The Tankermen Page 8

  Finn was more grateful to hear it than Janet would ever know, but his voice said ‘For the next twelve months, anyway.’ He tried to slip a little grin on to his face to soften it, but it went a bit crooked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Janet, looking more steady. ‘Well, that’s an arrangement your dad and mum worked out, isn’t it?’

  ‘They did.’ Of course, he’d been seven at the time, and pretty stirred up after their splitting up. It had seemed as if he wouldn’t have to give up either one of them. Instead, he was constantly having to give up both of them; instead of having two homes, he had none.

  ‘But Don—’ Janet’s hand was on his arm again. ‘It’s not set in concrete, is it?’

  Finn looked at her miserably. ‘I don’t know what I want.’

  ‘No, I know. I’m not saying you have to come home now or anything. But when you do know what you want, or if you need to talk about it, you know where to find me, don’t you? I mean, don’t think you’re all alone, will you? Whatever you do will always affect your family in some way. I don’t know what sort of a life you’re living up here, but there’s school next year, there’s Christmas. I only wish . . .’

  Finn could see her fighting back tears, and his own eyes started prickling in sympathy. He put an arm around her shoulders, with difficulty because Alex was so heavy. He felt very strange; this was what it would be like, without his dad—just the three of them. He was standing where his dad ought to be, comforting his dad’s wife, holding his dad’s son. He had an overwhelming feeling of not being ready, a terror of having to cope.

  He hung on to Janet and thought desperately. The man who cried out, last night, the man he was sure was his dad—he hadn’t been blasted with the acid. There’d been no smoke around, as there had been when the tankermen shot that cop. He was unconscious, that was all. He had to be alive somewhere. Finn would go to the cutting—maybe in daylight he’d see something he’d missed last night.

  ‘Donny, Don-nee.’ Alex was hauling on the neck of Finn’s T-shirt.

  ‘Yes, mate?’ said Finn, blinking.

  ‘Will you take me to the pool, after lunch?’

  The idea was so attractive that Finn had a sudden urge to accept. He glanced at Janet, who was smiling sadly at Alex. Her face, in contrast with Alex’s, was too white, and the skin around her eyes was dark and slightly crumpled. She hadn’t slept much, and he felt a pang of guilt for having escaped so easily into sleep himself last night.

  ‘I can’t, Alex. I’ve got to do a few things before I come home,’ he said painfully.

  ‘And then we’ll go to the pool,’ said Alex reassuringly.

  ‘Well, yeah, but it might not be today.’

  ‘But we’ll go another day,’ said Alex in the same comfortable tone, nodding.

  ‘Yeah, we will. But you’ve got to go home with Mum now, all right? I’ll see you later on.’

  ‘Will you?’ said Janet quietly.

  ‘Yeah, for sure. I’ve just got to see what I can find out about Dad.’

  Janet looked doubtful. ‘But nobody knows anything. The police said they’re totally mystified. They say they’ve lost three officers in the same way—two last night and one on Tuesday.’

  Finn nearly said ‘I know’, but looked at his feet and nodded instead. ‘Kiss goodbye?’ he said to Alex, and Alex put his arms around his neck and kissed him neatly on the mouth. Finn put him down on the footpath reluctantly, then straightened and kissed Janet on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you back home when I can,’ he promised. ‘Thanks for coming and finding me.’

  ‘Take care of yourself, Donny. We don’t want you to—we don’t want to lose you, too.’

  ‘You won’t,’ he said, sounding surer than he felt.

  He turned and plunged across the street again. On the far kerb he looked back. The station entrance was empty. He stood still, wanting to run back, follow them down the escalator, get on the train with them. So much had happened to him, and they were still the same. They’d been going on with lives Finn knew almost every detail of, and now the details came back at him in dozens—angles of furniture, tones of voice, mealtime rituals, garden smells, carpet patterns, the swoosh of his father’s car into the carport, Alex running across the lawn . . .

