The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  Perhaps part of Guy’s confidence, or over-confidence, had been that he knew his people. Rae. Felix. Wilcox. Claire, Isobel and Allison. And Ivan. But he hadn’t known me. What about Felix? Poor, bumbling Felix. I’d believed him capable of a lot more than personal dislike for Rae.

  I thought of Guy sweating over how close that Defence contract was to being signed, knowing that to be safe it had to go through before the elections, knowing the importance of gossip, and having to hope that nothing about the complaint to DIR would get passed on, that no-one at Defence would get to hear of it. I was sure Guy had planned to resign from DIR as soon as Compic had their contract, as soon as he had his hands on the money. He’d planned to jump, and all of us left behind would have watched enviously as he landed on his feet.

  What about my one-eyed lunch companion? It seemed he was exactly who he said he was, one of Compic’s rivals who’d finally got jack of them. And his takeover bid? If you can’t beat them, join them? Fancy yourself, Mr Whitelaw. Perhaps I’d send Bernard Whitelaw a bit of fancy email, invite him out for lunch or a coffee in the park.

  . . .

  Dianne Trapani seemed to have grown taller. I realised she wasn’t wearing black. Her hair was still tangled, blond with dark-brown roots, standing up from the crown in mock alarm. She wasn’t smoking. Di or Tony, or both together, had covered bare light-globes with coloured paper and moved the furniture in their small living room against the walls to make a space for dancing.

  Ivan looked at home at Dianne’s party, making rude remarks about Bill Gates and Windows 95, swinging a cup full of orange juice to emphasise a point. The man he was talking to leant back defensively, one hand on the lapel of his cream linen jacket.

  Dianne and her brother were playing house together, and it seemed they were both enjoying it. I thought of the cubby houses of my childhood, blankets and rugs draped over the back of the sofa, forgotten about and left for weeks, plates of fairy bread that had grown interesting grey-green fuzz when I pulled them out. I wondered at my mother’s leniency. Had she been allowed to make cubbies and leave them up for weeks when she was a small girl? Or had it been that she didn’t care about mine, didn’t even notice?

  It was a smallish party, mainly Tony’s friends. Tony looked happier than I’d ever seen him. His hair had grown very long and he wore it loose, trying, not very successfully, to hide the scars on his forehead, and a long one down his left cheek.

  ‘Yo, Sandy!’ he greeted me, and grinned.

  I hadn’t told Tony how much he reminded me of Peter, that to me he still had the butterfly softness of small boys. Tonight I saw that it was going, would soon be gone. Close up, Tony’s scars were pinched and starkly white, but Dianne had told me the doctor said there was a good chance they’d fade almost to nothing.

  We talked about the tribunal hearing, Tony looking bashful and relieved. Perhaps his car accident had had something to do with it, but the university had been kind to him. He had a year’s probation. He was to repeat first year and complete a hundred hours of community service, but there’d be no criminal charges. I wondered if Tony realised how lucky he’d been. A lot of bad blood had found its way out at the hearing, and criticisms of Professor Bailey from those whose word counted for something.

  ‘Are you still playing that game?’ I asked him.

  ‘Ambermush? Sure.’ Tony glanced at me from under black eyebrows that were growing back unevenly.

  ‘And that character you play?’

  ‘Soltar? She’s amazing. I never know what she’s going to do next.’

  ‘You don’t plan it? You just sit down at your keyboard?’

  ‘Like the other night. I thought I’d lost her?’ Tony warmed to his subject, leaning forward, his cheeks flushed and his black eyes shining. ‘I thought we were lost.’ He closed his eyes for a second, moving his jaw forward. ‘There’s this character called Bear, a guy who’s incredibly Machiavellian, smarter than Soltar, like he’s got the ability to read minds, you know? He can second-guess people, know what they’re going to do before they do it. He made a move on Soltar. She knew he was going to, but she didn’t know when, or how. It was like—everything froze, if you know what I mean. Then Kostya got her out of it. She wasn’t expecting it, wasn’t even thinking about him, but he was there for her.’

  I felt the prickling of a new kind of curiosity about this place Tony travelled to. He blinked again, and rubbed under his chin with the back of his hand.

