Quota (2 page)

How many Kardashian sisters are there? Lou's voice was all sniggering guile.
Three and a brother
yawned Barry as he knocked off the last of the Pasito.

The reefs were called Gawleys Kitchen, though Barry had never met anyone who could tell him why. When the swell rolled silently up from the southwest, the surfers would head out there. Some of them paddled the whole stretch from the foot of Antonias cliffs. Mostly they used tinnies or jetskis. On flat days the reef and its creatures belonged to the divers. Hefty crays and glassy-eyed trumpeter, shot through the gill rakers.

To the north and east of Gawleys, to Barry's left, the bay opened up again. A wide, docile bowl stretched out towards the cape, thirty or more k's away. As it curved away from town the land came round parallel to the prevailing swell and the waves turned to long, straight lines sweeping right to left below Barry's cliff-top perch. They ended their run at the eastern end of the bay, finally unburdening the last of the Southern Ocean's mythic fury on the sand. No one went there. Hardly anyone would walk a dog that far. The trail riders wouldn't take their horses down there; the swell dumped deep piles of kelp that clogged the beach. Dirt bikers and the odd fox shooter, that was about it. Barry had been there. But then he had a natural curiosity about things.

‘Okay then Darlene.' Lou had someone new on the line. ‘Which poison is said to have killed Socrates?'

Bugger. Hemlock? Or nightshade? The callers were going down like they'd been strafed. Arsenic, strychnine, cyanide; some stoner reckoned iocane powder.

Something about Gawleys.

Something out there in the dark wasn't quite dark. Barry made the mistake of looking at the lighthouse again, then had to blink away the purple spot in his vision, violet-violet-pink-white-gone. The water surface had the look of a grubby mirror, streaked with a blacker grey where the reef peered through.

Hemlock. It just sounded…ancient. Laurel wreaths and hemlock. Togas. He glanced down. Soy on his shirt, the sort of thing Deb used to tease him about. ‘Did you get any of it in your mouth, dear?'

Lovely Deb, tired and warm. Gone last spring, and with her all of the order and domesticity in Barry's life. The alcohol interlock device now clipped to the dashboard represented the loss and the pain that still echoed. He'd taken very hard to the stout in the weeks after the funeral, one schooner chasing another as he reassured the sympathetic. Yes, doing very well, thank you for asking. Eyes creasing, close enough to a smile.

He'd been warned about driving home from the pub. Taken aside, told it had to stop. He'd just accepted the warning like he accepted the condolences and concern. In the end he'd left the local cop no choice but to book him; the great irony being that once he'd lost his licence he completely lost interest in the grog. Like it had served its purpose, putting him off the road, then gone on to tap some other poor bugger on the shoulder.

The time without his licence didn't worry him all that much, aside from missing his drives out to Antonias. The interlock, though, that was an assault on his way of life. It seemed to choose exactly those times when he was most comfortable to start up its furious screeching for a sample of his breath—horn blaring, lights flashing—until he pulled over to satisfy it, feed it like some mewling infant. Minutes would pass before he could gather his frightened thoughts and restart the car.

He fumbled around under the drivers seat for the binoculars. Took a moment to focus and find his target in the blackness. He could just make out low lines of whitewater on the outer edge of Gawleys, when he found the thing that had caught his attention.

Orange.

There was no fixed light on the reefs—couldn't be, they were too exposed. The fishing boats had a red port light, green starboard, and white all round.

But this was orange, and it was moving. Larger, smaller. Moving or flickering? It was irregular somehow, getting bigger then fading again, then pulsing brightly. It was still a long way off, well over the back edge of Gawleys. The beam of the lighthouse, a cold white shaft through the air, caught it once, then again. Barry knew he was looking at the gunwale of a boat, the side of the cabin. And the idea came to him quietly like another answer. The boat was not where it was supposed to be.