  Finn’s heart thudded and his scalp crept. It was too much to bear, the thought that all this might be lost. The beige station wagon with the driver’s door open pulsed with blue light in his memory. Somehow he had to work it out, rewind time, make it un-happen. They wouldn’t be able to stand the loss, those two; his father was necessary to them, to their continuing the way they should, unharmed, with that sunny glow about them. And even if Finn himself didn’t get on all that well with him, it wasn’t as if he wanted his father gone, completely, from the world. The weight of Alex in his arms, the feeling of Janet’s bowed shoulders, had convinced him of that.

  But in the meantime, he couldn’t go home. He couldn’t be sure the tankermen weren’t abroad, and he didn’t want to draw them anywhere near Janet and Alex. And although he didn’t have a clue how he would find his dad, he was surely closer to doing it in this part of town than in Strathfield. Unless the tankermen were scared off by police, and they clearly weren’t, this was the place they frequented.

  He shouldn’t have stood so long with his back to the street, talking to Janet. He wouldn’t be much good to her and Alex with a smoking hole in his back, would he? He started on a roundabout route back to the flat, checking behind him every few paces.

  The flat was empty—and so was Finn’s stomach, he realised as he finished checking the place for unwanted visitors. He made himself a salad sandwich, careful not to use too much of anything. He would just eat quickly and then get on to the tankermen’s trail.

  There was a cracking sound in his back pocket as he sat down in front of the TV to eat. The postcards. He took them out and examined them again. Paradise Row tonight. How did Gran know he hadn’t been watching it this week? And what was going to be on? A ‘wedding of the year’? There was one of those pretty regularly and she was usually quite excited about them. But he’d have known about it weeks ago—they always gave you plenty of warning, for the sake of the ratings. Gran obviously hadn’t heard about his dad, or she wouldn’t be bothering about the trivia on the soaps. Maybe they hadn’t told her for fear of another stroke. He’d better not mention it in any of his postcards.

  He pressed the red button on the remote control. A woman with a perfectly blow-dried cloud of blonde hair and lip-gloss like porcelain appeared in a doorway. ‘I’ve got bad news for you, Hank,’ she said, and stepped forward. Finn’s brain switched off and he began eating.

  That afternoon he occupied himself with a search for clues. He went up to the lane again, scouting around the drain-hole and the place where the policeman had been shot, until he knew each loose paling, every crushed sweet wrapper and cigarette butt, every bump and crack in the pavement. He went back to the flat, borrowed Trevor’s Maglite and took it on the bus to Circular Quay. He lugged it through the Rocks to the cutting, and subjected the walls to grain-by-grain scrutiny. Where the tanker had gone in, he felt the rock-face for weak points, memorising fissures and water-stains, trying every combination of finger pressure he could think of. But it hadn’t worked like that, he knew even as he studied the wall—the rock had simply rearranged itself around and through the truck, like a fluid or a gas. Something like that was beyond him, beyond anyone.

  Anyone human, he thought, stepping back and sweeping his gaze hopelessly across the wall. If the tankermen were human they were a different kind of human, advanced beyond all others into a zone where other people didn’t matter any more. It was no good playing detectives; detectives tried to read their quarry’s mind, and who knew what went on inside the mind of a tankerman? Or even if he was a ‘man’ or had a mind. Who was to say? He might belong to some dimension human beings couldn’t even begin to dream of. Even the top chemists at FinCom had no idea what these guys might be about. A kid like Finn didn’t stand a
chance.

  Scowling, he switched off the torch and leaned against the rock-face. Except for the occasional passing car, the cutting was as quiet as a cathedral. Finn’s puzzling brain rested for a moment in the cool, dim spaciousness. He closed his eyes and pressed his hands against the rock. Gradually he became aware of a sensation against the palm of his right hand that his left hand wasn’t picking up. It felt like very, very weak pins and needles. He moved his thumbs together behind him, and discovered a line beyond which the sensation began. He had to concentrate hard to feel it at all, and when he shone the torch up and down the line there was no difference between the two surfaces, the live and the inactive.

  He moved along the wall extremely slowly, his hands and head against it, listening for the faint, prickling signal. It continued to tease him across a five-metre section of rock, unmarked in any way. Then it ceased, and he could detect, if he closed his eyes and consciously sensitised the palms of his hands, the straight border, the doorway’s edge.

