Читать книгу A Hand in the Bush - Jane Clifton - Страница 11

The 1966 powder-blue Mustang zipped along Melbourne Road to the Westgate Freeway, Gladys Knight's creamy tones throbbing through the ancient stereo. 'Life!' Decca sang along, 'it ain't easy.'

The fast lane was anything but. On days of high wind the traffic was instructed to reduce speed by flashing orange lights. This morning, however, on the uphill sweep it had ground to a halt below a flaccid windsock.

A hold-up on the inbound during peak hour could mean anything from roadworks to a collision to a jumper. Decca reached for her mobile phone and stepped out of the car to try and get a better look up ahead.

'Candy? It's me. I'm stuck on the Westgate. I have no idea. Someone's probably run out of petrol. I might be about fifteen minutes late, okay? Oh he did? That's very thoughtful of him. Did you reschedule? A month! Well, well, well. Okay. See you when I do.'

Things had been getting dark and sticky with Oleg Kransky, her 9 am appointment. His wife's behaviour had become increasingly erratic and he was barely managing to stay on top of his panic attacks at work. A whole month without therapy was not a good decision. Decca would ring him later. If she ever got off this damn bridge!

She killed the engine and leaned on the car's soft top, resting one pink boot on the door frame and gazing out over the rim of the bridge. A spread of light industry and petro-chemical storage below her to the left, stood cheek by chimney stack with tree-lined suburbia, rolling all the way out to the Dandenong ranges.

Such a strange bridge, she mused. Nothing like the Sydney Harbour or the Golden Gate or the Firth of Forth. The Westgate was neither a gate to anywhere nor a bridge over a large body of water. It was a traffic diversion, suspended in the middle of nowhere.

Why did they build it so high? You could stack five container ships, one on top of the other, on the water below before they even grazed the structure's underside.

And what must it have been like up here on that day in 1970 when, during construction, a steel span collapsed and thirty-five lives were lost? Some of them skyboarding to their deaths on slabs of concrete, some crushed below, others flung metres away by the blast of wind from falling debris. Like dropping out of a plane without a parachute.

As if echoing the drama of that day, an ambulance whined in mournful harmony with several police sirens somewhere in the distance. The in-bound traffic wasn't moving. The windsock wasn't moving. Time out beneath a leaden sky.

The last thing Decca needed this morning was time. Time to think about a woman who had lain buried deep in her mind for so long she had almost managed to forget her. Time to remember, all over again, that she could have done something to stop what had happened. Time to haul to the surface, for one last wave, the unpalatable notion that she might have been able to save somebody's life.

The fact that Winsome had popped up again, apparently alive and kicking, only made it worse. Because if she was alive, then who was it that...?

Decca slammed the car door and walked towards the safety railing at the edge of the bridge. She would not think about it. What possible purpose would it serve? Today was not the day.

Resting her elbows on the topmost of the three parallel bars that provided such an easy leg-up (and over), Decca fought to control her pulse as she looked down, almost sixty metres, to the murky waters below. She thanked her stars she didn't suffer from vertigo or from agoraphobia or any of the other disorders she encountered with her clients, many of whom had experienced their first panic attack on a bridge, or beneath one.

Dewey Quaife-her regular 1.30 Tuesday-couldn't have hacked it up here, thought Decca. Not Dewey, who travelled interstate by train or boat only-a non-deductible work expense-and had to gobble Serapax in order to attend her sister's recent wedding at Arthurs Seat. Any place higher than two metres above sea level, Dewey was toast.

Far below her the ambulance and police cars were converging on the banks of the river. Further upstream, Decca could make out the prow of an approaching police launch.

Someone had jumped.

Engines were starting to rev as Decca strolled back to the Mustang. As she glanced over at the leisurely flow of traffic in the outbound lane, a sudden blast from a motorbike broke the sound barrier, like some spooked-out jet plane banking for an emergency landing.

Decca winced and closed her eyes. She saw herself, astride the Bridgestone 175cc, at the top of that giant's long-lashed eye that is Sydney's Gladesville Bridge. The inlets glittering to her right and left, glancing off the cut-glass of her goggles as she ducks and weaves her way along the highway. Lane Cove, Iron Cove, Pyrmont, Spit: the names flooded back to her.

A cacophony of car horns, and the vision was gone.

'Build a bridge!' she yelled, doling out the bird to all and sundry, climbing back behind the wheel of the Mustang. And you build a bridge, she chastised herself, you get over it. You have work to do.

