A Family Madness

by Thomas Keneally

  Still no one appeared at the upstairs window. Delaney saw a police Commodore rolling toward him down the alley with only its parking lights on. He slipped out the gate to meet it. It held two young constables wearing the sort of mustaches favored by American police on television. He trailed the two of them up the outside stairs and watched them wriggle up through the open window in their tightarsed navy blue trousers. He followed, himself, feeling the residual damage in his shoulder during the second his wrists took his entire weight on the windowsill. Delaney and the constables now stood in an outer office. There were three desks and the usual dowdy office furnishings. A small indefinite light shone through from the boss’s office. The cops did not bother to tread softly. They strode over, and one of them threw the door open.

  Looking past the cops and through the door, Delaney could see that the light came from a two-barred electric radiator sitting on the floor. Within its small nimbus was a two-thirds-full flagon of red wine and two plastic cups. Beyond them, in the direction of an old three-seater sofa, violent movement could be seen, and Stanton, wearing only the Uncle Security shirt Denise had tapered down for him, stepped into the light cursing, his hands joined over his genitals. One of the cops now found a switch and turned a full and merciless light on the office. A woman sitting on the lounge reached, her arms cramped across her breasts, for pieces of clothing. “Turn the fucking lights off!” roared Stanton. The young policemen considered him. “Turn the bloody lights off till the lady gets dressed.”

  Delaney recognized the woman, a tired-looking but pretty widow who worked at Franklin’s. There were cruel dimplings across her abdomen from the children she had borne for her late husband.

  Delaney said, “Turn off the lights, Constable. It’s one of our blokes.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said the one near the lights, who whistled and, in his mercy, switched the lights off. The shabby seduction venue returned to an appropriate and kinder dimness. Stanton could no longer be seen as he had a second before, the humiliatingly swarthy legs and blue prick. “Jesus, Delaney, did you call the bloody law?”

  One of the police asked without any malice, “Do you blokes bring sheilas to your clients’ premises all the bloody time?”

  “Do you expect me to hire a fucking suite at the Regent?” asked Stanton.

  Delaney found himself weeping. The phenomenon terrified him. He made no sound and covered his mouth. Tears for his friend’s humiliation, or perhaps for his own desperate and joyous situation. Swallowing away furiously in the doorway, he managed to stop the flow. “There’s no need to take any action on this,” he heard himself saying. “I’ll keep special watch on the place and we’ll rewire the alarm in the morning.” It didn’t sound authoritative, so he said, “Brian here is an old copper himself. He’s got kids—”

  “Frig you, Delaney!” shouted Stanton, savaging his trousers, throttling them, the belt buckle tolling against his knees and a shiver in his voice, desire and claret and a two-bar radiator no longer adequate for the biting night. “He fucks the boss’s daughter,” he told the constables. “But they let him do it at the office.”

  Delaney felt the blood burning in his face and heard the widow from Franklin’s crying softly behind Stanton.

  The constables surprised Delaney by remaining lenient, as if they accepted Stanton’s proposition that we’re all sexual comics sooner or later and that it was uncomradely to put too much stress on the discovery of an old cop with his pants down. Both young men accepted a glass of the claret. The woman was excluded from this general absolution. Her shame went unrelieved. She dressed quickly in the toilet in the outer office and vanished. It was to a closing outer door that Stanton called futilely, “Let me see you to the car, sweetie!”

  “She never takes anyone to her place,” he explained to the cops in her wake. “Doesn’t want her kids to know.”

  He cleaned up quickly and left the premises, as they were called in industry and police terminology, locking up as he went. Delaney, the silly bugger who’d called the police, was a fringe member of the fraternity which flourished briefly in the dark yard of Dyson Engineering as Stanton, no longer foolish, the flagon held frankly in his hand, thanked them for everything. They had even helped him pick up the trail of tissues the widow had left. They would make a report, and it was agreed Delaney would too. Some kids had broken in and done no damage. Delaney would tell it that way to expiate for calling the police before checking up on whether it would make his friend feel stupid.

  “Listen, mate,” one of them called to Stanton from the doorway of the patrol car, “next time better make it the back seat of your Holden.”

