Jen’s forearms tensed at the sides of Mac’s neck and she nodded facetiously, breath streaming out of her nostrils. ‘Of course it’s not as if it’s the old husband-and-wife cover, right?’
‘Jen -‘
‘So it’s not as if you thought you could slip out and spend two weeks in a hotel room with another bird, and not tell me, right? That wasn’t how it was?’
‘ Jen -‘
‘She married?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Mac.
‘How old?’
‘ Jen! ‘
‘She better looking than me?’
‘Look, I don’t even know who she is -‘
‘Is. She. Better. Looking. Than. Me?’
‘No,’ smiled Mac. ‘She’ll be a dog.’
‘Really?’
‘Totally. She won’t be in the hotel – got a kennel lined up.’
Jenny smiled, softened a bit. Mac put his hands down to her hips.
‘This is what I like, right here,’ he said, grabbing her arse.
Jenny moved in to him and, looking into his eyes, said, ‘You’re a worry, know that, Macca?’
She put her hands behind his head and kissed him. Jenny may have been hard in many respects but she was a nice soft kisser.
‘You’re a beautiful girl,’ murmured Mac as Jenny pressed in closer, kissed him again. It had been a while, what with Rachel and the broken sleep, and Mac felt himself reacting to Jenny’s body. She felt him reacting too, and reached down, squeezed him gently.
Mac moved his hips. Jenny looked into his eyes and said, ‘It’s not as if I don’t trust you.’
‘No,’ mumbled Mac, his mind elsewhere.
‘So just keep thinking with the big head, huh Macca?’
‘Sure,’ said Mac, chuckling.
And then Jen squeezed him way too hard. Mac gasped, doubled over in pain and watched his wife walk away, ponytail swishing.
CHAPTER 27
Mac pulled up his pants slightly too fast and gasped as they hit the head he wasn’t supposed to think with. He tried again, more gingerly, and padded awkwardly back to his reclined seat, which in the Emirates A340 business class were the generous twenty-four-inch models. The eight pm fl ight would get into Singers around fi ve am and then he’d connect with a fl ight into Jakarta that would land shortly after eight am local time.
The lights were down and it was a chance to rest. Tucking back under the blanket, he dozed, thought about Jen and whether she’d been justifi ed in pinching him like that. She had a diffi cult personality at times and could get a bit cranky when she was hungover. Mac suspected she had cabin fever – wanted to get back into cop work, do what she loved.
Like many tough women there was a vulnerable side to her too.
When Mac had fi rst started seeing Jen, he’d been surprised at the fact that she often cried in bed at night, which was completely at odds with her daytime persona as the ice queen of the AFP. Initially he’d wanted to do a runner; criers, generally speaking, gave a bloke the excuse to make like the coyote and do what you had to do. But with Jenny it didn’t scare him and he hung around. They liked each other, but they also liked each other. In those early days, she didn’t want the tears discussed: I don’t cry, understand?
Jenny’s job was technically as intelligence liaison between the Australian Federal Police and other law enforcement, intelligence and military organisations in the countries to Australia’s near north, but the real impact of intelligence liaison was in her specialist detail, transnational sexual servitude – the enslavement of children and young women for the sexual enjoyment of blokes. It was a confronting detail and, like all of the women working in that area, Jenny went off sex from time to time and had had to get counselling when things got too much.
The hostess wandered by and Mac asked for a bottle of water. She brought him a Vittel and he sipped on it.
He’d often wondered how Jenny maintained her strength and good humour. Growing up on an orchard in western Victoria, her father had been a violent drunk, and while Jenny’s mother and younger sister went along with the program, Jenny couldn’t bow to it. From a young age, Jen made herself the target of her father’s violence, and she’d get the beatings and spend nights out in the barn, keeping out of harm’s way.
‘When he drank, he wanted respect,’ shrugged Jenny the fi rst time she told Mac about it, ‘but there was no way I could give him that.’
‘You couldn’t just play along?’ Mac had asked.
‘That’s what Mum wanted, but I’d say, “Why – to stop my own father punching me? Threatening me? Calling me a piece of shit?”’
That’s how Jenny had learned to see the world and the men who wandered around in it. Respect wasn’t a default setting for Jen. She’d spent long hours at the local swim club and water polo squad, staying away from the Old Man. Then one night, when she got home from swimming, her younger sister, Petra, came running out of the house in tears, her father close behind yelling something about his dinner.
Jenny had always been tall and willowy but in her fi rst year of high school, and with all the swimming, she’d become stronger in the shoulders, arms and legs. Something made her stand in front of Petra as her father charged after her.
‘Leave her alone,’ Jenny had yelled at him. ‘Pick on someone your own size!’
He’d walked up and punched Jenny fl ush on the jaw, sent her sprawling. When she told Mac this story, Jenny’s eyes took on a faraway look, as if she couldn’t quite explain how things went from bad to worse that night.
‘I was on my knees, shaking my head, probably concussed – he wasn’t a small guy – and I put my hands down to steady myself and my right hand went straight around a wrecking bar, nice big one too.’
The Old Man had come over to go on with it and Jenny swung the wrecking bar with two hands, like a baseball bat, and hit her father on the left kneecap. She’d recalled, ‘There was total silence for two seconds. He opened his mouth but no sound came out and he fell over like a tree going down.’
Jenny had cracked his patella.
‘He was moaning and groaning, and I stood up, threw the bar away and started walking down the driveway to the barn. I had a sleeping bag down there and everything.’
As she was walking, her sister screamed out, ‘Jenny!’ and when she turned she saw the fi rst fl ash from her Old Man’s rifl e and heard the slug pinging off the Massey-Ferguson. She ran across the home paddock and into the cherry orchards and kept running as the shots came out of the darkness.
The court acquitted her father and Jenny was sent to boarding school as an offi cial problem child. She’d barely talked to her family again and when her father died of cancer while she was studying at Monash University, she didn’t attend the funeral. One day Jenny had bumped into Petra in Brisbane, when they were both adults, and Petra still seemed to think that if Jen had kept her mouth shut and played along with their dad, everything would have been fi ne.
Jenny had grown through all that and Mac didn’t get much of the fallout from her childhood – with one exception: she was the only woman other than his mother ever to hit him. It was just after he’d fi nished a gig with Garvs in Jakarta back in ‘02. He’d had a few drinks after an operation, and then turned up to see Jen. But he’d forgotten to remove his Heckler from his belt and Jenny hit him on the head for that.
She put up with a lot from Mac but she wouldn’t tolerate a drunk with a fi rearm. And now she’d made it clear that she also had no tolerance for Mac having a second wife, even if it was in the line of duty.
