Peter Temple - An Iron Rose

As we trooped off, I saw Allie on the bonnet of her truck, leaning back against the windscreen, legs crossed at the ankle. She was wearing a red quilted jacket and a scarf, and you could see the colour in her cheeks from thirty metres. There was a man lounging next to her, floppy dark hair, sallow, young. She gave me the thumbs up, hand cocked forward. Three things went through my mind. One, she’d come to watch me play without being asked. Two, she’d come with another man. Three, don’t be a stupid prick.

In the second quarter, Bentham put a man called String Woodly at fullback. He consisted almost entirely of thin rubbery arms that he wound around you like pipe cleaners while pretending to be interested in taking a mark. No-one had ever seen him take a mark, but very few opposing players had got one while wrapped in String. Carrying him around was exhausting. Billy complained to the umpire. This didn’t work. I resorted to falling over in his embrace, trying to land on him with an elbow in some painful spot. This didn’t work either. I kept landing on my elbow with String on top of me. Finally, I had Flannery sent over and we had a chat.

The next time the ball came our way, coming down through the mist, Flannery got close behind the two of us, pulled out the back of String’s shorts. Using the waistband elastic as a step, he ran up String’s back and plucked the ball from the sky. String let me go, falling over forward, clutching at his shorts, now around his knees.

‘That’s not in the bloody game,’ he said, offended, as Flannery landed on his right shoulder.

‘Stick around, beanpole,’ Flannery said, getting ready to kick. ‘Show you lots not in the game.’ He took two paces and kicked the ball through the middle. He looked around at me, astounded by his feat. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Haven’t kicked a goal since school.’

‘That long,’ I said. ‘Since you were twelve.’

String wasn’t the same after his experience, and Flannery and I saw off a few other Bentham spoilers before the day was over. We ran out ten-goal winners. No-one could remember Brockley winning by ten goals. We went back to the Oak in a state of high excitement, singing one another’s praises. Nothing disturbed our joy until only the hard core remained.

‘Was a time,’ said Trevor Creedy, ‘when Brockley won by bloody ten goals every second week.’ He was a small man with close-set eyes, now murky, the kind of supporter who finds victory deeply unsatisfying. ‘That was,’ he said, ‘before they starting pickin girls. And makin blokes coach never kicked a footy.’

‘Trev,’ Mick said, ‘been meanin to ask ya. How’d ya like to share the coach’s job? I mean, with a view to takin it over?’

Creedy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘Tryin to bloody buy off ya critics. Won’t bloody work with me.’

He left, now a happier man.

‘Lovely fella,’ said Flannery. ‘Fixed his car for him, took it for a spin, see how it goes. When I give him the bill, he takes off fifty cents for petrol. Don’t expect me to pay for your joyridin, he says.’

Mick’s mobile trilled. He had a brief conversation, then he said, ‘Vinnie, me own Gestapo’s on the way. Let’s have a lightnin round for the survivors.’

The dog joined me as I stepped out of the door, suddenly aware that no area of my body was without its own dull pain. A full moon gave a pale and cold daylight when the clouds parted. Both limping a bit, the dog and I walked down the road and down the lane.

I was in the office, going through Allie’s work diary and writing up invoices, when I heard the car. Marcia Carrier was getting out of her BMW when I reached the door. She didn’t look like an Olympic dressage contestant today. Today she looked like an Olympic skier, apres ski : dark hair loose, big cream polo-necked sweater, camel-coloured pants. She looked healthy and fit, like someone who ran and swam and had a lot of wholehearted sex in front of open fires, followed by yoghurt milkshakes.

‘Mac,’ she said, ‘I rang the number you gave me, no reply. So I drove over on the off-chance.’

‘Nice to see you,’ I said.

‘Got a few minutes?’

‘Hours. Days. Kitchen’s the only warm room in the house.’

‘I was hoping for the forge.’

‘Forge’s having a rest today. Sunday is forge’s day of rest.’

The kitchen didn’t look too bad. Spartan but clean. I pulled another captain’s chair in front of the stove. Mick Doolan had sold me six for two hundred dollars: ‘To you, Moc, a gift. What I paid for them. Less. I think about it now, less. Much less.’

‘I’ll make coffee,’ I said.

‘Mac, sit,’ she said, lacing her fingers. ‘I have to tell you something and I’m embarrassed about it…’

I sat down.

‘When you came to see me about Ned Lowey, I think I said it was going to nag at me.’ She was studying her left hand on the arm of the chair. It was older than her face.

‘I remember.’

A spray of rain, like gravel thrown, hit the window. She tensed. Our eyes met.

‘Well, it did. I went back to the files, looking for something that might have happened while Mr Lowey was working at Kinross. I found something. About an hour ago.’

‘Happened to a girl?’

She nodded. ‘Two girls.’

‘When you were in charge?’

‘I was new. Took over in 1983, into a nightmare. The place was run like a mini-kingdom, all these places were, minimal record-keeping, incompetent staff, all sorts of kickbacks with suppliers and contractors, ghosts on the payroll, you name it. My predecessor might have been a wonderful man but he was completely out of touch with what was going on around him. And to make things worse, Kinross wasn’t even getting the funding it was entitled to. So I cleaned up the obvious rorts and got a proper reporting system going. Then I left the day-to-day running to my deputy. He seemed to be an honest person. I devoted most of my time to working on the department and the minister to get Kinross’s funding up to speed.’

‘The girls,’ I said.

She clasped her hands, face unhappy. ‘Mac, I found a report in Daryl Hopman’s confidential file. He was my deputy. I’ve never seen the file before, didn’t know it existed. And I only found it by chance.’

‘What kind of report?’

‘It involves two girls. I should have been told about it and I wasn’t.’

She paused. I waited.

She sighed again. ‘It also involves Mr Lowey. I’m sorry to tell you that. I know how much he meant to you.’

‘Involves?’ I could feel the blood in my head.

Marcia put her hands through her hair. ‘I’ll just say it. The girls were caught coming back into the Kinross grounds shortly before four am one night in November 1985. They said they had been at Ned Lowey’s house and had been given drugs, amphetamines, speed, for sex.’

I stood up. ‘Not possible, a mistake. Not Ned. Absolutely not.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Marcia said. ‘I’m really sorry. I felt I had to tell you.’

I went to the window, looked out, saw nothing. ‘What was done?’

‘Nothing. It’s unbelievable. Nothing was done about a serious allegation of criminal conduct. Nothing. It says everything about the way Kinross was run in the old days. I shudder to think what else may have been ignored like this. In the maintenance supervisor’s file I found a note from Daryl saying that Ned was not to be employed again. I presume Daryl wrote the report as some kind of insurance if word leaked out.’

‘Insurance?’

‘He may have planned to say that he had made a report to me and that I was the one who failed to act.’

‘The girls said Ned gave them drugs?’ Ned having anything to do with any drug other than a stubbie of Vic Bitter was inconceivable. But my treacherous inner voice said: What do you really know about Ned?