When Colts Ran (28 page)

Passing another door, he looked in, he found
Goats
.

So here was the answer to a question from a while back – as to where that painting had gone, leaving the pale square on Colts's shabby wall, and who'd had the money to pay for it. In the end, Hooke smiled, Hooke always found out. He had Colts. Now he had Merrington. Or almost.

That question was certainly in the air with Merrington – ‘to be tested by Hooke' – and had been since the auction, when Merrington bid up to prove his worth and overpriced himself against the district norms. Tracing it back, Hooke identified the question separating Merrington out from his other clients – the source of attraction. Merrington didn't have to be like other people if he didn't want to be. It wasn't the evident wealth that gave him the freedom, though maybe the possible source of it, way back, in brothel earnings, helped cut an edge. Anything bad that could be said about him had been said all his life since he was a boy in ringlets wearing a private school blazer and attracting the gutter press.

By contrast Hooke spent his entire life matching himself to others' needs up to a finely judged pitch of acceptance. Who was more impartial than the auctioneer tenor-throating animals and merchandise to their inherent market worth? He got through by cultivating an air of absolute equality, hard won.

Merrington was more than he seemed, Hooke already knew that. His painting room was more than Merrington, pointing to a truth Hooke had always known in the blustery world around him, but hadn't ever quite focused on to see so brilliantly. For Alan Hooke was at a point in life when he wanted not just to have passed through the world but to have whatever was true in the world passed through him.

There was always that seeking part of Hooke, wanting that little bit more. He felt a nibble of it now, its promise. It gave him pluck in the amateur ring, when younger, and was there in his singing when he was a bit older, one of Rev. Vince Powell's revivalist choristers, in a longing for spiritual moments uncorrupted by second thoughts. But what, Hooke asked himself, was truly, widely and generously amazing about him at all? He was in the groove as successor to Careful Bob down the years. That defined him locally, and still did. That Liz found him remarkable, a cause for praise, was the definition of her loving him. What about the rest?

Something was left over for Hooke as a man that he was faced dealing with as a man. It rose into his understanding as a drive to line up with sex and the providing instinct. Nothing more than that, but it seemed more elevated and he could only express it as a question: where was the room equivalent to Merrington's where Hooke himself kept a few reflections of his aspiring self, ready for show? If a man didn't have one, he surely needed one. The glimpse of
Goats
told him that. Colts was a man whose whole life had shrunk down from something too amazing for him to handle. Hooke wasn't going to have it that way for himself.

Up on the mountain was the best fattening country Careful Bob had ever stumbled across, those crafted, exemplary paddocks surrounded by untouched forest, tall timber shedding long clattering strips of bark, the acreage that the sheep-grazing Knoxes hadn't valued, to Randolph Knox's bitter regret. Could be those acres were Hooke's amazing room, ceiling open to the sky, walls wide.

Hooke kept the wonders of the Bullock Run in the family as a rule. It was his workaday mental refuge, the place he went at weekends and on long summer evenings when the day's dealing was done – just twenty minutes' drive from the agency door to the locked gate. He used to go up with Colts, but no longer. Now he decided to ask Merrington up there.

Let him see something wild after a man's heart, Hooke resolved. Let them make a full day of it as he used to, with Colts. He would bring Liz's boys, Matt and Johnny, who followed his every move; they would ride farm bikes while Hooke and Merrington took to the ridges on horseback, and Liz and Dominique, that graceful Burgundian, spread a picnic lunch on the creekbank near the waterfall. If the arrangement fell at the right time the twins might come, should their Sydney social diaries permit, a bonus for Hooke's feelings and a chance for Merrington to meet them and even possibly for them to decide about the sitting he'd offered, twins paying double.

That year was a hectic one in Hooke and Liz's life. Liz carried a full teaching load with extra marking at night. Hooke ranged wide looking for stock, embarking on long drives and conducting his life via car phone out to the Riverina and north to the Hunter, skirting Sydney where on the horizon construction cranes wavered like long-legged mosquitoes as the city was made over for the Olympics. Several times passing he called his daughters to arrange a coffee or a Chinese meal, but it rarely worked out.