  He felt for the border as high as he could reach, then picked up a pebble and scratched a line down the rock to mark it. He did the same on the other side. His marks were nearly invisible, and when he tested them for accuracy he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t just willing the signal into existence by the intensity of his desire to get through the rock. But he felt as if he were a step closer to finding his dad—he knew where to go, even if he hadn’t a clue how to get there.

  Jed came home at a quarter to seven. ‘Geez mate, you haven’t moved since I left you here this morning.’ He flung his helmet on to an armchair and noisily unzipped his jacket.

  ‘Ssh! I did go out,’ said Finn absently, pushing the volume up with the remote control.

  ‘Yeah? Where’d you—’

  ‘Ssh! Just for fifteen minutes. I’ve gotta watch this!’

  Trevor came to the kitchen door, tongs in his hand. ‘He’s got some bee in his bonnet about this crappy programme. Wouldn’t let me watch the news, even! In my own home!’ he added pointedly. ‘Bloody freeloaders.’ He gave Jed a wink.

  On the screen, Todd McIntyre picked up a note from the dining room table. His voice boomed in the small room. ‘She’s gone! She’s not coming back!’ His hand started to shake, then he clutched at his chest and the flat was filled with his gasps and whimpers of pain. He collapsed, and the theme music smoothed the way to an ad break. Finn muted the fanatical raving of a car salesman and sat back shaking his head.

  ‘Nothing in that lot.’

  ‘You’re telling me!’ Trevor snorted and disappeared into the kitchen.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a soap addict,’ Jed said with amusement, dropping on to the other end of the sofa.

  ‘I watch this one with my gran all the time. You get kind of involved, even if you know it’s terrible. I got this from her today.’ He pushed the postcard along the coffee table.

  Jed scanned it. ‘But does she mean tonight, or the night she wrote it?’

  ‘Dunno. I’m watching just in case it’s tonight.’

  ‘What, is she going to be on it or something?’

  Finn unnerved Jed with a long, considering stare. ‘Yeah. Maybe she is,’ he said, and turned back to watch the dance of the ads.

  ‘Maybe someone’s on the show visiting an old people’s home or something. It could be Geriatrics Week for all I know.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Finn sounded as if something very interesting had just occurred to him.

  ‘Why do I get the feeling this is all so terribly serious, anyway?’

  Finn gave him another of those looks. ‘I don’t know. But she wrote this card herself, it looks like. Usually she has to get someone at the Home to write for her. It must be important.’

  Jed watched him as he upped the volume again and began to watch intently. It was a bit odd, but it was good to see the kid taking an interest in something, he supposed. You could see that the cogwheels were turning again after last night’s shock. The anxious forward lean towards the screen, the eyes that looked as if they might bore holes in the set, the toe of the sneaker shifting on the rug—they might be a bit obsessive, but they were better than the despair that had dragged the whole household down with it.

  Unable to make sense of the sludge of the story, Jed sniffed the air and called out to Trevor, ‘What’s fryin’, boy?’

  ‘Snags,’ said Trevor. ‘Finn bought ’em, and some dead horse, so I’m celebrating with a barbie.’

  ‘That’s her!’ yelped Finn, and bounced on the edge of the couch. Jed frowned at the screen and saw two teenage girls conspiring over a table in a coffee shop.

  ‘You’re having me on! If either of those is a grandmother, I’m Princess Di!’

  ‘Not them, you dope! The lady in the background!’

  Jed moved closer and screwed up his eyes to see. A little old lady in a green and pink dress was seated at a table behind the girls, drinking tea poured from a delicate-looking white pot patterned with sprigs of flowers. Her hair was mauve, and her face was a wrinklier, kinder version of Finn’s. ‘Well, they’ve managed to conceal the wheelchair pretty well.’

