The trophy was still on the stage when he departed.
Harry would like to wait for time to do its passing, for it to soften the edges and heal the wounds, for it to temper his impatience with a dose of enlightenment, but time is a gradual instrument and he can’t stand it anymore. Not any of it. The idea of Jack and Eddy strutting around like they’ve gotten away with something, another pair of knickers for their famed trophy drawer, one more in a gluttony of misdeeds, nearly enough to send him over there. Not because he needs to be told what happened after he left Sportsman’s Night, and not because it would make any difference if he did hit them for six, but just for once to even up the fixture, to make them own their offences, to force them to suffer for their trespasses the way others have been forced to suffer theirs. But Harry knows it would be about as effective as pissing into the wind.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been fourteen years since my first confession and I have never told the truth. I have been lazy, cruel and indecisive. I have lied. I have committed the sin of omission. I have twisted and turned, I have squirmed. I have been weak, afraid and uninspired. I have not taken the higher road. I have chosen the easier path when it has been expedient and it has always been expedient. I have not stepped up. I have gone along. I have baited and switched. I have avoided. I have been undone and I have blamed others for my undoing. I have hidden when I could have led. I have not come to the aid of those I could have helped. I have turned my back on those who needed me. I have turned a blind eye. I have abandoned, judged and sinned. I have failed.
He puts down the cricket bat and grabs his car keys.
The letter itself he gets Dean to write:
“To whom it may concern …”
III.
Renunciation
From the little that Matt said later, it could be extrapolated thus: with one in front and one behind, the brothers were effectively screwing each other.
And then the party really got started.
The girl didn’t remember much. There was the music and the lights, the dancing. Then afterwards, when she woke up on the stretcher in a side room downstairs, or rather, when she came to, the rest of the girls long gone, groggy and dazed, her mouth dry, the tight scratchy feeling of cracked lips. It wasn’t until she went to the bathroom that she noticed her underpants were missing, special red sexy ones she’d nicked from work. Blood on her thighs.
She needed to wee but the burning sensation was so intense she had to stop before she got started. It was as though someone had taken a knife to her pelvis, searing her in her most sensitive place.
She bent forward letting her head fall between her knees, the motion fanning the tiny wisps of pubic hair ringing the base of the toilet.
Tears landed on the tiles between her feet but she wasn’t aware that she was crying. It’s just that it hurt so much, the tiniest little drop stinging sharper than any open wound she’d ever treated, yet she was busting. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt such an urgent need to go.
She braced herself and released another drip, the splash blotted by her heavy intake of breath, time seeming to stop as a thin veneer of sweat broke out across her top lip. Was it possible for the pain to feel like both a burn and a cut?
She flushed the toilet, then balanced herself over the bathtub where she rinsed her vagina with warm water cupped from the calcified faucet. “Please stop,” she whispered, willing the pain away.
Gradually it subsided and her thoughts were overtaken by a swirl of images, of smoke, of crushed velvet, and of the men, dancing with her as the audience clapped, clapped, slow careful dancing, and then the dancing stopped and they laid her down, the audience still applauding as a distinct yeasty scent overtook her, a feeling of drowning, and then her mind went blank.
She closed her eyes and shook her head as though in doing that she could make the images go away.
And perhaps it wasn’t even true. She might have been hallucinating, been ill with a fever. Imagining things. Terrible things. No, they couldn’t be true. Her mother often said she was fanciful, had an overactive imagination.
But then Greta returned to the room. “Three hundred bucks,” she said, opening the girl’s handbag, stuffing the cash inside. All twenties. And then the man who met her at the station (when was that, days ago, weeks ago?) bundled her into the back of a silver Audi and dropped her home, the early hours, Greta smoking in the front passenger seat, the smell of cigarettes mixed with the distinctive musk of Greta’s perfume, easy listening on the radio for the entire hour’s drive, the green-skirted hula doll on the car’s dashboard madly swivelling at every turn.
Greta tapped the side of her nose as the girl prepared to get out of the car. “You did good, kiddo,” she said. “Keep this to yourself and there’ll be more work if you want it.”
Ray’s Mazda was parked in the drive. The front door was unlocked. The girl tiptoed inside, her stilettos in hand, ladders in her fishnets, the stockings all torn around her feet.