Like a procession of mourners at a viewing, the traffic crawled past a dusty white Toyota Starlet, quarantined in the breakdown lane inside a sweep of orange witches' hats. A motorcycle cop was directing traffic around it while another uniform unrolled the blue-and-white tape from one part of the safety railing to the other. A few metres ahead, a brand new yellow Hyundai sedan was also parked hard up against the rails.

Tyres crunched over broken glass but the Starlet seemed unmarked. A 'Baby on Board' sign hung in its back window.

What kind of person jumps at 8.45 am in full view of peak-hour traffic, thought Decca. And was the baby still on board?

Opera? Would the blind date be the opera type? Boyd wondered as he stroked his lips with the tickets. Hard to tell across a crowded dinner table.

'I've invited someone very interesting, just for you,' Flavia had cajoled down the line, two weeks ago. 'Come on, Boy! You can't stay at home and mope. Ronnie wouldn't want that.'

'She's not dead for Christ's sake!' Boyd had snapped.

'I know, I know, duckie. And neither are you. So come. Think of it as a lovely meal with pleasant company-nothing more, nothing less. No pressure at all.'

Boyd flinched at the memory of how many times he and Ronnie had attended Dax and Flavia's legendary dinner parties at which Mr and Mrs Perfect Marriage tried to match up some hopelessly unsuited pair of losers over the vichyssoise and trout. Well, who's sniggering now? With his luck, they'd set him up with some ball-tearing, femo-Nazi with glasses and a moustache.

He pulled open a desk drawer and filed the tickets.

'I'm more of a metal man, myself,' Roger, his partner in the firm, had chuckled as he pressed the gilt-edged tickets into Boyd's eager palm. Sure, mate. Scrap metal.

Smarmy bastard. Two or three-four at the most-show-biz clients provided Roger Cockburn with enough clout to schmooze his moniker onto every A-list in town. What? Did they think he gave discounts in return? No money in show-business clients, Roger, luvvie, Boyd wanted to say. Well, apart from that sausage-lipped soapette who was doing well in the states right now. And the film producer. Who'd have thought that little Fitzroy weasel could have produced anything of interest, and to the world at large no less? There was no accounting for taste.

Anyway, the tickets could be a plus-with the right woman. So, good on you, Roger, keep that nose firmly...

Wouldn't have cut any ice with Ronnie, Boyd mused. Strictly jazz for Miss Veronica: blue note, period. Opera sent her to sleep, she said; no backbeat. How she'd laugh at the idea of him flying solo at this dinner.

Who else would be there? The usual suspects, he imagined. Plus the blind date herself, of course, sticking out like an anorexic at Weight Watchers. If only Dax and Flavia offered more options. A selection of singles perhaps? An expanse of exes, a welter of wannabes. No, that wouldn't work: more than two mavericks would unsettle the herd.

Maurice and Jan-always the first to arrive and the first to leave-he in vintage Country Road, she in Laura Ashley-having their regular night out, on relationship-counsellor's advice, but brandishing their mobile phones in case of emergency calls from the twins' babysitter. They'd exchange nervous chit-chat over an Evian or two with Sheldon, pillar of the fourth estate.

Bow-tie askew and pissed to the eyeballs on arrival, Sheldon would be trashing the nibblies while Yolande ('Yo!'), his partner of seven years, would plonk herself next to the water feature and furiously suck coffin nails through pleated lips, wishing the hell she was back in Florida. 'Everything good in A-mer-i-ca...la-la-la-la-la-la lah lah lah!' By evening's end the diners would be treated to the usual down-home version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf from this brace of redheads.

Who else?

Possibly the most boring thirty-two-year-old in the world: Judith. Blonde and anaemic, with hair so fine that her ears poked through like abalone shells. Bony, very bony, but not fashionably bony: premature-curvature-of-the-spine bony-high-waisted and no arse. Judith favoured pastel arran sweaters tucked into ski pants, tucked into boots. One hand nursing a glass of riesling to her chest, the other arm lodged in the armpit of her vertically challenged husband, Lyle.

A power pack of unresolved sexual tension, Lyle would fuck a beanbag if it gave him a nudge. In conversation with women his eyes locked in at fourth rib, while with men he assumed an unctuous complicity in the pursuit of pussy. Who said all real estate agents were the same?

But it wouldn't be a dinner at Dax and Flavia's without Allen-is he gay? he's gotta be-and big fat Trisha, the bubbly one-Miss Life-of-the-party-let's-play-Twister! Always just back from somewhere, in clothes that everyone was wearing 'over there', Allen and Trisha are the glue that sticks the party together. They make us feel so cosmopolitan and k-ray-zee!

Sangria at six? Boyd could hardly wait.