Hooke's was an old problem: offering clients the best-priced animals while securing top dollar when they moved through to the selling end, which, livestock being what it was, came in the same market moment. ‘Hooke A Winner' was the slogan current since Careful Bob was a boy in shorts, with a logo of Hooke in trout-fishing waders landing a sheep – but still only as good as the most recent sale. Wool, by comparison, was in a trough and so Hooke had the leisure to acquire, for the two or three concerns that cared enough to try, a line of fine wool breeders challenging his own in readiness for when the industry looked up. Colts's sheepclassing reputation, formerly a Hooke & Hooke cachet, had fallen off. Hooke stood ready to drive Colts around and use his eye from the passenger seat without needing to roll down the window, if need be, to revive and resuscitate the one-lunged man from his drowning breath.

Almost when the details seemed too hard to arrange the twins phoned to set a date mid-term for their seventeenth birthday dinner ‘at home', as Hooke liked to say – except the farmhouse on the town boundary of Isabel Junction where they'd started their lives had long since ceased being their centre. Once they'd ridden small bicycles with ribbons flying from the handlegrips past the hayshed and out into the ordinary backstreets leading down to the primary school. Hooke had an enduring image of them wobbling all over the road as he drove slowly behind them, making sure they were safe.

Now when they phoned there was the same feeling of protectiveness but he felt wrong-footed, intrusive: ‘Why not come Friday evening and go back Sunday night?'

Objecting, they said they would rather travel on the train, arriving early Saturday afternoon and returning late the next morning.

‘I don't see the point of such a short stay,' Hooke insisted. ‘Less than twenty-four hours!'

He couldn't keep the edge of complaint from his voice, making him seem all obstinate fatherhood to his daughters, whereas to others, including Liz, nothing impossible was his motto and geniality plus his reputation.

‘Dad, can we do it our way for once?'

Hooke handed the phone to Liz feeling that they always did.

Hooke's definition of being a man in a family of women was containment of feeling while the women expressed theirs every way they could. They seemed to have extra lines open to each other while the men's emotional exchange barely connected. Maybe Hooke wanted it that way, liked it better, except sometimes it bothered him, and when it did it seemed more important than anything.

Liz learned how the twins were sacrificing a Saturday night party with their Sydney friends, for which a Friday night party was to be substituted. So a Saturday arrival it would be, no choice.

‘You sympathised with them,' said Hooke, as she put the phone down.

‘I was young once.'

‘So was I, but I paid my dues.'

‘Alan, your mother told me you were abominable – never at home, driving hundreds of miles to parties and dances and leaving her dangling when she longed to know who you were interested in.'

‘Not at sixteen, seventeen. I was a lot older. Besides, it's their birthday, I'm their father,' said Hooke flatly.

‘You don't understand a thing,' she assured him. ‘Seventeen is older than it was. Darling, they love you to bits, you're the anchor in their lives.'

Except when he up-anchored that once, he thought, creating uncertainty in their lives of which they might never know the end.

Hooke stood on the platform, his heart full. His daughters stepped from the train – freckle-faced Abbey with a head of flossy red hair wound up in a bandana; Tina with short blonde spiky ends (whereas last time Abbey was blonde and Tina red).

After kissing him they turned to Liz, hugging her to the count of ten. ‘No other luggage?' he said as they shouldered their backpacks. They had large paper bags but wouldn't let him take even them. He knew of course how skilled they were at packing minimal luggage after a childhood of shuttle domesticity. They skipped ahead arm-linked with Liz, leaving Hooke with the familiar emotion of wanting more than they could give. In the car he drove with a tolerant half-smile, just holding the wheel and being of service.

‘Where's Kingsley?' they said, looking up and down Gograndli Street. There were times in the past when he'd been there to greet them, Uncle Kings, close as family.

Hooke said nothing.

‘Oh, I get it,' said Tina. ‘He's back on the slops, he's been frozen out.'

