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things to. Like why your phone is off or what you’re doing with your life. Or the reason you don’t want to talk to your coach. And why you don’t care if it pisses him off. Laurie is a big boy. He’ll get over it.
    Dean’s house is at the top of the road. As Harry slugs his way up the rise he doesn’t immediately notice the song, his thoughts still tangled up with his confusion, the argument with his mother. He is supposed to be on holidays, isn’t he? What difference does it make how he spends his time? But as he turns into the street the music catches up to him again, the insistent up-tempo beat, thrumming, never far away now, persistently refusing to let him put the incident out of his mind.
    Loosen up my buttons, baby … like the singer is asking for a favour.
    The venue had been so close they could have walked there from the hotel, a large fancy establishment at the top end of the city with champagne in the minibar and thick white robes hanging on hooks inside the bathrooms. Harry and Matt had adjoining rooms, each with a king-size bed, a suite if they’d wanted it to be, separated by a locked connecting door.
    Harry tried it a couple of times to be sure, then got his kit off and lay down on the floor (a wheat-coloured short-pile, soft under his skin), too late realising he hadn’t drawn the curtains, the flicker of fluorescent-lit office windows visible even from his supine position. The ceiling was off-white with a texturised finish and copper fire sprinklers. He briefly entertained the fantasy of setting them off, of igniting a match beneath the smoke alarm and evacuating the building, envisioning the damp huddle of people in partial undress congregated on the footpath below, the disappointed actors of who knows how many trysts.
    His tuxedo was sheathed in a plastic suit bag hanging in the empty wardrobe. He felt like an imposter as he slipped it on, the sleeves a margin too short, the legs a fraction too long. “We can have it adjusted,” Michelle had suggested, she could put in a word and it would be ready that same afternoon, but with a bird in the hand, Diana demurred (she didn’t like to gamble on other people’s largesse), insisted no one would be able to tell.
    He scanned the refrigerator – Toblerone, pretzels, juice, wine, spirits – contemplated a shot of whiskey for courage, then slipped an unopened Jack Daniel’s miniature in his pocket.
    Time called on second thoughts.
    Matt banged on the wall when he was ready to go. Harry took one more look at himself, checked the position of his tie, then headed out. They met in the brightly carpeted hallway, game faces on, more acquaintances than relatives, their only obvious familial commonality the infamous pedigree of their shared last name.
    But you keep fronting …
    â€œShut up,” he says to the quiet road, briefly closing his eyes, curtains drawn against a dreary sun, meaning, leave me alone, go away , stop . Illogical, closing one’s eyes to hush an imaginary sound; wouldn’t covering one’s ears make more sense? Hear no evil. Or is the seeing part and parcel of the hearing, all dimensions of the same memory? A single moment that has stripped him of his capacity for calm, his world having become a catastrophe of noise in that fraction of space in between the before and after. Why, why, why, why, what? Everything a question now, everything conditional. Prior to that night he hadn’t spent too much time thinking about what he was thinking: he’d have an idea or not, he’d act on it or not. There was none of this friction, this battling within himself for a comfortable point of view – did he do the right thing, did he have any choice, what other options were available to him? – a commotion of ideas jockeying for prime position.
    He feels light-headed. Almost there, he can barely catch his breath.
    Half time in the changing rooms at the MCG, the