  ‘Di doesn’t mind?’ I asked.

  Tony ducked his head and smiled. ‘My sister’s got a new boyfriend.’

  I glanced across to where Dianne was talking to a tall young man in a black leather jacket.

  ‘That’s him? He looks like Ateeq.’

  ‘Cousin,’ Tony said. ‘They met at the shop. My sister went in there to buy a tape and came out with a carload of hi-fi equipment.’

  We laughed, and I squeezed Tony’s arm. He looked indulgent, as if for once he was the older, more responsible sibling.

  ‘What happened to that detective, the one who came to see me when I was in hospital?’

  ‘He’s had a relapse.’

  ‘Shit.’ Tony tried for the right expression, not quite managing it.

  ‘But he’s hanging in there,’ I said. ‘He’ll be out again in a day or two. Getting back to Ambermush, is it like real life? Do you try out things that have happened to you, to work out better endings, stuff like that?’

  Tony laughed again, and said, ‘Soltar’s as different from me as—broccoli from eggs.’

  Tony had no way of knowing about the other characters, he told me, whether they were as different from their creators as he claimed to be from his. It was a trust thing. Unless the other players chose to tell him, he couldn’t tell whether they were old, young, male, female; whether it was entirely fantasy, or whether they sneaked in real-life situations, which was what appealed to me, the notion that you might work out how to be a better person, live better, in cyberspace.

  Ivan would tell me I was being sentimental, but I could turn that accusation back on him any time I chose.

  When I went up to Ivan and touched him on the arm, his expression was quizzical, inquiring.

  All I wanted, or believed I wanted, was to skate on the surface of Ivan’s moods, to keep him there, on the surface, and myself as well.

  Ivan had commented on the way to the party—me driving, proud of two good arms, keeping the nerves down below my diaphragm—‘Well, you know, Sandy, I’m a wizard when it comes to motor cars. A motor car just sees me coming and it does exactly as I want.’

  I’d chosen to say nothing, instead of the everything that needed to be said some time.

  I could strengthen my grip on his arm and say, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Ivan would smile, one black eyebrow lifted, and reply, ‘It’s cool.’ Or, ‘It’s OK, Sandy, really.’

  And it might be.

  An End and a Beginning

  The chap and quat of basketballs forms a steady backbeat to my thoughts. I sit at the dining-room table in front of the window and watch a high-school teacher showing some students how to throw a javelin. The teacher wears a wide-brimmed straw hat, a khaki shirt and shorts. He steps back on one foot in a strained, balletic pose, half-sport, half-sculpture, then moves his arm forward in a wide, slow-motion arc, so that the group of watching students—and me through my window—see a blessed golden spear shoot forward and fly. After an age of growing up has passed, the spear falls into the well-washed turf.

  Kids go on shooting for goals on the high-school court way after it gets dark. If practice can make them Michael Jordans, then each one will be for sure. I see them as Peter in a few years time, but the picture no longer carries with it the anxiety it once did.

  Peter’s over at Derek’s while I’m finishing this—my account of events, mine as opposed to Gail Trembath’s, or anybody else’s. I gave Gail an exclusive on how we set a trap and caught Guy Harmer, and made her the happiest reporter in the southern hem
isphere, for a while at least.

  I’m in the Lyneham house, and Derek’s doing what he said he always wanted—building from his own design, from the dirt up, on a block out along the Murrumbidgee. Meanwhile he’s renting a flat in Braddon, where Peter has his own bedroom, but can’t take Fred.

  The story of the end of my marriage to Derek both is and isn’t part of this account. I feel a bit guilty for not saying more about it, and Derek, when he reads this, will hate it and say I’ve misjudged him.

  Derek looked at me when he got off the plane, looked at me over the top of Peter’s head, and we both knew it was over. Derek’s face was blank with the need to tell me what he’d put off for so long. He’d met someone in America. She was flying out within a month to join him. He wanted a divorce.

