A school bus roared past in a cloud of diesel. Flanagan snarled and only just stopped himself throwing the phone. Instead, he indicated hastily, gunned the engine till it squealed, and pulled out into the middle of the road headed straight for Lord’s house.
*
TENEILLE WAS AS good as her word. Flanagan found her in the kitchen grating cabbage and carrots for a coleslaw. As if calmed by her presence, he went into the bathroom and washed up and then re-appeared to help, the big pile of charitable groceries unspeaking on the pine bench.
“No word from this Franco fellow?”
“None yet,” he replied. “Sorry, Teneille. You know I’ll tell you the minute I hear news.”
“I know,” she sighed, sounding trembly. “I just spoke to my mother an hour ago. For an hour. They’re going to file a missing persons with the police.”
“It couldn’t hurt,” Flanagan said. “It might even discourage Franco.”
“I don’t know . . . he doesn’t sound easily discouraged.”
“We’ll see,” Flanagan replied. “What time are you expecting people?”
Teneille brightened visibly. “Six-thirty, seven. It’s just a few friends.”
“Couples?” he winced.
“Actually, there’s a single girl in there as well,” Teneille smiled.
Flanagan picked up a knife and started speed slicing tomatoes and shifting the results onto a small, flat glass tray.
“Not trying to fix me up, I hope.”
“You? No,” Teneille laughed. “I told her I was keeping you for a spare.”
She was still grinning when Flanagan looked up, and the silence and stillness that instantly descended was more powerful than anything either of them probably expected. It was almost just as well Flanagan ran the sharp knife right across his knuckles. Spitting and cursing and shaking his hand about, casting the room in red droplets, he sparked at the acute pain. What started as an over-exaggeration for the sake of easing an awkward moment turned suddenly into a full-on fit as he roared, turned helplessly and put his wounded fist through one of the nearest pine cupboards.
Teneille held her hands together against her chest, caught between concern and self-preservation as she backed slowly out of the kitchen to leave Flanagan hyper-ventilating and leaning over the sink, harsh breaths flavoured with tears as his bleeding hand wept into the stainless steel basin.
“Mick?”
Flanagan shook his head, glancing up at the staved-in cupboard for confirmation. Then he groaned, looking back down the drain and imagining it a grave he was digging for himself.
“Fuck. Fuck. Sorry.”
Still shaking his head, he almost didn’t feel Teneille’s hands on his back, her touch so tentative and light. Eventually he turned and looked at her, unusually unrepentant with the tears dribbling down both cheeks and off his chin. She placed her palm over the side of his face and was only a few inches away, and yet there was nothing else in it, finally, except genuine concern.
“I really am going to have to introduce you to some meditation.”
“I’ve schooled myself in my own misery,” he replied in a husky voice. “I’m not sure I won’t just end up in, you know . . . a place of deep sorrow.”
Flanagan smiled weakly, but Teneille didn’t get his Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon reference. Instead, she turned on the cold tap and soaked a chequered tea towel and helped wrap it around his hand.
“I hope you’re going to be OK for tonight?”
He looked up again from her ministrations, the undertones unavoidable.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Or I’ll go out.”
Teneille only nodded her head, finally no longer speaking her concerns. Flanagan could only be grateful, and for the first time thought maybe meditation – if not a bullet – might be a good idea.
*
THEY WERE BEAUTIFUL people, even the ugly ones. Even the men, Flanagan had to concede. They weren’t his type – they certainly weren’t his crowd – but with a shave and a shampoo and gauze tape across his knuckles and a few quiet, polite lies, he was able to get by. The food certainly smelled good, Teneille’s marinade making the meat like something only Zeus enjoyed on Olympus, and even the scariest of the guests brought cold, exotic beer and an almost Libertine urge to share it. Flanagan could appreciate that if nothing else.
“This is Jackie,” said Teneille, indicating a creature about the height of a bulldog, blonde and blue-eyed and only slightly less made-up than a Kabuki doll. “She’s a naturopath and her husband here is John, a life coach and recovering Christian scientist.”