*
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. He’s had this dream before. Or he’s dreaming that he’s had this dream before. Except that this time the priest is young. Too young. In his pinstripe suit, ankle boots and goatee. Making lame comparisons between Tracy and Deborah Harry songs (“Die Young Stay Pretty”). People dabbing at their eyes as he lunges at cheap gambits, God taking the special ones early, that she must have been too good for this world. It is humid. Sticky. The ground dry and lumpy as though it has rained and then dried again, the surface hard and irregular as coral. You are dust and to dust you shall return. Harry feels his armpits dampen inside his jacket, sweat run down his back. He watches himself rise from the folding seat and join the procession of other mourners approaching the grave. I am the resurrection and the life. The coffin is partly scattered with red roses. The scene reminding him of a movie, though even in the dream he can’t remember which one. He holds out his arm and drops his rose. It seems to catch on a burst of warm air and spirals slowly down. An eternity until it lands. Then he turns without saying a word to anyone and makes his way back to the waiting car.
Halfway between the city and oblivion the sea is black. On the highway cars concertina in their rush to the coast, piling up on each other like waves.
Each year dozens of people die at the beach. Half cocked weekend warriors way out of their depth.
Only the day before Dean swore he saw a body drifting near the Bluff – it was facedown, he said, floating in the sea – but when they went back later there was no sign of it, just the busy tide as always thrashing between the lighthouse and the Rocks.
In his fantasies everyone is dead: Diana, Alan, Matt, Kate, Rosie, Margo, Laurie, Ted, Jack, Eddy, all lined up on a motel bed. Only the girls survive, getting on with their lives as though the others have never existed. Occasionally he envisages them together, his girl, his father’s girl, always fixed in time, running through native flower meadows, the warm sun high in the sky as they course hand in hand through hip-height grasses. Or they might be dressed as cheerleaders, standing side by side on a curated winter field, bright and brassy, happily singing the Club song as the players stream onto the field, glorious warriors in their gold and Prussian blue.
Baby, can’t you see?
At night, when it is quiet, he lies listening to the breeze. Sssssssss. The soft rustle of the leaves penetrating his sleep, its own melody, blowing through the eucalyptus leaves like a promise.
Sopping wet with perspiration, back from a run, Harry approaches Margo’s Citroën, which is parked in front of the house. This time he can afford to be sociable. “Do you want to come inside?”
Margo smiles. “Can I take a raincheck?”
“Suit yourself.”
It is a perfect morning for footy practice, the kind he used to almost look forward to, the rote formula of it, trading the polished cowhide back and forth, firm and dry between his calloused fingers. He rips off a shoe, pulls at his sock
to line up the stitching, then leans a hand against the car as he stretches out his quads, first one leg and then the other, the gentle breeze loosing a steady supply of gumnuts on the hood as they make small talk about Christmas, how she spent a few days at the family beach house, swam, read a book, ate too much plum pudding. Magpies chortle on the power lines. “I should probably go in,” he says when he is done. “Take a shower.”
Margo nods. “Just one thing,” she says, removing her sunglasses. “And I promise it’s off the record, way off, strictly between us, I swear, but was it you? I need to know. Did you write it? Do you want to tell me more about it?”
“About what?”
“The letter, this business with the girl. You know I can’t do anything with it. Not unless I get someone else to confirm the allegations. But the Club’s hardly going to admit to anything, are they? Or any of your compatriots.”
He scoffs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really don’t.”
She smiles. “That’s funny.”
“Why?”
“No, that’s not what I mean. It’s just I thought you’d say that, that’s all. That’s alright. I get it, because what are you going to do? You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, right? Don’t want to be a dobber. Not in this country. A crime greater than treason. But that’s as good as shooting yourself in the foot. You look guilty as sin or you compromise the team. What a choice. You give them half a chance, step out of line and they’ll let you wear it. That’s it, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I? You’ve got nowhere else to go. No other way to play it. Maybe you can just give me a sign so I know I’m not completely off-track. A little hint. What do you say, a wink for ‘yes’, a frown for ‘no’?”
“Sorry Maggie. You’re barking up the wrong tree here.”
“Is that so? Which tree should I be barking up then?”
He shakes his head and laughs. “I don’t know. I can’t help you. I don’t know what you mean.”