  The Commodore crept away. Stanton might never have to face those two young coppers again—they might be transferred to Botany or Brewarrina. Delaney however was a friend. Every night he could bring to work, willfully, an image of bare-arsed Stanton and his blue phallus exposed by fluorescent light.

  “Well, thank you, cobber,” said Stanton. “Thank you, high-class fucker!”

  “How do you know?” Delaney asked. “Danielle and me. How do you know?”

  “Read it in the bloody Sydney Morning Herald.”

  From his years of football, Delaney had learned the game’s butt end range of skills. He liked to depend on penetration and speed, but there were as well eye-gouging and ball-crushing, winding and knees in the back, the clenched arm across the shoulder blade and the uppercut on the referee’s blind side. From this underworld of Rugby League Delaney produced an elbowing action which left Stanton gagging and devoid of breath.

  “What do you mean, they let me do it at the office?”

  Stanton laid the bottle down, gasped for a while, and said like a man with laryngitis, “Do you think the old Rudi doesn’t know? You think you creep back at midnight and root his daughter and he doesn’t know? He knows who the chicken king’s fucking but he doesn’t know about Delaney? You stupid prick! He wants you in. He wants another son. Good God help you, you poor bastard.” His breath had revived now. He stood upright and spoke calmly, as if all the spite he felt as an interrupted lover had evaporated in an instant. “I know what I’m doing. A poor lonely checkout bitch and a flask of red ned. You don’t know what in the bloody hell you’re doing.”

  This was worse, pity from a recent shirttail crackler, a trouserless goon. Delaney hissed at him—stuff about Stanton having enough disasters of his own without worrying about Delaney’s. This is the end of all friendship, Delaney thought.

  In the morning, signing off his .38, he asked Danielle to follow him to the car. “Does your father know?” he asked. She stood blinking in the sunlight. He had never seen her before with the sun in her eyes. It was one of those sharp, sunny winter mornings. The world’s best winter! said promoters of Sydney, not always exactly, since it could rain like a hose.

  “Does your father know?” he repeated. And Warwick? Who had listened calmly to the erotic chat of the chicken king.

  “He knows I make my own decisions,” she said. She bravely raised her jawline to the sun. He would long remember both the claim and the gesture. She said, smiling beneath her lowered eyes, “You never think other people are catching on. But they do.”

  “We ought to get out of the house. Out of your room. We ought to go somewhere else.”

  “Where would that be?” she asked.

  “I’ll look around.” It was impossible to see himself and above all Danielle booking into some motel. The Travelodge? The Pasadena? The Rio Bravo? (Here in the west of Sydney motels seemed to be named after Clint Eastwood movies.) It was impossible to see this pair of lovers disconnecting the alarms at Dyson Engineering and climbing through a window to the mean comfort of an old sofa and a two-bar radiator.

  “What I turn up with will be all right with you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She considered her hands and smiled again. “Yes. Within limits.”

  28

  It was after midnight, in the meat of Delaney’s shift. Warwick found him in front
of the Datsun dealership in Blacktown. “Quick, Terry,” he said. “Leave your car, I’ll drive you back.”

  Delaney asked him why. But he could not complain that his routine was being broken. It had been broken often enough since he became Danielle’s lover and sole desire.

  “Something you’ll be interested in,” said Warwick. “Promise you that.”

  Is this the family intervention? Delaney wondered. I’m driven to a paddock behind Rooty Hill and shot in the head with cold Warwick’s Magnum. All done with that same smoothness you saw when he switched over to earphones on the scanner. Getting into the car beside Warwick, he placed his hand, for the first time in his security career, on his .38, stretching against the handle of the thing as if it were a walking stick.

  “I thought you should see this,” said Warwick, driving off. “Since Scott’s still got his problem.” Scott had gone to a little shack the family owned out beyond Lithgow to let the burns heal. Scott, Kabbel had said, loved the bush. In the meantime, Warwick seemed to be arguing, Delaney was the substitute Scott.

  Warwick turned the car back down Main Street toward Seven Hills. Delaney had to be careful what questions he asked. He did not want to provoke any reference to Danielle. He didn’t want to hear what Warwick thought of the affair, whether it amused or outraged him.

