Bangalore. Roger Crook

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СКАЧАТЬ Alice made up the beds Alice gave her the history.

      “Angus’ grandfather added this wing. It was built so the next generation, in this case Angus’ father and family, could get away from the grandparents. So Angus and Michelle used it when they got married and I think Michelle hated it. She hated not having the run and control of the whole house. She had to wait her turn to be the lady of the manor; she never made it though.” She looked at Pat across the double bed as they folded in the sheets and with a perfectly straight face added, “So I’m sure she will be comfortable in here.”

      As they left the South Wing, Alice said, “Pat will you please remind Angus to put some white wine to cool?”

      Chapter 3.

       Michelle, Roddy and Rachael.

      As Pat walked down the hallway to find Angus she looked at her watch. It was a pilot’s watch, big enough to read at a glance with numerous functions that would help with dead reckoning navigation if instruments failed. Ewen had bought it for her and she thought about him somewhere in the cold mountains of Afghanistan, maybe injured, maybe dying, maybe under fire, running, fighting his way to safety with his mates.

      She thought about her contact with SAS Troopers. Seeing them return after weeks in the hills of Afghanistan, where they had been self-sufficient, carrying all their needs on their backs. She remembered the tiredness, the exhaustion in their eyes, the smell of fighting men who hadn’t showered, maybe hadn’t washed in all the time they had been away. But most of all she remembered the cautiousness, the wariness in their behaviour, always checking, always looking out for each other. When they were being evacuated there was no scrambling to get away, each man watched the others’ backs until the last one got in the helicopter; even then one of his mates watched his back from the door. Always searching the landscape, always watching. She knew that if Ewen was going to survive, it would be because of those men.

      Pat found Angus on the veranda, in the chair he had been in before breakfast. He was rolling a cigarette. As he licked the paper he motioned towards his tobacco and papers on the table, offering them to her.

      As she picked up the pouch and papers, she said, “Haven’t smoked for six months. Ewen got me off them. Now I think I need one. I can always stop again.”

      “Don’t let me lead you astray.”

      “You’re not. I was dying for a smoke yesterday when I was driving out here, but I didn’t have any.” As she was speaking she was, quickly and with a definite dexterity that could only have been acquired with practice, taking a filter from the pouch, licking the paper and rolling a cigarette. Angus held out his lighter to her.

      “I’m the same, with smoking that is. I just find it so hard to give up. All those holier than thou people, even governments, don’t seem to understand. They spend so much money on anti-smoking campaigns, and Drink Safe, and Work Safe and Drive Safe or whatever it’s called, and here we are in the new millennium and there are still thousands of kids living on the street, homeless. Old people needing blankets every winter. They tell me the cost of electricity is going through the roof. Taxes on everything. Now a carbon tax, which seems to have everyone confused, including me.

      “More people paying twice for education and don’t even mention the Aboriginal people. There was a time when we had a school for all of the kids on Bangalore, and they all learned to read and write at the very least. Now many of the black kids in the desert communities are illiterate, and the stories are coming out of some of the remote communities about child abuse and petrol sniffing causing permanent brain damage, I sometimes wonder what’s happened to all the money over the last forty years. It’s so very sad…”

      “Is that why you like it up here?”

      “What, away from the maelstrom of what is called modern life, the new millennium? Probably. It’s getting more and more difficult to run this place, but up here we like to think we have kept some vestige of real values, some might say old values. Maybe they have no place in the world anymore. Now it’s a dog against dog world. It’s a litigious world. Everybody wants to blame someone else for every stumble they make in life. So yes, to answer your question, I like to be away from all of that.

      “I have a small circle of wonderful friends who I know are not on the make, as far as our friendship is concerned. I have a larger circle of friends, many introduced to me by my ex-wife, most of whom work in the big end of town, who I would not trust an inch and certainly not with my secrets or my money.” Angus looked at her. “I’m sorry; didn’t mean to sermonise, although some of my family think I am a bit monastic living out here.” Then he grinned. “They don’t know what they’re missing.”

      She looked at him as she stubbed her cigarette in the ashtray on the table. “Can’t say I blame you. You and my dad will get along fine. He hates lawyers and accountants.”

      “What does he do?”

      “He’s a mining engineer. Got re-trenched two years ago after twenty years of loyalty to one company. The firm he worked for was taken over by an American company. Dad was the Chief Engineer. He was integral to the takeover; it was his knowledge that secured the deal with the American investors. After assuring him there would be no changes they called him in one morning and put his retrenchment deal on the table, told him take it or fight, but ‘clean out your desk and be gone by lunchtime’. They had a security man stand by his desk. He had to catch a taxi home. They humiliated him and it hurt him so deeply.

      “Dad fought them until he had spent all his savings and re-mortgaged the house. When all that money was gone, then he gave up. He’d spent his entire package and his savings on legal fees and then his lawyer told him that they were still at least two years away from the Supreme Court and that he had better have eighty thousand dollars available when the time came. So he gave up. His lawyer also told him that they had done everything they could and the decision was up to the Court, and whether the Judge had shit on his liver and whether he liked the look of Dad when the case started. That really depressed him. Now he hates lawyers and the legal system.”

      “He and I do have something in common then. The whole legal system seems to be out of control. Justice it seems to me is now the province of the rich in this land. Who is right and who is wrong doesn’t seem to matter. Whoever has the most money to pay the best lawyers wins. What average workingman or woman can afford lawyers at anything from three hundred to five hundred dollars an hour? Lawyers are leaches. What’s your father doing now?”

      “He formed a small engineering consultancy firm with a friend. With the boom in mining they are now in great demand. He’s changed though.”

      “How?”

      “He split up with my mother after thirty-two years. I don’t think it was because of the lawsuit. I think they’d been unhappy for years, but the lawsuit and the cost wouldn’t have helped. She’d always worked as a theatre nurse; she now works in Royal Perth. Dad knew nothing but work – so they drifted apart. Then Mum and a skin specialist found each other and she moved out to live with him down by the river. The settlement went through very quickly. Her lawyers started on Dad when he was at his most vulnerable, so he gave her everything that was left. Basically he got screwed when he was most exposed. I lent him some money when times got really bad and that embarrassed him, I think. The whole thing made him very bitter against my mother.”

      With a knowing look, Angus replied, “I’m not surprised he’s bitter. I sometimes wonder about the law, justice and lawyers, it’s – they – are almost an oxymoron.”

      “He paid all the legal costs out of what was СКАЧАТЬ