Read The Family Men for Free Online Page B

then back to Sportsman’s Night, his girl, Baby, can’t you see?
    But Dean won’t shut up. “Are you saying you’re happy to share the spoils? Sloppy seconds is good enough for me. Whatever you can spare. Unless you’d prefer me to audition the candidates, break them in for you, which I’d be more than happy to do.”
    â€œJesus, Dean, sometimes you’re such a cunt.” It is the kind of thing he can say after nearly twenty years living in each other’s pockets. Twenty years watching each other’s backs.
    His friend is flattered. “The pub later?”
    â€œSure.”
    The surf is dead flat. They paddle out then sit there straddling their boards, quietly transfixed by the unbroken line of the horizon.
    Save a Mouse, Eat a Pussy – the bumper sticker on Dean’s ute. Half a mile from the beach, the steady idle of the waves gathers around them in the night, enclosing them in a low auditory fog, a barely discernible racket like the engine noise on an aeroplane at high altitude. Too much Jim Beam, or maybe not enough? Dean fumbles with the keys as Harry leans against the car door scoffing the rest of his chips, lining his stomach, aware of the automatic rhythm of his breathing, the pumping of the air in and out – he saw those machines in the hospital when his grandad was sick, ventilators like game consoles forcing the oxygen through his grandfather’s lungs – as the ground shifts beneath his feet, its solidity threatening to dissolve at any moment, swallowing him up in his own ambivalence.
    The band at the pub is just tuning up, the sound check wafting across the car park, along with the odd high-pitched giggle and the distant clack clack of high heels on the pavement.
    Dean digs out his tobacco tin from under the back seat and rolls a spliff. Tally-ho! He offers some to Harry, but the alcohol is enough, Harry’s mind already playing tricks with him, pairing snatches of conversation with unrelated images. Always leading back to the same topic. Tracks. Shacks. Along the road to Gundagai. Damn, what is the next line? Old-fashioned. Jack. Jack. Jack. Squinting in the dark, trying to remember how it all played out. Sportsman’s Night, the crowning social event of the season.
    He remembers talking with Jack, early in the evening, before it all went pear-shaped. Jack putting the wind up him about the dancers, telling him he could arrange a dance in private if Harry felt like it. “You know, ‘dance’,” he said, winking, then assuring him that it was all alright, that it was just a game, that they all knew the score. Harry’s eyes on the girl. Jack saying, “What are you looking at?” And then Jack seeing her too. Seeing her properly, as distinct from the others. Harry having singled her out for him.
    Yes. That’s it, that’s what Jack said. Under his breath: “Hello there, you pretty young thing.”
    Michael Jackson. They were always playing him at Club events.
    Harry doubted she was more than seventeen, maybe eighteen years old, her lipstick the same colour as Rosie’s, his would-be girlfriend, a blazing slash of recrimination smeared across her dry cracked mouth. Last time he and Rosie kissed he stopped and made her wipe it off, transferring the cosmetic stain to a bloodied tissue to be wadded up and thrown away. As though one act could erase another. One girl could erase another. His father’s, his brother’s, his. Or was every girl now the same girl, each lost soul his responsibility? And then he was back to Jack again: “Women: can’t live with them, can’t kill them.”
    He presses himself against the cool body of the car. He has that same sick feeling one gets riding a roller coaster as the carriage slows to a crawl before making its descent. He squeezes his fists tightly as they approach the summit and then the floor seems to fall away and his knees buckle and he thinks he