The Tankermen (7 page)

Finn’s T-shirt was crisp and white again—Jed had soaked it in cold water and given it a good scrub, and lent him one of his own shirts to sleep in. Finn had been most impressed, enough to forgive Jed the searing pain he’d caused him by doctoring the rawer areas of his chest. Now the burning was all gone, and overnight the damaged flesh had begun to grow a hardened layer under which to heal.

Yesterday’s shooting seemed remote. He kept taking out the memories and inspecting them, but the shocking effect had gone from them, replaced by a vague disbelief. Finn half expected something to come along that would explain them away—maybe it had all been a stunt for
Candid Camera
, with someone filming Finn’s horrified reaction for the entertainment of a studio audience. He would’ve loved to believe it, but he couldn’t.

What was going to happen, though? With that policeman missing, were the cops going to suspect
him
, Finn? Was he now wanted for suspected murder? He slid down in his seat at the thought, glancing about uneasily. Maybe they’d told his dad already—maybe they’d have police at the office, even,
waiting in case he turned up.

Outside the suburbs jounced by, wearing a fresh look that would fade as the temperature climbed during the morning. The sky was absolutely clear, the sun zeroing in without interruption and bouncing brightly off every surface. Finn decided not to give his dad too much background information about the oil sample; it was not a morning for believing paranoid crazy talk about tankermen. He wouldn’t tell him much at all, in fact, just drop off the sample and get out as quickly as he could. He didn’t want to get caught up in any explanations of his own behaviour, or to sit through any of his dad’s tirades.

The bus started along the slow roller-coaster of Epping Road, grinding up and swooping down the hills. Finn came out of his thoughts and tried to remember just where his father’s lab was. It was a few years since he’d been there, and he wasn’t sure whether the building would even be visible from the road any more, the way it’d been half buried in plantings of native trees. He craned forward.

A brand-new sign with the FinCom logo made it easy for him in the end. He got off the bus, walked back, cut across the double highway and followed the drive up to the low white rectangle of the lab.

‘Hullo, Don! How are you?’ The receptionist didn’t look at all surprised to see him, just delighted. ‘Dropped in to have lunch with Dad, have you?’

‘Oh no, I just have to see him for a minute about something.’

‘Well, I know he’s waiting on a call from America, but I’ll give him a buzz and let him know you’re here.’

Finn tried to seem as relaxed as she was, feeling a bit sick inside. He sloshed the sample around in its jar.

‘He says to go on up,’ said the receptionist, putting the
phone down and smiling at him. Finn felt as if he were trying to hold time still, but it was pulling him along anyway.

By the time he got to his father’s office he was sure his thumping heart must be audible. The plastic plaque on the door, ‘Dr Richard Finley’, helped; the name seemed foreign, formal, not connected with Finn at all. He knocked twice and opened the door.

His father was sitting at his desk writing, and looked up and put his pen down as Finn entered. ‘Hullo, Don,’ he said in a fairly amiable voice, but Finn could see some kind of fight going on in his face—the eyes crinkled but the mouth stayed open anxiously—and his father sat back and then forward again as if undecided about standing up.

‘Hi, Dad. I can’t stay,’ Finn said quickly. He put the jar on the desk and stepped back. ‘I just brought you this.’ The sample in its second-hand jar looked very shoddy in the antiseptic office. Dr Finley regarded it a moment, then picked it up and swirled the liquid around. Finn continued, ‘I think it’s some kind of poison. I collected it up the Cross last night. Some guys in gas masks and rubber suits were pumping it into a drain.’

‘Right. We heard you were around the Cross somewhere,’ Dr Finley said, staring at the contents of the jar.

Finn bit his lower lip. ‘Yeah, well . . .’

‘The police said you didn’t look too good, but—’ He cast a narrow glance over his son. ‘—you seem okay now. A bit pale, maybe. And thin . . .’ Finn shrugged, and Dr Finley sat back. ‘You eating okay? I’m asking for Janet—she’s always saying “I hope he’s not just eating junk food!”’ A tight little smile escaped on to his face.