  ‘It’s her and it’s not her,’ said Finn. ‘It’s her the way she was the first time I went up to Casino, before she got sick. These days the right side of her face is all caved in from the stroke. She can’t get that kind of—there!—that sort of twinkly look in her eye.’ The lady had briefly looked out at them, her lips twitching as if she were sharing a joke with them. Behind her, outside the café window, a kid in baggy shorts and T-shirt moseyed to a stop, a giant skateboard under one arm. The lady glanced at his slouched back, then looked out at them again.

  ‘Did she wink just then?’ said Jed.

  ‘My gran never winks!’ Finn sounded so shocked Jed almost laughed.

  The lady put down her cup and sat quite still with her hands in her lap, gazing out the window at the skateboard boy.

  ‘Who wants a snag?’ Trevor bellowed.

  ‘In a minute, mate!’ Jed yelled back.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Finn held out his hands in puzzlement. ‘She’s just sitting there.’

  ‘She wants you to watch what she’s watching,’ said Jed, then wondered why he was so sure. Wasn’t this a soap opera? Wasn’t this woman just some extra the production company had come up with, doing her job?

  ‘So? That kid with the skateboard. Oh, he’s gone.’

  The old lady remained immobile. Finn could tell that the girls’ conversation was about to start winding down. Outside the café window a battered yellow ute went slowly past, the kid on the skateboard hitching a ride behind it, hanging on to a corner of the empty tray. Then the action cut to Stacey’s messy little flat, and Finn’s gran was gone.

  Finn felt chilled, the whole day’s worth of puzzling thoughts brought to a silent, clarified halt. He turned to Jed, who shrugged and got up, saying, ‘Blowed if I know,’ with an embarrassed grin.

  Trevor was clattering around at the table with a platter of sausages and a pile of buttered bread. ‘Turn that crap off and let’s eat.’

  In the silence Finn sat down at the table, took a sausage, laid it across a slice of bread and put a blat of sauce on top of it.

  ‘You seen anything of Douggie lately?’ Trevor asked Jed.

  ‘Yesterday morning I saw him going from his room to the bog. That’s all. I was running late. No time to listen to all his excuses.’

  ‘He owes me a month’s rent. That’s why he’s lying low.’ Trevor took an enormous bite of sausage sandwich.

  ‘It’s dangerous, of course,’ said Finn, rolling the bread carefully around the sausage and biting off the end.

  ‘What is?’ said Jed, sauce clinging to his red moustache as he chewed. ‘Not paying rent? I’ll say it is.’

  ‘Hitching a ride like that, on the back of a truck.’

  ‘Hmmm?’ Jed’s eyebrows went awry.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to get caught doing it,’ Finn said.

  Jed took a bite and chewed, frowning hard.

/>   ‘By the driver of the truck, I mean.’ Finn’s sandwich sat forgotten on his plate. ‘Of course, they’re pretty slow off the mark, as you say.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything!’ said Trevor in astonishment.

  ‘We might just manage to hold on long enough to get through the wall,’ Finn continued. He looked up from his plate to see Jed swallow without having chewed properly. He considered Finn for a moment, then took out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped his moustache with great care.

  ‘What wall? What are you rabbiting on about? Jed, what’s he rabbiting on about?’ Trevor poked Jed’s massive shoulder.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Jed, even more calmly than Finn, ‘it would be . . . very dangerous. And why “we”? I saw one kid, one skateboard.’

  ‘I was thinking of the bike, but sure, I can pinch a skateboard from somewhere. I can wait down at the cutting by myself, no problem.’

  ‘There’s no cover.’

  ‘I’ll manage. I’ll . . . hide behind a parked car, or something.’

  ‘You’d have to be right out on the road, the speed those guys go.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ Trevor said loudly. ‘I’ll just crawl back into my little hole and stop bothering you. This is obviously all too important to bother explaining to outsiders.’ He glared at Finn, and was ignored again.

  ‘You’re right. You need the bike,’ said Jed, and fell to eating again. Finn watched him. He paused before the next bite. ‘Of course, we don’t know what’s inside that wall.’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘Are you guys going to break into a prison or something? Hey Finn, you’re not leading our Jed into a life of crime, are you?’ Trevor giggled, but stopped when Finn gave him a blank look.