He snapped the radio off. Tried the high beams but they bleached out somewhere in the middle distance. A sheet of newspaper whipped past the front of the ute as though it had taken fright. Barry noted its path—the wind had arrived from the southwest again, punching a violent gust into the stillness, followed by a long stream of colder air. The heavy calm of the evening was done, and a change would reassert the order of things.

He turned the lights off and waited patiently for his eyes to figure it all out. Leaning forward now. Squinting until he felt a little ache under his eyebrows where the binoculars were pressing. He scrunched the greasy paper bag into a ball and fired it backhand at the dark space where the dog lay curled. A moment or two later, light and dark resolved themselves into shapes, and the shapes made sense.

He picked up the phone from the passenger seat and started dialling.

CHARLIE TRIED TO imagine her. Making her way towards him, just a tram ride from one end of Collins Street to the other, running from the revolving doors of the lobby to catch the 109. She hated being late.

He picked up a newspaper from the rack by the door as the waiter approached. ‘I booked a table for two. Jardim.'

At the table he scanned the state politics and couldn't settle, his mind flicking back to Anna. She would be intent, calming herself and rehearsing as the tram rumbled westward. Telling herself about the longer view, the good sense of what she was about to do. Good sense being a core virtue in her world, he thought, and the point where their worlds deviated. Him with his contempt for good sense and her with her respect for forethought, for logical outcomes.

He imagined that few women of twenty-eight with a shared address and a rock on the finger would let go without long introspection. Anna had tolerated the outbursts and silences, tried to insinuate change where she could; commented, sometimes, on his lack of insight, his remoteness. He acknowledged these things to himself and from sheer obduracy said nothing. Which had led them to tonight.

The newspaper, trite, repetitive, was irritating him now. He was staring at the print rather than reading. He watched the boyfriends, the husbands, at tables around him. Compared their gestures, some of them made for display, others subconscious: the reaching hand on a shoulder, the turn of the body to convey full and undivided attention. These things were lacking between him and Anna, he knew. The decision had been made gradually through the cumulative weight of failed gestures. She was simply coming to deliver it.

He folded the paper and tossed it. At the end of the street the last glow of the day would be fading over the apartments of the Docklands. Outside, the lights of Renfrey's spilled yellow onto the laneway cobbles.

The door swung inwards with its little bell and she appeared in front of him, slightly flustered as he'd expected. She smiled briefly before her eyes fell to his wine glass. The way he held it, cupped with the stem between his second and third fingers, was one of the first things that had ever annoyed her about him. Back when the glow of lust still hummed over everything, there was already this small discord. She'd make a point of it at dinner parties; half-mocking asides.

As he stood and leaned towards her she turned slightly, enough to ensure his kiss landed on her cheek. This was her way, the aggregation of tiny cues that obviated the need to spell things out, and so it unfolded. He took up the menu and slumped behind it, correctly anticipating that she'd pull down the top edge to look him in the eyes. He'd never liked making direct eye contact with anyone and he remembered being surprised during their first weeks together that he could stare deeply at her, without self-consciousness. She'd always taken it as obvious that people could do this; that if they could have sex they could surely cope with other small intimacies. She'd once said that she felt she was looking straight at the lost child inside him.

Sentimental crap. Ever since she'd found out about his little brother, it felt to Charlie as though she had resolved to open him up about it. She would raise it at the strangest times—out of a long silence in the car, in bed in the darkness. Did he ever miss him? Did he cry a lot back then? Did he ever go to the grave? And while there were times when he wanted to revisit all of that, those times never coincided with her questions.

Her hands were pressed flat on the table before him.

‘So…' She was looking for an opening. ‘So this is the talk we needed to have.'

‘You mean the break-up talk?' Far too quick. He'd slipped it out casually like saying he'd have the salmon. ‘Is it Alex Reimers?' he asked, mock-serious.

‘No, it's not Alex Reimers, Charlie. It's you.' There was hurt in her voice and maybe a tiny edge of guilt, just needling away in there. It had been a close thing with Alex Reimers at her office Christmas party, the arrogant little prick. As far as he could tell, she hadn't crossed the line.