‘Yeah, I know, Dad. It’s not like
you
care.’ Finn mimicked the smile. He heard the force behind his own words as his father’s smile vanished. ‘Yeah, I’m eating okay,’ he added
quickly. ‘Honest, you don’t have to worry about me. This sample—’

‘I can run it through today and you can call for the results this afternoon,’ his father said, almost dismissively, Finn thought. ‘We usually send out a written confirmation . . . I understand you’re receiving mail poste restante at King’s Cross?’

Finn looked up, surprise and dismay playing for equal time on his face. His father knew, but hadn’t sent anything?

‘The staff at your grandmother’s nursing home told us,’ said his dad. ‘We thought you might turn up there, so we contacted them. And then, of course, the police sighted you yesterday. At the station, they said, which surprised us. We thought you must have been in some sort of trouble, the way you ran off. I must say, Don—’

Finn heard the familiar hectoring tone creep into his father’s voice, and automatically bent his head to allow the lecture to pass over it. But there was silence, and he looked up to see his father, with an effort, close his lips. They both looked at the desktop, which was clear except for the sample and the pad of paper on which Finn’s father had been drafting a letter in his slanting, even handwriting. Finn felt a lecture hovering in the air somewhere very close, ready to break through at any second.

The phone rang. ‘Uh-oh,’ said Finn’s dad, and picked it up. ‘Okay, put him through. Sit down, Don. I’ve been waiting on this call. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

Finn resisted approaching the desk and sitting in the visitor’s chair. That businesslike voice didn’t have any power over him, he told himself, at the same time as he felt his habitual obedience trying to drag him forward. The telephone conversation, incomprehensible, flowed soothingly around him, and images flashed through his mind of his own room at Dad and Janet’s, of his comfortable bed, of some of
the meals his dad cooked, like
lasagne alla Finley
, the Parmesan cheese softening into the tomatoey mince . . .

His dad looked up, waving him towards the chair. Finn hesitated, then shook his head, mouthed ‘Gotta go,’ backed out of the office, and pulled the door closed behind him. He hurried away down the corridors, rubbing his hands down the thighs of his jeans, his heart still thundering.

Outside, he was just in time to catch a city-bound bus. He sat right down the back in a corner, breathing deeply, wobbly with relief. At least, he
thought
it was relief. He’d done it—delivered the sample, escaped without a scene, without having to explain himself or make any promises about returning or go through any kind of third degree. Maybe he was disappointed—maybe he’d really
wanted
his father to make a fuss, force some kind of showdown.

He should have known, though, that his dad just wasn’t that kind of guy. He’d never begged in his life, and Finn wanted him to beg. He wanted to hear him say he missed Finn and needed him at home. He wanted one of those forbidden hugs. But even during the split with his mum his father hadn’t said any of those things fathers tell their kids in the soaps, about how the kids are loved whatever happened to the parents. His mum had talked, and cried a lot, and talked some more—maybe too much. She’d let Finn see the stretch and twang of every nerve, and even nowadays, when she prided herself on a full recovery, the instinct to protect her and the wish to be protected
by
her were always fighting away inside him.

From his father, though, he’d been shut out, along with the rest of the world. His father’s distrust had clanged down between them like a steel gate. The first year, before Janet had arrived and found the chink in the gate, had been murder—Finn and his dad being ultra-polite, moving around
the house stiffly, silently, like thieves. But even then, at the end of every excruciating day, there’d been this bedtime ritual that had made up for the distance: his father reading him some stories, and then Finn falling asleep in front of the television and waking up in his father’s arms being carried to bed. He’d doze off again with his dad rubbing his back, at first a little too roughly, then softer. That hadn’t happened much, since Janet, since Alex. Often it was Finn himself settling Alex while Janet and his father talked in the sitting room—one voice calm and constant, the other full of knots and strains and irritations, bursting out at intervals. And Alex’s whisper: ‘I want a drink of milk, Donny.’ ‘You can’t, mate. You just cleaned your teeth. You want a story instead?’ A faint rustle on the pillow as Alex nodded in the dark.

Finn tapped his fingers together on his knees, glanced out the back window of the bus and stopped breathing. A couple of cars away a grimy tanker was keeping pace with the bus. He could see no brand name on it, and the cars in front of it obscured the numberplate. What gave him the shivers, though, was the tinted windscreen. What truckie would ever darken the windscreen almost to black, so that he and his passenger could only be seen as bulky shadows propped in the cab?

