by Ian Wedde
The bed sinks a little as Vero sits down beside me. She’s breathing heavily, and I know she’s turned herself sideways to look at me, because I can feel her breath on my neck.
‘Agnes took me out for lunch at the Monde Marie and gave me some nice lingerie,’ says Vero. ‘She also told me not to let boys cajole me into fucking them, not that she put it like that.’ Her breath continues to puff against my neck. ‘Don’t be so angry, Sandy. It wasn’t the poor girl’s fault, whatever happened. She got herself all dressed up. Why not assume she cared about Mick?’
‘She was a hooker,’ I say, not looking at my sister but at the carefully edited mise-en-scène of the La-Z-Boy and the TV set, with the concreted backyard beyond through the French doors. A wash of late-afternoon light is refracted across the beautifully ordered stripes of the tongue-and-groove matai floorboards, which ‘Marty’ used to love oiling with his own concoction of linseed, turpentine and beeswax, and then getting us to skate around the floor with socks on, to cut back to the shine.
‘Of course she was,’ says Vero. ‘With your superior powers of discernment you’d have grasped that instantly.’
When I do turn away from the still-life arrangement on the floor of the big living room of the house, with its odd diagonals of amber afternoon light, and face my sister again, she’s looking where I was a second ago, across the room and out at the yard.
‘I feel sorry for the poor buggers who’ll have to rip that lot up,’ she says, as if in her mind the house has already been sold to some connoisseurs bent on restoring it. ‘Sooner them than me.’ Then she gets to her feet. ‘Sooner them than me,’ she says again. ‘Bloody Mick. It was never going to be easy getting rid of him.’ She pulls the French doors shut and shoots the brass bolts that Martin Klepka chose with such care.
‘What do you want to do now?’ I ask, needing more than anything to fall back on Mick’s bed and go to sleep.
‘I’m going to tell Mick’s friends,’ says Vero. ‘I’m not stopping here a moment longer. It’s starting to give me the creeps.’ She extends the handle of her trundle suitcase with a smart snap. ‘Come on, Sandy,’ she says. ‘I’m not doing this on my own.’
The bar is nice and warm after the blustery chill of the walk along Cambridge Terrace, and I take a seat at one of the few remaining vacant tables while Vero talks to the barman. I watch my sister taking care. She leans over the bar, talking quietly to the guy, whose patient smile suddenly shuts down as he takes Vero’s hand in both of his. Then he’s pointing up at a shelf of whiskies, wagging his finger in their direction. Vero’s nodding and pointing too. The guy reaches up and takes down a bottle of Jameson’s. I know the label because it was Mick’s favourite, we used to have one or two when our trustees’ meetings were held in this bar back then.
Veronica holds the bottle of Jameson’s aloft and is noticed.
‘Anybody here a friend of Micky Klepka’s?’ she shouts.
A whole lot of heads crane and swivel and give Micky’s sister their close attention, like punters watching the leaders in the home straight, the way I remember they did on the occasions when Jilly dragooned me into the members’ stand at Ellerslie. Their expressions are pretty uniformly thrilled at first, as if they’ve finally seen a winner, but then they get it.