They all gave a laugh, especially John, Flanagan’s height with brown hair naturally inclined to a priestly tonsure, weird denim slacks that belted around the waist with a tie and only reached below his knees, formless and loose, that revealed vaguely feminine, hairless calves ending in moccasins.
“Janelle’s an old friend of mine,” Teneille said, indicating a hugely pregnant woman with glowing tanned skin and freckles and fantastic white teeth, an impending mother-of-three to three different men. Somehow, she didn’t have any of the kids with her, apart from the one beneath her dress.
“We survived St Olga’s together, though Janelle was always the brave one,” Teneille explained. “She’s an artist for a living. You’re doing well, aren’t you darling?”
“I’m not complaining,” her friend replied.
“What sort of art?” Flanagan asked. “Sculpture? Painting?”
“Medical photography,” Janelle explained with a mysterious twinkle.
Roland, Ari and Joyce were the next to arrive, something implicit in the use of the pronouns and possessives suggesting they all had something going. Roland was a tall, brooding Germanic type with a chestnut beard to cover a receding chin. Ari was blonder, a surfie by complexion alone since he spent most of his time indoors as a yoga instructor. To Flanagan, Joyce seemed a misnomer, what with her helmet of black hair and crisp pronunciation. After a few drinks, she conceded she was fucking both men in time-share because neither one could cope with her on their own. Proudly temperamental and classist despite her own job as a social worker, Joyce managed to slip Flanagan her card on the pretext of his lie about setting up in corporate security.
“You know,” she said, fingers running down his scarred knuckles, “in case someone gets traumatised and needs a shoulder to cry on.”
Dennis was almost a relief, just an Internet technician raised on a station in the state’s north who fled to Perth when he was seventeen after coming out of the closet. It didn’t stop him nearly playing A-grade cricket; and he and Flanagan discussed the upcoming Ashes and the good old days of Western Australian cricket when the national side had seven of its eleven spots filled by West Aussies. Dennis suggested they trade numbers after Flanagan mentioned interest in playing, and Flanagan, too long immersed in the jungle surrounded by homophobic grunts and ammunition, stalled awkwardly to both their embarrassment.
“Or maybe I’ll just catch up with you later,” the handsome man grinned painfully.
The real allure came in the form of Margot: a tall, auburn-haired serial divorcee weighing in at only fifty-five kilos and twenty-seven years. Margot had three ex-husbands and five houses to her name and had reinvented herself as a palmistry and tarot reader, though she wouldn’t admit if she was good enough to pay the bills through clairvoyance alone. Flanagan knew Teneille had invited Margot as a set up, and truth be told, between her killer green eyes and the hard nipples straining against her Indian blouse, Flanagan knew she’d be hard to turn down. He was grateful when they didn’t hit it off. Teneille’s hawkish gaze was at least partly the reason, the evening’s initial mild flirtation as intimate as an episode of Big Brother with the hostess’s odd comments and drinks offers and walking over both times sultry Margot got Flanagan on her own down near the bird bath.
“I appreciate you indulging us,” Teneille said at one point, seated beside him on the veranda. “I know these people must seem frustrat
ing to you.”
In the back room, Lord stood on his own watching the footy. Brett Hopkins was on five goals for the half.
Flanagan only glanced sideways. “You don’t have to say that.”
Teneille gave a strangely rugged grin.
“I’m getting to know you, Flanagan,” she said. “You’re a tough guy, but you’ve got no inner peace.”
“Sounds pretty normal to me.”
“Well, I think you’re wrong,” she said. “You may judge them harshly, but look around you: the one thing I can vouch for my friends, they’re weirdos, they’re unusual, maybe you think they’re freaks, but they’re at peace. With themselves, at least.”
It felt like an ambush and Flanagan pulled his hand away from near hers, causing it to slap the edge of the seat.
“Hmmm, well, maybe I’ll chase you up about that meditation some time.”