Finn sank into his seat, the back of his head prickling. The bus began to slow down towards a bus-stop, and he watched the side windows, expecting the tanker to overtake. It didn’t. When the bus pulled out into the traffic again he risked another glance out the back and saw the tanker, too, pulling away from the kerb.

The journey into town was long and harrowing. For a while Finn could keep out of sight by lying across the back seat, but eventually there were too many people on the bus for that. He shifted forward a few seats so that there were
some protective layers between himself and his pursuers if they should decide to fire at the back of the bus. Where were the bus’s fuel tanks, he wondered uncomfortably. Right underneath him, probably.

At every bus-stop he heard a series of angry toots on car horns as the tanker halted behind them. And he couldn’t stop himself glancing behind, bracing himself against the jerk of fear in his stomach every time he saw the tanker following. Some of the passengers behind him began looking slightly unnerved, and a couple glanced over their shoulders to see what was making Finn so jittery.

As they crossed the bridge Finn began to panic. The bus route ended at Wynyard Station. He couldn’t hide from them much longer.

Feeling doomed, he peered forward and saw the greenery of Wynyard Park approaching. As the bus slowed he waited for a few people to gather at the doors before he stood; maybe he could protect himself by surrounding himself with a human shield.

But the shield dispersed, striding off in all directions as he stepped on to the pavement. He skipped after the greater part of it, which was a single file of shoppers crossing the park.

Halfway over he looked behind. The tanker had stopped in the middle of Clarence Street in front of a line of hooting vehicles. The cab window was gliding down. Finn thought he saw a red twinkle behind it, but he couldn’t be sure; he was running too fast, darting as erratically as possible among the shoppers. He dashed past the fountain and ran down the path beyond.

A shock wave rushed forward and splattered his back. Thrown water and shards of brickwork flew past him. He felt something embed itself in the back of his thigh, but it didn’t burn and it caused him no pain, so he kept right on running.

He veered around a woman who was standing stunned, gaping at something behind him, and took a couple of flying leaps over people who had been knocked over by the blast. There was a little arcade he needed, right by the Menzies Hotel. His eye was on it, and all the people turning wide-eyed to see what had happened would come between him and the tankermen. Just as long as they didn’t fire again.

Two pillars of the covered walkway sheltering the bus-stops changed from green to orange as he approached, and flew apart as he charged by. He flung up his arms to protect himself, and kept running; a piece glanced off the back of his head. He dodged a slow-moving bus, nearly slammed back into it as a taxi pared his toenails, and threw himself into the arcade entrance. Behind him there was much crashing and shouting as the walkway roof collapsed, but he didn’t dare spare it a glance.

He didn’t stop running until he reached Martin Place and was on the Kings Cross train. The pain in his thigh hit him then, like a bad cramp locking up half his leg. The other passengers tried not to notice as he sat groaning in the seat, feeling blood trickle down his calf.

At the Cross he managed to hobble out, get up the escalators and fall into a taxi on Victoria Road.

‘I should take you to hospital, no?’ the driver said nervously, risking short glances at Finn’s body stretched out shaking on the back seat.

‘No, it’s okay,’ Finn said weakly. ‘I’m going to my friend’s place. He’s a doctor—he’ll look after me. I’m sorry, though, for messing up your seat.’ He waved a bloody hand.

‘Is okay. All plastic; it wipe off.’ The driver cheerfully flapped a rag at him, then swerved and swore with fright. ‘I nearly run dat bloke over!’

Finn laid his head on the seat and passed out.

He woke up a couple of times, but not properly—once when Jed, the taxi driver and one of Jed’s mates were manhandling him up the stairs to the flat, muttering instructions to each other, and once when Jed extracted the piece of debris from his thigh. Then he yelped and began to shake, feeling terribly cold. He felt Jed’s big hand firm on the middle of his back. ‘It’s okay, mate. You just rest a bit now, hey?’ And he sank away again as a blanket was spread over him.

When he surfaced again the room was empty and incongruously beautiful. There was a big tree outside the open window, and a couple of birds were sitting in it somewhere, unravelling a complicated duet in the afternoon light. Sunbeams moved about in the floating dust of the room and lit up circles of the crimson carpet.