Free The Family Men by Catherine Harris Page B

telephone call, though he can’t be sure, someone might have rung – at this time of night it is impossible to know what is real and what isn’t – telling himself not to stress it, even if it was a call it was likely just a fan or a wrong number. It doesn’t make sense that it was Margo (she isn’t a teenager). She’d just been fishing earlier on. Even if Jack and Eddy have been talking, if she had something concrete she would have said as much. That was her job, wasn’t it, to fact-find, verify. Do you have a comment? No comment? What would be the purpose of her hounding him like this, making late-night calls then hanging up, if she already had what she was after? There was nothing to be gained. It could only get him offside.
    He thinks again about the girl, mentally seats himself beside her on the train, her features blank, like an activity book yet to be coloured in, wishing it was possible, that he could transport himself there, that he could tell her to go home.
    *
    The girl felt a slight chill. She crossed her legs, then examined the pattern of fibres across her knees as the train rattled on, the steady stop-start of the stations metering out the journey with such regularity that the carriage began to feel like a world unto itself, the universe contained within its fluorescent-lit dimensions, the artificial brightness casting a distinctive pall across the faces of its inhabitants, mirrored back by the silver-tinged reflective windows. She surveyed the passengers – a young father down the other end attempting to corral his footloose toddler while his partner, left foot on the pram, fussed over her nursing baby; a woman two rows ahead lost in her Jodi Picoult novel; diagonally opposite an elderly man with sticky-taped glasses reading the Herald Sun ; and several other passengers variously distracted by newspapers and iPods – wondering if her secret was apparent from her demeanour or if she looked like any other young woman on her way into town. Truth be told, she already knew the answer, but where ordinarily she might have been disappointed, in this instance it pleased her that she so effortlessly blended in. Granted, most of the passengers would have been alarmed to learn that she was still a teenager, but as a twenty-something, her appearance (at a glance at least) was unremarkable.
    Would she have described herself as happy? Yes, excited and happy. And a little smug, harbouring a degree of pity for her fellow travellers, these denizens of the public transport system, members of that wider class of citizenry she typically dismissed as “people”, a collective noun meaning they had no clue. Uninteresting, boring, passionless, stupid.
    Her mother was one of those people, always going on about “our” values and “doing the right thing”, as though anyone cared if she only bought Australian-grown tinned tomatoes or never used the clothes dryer, when in the same breath she hung on Ray’s every word – Jump! How high? – like it was 1952 and her job to do whatever it was he told her, Ray trying it on with her when her mum wasn’t around – get me this, get me that – the girl saying, “It’s not a hotel,” then Ray calling her a stupid brat. Denying it later, of course (“A little credit please, as if I’d speak to your daughter like that”), her mother insisting the girl tell the truth, “You’re lying, you’re lying” (because she didn’t want Ray leaving her like all her other boyfriends had) – “Why can’t you just tell the truth?” – when the girl was being honest. Why should she say she’d done something that she hadn’t?
    The girl wasn’t going to live her life that way. Pandering to other people. Day after day. Year after year. Always one foot in the grave. Her father certainly hadn’t, taking off the first chance he got. Not that she blamed him.