Teneille smiled. “Sure thing. Don’t drink too much. Nine am. You can come to yoga with me.”
THIRTEEN
IT WASN’T THE first time Flanagan had done yoga, though he didn’t remember it being quite so painful. It was bad etiquette, but he was glad to be called from the women-dominated class by the chirruping of his phone tucked into his left Blundstone boot out in the change room.
Flanagan uncoiled from the dog pose, his back aching and one side twitching, and crossed the wooden floor almost daintily on his bare feet. The other room was just an antechamber between the hall and the main entrance and he took the phone outside and down the stairs as he answered it, strangely glad to hear Carlo Franco’s clipped voice on the other end.
“Flanagan,” the gangster said, and then he took a couple of breaths. “Hope you didn’t make any plans for today. I thought you might like a drive in the country.”
Standing in his swimming shorts and a new t-shirt from Coles, Flanagan felt conspicuous standing on the footpath of the busy High Street. As he changed ears on the phone, a few Saturday morning fashionistas struggled past, their eyes on his bare legs, the girls giggling conspiratorially into each other.
“The country? Where are you thinking, Carlo?”
“The less said the better, mate,” the foxy Mr Franco replied. “I’ll send Peter to collect you at twelve. Whereabouts?”
Flanagan gave him the Mosman Park train station, just a few blocks from Lord and Teneille’s home, and Franco rang off before he could get any other details. Flanagan vowed to leave his cell phone number and final requests with Teneille in case he never made it back. Hopefully Allyson, a girl he’d never met yet whose reputation for trouble he was beginning to appreciate, would be coming back with him at the end of the day.
Clicking the phone off, Flanagan jogged up the steps only to collide at the top with one of the two instructors, a wiry-looking fifty-year-old named Irene. She gave him an up and down that was more intuitive medical than covetous appraisal and stopped him at the door with a raised hand.
“How are you handling it in there?”
Flanagan smiled tightly and inexpertly tossed the small handset back into the clothes pooled beside his boots.
“You’re worried I’m going to strain something?”
The woman gave a taut grin of her own. “I can hear your tendons groaning like the wires on the Sydney Harbour Bridge,” she replied. “Are you sure you warmed up enough in there?”
“I’m not sure I could ever warm up enough for that.”
“Maybe you should be in the beginners’ class? Teneille brought you?”
“Yeah,” he nodded, “but hold on.” He raised his own palm. “I have what passes for a black belt in pencak silat, if you’ve ever heard of it –”
“The Indonesian martial art,” Irene said.
“That’s right. It’s pretty fluid. I always thought of myself as flexible and fast.”
Irene squinted and looked up and down again. “In what lifetime?”
Flanagan’s eyes were agog. “What do you mean?”
“Well, how old are you?”
“Thirty.”
“OK,” Irene said. “And how old were you when you did this training?”
“I started in my early twenties.”
She tapped him on the stomach. “And were you carting this around when you did that?”
Out of pride, Flanagan lifted his blue t-shirt to show he was carrying more muscle than flab, though undeniably a fair helping of each right at that point in time. Irene only grunted, probably confirmed, and then she wrapped leathery fingers around the bicep curled by lifting his hem.
“And how about these? I hope you don’t call them your ‘guns,’ for God’s sake. A young man’s vanity, unless you’re a labourer or something. Have you been lifting weights?”
“I was . . . stationed . . . in northern Thailand. There’s not a lot to do.”
“Thailand or prison?” she asked.
“Thailand,” Flanagan scowled.
“OK. You know, bigger isn’t always better. More body mass means more work for vital organs, less transportation of nutrients and oxygen, and in general a shorter life expectancy. I know our society worships big men, but it’s the skinny ones who live till they’re a hundred.”
“I used to be smaller, it’s true,” he conceded. “My teacher in Java was a little Muslim bloke called Yazid. Tiny. Tiny, but quick.”
Irene gave him a final examination. The class beyond the door were lying spread-eagled, the rest-cum-meditation Flanagan had been yearning.
