit-looking young constable, and they looked on in silence. The batsman, a recent graduate employed to oversee property conveyances at a Merimbula firm, watched disdainfully as it fizzed through a safe distance outside his off stump. The second ball, also ignored, was wide down the leg side.

  ‘Next one has to be a bouncer,’ Surrey predicted, and it was. Still no shot offered.

  Harry put on his sunglasses. ‘I’ve always thought that a game of social cricket would make a better television broadcast than a one-day pyjama international. Everyone can identify with it. Young Turks, out to show they’re hot stuff, racing in like Dennis Lillee or hooking like Dougie Walters, fat old blokes with a beer in one hand who can’t be bothered to chase a ball, some playing in football jumpers and thongs, and a couple of kids roped in at the last minute. The umpiring’s risibly partisan, if not a disgrace —’

  ‘Right up to standard, in other words. And after lunch,’ Surrey said, opening a Thermos and pouring tea for the women and himself, ‘everyone’s so full of steak and sausages and VB that no one can keep score, and no one cares anyway.’

  Which is, more or less, the way the match went. The Legal Eagles (Warren insisted on the name) were three wickets down for 203 at the end of their fifty overs, a score attributable to the four solicitors, not long out of university, at the top of the batting order. Harry and Surrey both claimed to be relieved that they’d not been required, but the competitive Curry streak was disappointed not to have had a swing at the bottom-of-the-list bowlers from the police side. Surrey had brought the den Boer prosecution brief of evidence for Harry, and he spent most of the morning reading it in his deckchair in the shade, and asking questions. ‘It doesn’t look good, mate,’ was his assessment when Surrey asked him what he thought. ‘Our bloke must be Captain Rats if there’s any scintilla of fact in this story about him saying, “I think I’ll shoot you anyway” and bang! he does. Makes him sound very seriously mad.’

  The sides kept their distances while the barbecues were fired up and the meat carbonised. Big bowls of salad were produced from the boots of cars, eskies crammed with ice and beer were opened and emptied, there was a gr
eat deal of sponge and fruit cake on offer, the groups started to mix, and the only people capable of sustaining the cricketing effort when the police padded up and the lawyers took the field were the schoolboys. The rules of engagement specified that everyone had to bowl, including the wicketkeeper (who didn’t trouble to remove his pads), and Surrey, taking his turn, had a detective constable caught in slips and a woman constable lbw in the first of his two allotted overs. Harry, by contrast, had a great deal of trouble keeping the ball on the pitch, and was grateful that the tailender batsmen only hit him for three boundaries. Still, the lawyers won the match by more than eighty runs.

  The players got together for a final beer after stumps were drawn, and they even thanked each other for the game.

  It had turned overcast and cool in the late afternoon, and the Curry–Surreys gathered in Harry’s LandCruiser out of the freshening breeze before parting. Lily asked Arabella what she thought of her first Australian cricket match.

  ‘Not quite what I expected, to be honest. We suffered from a distinct lack of cucumber sandwiches, and the only tea we had was what David gave us from his Thermos. At least we had deckchairs.’

  ‘And you had a beautiful hat,’ the younger Surrey girl, Chloe, said, holding Arabella’s hand.

  They all kissed goodbye, and headed home in their different directions — the Surreys up to the Snowy Mountains Highway and on to Goulburn, while Harry and Arabella took the back road home through hilly farm country and native forest, crossing the majestic timber bridge over Candelo Creek, and continuing through Wyndham and Burragate. It was dark when they got to RonLyn, but the chickens had already trooped voluntarily back into the coop. Harry got the fire going again, then the fuel stove, and chased up the ingredients for an onion and garlic omelette. Everything fresh, everything from the farm, except the pinot noir.