  “Come on,” said Delaney in the end, an ordinary formula but painfully chosen, “tell a man where in the hell we’re going, eh?”

  Warwick reached between them and switched on a shortwave under the instrument panel. The bell-clear voice of a taxi dispatcher filled the car. “Lalor Park to Ryde,” it said. “Marsden Hospital to Girraween. Blacktown Tenpin to Merrylands.” Warwick switched the volume down and smiled modestly at Delaney. A prince of technology. “Our mate Mr. Stevens has just called a cab from Wentworthville Leagues Club.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Delaney, liking less than ever all this lifting of sound waves Warwick was so keen on, this electronic thievery. “We’re five minutes from Stevo the vandal’s place in Pretoria Road,” Warwick told him. “We’ll be there long before him.”

  “No,” Delaney yelled. “No way. I’m not here for any of that.”

  Warwick kept on in a level clinical way. “You were injured, after all. Getting pictures which some clown of a boozing mate of Stevo’s loses down the back of a filing cabinet. I mean, Delaney, we can go round pretending we’re saving society by shaking hands with doorknobs and shining torches at windows. We don’t make a dent on the core of things, you know, the protected species.”

  Delaney writhed in his seat. “Jesus, we’ve got protected judges and casino owners, and bookmakers and politicians shoveling smack straight into the veins of sixteen-year-olds in King’s Cross, and you want to bring the axe down on poor bloody Stevo. I don’t care enough about him. I won’t touch him. I won’t let you touch him. I mean it, Warwick. Bloody hell!”

  Warwick clucked at Delaney’s extravagance. “Neither of us’ll touch him. How’s that for a promise.”

  Delaney hauled himself across the vinyl seat closer to Warwick, inspecting his face. A handsome, studious face. It broke into laughter. “Honest, Terry,” said Warwick.

  The houses of Pretoria Street sat low among the telegraph poles. I am the happiest man in Australia, berserkly in love as I have always wanted to be since old Aubin brought the print into class. I have found the woman in the pavilion surrounded by lions and unicorns, kangaroos and emus. The woman at the middle of things.

  Yet the world had never looked meaner or more a cause for shooting yourself than it did in Pretoria Road after midnight. At the heart of each bungalow a love which had soured and flaked together with the first hopeful nuptial coat of paint, which had spawned large punks whose high-axled and spray-painted wrecks were parked everywhere on pavement and lawns. A street of no manners, no grace, no hope. The street where you’d expect to find Stevo living. All his connections and barbarisms and old mates hadn’t brought him further than this. You just had to look at the place to know that Stevo had brought his own vengeance on himself.

  Warwick parked close in to the pavement by a corner house and beside some kid’s scarlet Torana. “See the place down there?” he asked Delaney. “Open carport, low brick fence. That’s Stevo’s castle. His wife’s a diabetic and on holiday in Queensland. Stevo celebrates by visiting all the licensed clubs. He’d like to find a woman to bring back with him in the cab, but they still haven’t made them that low.”

  Delaney said, “If you try to run the poor loveless old bugger down I’ll get in your way.” He grasped the parking brake between the bucket seat and jerked it on two extra notches.

  “Anyone would think,” said Warwick, “Stevo was a relative of the Delaneys.”

  And in a way he was. Stevo was a man Delaney had till recently thought he could never become. But now that Delaney was the happiest man in Australia any disaster could overtake him.

  “Just so you’re clear on that,” said Delaney.

  “How much in match fees did he cost you?”

  “Not a cent. The coach cursed me last Sunday, but even a champion’s entitled to one bad game.”

  “It might all come against you later,” murmured Warwick.

  They saw a taxi then, edging along Pretoria Road from the other direction, the driver looking for letterbox numbers with probably damn-all help from a drowsy Stevo. The cab found the place and braked. Stevo took an age to emerge. Watching Warwick keenly for any mad movement, Delaney pictured Stevo grunting and farting and trying to find his money. By the light of a streetlamp Delaney saw him open the door—the front-seat door, Stevo willing to be the cab-driver’s mate all the way home from Wentworthville Leagues. Stevo stood by the driver’s window for a time, chatting, settling on or arguing about a tip. Through all this Delaney went on taking readings on Warwick’s face. It remained composed, empty of any berserk intention.