At the house Matt and Johnny came running to the car and dragged the girls to the dog kennels to muss the border collie's coat, then to the basketball hoop clamped to the hayshed where the boys shot baskets to the girls' applause until called for afternoon tea. On the verandah Hooke asked them about school marks and they said they'd already told him, but he couldn't remember being told, so they patiently spelt it out.

‘Tell them how they look,' whispered Liz.

‘Ah, by the way,' he fidgeted with his teaspoon, ‘you girls look sensational.' He smiled the easy, loafing smile his clients liked.

‘Do you think so, Dad? Really?'

‘Yes, smashin',' he confirmed, appropriating one of Liz's North Londonisms.

They were pleased.

Then they were back with Liz, the three of them flinging dresses on beds and pooling jewellery. Hooke went to swab the concrete floor of the ram shed and waited for them to come over. As the sun sank lower he calculated that if they rushed they had time to reach the Bullock Run for a dose of country feel before they scrubbed up for the restaurant. When he went back to the house and put the question to Liz she said she'd never heard anything so absurd in all her life. The girls were in the bathroom with steam coming out from under the door in volcanic folds.

At dinner at the Pizza Heaven they announced, ‘No speeches!'

And this left Hooke with a lump in his throat because he wanted to say something tipsily profound over the remains of the garlic bread and a demolished Mexican Special. What was it again?

‘I've always been glad I had daughters because sons might clock me and run me down on their motorbikes.'

Matt and Johnny with their wet, slicked-back hair and spotted bow ties gave him the grin.

‘Definitely a speech,' groaned Abbey.

‘So we're less of a threat,' said Tina with a martial-arts scowl, ‘because we're weak?'

‘You don't understand. I always had the fantasy of a togetherness thing. That we'd go to concerts in Milan or sample vineyards in, ah, Burgundy. You'd link arms with me like you do with Liz – heads would turn and people would say, “
sacre bleu
, they're incredible
jeune filles
, and they're his daughters”.'

‘Name the day,' said Tina with a downward lilt to her voice. Everyone knew that Hooke was hard to uproot from his working life, his typical holiday being an expenses-paid trip around New Zealand glaciers as a reward for selling drenches.

‘Look,' said Hooke, producing two felt-covered jewellery cases from his jacket pocket and shuffling them like a conjurer. ‘Whose is which?'

It was an old birthday routine. Whichever they received, gold wrist bracelet or silver ankle bracelet, they would swap perpetually, everything interchangeable in their lives; their friendship with each other, Hooke felt, a safety net they had when he wasn't around. Once he'd tried to say this to them and hadn't been understood – or only too fully understood, he didn't quite know. If you offered perceptions and got a prickly response, was the message through?

They came around the table, hugged and kissed him, and smiled conspiratorially at Liz because they knew she'd had a hand in pushing him to get what they wanted and in steering him to the jewellery store.

Hooke had them now. But there was still a gap. Their twinship, their life in the city with their mother – an intimacy sealed from Hooke – their girls' web of secrets, their casting of him as cranky and contradictory when he often was not, all this left him feeling excluded as a matter of course, even unloved at bedrock when he considered how much he gave and how little flowed back of what he wanted, and would be only too simple to give.

But what difference did it make really? He loved them. He underwrote their lives without question, and always would. If there was ever a mortal threat to them he would stand before them, sword and shield warding off danger. Frankly he would die for them, though with a lament on his lips: Farewell dear Lizzie, my love, I must leave thee now.

‘Dad, you're drunk!'

‘What did I say?'

‘You were humming some old “choral” item or other.'

Liz squeezed his hand under the table.

Hooke ordered another bottle of red and watched it go straight into three out-thrust tumblers and so went for another. At the bar it was one friendly drunk after another wanting a part of him. Colts was there in the payment line, swaying on his feet, and Hooke stood blocking him from seeing that the girls were home. Colts had a strand of cheesy onion stuck on his lip and promised through pungent breath he'd be at the agency at seven Monday morning to rake out the yard. ‘You'd better be,' said Hooke, returning to the table to find the next round of pizzas arrived and everyone tucking in.