‘You're going red.'

‘I'm going red because I'm angry, and you know I hate being cross-examined. It's you, Charlie.
You
. I'm not going to give you that crap about it being me, because it isn't. I've tried and tried. I've listened to your rants about how everybody disappoints you…'

She looked around furtively, conscious that she'd raised her voice, then started again at a lower pitch. ‘No one can live up to the expectations you set for them. They always let you down. I'm sure you think I've let you down Charlie, but I haven't. I've stuck by you and I've encouraged you and I, I…

‘Fuck it Charlie. I can't do it anymore.'

He traced lines on the tablecloth with his index finger.
This show is not going to survive to entree
, he thought. As for her thing about expectations, she was of course dead right.

‘That's not true,' he said anyway. ‘It's a whole lot of horseshit you've thought up to give yourself a reason. If you weren't working six days a bloody week, if we had a life, it mightn't seem like such a slog. What the hell are you trying to do with your life?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘What do I mean? You want to make partner so you can work seven days? You want to make eight hundred grand a year so you can have a family and never have to put up with their company?'

‘Don't exaggerate. It's called building a future, Charlie. You don't seem to have the patience to do it.'

‘What's the future in that?' Charlie was almost yelling in his indignation, completely unaware of his own volume. She glanced around the room to measure the attention of nearby diners. ‘It's you and me! There's no kids, there's barely any parents, there isn't even a fucking cat. If you can't be selfish now, Annie baby, when are you ever going to be? You're obsessed with squirrelling your life away for a rainy day. Jesus.' He buried his forehead in both hands and felt the fingers spear upwards through his fringe.

She would now know he was grappling with it, with what he was about to lose. The only blow he'd landed, and it was a cowardly one, was calling her
Annie
.

He settled back in his chair, the finger wandering over the table again.

‘I really blew it with that Lefcovics thing, didn't I? Bit awkward being attached to a barrister who's facing disciplinary proceedings, hmm? Bet the wires are just
singing
with that one round the big firms…'

‘You're overstating your own importance, Charlie. I don't think anyone's even mentioned it to me at work.' This they both knew to be untrue. The email had done the rounds very quickly, before people who knew her connection to ‘the barrister who had the brain snap' could intervene.

‘If you ask me, it might be a symptom of the wider problem here, but it's not
the
problem. If you can't hang onto your self-discipline in front of that old coot, then you're not in good shape. You're not, Charlie. I mean it.'

‘Fucker had it coming.' He sighed loudly and looked over his shoulder for the waiter. ‘What about the lease?'

‘I've checked it and they'll let us out, but I thought you might want to stay there. It's up to you. I can go stay with Dad for a while if that's easiest.'

‘The furniture? You bought the furniture.'

‘It's on interest-free. I can't believe you don't know that. I'm paying it off out of the joint account. You can keep it with the apartment if you can make the payments. But don't leave it till the two-year mark or you know they'll go mad on the interest.' Charlie felt humiliated all of a sudden, her telling him how to conduct himself.

‘What about the ring?' He was sick with disgust.

She held out her left hand and rolled the damn thing around the finger until the emerald sat in its rightful place. She didn't answer at first, and he could see the tears forming in her eyes. He pressed blindly on.

‘There's one thing I've learned,' he said, and it was the first time he'd sounded sincere. ‘You can't get hurt if you don't commit, Annie. It's not personal, it's just the truth. I worshipped Harry. I worshipped the air around him. I worshipped the things on the fucking table next to his bed, because they were
his
. The parents idolised him too. So did everyone. And when he went, it just turned off the sun.'

There was silence between them for a long time.

‘And then they bared their fangs on each other, dear ol' Mum and Dad. Ripped away at each other until they hated to be in the same room. At the bottom of every tragedy, there's someone who committed. Parent, lover, child, doesn't matter. Love's the root of all misery, wobbly bloody highwire act, and the more of it you've got, the harder you're going to come down.'