  Stevo went to his gate, leaned on it, swung it. It exploded with a small neat phosphorus flash about the size of a bowling ball and a noise adequate to turn sleeping neighbors over but, in a street of bombs and hot rods, not to wake them. Stevo stood under the streetlamp holding his right hand up by the wrist. It streamed blood. Even at that distance Delaney surmised that segments of Stevo’s fingers were gone. Stevo flopped onto his hip but continued to hold and examine his hand. The cabdriver ran to him.

  “There you are,” said Warwick. More or less in the shadow of the scarlet Torana, he backed his car slowly around the corner, made a casual turn, and drove away, not however putting on his headlights until he had rounded a further corner by a high school.

  “God almighty!” said Delaney, finding his voice.

  “Well,” said Warwick, beginning to breathe more loudly, “he blinded Scott. In older societies he would have been blinded himself. I mean, Delaney, there’s not enough obvious retribution these days. That’s what drives people mad and makes everyone sick. I’m not going to be made sick.”

  Delaney yelled at him. His fury though was partly aimed at himself, for losing his way in a foreign tribe who booby-trapped front gates. “You stupid prick! Your brother’s burns will heal. You going round to give Stevo back his fingers then?”

  “Come on, Delaney! You’re upset because a no-hoper like Stevo lost his aerosol finger?” He laughed. He knew exactly that it was a lack of bearings that worried Delaney.

  “How did you learn to do that sort of thing?”

  “Survivalist manuals from the States.”

  “Survivalist?” Delaney asked, feeling nausea, his stomach, heart, lungs, all those parts they called in the Bible “the reins,” blazing and churning, and the delicious and terrible hook of Danielle in his gills. “Surviving what?”

  “The Wave. The tsunami. Everyone knows. There’ll be one in the end. Nothing surer.”

  “A wave? How do you know there’ll be a wave? Are you a scientist?”

  “I use the term as a figure of speech,” murmured Warwick, pausing at the lights on the Great Western Highway
and watching the semitrailers roar by, laden with beer and sheet metal for Bourke or Broken Hill, drivers intent on death or a bonus. “There’ll certainly be an end to all this madness.”

  29

  RADISLAW KABBEL’S HISTORY OF THE KABBELSKI FAMILY

  My father found it hard to find an appropriate substitute for Herr Hirschmann, since the whole population seemed to be swept up into war efforts of one kind or another. He located at last a seventy-year-old woman, living in retirement in a house in Pushkina Street, who had graduated in law and letters in Cracow in the days of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef, whose empire then controlled that city. She must have been a prodigy in her day, even to the progressive Austrians, and she had taught most of her life in Warsaw and Vienna. Staroviche was the town of her ancestors to which she had retired. My father would sometimes say of her after a drink, “Never retire anywhere near the Warsaw–Minsk–Smolensk highway. There are always Goths and Vandals marching up or down it.” But the advice came too late. Her name anyway was Miss Tokina; she had a serene face and an instinct for controlling Genia as if the age difference between them were only a few years instead of over half a century. She got Genia reading the German classics—turning my sister’s inchoate adolescent energies onto Heine and Goethe.

  Miss Tokina however did not come until just before the final scene in Onkel Willi’s life. Because of the events of Kommissar Ganz’s fall, I would for most of the period of Miss Tokina’s tuition in the house therefore be in a privileged position, like that of a recuperating survivor of a shipwreck or of an African hunter who has emerged wraithlike from the tyranny of a swamp fever caught on safari. My Belorussian education would by then be virtually at an end. I could pretend nausea or a headache and my mother would exempt me from Miss Tokina’s sessions. I believe that my frequent absence from her classes bound Tokina and Genia closer and that her ultimate death of malnutrition and pneumonia in the Michelstadt Displaced Persons Camp in 1946 would help drive Genia away from the family and into the arms of Sergeant Pointeaux. But to mention Miss Tokina’s death and Sergeant Pointeaux’s venality is to take the family history ahead by years and not by days. I return therefore to May 1943, when the great news had just been telephoned to my father in the middle of the night by my godfather Ostrowsky himself that a Belorussian Republican Congress would hold preliminary meetings before Christmas in the Minsk Opera House.