‘Same here, me-you.’
She smiled and small wrinkles fanned out from the corners of her eyes; there were faint lines beside her mouth too. I found the lines much more attractive than smoothness. I touched her face.
‘Want to go to bed?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘You think that’s a bit quick? Should we discuss herpes?’
I said ‘No’ and kissed her again. She leaned into it; either we were getting our breath back or getting better at it. The kiss lasted longer and meant more. We stood up and hugged. I felt her hip bones bite in just below mine.
‘Not too quick?’
I shook my head and kissed her neck. She twisted free and pulled me by the hand.
‘I told you my first six months were nearly up’, she said.
7
I wouldn’t say it was anything spectacular the first time. I tend to take my cue from my partners, and my last partner had been the passive, easily pleased type; Helen was energetic, so there were some adjustments to make. She had a queen-sized bed and we used the whole of it trying to find out what each other liked. That involved a good deal of laughing.
She had black satin sheets on the bed and, after the first session, I propped up above her on one elbow and arranged the edge of the sheet exactly halfway across her breasts which were flat as she lay on her back. I smoothed the sheet down around her body and sculptured her into a sort of mermaid shape. She smiled up at me.
‘Kinky’, she said.
‘No, just tucking you in.’
‘Tuck me in some more.’
I did and tucking got to touching and we used our hands on each other urgently which, as it turned out, we both liked.
After, she got us drinks and brought them back to the bed. ‘Pretty good?’ she said.
I nodded. ‘Very, very good. Tell me about your life.’
The drinks were pretty heavily diluted with water, which is the way I’ll always take my second whisky, by preference- especially at 2 a.m. in the morning. She took a healthy pull on hers and looked up at the high, off-white ceiling. Good teeth, I thought, good everything.
‘Where to start? Great question though. Ah… my kid’s name is Verity. Sorry.’
‘So you should be. Poor kid.’
‘I bowed to pressure.’
‘Uh huh. How long’ve you been married?’
‘Twelve years, nearly thirteen.’
‘This the first time you’ve been allowed out?’
‘It’s the first time I’ve been allowed out as you put it, yes. It’s not the first time I’ve been out.’
‘You’ve had affairs with men before?’ I arranged my face to make sure she knew I was joking.
‘Affairs and… honourable stand-offs.’
‘I won’t even ask what that means. Are you going to trifle with my affections?’
‘Probably.’ She slid her hand under the sheet. ‘I’m certainly going to trifle with these.’
It went on like that until close to dawn. I slept for a while, and when I woke up I was alone in the big bed. There was a small wardrobe in one corner of the room, an upholstered chair with clothes thrown over it, a low table near the bed carrying a stack of books-no other furniture. The heavy curtains over a big window were only half- drawn and light was coming in strongly through the gap. I got up, jerked the curtains apart and was hit in the eye by the view of Elizabeth Bay. The sky was an intense blue and there was a light swell which kept the boats moving at their moorings in a slow, rhythmic dance. From this distance the Darling Point shoreline looked green and unsullied. I went back to the bed, pulled up the pillows and sat and looked at the dancing boats.
Helen came in carrying a breakfast tray; she was wearing the silk thing again and it only looked better for a few creases. As I watched her it struck me that her features looked very different in the natural light. Her nose was still nicely crooked and her dark eyes deep with the fine lines ready to appear; but a tightness was gone, and the pugnacity was reduced. Sex and a little sleep seemed to do her a power of good. Her hair was spiky and sticking up irregularly; I wanted to smooth it down, groom her like a cat.
‘I thought you’d be a coffee rather than tea man-toast not cereal, honey not jam.’
‘Right three times.’
We settled the tray on the bed, kissed briefly and got into the food.
‘Did you tell me anything about the job you’re on last night? I have this weird memory; I forget almost everything I’m told immediately and remember it all much later.’
‘No, I didn’t tell you.’
‘Are you going to?’
‘What’s the point?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, I can react all right at the time I’m being told. My understanding’s not impaired.’
‘I’ll decide according to the quality of the coffee.’
I drank some and she looked at me expectantly.
‘Well?’
‘The coffee’s good-that means I don’t have to tell you. It’d be a punishment to be told about it.’ She punched me lightly, but a light punch from her was a fair tap.
‘All right, all right, I’ll tell you.’
‘It’s just that I saw the gun, you see. Do you really need to carry a gun around with you when you work?’
I shrugged.
‘I’ve never fired a gun in my life’, she said.
‘You’re not missing much. I thought all country women kept guns in the kitchen. By the stove. Dumb place to keep it, come to think of it.’
She’d drawn away a bit on the bed and she drank some coffee before answering. ‘I’m not a country woman, originally. I grew up in Sydney and only moved up there when I married Mike.’
That’d be when you were about twenty-two.’
‘Twenty-one; so you really are a detective?’
I grunted. ‘So-called. Mostly I go along with people when they move money about, or do things like you saw me doing the other night. I look for missing people, too. That’s what I’m on now, sort of
‘You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want to.’
‘No, I don’t mind. He’s not really missing. I saw him last night in fact. He’s the son of the guy who took me away from you at Roberta’s. Remember?’
‘I do. I wasn’t pleased. I met him, Mr… Guthrie?’
‘Yeah. Well, he’s hired me to find out what’s gone wrong with his kid. There’s something bloody funny about it, that’s for sure. I followed the kid and the people he was drinking with last night, and that’s when I ran into the two unfriendly guys I dropped off at your front door.’
I put my cup down, took hers and put it down and gently cased across the bed. I licked my finger and smoothed down her hair.
‘I’m not a gunman’, I said. ‘I’m not a thug.’
‘I know.’
‘Once in a while things get very heavy in what I do-not very often, not even once a year. I haven’t got a thing about guns. I got a bellyful of guns in the army.’
She grabbed my face, squeezed and kissed me-she was a very physical woman. ‘We’ll leave the army for
