St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(3)
When the paratrooper came home on leave after Arnhem the young’un had been sleeping in his bed. They shared the small loft bedroom for a week and the farmer often heard them talking well into the night. This was surprising, since the boy had spoken barely a dozen words since the day he arrived on the train from London.
The soldier’s leave had been brief and too soon over. The war in Europe was coming to a close and the farmer hoped his son would be safe and manage to stay alive until the war was over. But even though Hitler was almost finished now, the Japs had shown no readiness to surrender, so soldier men would still be needed for the killing business in India and Burma.
The farmer reset the snare and tied the gutted rabbit by its ears to the pair already on his shoulder. He saw some flecks of gore on the young’un’s face and leaned down to brush them off with his rough farmer’s hand.
The boy didn’t react. Behind the blank face he was thinking, wondering. The hot, wet guts of the rabbit had stung his cheek, which he understood, but there was something else, something confusing. He was wearing rough corduroy trousers, a singlet, a ragged woollen jumper, and on top of that a too-big, hand-me-down tweed jacket the farmer’s wife had pulled from a cupboard. He was bundled up against the late winter chill, trousers tied tightly about his waist with a length of hemp in place of a belt. How, he was wondering, had it happened? Had the guts of the rabbit managed to find their way inside the barrier of his clothing, past the rope and fabric bunched around his waist, dribbling somehow down his body and finally stopping between his legs? That must have been it, he decided, that must have been how it had happened.
He had watched the farmer slip the knife blade down into the still-twitching belly of the rabbit and then upwards, casually flicking the entrails away. The sensation of the warm offal splashing on his cheek had been matched by an instantaneous and unexpected burning between his legs. His little jigger had suddenly felt strange, different, like it was on fire, like it was in flames. But the burning sensation, though odd, wasn’t all that uncomfortable. It wasn’t uncomfortable at all in fact. There was not much that the boy had ever liked in his young life but now he decided he liked that strange feeling of heat at the base of his belly, right between his spindly legs. He liked it very, very much.
ONE
Charlie Berlin woke early. He hadn’t slept well, which was how it seemed to be these days. Had he ever slept well? he wondered. Rebecca was beside him and he watched her. She slept well and he envied her that. Her breathing was gentle and regular with an odd, occasional snuffling noise followed sometimes by a slight whimper that always made him smile. The alarm clock said he had another hour but he was awake now and might as well be up.
He moved slowly, trying not to disturb Rebecca. She could be wide-awake instantly, even from the deepest sleep, he had seen it. If one of the children called out from a bedroom a dozen feet away she was there in seconds, to calm and comfort, to make everything better – and then she would be back in bed beside him and fast asleep just as quickly. She could calm and comfort him too but there were some things in Charlie Berlin’s life that no one could ever make better.
He did his exercises, push-ups, sit-ups and squats, then shaved and showered. As always, he avoided looking directly into his own eyes in the mirror while shaving, concentrating on the path of the Gillette safety razor gliding though the snowy-white shaving soap. Overall, though, he decided he looked okay, broken nose and all. Despite a slightly thickening waistline and hair tending towards grey he was still pretty fit for a man in his forties, thanks to the daily exercise regimen retained from his amateur boxing days and his time in the air force. They reckoned a bloke would eventually start to look like his old man but Berlin had very few memories of his own father to go by. In any case his father had never made old bones.
Before he’d found Rebecca, Charlie Berlin was a loner, though not by choice. His parents drowned in a boating mishap when he was six, leaving him and older brother Billy to be raised by their grandparents. Billy Berlin was a wild boy, a larrikin, and Charlie’s hero. He enlisted in ‘39 and disappeared without trace from a Singapore hospital after the city fell to the Japanese. Berlin joined the air force soon after, though as a young policeman he’d been under no obligation to serve. When he arrived home from Europe in 1945 his grandparents were both long dead and his fiancée had left him for a Yank soldier. In some ways he was glad that they weren’t there to see what he had become, what the war had made him. It was Rebecca who had saved him, who had brought him back from the dark places.
After putting on a clean white shirt, a neatly knotted tie and his work suit, he wandered out to the front gate to collect the milk and morning papers. As always, his shoes had been carefully polished the night before and he avoided the damp grass bordering the concrete driveway of the three-bedroom weatherboard house he had bought with a war service loan. Droplets of dew were beading on the roofs and bonnets of the two cars in the driveway, a small pale blue Datsun station wagon and Rebecca’s green and even smaller Mini Cooper.
Back inside the house Berlin put both foil-capped milk bottles in the fridge next to a three quarters-full bottle from the day before. He filled the kettle and put it on the gas burner. Two slices of yesterday’s bread went into the toaster. While he waited he checked the front pages of both The Age and The Sun for any news of far-off battles. For now it seemed the world was quiet, which made him happy. In local news the judicial inquiry into police corruption under Justice Llewellyn Luscombe was into its third month. The inquiry would decide if there were grounds for a royal commission into police corruption. Berlin, like any decent copper, could tell them a royal commission was needed and long overdue but also that it would never ever happen. Too many powerful people had too much to hide. He had to squint to read the tiny type of the weather forecast. It said to expect a nice day.