“OK,” she announced. “How long have you been back from Asia?”
“Just a few weeks.”
“Are you swimming?”
“Yeah,” Flanagan said.
“OK. Time to lose that bulk. Come back Wednesday morning, ten am. OK?”
“Jesus,” he laughed, startled by her forthrightness. “It’ll be my pleasure.”
“Good,” the woman laughed.
“My name’s Flanagan,” he said, and they shook hands.
*
THEY SQUEEZED IN a swim at Bathers’ Beach, conspicuous among the Japanese tourists queuing for McDonalds, grey clouds off an otherwise spotless horizon, a warm easterly suggesting confusion in the stratosphere as Flanagan and Teneille dropped the gear they’d carried from High Street and dared each other into the sea. Flanagan was coy and his partner exuberant, laughing and squealing at the ocean’s first tiny touch, firm-figured and big bottomed like the song as goose pimples swarmed across her lightly tanned flesh. Flanagan felt downright philosophical as he let his friend’s wife cajole and finally push him into the seaweedy water, salt thick like from the shaker in the swirling murk.
Teneille kept her distance once they both had their hair wet, sensibly aware that it would be more than being childish to play chicken with such private monsters. Or perhaps that’s what Flanagan imagined.
“It’s funny,” he declared as he stood thigh-deep and thoroughly soaked in the cold water. “I sort of figured I’d be doing this with Lord, not his missus.”
“He’s probably doing paperwork,” Teneille replied.
“You sound bitter.”
“I’m not,” she quickly snapped. “I’d rather he get it out of the fucking way first thing so we can at least have the semblance of a weekend together.”
“And you’ve got your yoga.”
Teneille shrugged. “That’s right.”
Flanagan thought about asking if she wanted to get a room somewhere. The money in his pocket would buy the best suite at the Esplanade for a week. Instead, half-erect already from the surging cold, he turned and walked back to his t-shirt and started wiping off his arms and legs. Back still turned, aware she was coming up the beach as well, he shucked out of his wet shorts and slipped with difficulty into his jeans.
“Ouch,” Teneille laughed.
Flanagan looked across and smiled, screwing up his mouth sideways as he willed explicit thoughts to pass. Her hair was plastered across her face and neck like seaweed itself, blue eyes afire with the elements.
“I got a
call from Franco,” Flanagan said. “I’m going with him at noon.”
Teneille didn’t say anything, merely nodding, face gone tight.
She had a towel already and quickly dried off. Then she wrapped the towel around her, crouching nimbly to pick up her things.
“Better get you home, commando.”
FOURTEEN
AT THE HOUSE, Flanagan went into his room and ran a stock-take on his meagre things before changing into the dark blue long-sleeve shirt again, accessorising with the leather coat and the Colt Python. After a long moment’s deliberation, he sighed and tucked the deadly handgun back into the flap at the side of his duffel. It felt strange without the money sitting in there with it, but he could only smile when he thought of his duplicitous Adelaide Street bank manager and the possibility of his own house in South Fremantle.
Such warm thoughts were going to have to sustain him, he knew. Making sure he had a copy of Allyson’s photo and deliberately leaving his ID behind, Flanagan pulled the phone from the charger and walked from the room just in time for it to start ringing.
“Flanagan,” he said.
He snatched the cigarettes from the railing out back and had time to light one before the caller summoned the wherewithal to talk.
“Mick, it’s your mother.”
Flanagan’s heart did a double-take and he coughed out the remnants of his first cigarette since driving with Teneille to the port. Glancing back into the house as if concerned about privacy, he saw his friend’s wet-haired wife admitting the carpenter Flanagan had promised to hire. He took another toke and slowly exhaled.
“Well come on, say something,” his mum said.
“You took your time,” Flanagan finally replied.
Anne exhaled audibly, the sound half-cigarette, half age-old irritability.
“I could say the same about you,” she groaned, doing her best to stifle the irate pitch into which she too-easily slipped. “Nuala said she saw you. You visited her. Were you going to call me?”
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