  Derek and I had more in common that morning at the airport than we’d had in years. Peter makes no bones about wanting us back together, but he likes Valerie and seems happy spending time with her and Derek. Valerie was there when I phoned Derek and Peter after the accident. Peter never said a word about her. I asked him why and he said, ‘Mum. You were stressed out enough.’

  I asked Peter whether he’d ever said anything to his father about Ivan and me, and he shook his head, his mouth set in that stoic line that warned me not to push him.

  I like to take Fred for a walk when it’s beginning to get dark. We cross the road to the school oval, listening to the steadiness and urgency of the traffic on the highways behind and to the side of us. I stare at the poplars that grab and hold the last light as it disappears behind O’Connor Ridge.

  We move towards the belt of trees where the high-school students eat their lunch, Fred scavenging, me with my head up. Fred always hopes for the bonanza of a whole discarded sandwich, or a piece of cake. He misses his master; sometimes, when I’m turning for home, he disappears and won’t come when I call.

  The lights over the path and along the street bring memories with them; full-throated memories that take not only human form, but the forms of clever machines as well.

  Who haven’t I accounted for? Bambi’s doing dressmaking at home. Between seams, she’s reading the job ads and hoping to strike it lucky for an interview, like me.

  I visited her one afternoon and we drank Red Zinger tea and chatted. I wondered how I could ever have believed Bambi capable of framing Rae Evans and stuffing up my car, realising I shared with her the impulse to carry colour around, to be captured by bright petals and the hungry opacity of leaves.

  There was a postcard from Rae in the letterbox waiting for me when I got home from Bambi’s.

  At first I didn’t even notice the picture on the front. ‘Hello Sandra,’ Rae wrote, in her small, backsloping hand. ‘I don’t think about many of my ex-colleagues, but I do about you. So let me know how you’re keeping.’

  I flicked the card over and studied the photograph of a North Queensland rainforest, imagining the light of the tropics glancing off Rae’s indoor skin, as I propped the card against the sugar bowl. A feeling of escape rose from it like perfumed oil.

  I thought of Rae as she’d been when I first met her. And then by the lake in the dark that evening. Of Rae’s omissions and half-truths. Of how I’d liked her, and of how she’d made me angry. Of what might have happened if she hadn’t left Canberra the day the charges against her were dropped.

  Somehow I didn’t think Rae would ever willingly come back here to live. I stared at her address in tiny letters at the bottom of the card, as though she’d added it as an afterthought. She’d already said thank you and congratulated me on our report, which was on the AGPS bookshelves at last between maroon and pale-blue covers.

  I doubt whether DIR will have Rae back, if DIR still exists after the elections. They’ve been so long in coming. Now they’re only a few days away, I feel strangely calm about the outcome.

  I got a surprise phone call the day after Rae’s postcard. A security guy at DEET had walked into a problem with a hacker, and wondered if I’d consider a little low-key investigating.

  ‘Why me?’ I asked, trying to hide the fact that I was tickled pink.

  Well, he said, he’d heard about me. His ‘problem’—the way he said the word made me feel as though he was asking me to walk across a roomful of eggs without breaking them—required an indirect approach.

  I didn’t say yes right off. I waited twenty-four hours, then said it. Computer Security Consultant. Does that sound grand? I must say I find it appealing. With a bit of luck and good connections, with one thing leading to another, who knows, even I might find a way to get along in cyberspace.

  . . .

  Ivan gave Brook the completed horse as a coming-home present. Brook is learning to program. He has to go in for chemo once a week, and he’s bald again. Apart from that, he’s becoming as much of a tech-head as Ivan was, or is.

  I was there when Brook tried it out for the first time.

  He pirouetted slowly, his face and head invisible beneath the helmet. Because I couldn’t see his eyes, I didn’t know how he felt, how he was reacting, but his movements reminded me of ballet steps, slow, untutored, with an uncommon grace. He held the joystick at arm’s length for balance, moving it slowly forward, then back in towards his body with a calm precision.

  He stopped his slow circling, and for a few more moments swayed from side to side. Ivan went to him and grasped him by the shoulders, and took the helmet off as gently as if he was removing a bonnet from a newborn baby.

  Brook’s face was washed clean of any expression, and his bald head shone with dancing.

