Mark Abernethy: Second Strike

Johnny and Ari laughed at one another and Mari pouted. ‘ Dad! ‘

They dug in and one of Virginia’s boys, Charlie, wandered out, complaining that someone wouldn’t let him watch something. So his father, Graham – Mac’s brother-in-law – told him that if he had to come in there and sort it out, the whole thing was going off. Charles scarpered, problem solved.

They got louder as they drank and Ari, who’d been regaling the table with tales of how different the Israeli desert was to the Moscow ice, asked Huck how he had met Frank. The table went silent, the rest of them knowing that Huck didn’t talk about the war.

The two old soldiers stared at each other, and Frank shook his head, ‘Nah, Huck doesn’t want to tell that.’

‘Oh come on, Dad!’ said Mari. ‘I’ve been waiting years for this.’

Huck fi nally smiled, sipped on his beer, and told them how the Kiwi and Aussie SAS were doing the LURP patrols out of the Nui Dat base in South Vietnam during the late 1960s. ‘I knew Frank to say hello but we hadn’t done any patrols together by then.’

‘Hang on, Huck. Dad, you never told me you were SAS,’ said Mac.

‘Yeah, well you’ve spent fi fteen years telling me you’re a fl amin’ textbook salesman!’

The whole table went up in a roar of laughter and Mac sat there and wore it, Johnny slapping Ari with a high fi ve. As the laughter died, Mari said, ‘Go on, Dad.’

‘Well I’d been having a few problems with this Texan bloke, red-headed special forces fella.’

‘Trouble?’ asked Jenny. ‘Weren’t you all on the same side?’

‘Yeah, but in those days – 1968 – a bloke like me couldn’t hit a white fella.’

‘Why not?’ asked Mari.

‘Because that’s how it was. The Yanks didn’t even have an integrated special forces.’

‘So the Texan?’ asked Jenny.

‘Well, yeah. He was winding me up and I was ignoring it. It was a big base and the Aussies and Kiwi SAS generally kept to themselves, pretty much. Anyway, one afternoon the Texan had been drinking and he did something which was supposed to get me fi ghting. I didn’t want to. A white man would’ve just been told off, but I’d have to spend time in the stockade and lose my leave privileges. I was going to let it go, but Frank here -‘ he smiled and Frank raised his glass, ‘was this wild-eyed Queensland boy and he took the fi ght for me.’

‘Kick his arse, Frank?’ asked Mari, fi ring up.

‘Nah, mate,’ smiled Frank, shaking his head.

‘This Texan was the barracks bully,’ said Huck. ‘He’d been a Golden Gloves heavyweight back in Dallas but Frank just walked up and got into it. They fought for ten minutes and the whole base came out for it – the MPs stood off for a while and then broke it up and marched both of them down to the stockade. I think they spent a week emptying the latrines.’

‘Go, Frank!’ said Mari. ‘Kick his arse!’

They laughed and then Ari piped up. ‘For what did the Texan say that make Frank fi ght?’

Huck turned to him, and they held stares. ‘Fella called me a nigger.

Frank wouldn’t let it go.’

They arrived at Southport’s Guardian Angels church in two minivan cabs and muscled some room for the whole gang about halfway down and on the left. They were going to the nine o’clock mass and, although the church was large and had high ceilings, it was still Queensland in the middle of summer, so it was hot. Mac wondered at his father’s enthusiasm for mass. An atheist since Vietnam, he’d once told Mac that during the war he’d lost his childhood faith and couldn’t get it back. But he liked the family togetherness of Christmas mass.

Mac ended up between Frank and Ari, so he stood between the atheist and the Jew and they all sang the hymns, and when Mac leaned back he saw that Ari was holding Marama’s hand and further along Rachel was asleep over Jenny’s shoulder. Sarah – his other daughter

– was standing in the pew trying to sing along to ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’. Mac caught her eye and winked, and she was bashful, buried her head in her grandmother’s hip. Then she turned back and smiled at him.

He thought back to a midnight mass in Manila, when he wondered how Joe Imbruglia could smile and cry at the same time. And Mac looked at Sarah and smiled, and it all made sense.

Mac left the car running at the kerb and dashed into the 7-Eleven on Surf Avenue, the one just across the highway from Jupiters Casino.

He grabbed a litre of milk, a bag of nappies, some wet wipes, tissues, and Stayfrees and moved to the counter. A woman beat him to it and he stood in line, craning his neck towards the window to see if any parking police were going to ping him for the illegal park. The kids were in the back seat and Johnny sat in the front passenger side, face hidden behind wrap-around shades, boogying to the Black Eyed Peas.

Mac forced himself to be patient. The woman in front of him had two toddlers in a stroller – twins – and the white cotton gloves she was wearing meant she was having trouble getting cash out of her purse. She was done up in a long-sleeved rugby jumper, a wide-brimmed sun hat and some kind of turtle-neck skivvy. Mac knew it was a good idea to keep out of the Queensland sun, but this bird seemed a little over the top. She fi nally paid while Mac made funny faces at her toddlers.

Mac bought the gear, paid with an EFTPOS card. Then he bolted for the car with his plastic bag of goodies. As he left the store, the woman blocked his way. He wondered if he’d dropped something, probably one of Jen’s lists.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ said the woman from behind her huge sunnies, and he noticed how her scarf wrapped down around her jaw and up under the hat. ‘You wouldn’t be Mr McQueen, would you?’

Mac froze. Looked around, looked for eyes, for a van. He looked for aerials and men reading magazines, touching their ears.

He felt exposed, ambushed.

‘Nah, love,’ he mumbled, trying to move past her. ‘Got the wrong guy.’

He went around the back of the Commodore doing some basic counter-surveillance up and down the street, but it was just people pushing shopping trolleys from the supermarket and gangs of kids with boogie boards. One of his recurring nightmares was that his profession could somehow blow back into his private life, hurt his wife, his children, his friends.

He stole a look at the woman as he went for the door handle.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought I remembered you from the hospital.’

Mac paused.

‘You know, in Denpasar?’ she prompted.

He felt the breath race out of him as the past whistled through his mind like wind through trees.

‘Yeah, I’m the guy,’ he said, wandering slowly back to the footpath like he was sleepwalking.

As the woman smiled, Mac saw scar tissue crease like plastic up the side of her face, over the ear he had once guessed wasn’t there.

‘Bronwyn, remember? Bronnie Bruce?’ she said.

Nodding, he took her in. The gloves, the hat, the scarf, the long sleeves on a thirty-eight-degree day. His knees were rubbery as he realised that the woman he’d known for a terrible ten minutes of his life had once been beautiful.

‘How’s it going?’ he asked, and he was back in that ward, feeling the air shake with a person so broken with pain and sadness that she’d rather die.

‘Well, I’m living here now, married again. Life’s good,’ she said, smiling.

‘Great. So what happened to, umm…?’

‘Gavin? Yeah, he couldn’t handle it. I mean, my injuries and that.’

She shook her head slowly, like she was sorry for Gavin rather than herself. ‘He hit the drink something bad. I got my divorce in Royal Brisbane.’