‘While you’re over there, prancing around on your self-righteous, peace-loving pony, you might like to take a moment to reflect on all the times you came running to me, needing me to jump in and save your hide afteryoustarted brawls with kids at school who were too big for you.’
‘Oh, here we go.’
‘You remember that, right?’
‘Yes, let’s all keep doing the things we did as teenagers and pretend they’re okay to do in our mid-forties. I’ll go jerk off into a sock and you can go tipping cows.’
He wasn’t even listening. ‘Thenyou have the gall to go and bring cigarettes and books and outside food and fucking clothes to Arthur when he’s laid up in hospital.’ Russell shook his head, his lip curled in repulsion. ‘Daddy, can I spoon-feed your raspberry jellyto you? Daddy, can I rub your tootsies for you? I’m a good little boy, aren’t I, Daddy?’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Despite it all, the baby voice was so absurd coming out of this huge hairy beast of a man, with his scars and his mean eyes and his enormous scabbed knuckles on the steering wheel. And Russell’s fury got to a place like that sometimes—a place beyond sanity, into darkly comic levels of vitriol. Now I was thinking of all the fights we’d ever had. All of them over stupid shit. ‘You really are something else, you know that?’
My brother didn’t answer. He was staring at the river, the houses that lined it as we approached the ferry. Hamptons style, two storey, all white trims and boats rocking gently in their moorings. When we were kids we’d walked these houses in the summer, going door to door selling oranges from the farm. Each of us holding the handle of a laundry basket heavy with fruit.
‘You know, I don’t think any of this is about how I treated Dad after you slugged him,’ I said.
‘What’s it about then, Dr Phil?’
‘I think it’s about you not knowing how to tell me that you’re gay.’
The humour in the car evaporated, snatched from the very air, replaced by a hateful energy that clouded out from the other side of the car. Russell slowed at the lineup for the ferry, watching the big vessel beyond the boom gate making its way towards us. ‘Be very careful what you say next, Evan,’ he said.
‘You didn’t even try to tell me.’ I shrugged. ‘You told Georgia, and Georgia told her family, and they told people, andtheytold people, and it gradually drifted over to Dad and me. But you never called me up and actually told me. Do I get to be pissed off about that? After everything you and I have been through together, I had to hear about what happened on the fucking grapevine?’
‘No.’ He glared at me. ‘You don’t get to be pissed off about that.’
‘I think you didn’t tell me because you were afraid of what I’d say.’
Russell said nothing. He was squinting at swallows twisting and spinning around the ferry, landing on its lines and railings, hurling themselves headfirst into the wind.
I went on. ‘By the time Dad had gone and pulled his bullshit at your front door, you must have been terrified about what kind of bullshitIwas going to come out with. So, you found a way to be angry at me, so I’d never have the chance to tell you what I think.’
‘Let me explain something to you, Evan,’ Russell said. He pointed at himself, at me, the car around us, the ferry, and the boats beyond. ‘This? This whole weekend? This is not that chance. In case you were thinking that it is.’
‘Oh, it isn’t?’
‘No,’ he said. His voice was low, rumbling, the growl of a male lion warning a potential rival not to come close to the pride. Eyes full of dark experience. ‘It isn’t. You want to give me an exhaustive breakdown of what you think about it all? You want to list it all out? Whether you think I was faking it with Georgia. Whether youknew, when we were growing up. You go right ahead and do that, Evan. Write it all down. And when you’re done, take the paper, fold it neatly and shove it up your own arse.’
I nodded. ‘This is what he always wanted, you know,’ I said. ‘Dad. He always wanted us to hate each other. You’re sitting there fulfilling his dream.’
‘I guess I really am the better son, then.’ Russell gave an icy smile.
The boom gate lifted, and Russell drove us onto the vessel.
RUSSELL
Wisemans Ferry Medical Centre was on a hill across the wide street from a Bottlemart. The liquor store was already parked out with the vehicles of local tradesmen enjoying their Saturdays. They’d be preloading for a big night on the farms and wooded lots around town. I could already smell woodsmoke on the wind as I stepped out beside a long wheelchair ramp. I got a text from Bridie and opened it to find a selfie, her smile wide and an enormous lizard clutched against her side. The thing was as thick around the middle as a pool noodle, its chest and midsection lying along Bridie’s forearm, its eyes indignant and looking right at the camera. I could see the back leg was twisted and swollen. Being a middle-aged male and a father, I texted the thumbs up emoji.
Evan ended a phone call and tapped out a text to someone with another of those stressed sighs that everybody around me seemed to be giving every fifteen minutes or so, like the man was a walking pressure cooker with a faulty release valve.
‘So, Dodge is telling me Chloe’s body was brought here rather than to Gosford,’ he said, coming around the bonnet and standing near me. ‘After the paras arrived and took her out of the hotel and tried CPR. Once they’d realised she was definitely dead, their thinking was that they needed to get her somewhere sterile, and this is on the route back to the city, at least. She’s been kept at room temperature, he says, so that forensics can look into a proper time of death once she’s transported to the lab.’
This was good. I didn’t say so, but I’d been hoping Chloe hadn’t been put on ice before I saw her. That would fuck up time of death calculations even worse than they already had been.
‘Do you know these lot?’
‘Vaguely.’ Evan said. ‘I’ve never brought a body here.’
There was an ambulance parked in a bay marked out for the head GP of the clinic, and a handwritten sign on the door of the centre stated that the surgery was closed until further notice. A red-haired woman in navy-blue scrubs opened the door as Evan arrived ahead of me, smiling at him sadly and giving me a wary look. There was some chatter back and forth between the local cop and the people of his region, so I stood at the window with my best expression of impatience, because the last thing I wanted was to make friends. After I’d cleared my throat at least twice I was offered a set of gloves from a box and directed to a door at the back of the empty centre.
