Читать книгу Back of Sunset - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 7

Stephen picked up Tristram just after six on that Friday evening and joined the streams of traffic fighting to get into the channels that would take them across the Harbour Bridge. “Lotta bad-tempered bastards,” said Tristram. “Where they all rushing to?”

“Some going home, some going away from the week-end,” Stephen said, keeping the Jaguar steady, out-bluffing a Holden trying to crash in from the left. “Friday night’s always a bit of a mad panic. Everyone likes to get home for a restful week-end.”

“Stone the bloody crows,” said Tristram, and stared out at the city as it battled furiously to get home for a restful weekend.

They were going down the Wakehurst Parkway, through the cool grey dusk of the forest, away from the city and the bad tempers, before Stephen said, “I went home and dug out an old trunk I haven’t looked at in years. I found this.”

Tristram took the small aboriginal charm. It was a rough carving of a bird, hung on a thin strip of kangaroo hide which passed through the closed beak of the bird. The charm had once been painted, but the red and yellow ochre now remained only in cracks in the wooden bird. It looked shabby and useless, a relic of childhood belonging with the broken top and the bent and rusted Meccano part. It’s magic had washed off with its paint.

“I remember it,” Tristram said. “Did it ever bring you any luck?”

“I don’t know,” said Stephen, surprised that another man could believe in portents: did Tristram mark the trail of his day by the first small happenings as soon as he woke? “Do you believe in that sort of thing?”

“I dunno that I got any beliefs at all. I just accept what comes. When it comes to things like these,” he bounced the charm in his hand, “the blacks are no sillier than a lotta whites.”

“Did you give it to me, hoping it would bring me luck?”

“I can’t remember, Steve. But I reckon I must have. Your old man never had much luck. Maybe I was wishing better things for you.” He looked out of the car, at the trees retreating into the dusk, closing ranks against the night. “It shook me when I read he was dead. I went out and got drunk, stayed that way for a week. Your dad was a great man, Steve, and nobody ever knew it. Only me, and maybe Charlie Goodyear.”

Stephen himself had never known it; no man could ever truly judge his father. “He was meant to be more than just a suburban G.P., if that’s what you mean. Though I don’t think he would ever have been as good a surgeon as Charles.”

“There’s more to being a doc than cutting people open. And I don’t mean being a physician, you know what I mean? Hippocrates could have had your old man in mind when he wrote his Precepts.” Education and learning still rode smoothly on the roughened tongue; the voice was the careless one of years in the Outback, but the mind remembered the books of its youth. “Me and Charlie and your old man, we were all idealists once. Your old man used to take pride in the fact that he was born in the same year as the Commonwealth. We were all gunna help build it, we used to say. Him and Charlie building its health, me building its buildings. Stone the crows, we dreamed, Steve. Talked and dreamed and hoped. And then I got T.B., and something happened to the other two. I remember thinking back in ‘38, the last time I saw Tom, he was the only one who still had his ideals. Charlie had forgotten his, and I didn’t need mine any more.” He looked at Stephen, his face chipped and worn as a rock in the pale light from the dashboard. “Your old man should never have given up that Flying Doctor job, Steve.”

“He had to give it up. My mother couldn’t take it up there in the Kimberleys. It’s not woman’s country. We stayed only six months and she hated every day of it. She tried, Jack, I know that. But she just couldn’t take it.”

“Did you like it?”

“I can’t remember much of it. I was only seven then. It was the Wet season and I never got out of Winnemincka.”

“It hasn’t changed since you were there. Maybe got even a bit worse – the pearlers have all gone.” He looked sideways at Stephen, a little slyly. “You oughta come up some time for a holiday.”

Stephen shook his head, smiling at the old man’s naïve approach. “I’m off to England early next year. I’ve been going to go for five years, to do my F.R.C.S.”

“You a good doc, Steve?”

“I’m supposed to be. That’s why Charles chose me as his partner. I don’t think he took me in just because he knew Dad.”

“You gunna take over from him when you come back?”

“That was the idea originally.” Stephen changed gears carefully, turning the car into the main road from the parkway, keeping his eyes on the road as if he were still besieged by the battling traffic they had now left far behind. “I don’t know that I’m coming back.”

“Why not?” Tristram’s crackle had an edge to it. “Too many bloody people leave this country and never come back.”

“I’ve got other plans. Or rather, Charles’s daughter has. We’re sort of semi-engaged.”

“And she’s making the plans for you? Stone the crows, what’s happening to the bloody men of this country? Charlie’s wife running him, his daughter running you – and if it comes to that, your mum ran your dad’s life.”

Stephen felt a surge of anger. “You’re one-eyed about that. My mother tried – don’t you think Dad owed her something?”

“I’m shoving me neck out, not minding me own business.” Tristram’s teeth clicked savagely: the words were awkward in his mouth, too long held back. “Your old man was meant for more than being a good husband, being a father to you, looking after a lotta patients who never appreciated him. He was wasted, son. Christ, I never seen a man whose life was so wasted!”

“How do you know he was wasted?” said Stephen, defending his dead mother but knowing she would never have defended herself: she had loved his father and had tried, really tried, to live where Tom McCabe’s heart had driven him: but her body and her will had been weak, and Tom, loving her as much as she loved him, had given in. “How do you know he was wasted?”

“He knew it himself, son. When I said good-bye to him back in ‘38,I knew which one of us was already the dead one.” He handed back the aboriginal charm. “Here you are, Steve. You may need this yet.”