  Curious, I climbed up on the platform. There was nothing to frighten me now in the dull soft hiss of illicit spears against a horse’s wooden sides.

  I thought it would be the old VR, with perhaps the battle added on. I expected to move inside a burning city, wooden buildings collapsing inwards, the sounds of screaming, heavy timber falling.

  Instead there was blackness, slowly taking shape. A black horse, both mythical and life-like, extraordinarily beautiful, made for destruction yet somehow surviving.

  I was inside it, as before. But this time I felt its heart beat next to mine; its life, its vital organs warm between my breasts. Then I was riding it, this creature of humility and grace, over a dry land, eucalypt forests, a river, towards a crystal coastline and the sea. A creature made for flight, instead of a shell of dead wood being dragged by its belly towards death.

  I wept when it was over, somehow too spent to lift the helmet off. My tears wet the blue padded leather, and I balanced unsteadily, one hand on either side of the corral.

  — END —

  From the next SANDRA MAHONEY novel …

  One

  Grey castle walls rose from sheer cliffs. I felt as though spires of salt water were constantly washing over me, as they washed and worried the sharp rocks at the cliff’s base. Intense cold entered my body through my fingernails and ankle joints, and I forgot I was standing in a room in Canberra, staring at a computer screen. Whoever had created the scene in front of me had drawn the walls and rocks as though they were almost one—straight grey smoothness of the walls, more variation of colour in the cliff face—inseparable and yet not quite. I felt that he—for I knew the artist’s name—had intended both rocks and walls to rise from the ocean as though the whole of Irish history could be made ­contingent in the blinking of an eye.

  Yet I stared for a long time at the dividing line, as though it was the picture’s most important feature. Directly below it was the body of a young man, his blond hair a single spot of brightness on the screen, long enough to cover his face, and flowing over one dark shoulder. He lay on the spray-wet rocks with his left arm bent underneath his head. A single, hurried glance might have left the viewer with the impression that he was asleep, except for the impossible angle of his legs, spired rocks that gave no quarter.

  He wore a black shirt that might have been a uniform. I imagined him standing on the castle wall, looking down, or up, in that last moment before he
jumped, a person whose decision, or blank despair without decision, had got him that far, to stand above the ocean on the thick waist of an ancient building.

  I turned to the woman standing next to me, realising that the grip of cold came from her as well.

  I was aware that Moira Howley, the mother of the young man whose computer we were looking at, in fact wasn’t looking at it, hadn’t looked at it since she’d led me to her son’s room and switched it on. While I’d been staring at the screen, she’d been standing with her head down, one hand resting on a black table.

  ‘Is this all Niall left? No note? No other message?’

  ‘No,’ Moira said. ‘Just this.’

  ‘What about a will?’

  Moira did not so much shake her head as her whole body. She turned from the computer to stare out a window at a square of grass. A magpie hopped across it, dragging a tangled piece of string.

  ‘It’s a nightmare,’ she said softly. Her eyes were swollen, yet suddenly full of pride.

  ‘But you kept it?’

  ‘I’ve stared at it till I was sure I was going mad. That’s why I phoned you.’

  ‘What did the police say?’

  ‘A suicide note,’ Moira said, finally looking at me. ‘That was their conclusion.’

  ‘Did you attend the hearing?’

  ‘I couldn’t. Bernard did.’

  ‘But you—’

  ‘The coroner said he was satisfied that Niall had taken his own life.’

  I didn’t know why my questions were making Moira impatient. She looked top-heavy and yet frail, a house of cards that was about to topple over, a house a child had made and then forgotten, that the first breeze from an open door might send scattering. Part of it was winter clothes too thick for a September morning, a morning people were celebrating all over Canberra, throwing off jumpers, getting out of doors.

  Her only son had killed himself on the night of the winter solstice, and she shivered in remembrance. Her brown woollen cardigan had wide lapels and sagging hip-length pockets. A long skirt, colour of mustard that had been in the fridge too long, was designed to be worn with boots, yet Moira had on thick white socks and a pair of dark blue clogs. When she’d brushed her hand against mine, it felt like I’d put my hand in a freezer.