Little league, juniors, TAC Cup, VFL, AFL. That is enough. Harry slips the Saint Christopher medal into his pocket, then loads his tent and rucksack into the back of his car.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Diana is always saying that the men in the family are cursed, their talents having leached from them as much as they’ve bestowed, keeping them fixed in a one-note existence of speed, intensity and strength, a dead-end combination of diminishing returns. And maybe, Harry thinks, she is right, everyone dipping into the well too many times, putting nothing back (and he doesn’t mean the weekly tenner for the church collection plate). Compounded as interest, handed down from father to son, each generation shouldering what its forebears couldn’t, lugging it in its own clumsy fashion, that inherited dead weight, on and on until finally someone says stop and takes care of business.
END OF AN ERA AS FUREY QUITS
By Margo Milne-Arthurs
January 8, 2007
Star recruit and youngest member of the Furey football dynasty, Harry Furey, has turned his back on AFL football.
The shy centre halfback says he’s achieved everything he set out to in the game and is ready to move forward. He is eager to explore other career options.
“It’s not for everybody,” said coach Laurie Holden, who played alongside Harry’s father, Club legend Alan Furey, in the 1980s. “We’d love to see him stay but players have to be honest with themselves and if their hearts aren’t in it they’ll never be any good. Quitting like this takes a lot of guts, but in the long run it’s best for him and it’s best for the team. We wish him every success.”
Furey and his brother were recruited under the father-son rule but while Matt Furey has thrived in the spotlight, Harry appears to have struggled with the family legacy and with his father’s notoriety off the field.
“We are sorry to see a skilled footballer turn his back on such a promising career,” said Ted Parker, Club president. “Harry is part of the family. The door is always open if he changes his mind.”
Furey was recruited from high school, playing his first AFL game at seventeen.
“It’s been a wonderful run for the Furey clan,” added Parker. “Let’s hope it’s not the end of an era.”
A journalist once asked Alan Furey about his game strategy, what went through his mind when he ran out onto the field. “That’s easy,” he said. “Don’t let the other team have the ball.”
Harry takes his Sherrin, sticks it on the front seat, then drives out slowly along the familiar streets. Past his mum’s. Past his old school. Past the units where the paddock used to be. At the oval, kids run free as birds. He pulls over, turns off the ignition and watches them tear around. Then he grabs the football, gets out of the car and drills it clear across the ground.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to Clare Forster of Curtis Brown and to everyone at Black Inc., especially Caitlin Yates, who got behind this project from the get-go, Anna Lensky, who got it out there, and Nikola Lusk, whose warmth, wit and expert guidance made working with her such a pleasure. Thank you also to the people who spoke with me on background. I hope I have done your stories justice and that this novel is consistent with your expectations.
For various forms of assistance during the writing of this book, I would like to thank: Anne Andgel, Rachelle Andgel, Mary Archer and family, Barbara Brook, Gillian Cohen, Gregory Day, Amy Espeseth, Jan Goldberg, Anita Harris, Charles Hausknecht, Lisa Jacobson, Patrick Mangan, Ian Syson, Scott Tannahill, Victoria University (and my friends and colleagues there), the Wednesday ladies, and the extremely fabulous crew at Dendy Park.
Elizabeth Cowell, Kate Daw, Phyllis Moritz, Richard Stringer, Maria Tumarkin and Jennifer Zukovsky each went above and beyond and I am deeply indebted to them for their generosity and friendship, without which this manuscript would not have found its way.
Finally and mostly to my main squeeze, Phillip, who saw me through the dirty daily business of the writing and production processes: Thank you, honey, like that even begins to cover it. I am so lucky to have you on my team. X.
*
“Small-Scale” © Gig Ryan. Reprinted with permission. “Buttons”: Words and music by Nicole Scherzinger, Jamal Jones, Sean Garrett and Jason Perry. Copyright © 2005 Songs of Universal, Inc., She Rights Music, Universal Music Corp., Showdy Pimp Music, Team S Dot Publishing, Hitco Music and Jason’s Lyrics. All rights for She Rights Music controlled and administered by Songs of Universal, Inc. All Rights for Showdy Pimp Music controlled and administered by Universal Music Corp. All rights for Team S Dot Publishing and Hitco Music administered by Bug Music, Inc., A BMG Chrysalis Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation. Written by Jason Perry. Published by Jason’s Lyrics (SESAC) / Reach Music Tunes (SESAC).
The Family Men Page 19
