Where the Dead Men Go by Liam McIlvanney

athletes’ village?’
    ‘The velo drome, Gerry.’
    ‘Aah, brilliant.’ I hugged her. ‘Brilliant. Well done.’ I paused. ‘What about his Lordship?’
    She looked at her watch. ‘Sitter’s due in forty minutes. Get your arse in that shower.’
    *
    Ferrante’s was busy with the pre-theatre crowd but we landed a nice two-seater by the aquarium. We ordered Glendronach Parliaments to celebrate Mari’s news, and a bottle of Central Otago pinot to make her feel at home.
    Though we always spoke about making time for ourselves we rarely did it. I’d forgotten how good it could be just to talk and drink and eat, enjoy the music of a conversation, be Mari and Gerry, not Mum and Dad. Mari was stoked about the bid, kept coming back to it. It wouldn’t be officially announced till the New Year but they’d been tipped the wink that their bid was the winner. I was enjoying her elation, the wine, the nearness of her bare arms across the table, until halfway through the entrees I noticed Mari staring at something over my shoulder. She did it three or four times over the next two minutes. When she did it again I knocked my napkin to the floor and bent to fetch it. Three tables away. Big, good-looking guy in a pink polo shirt, the Kappa logo on his chest, the two naked women sitting back to back.
    I tried to focus on Mari’s words but the guy’s big square grinning face kept swimming up before me. When she looked at him again I stopped eating, set my knife and fork down on the plate.
    ‘Jesus.’ I finished chewing. ‘What the fuck, Mari – do you know this guy?’ I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. ‘Do you want me to get you an introduction?’
    She was still watching him, though her head responded to the tether of my voice and then her eyes followed, focused on me, puzzled at my angry tone: ‘What? Yeah, I do know him. I was trying to work out where I’d seen him. It was with Bryan, he came to see Bryan last week.’ Bryan Hamill was Mari’s boss at the firm. She was smiling. ‘Oh, that’s sweet, Gerry. Were you jealous? A pink polo shirt? Really? The Magnum moustache? You’re worse than my old man.’
    Mari’s father had once walked out of an amateur production of Death of a Salesman when he thought Mari’s mother was flirting with Willy Loman.
    ‘Listen, remind me to phone home when I get back,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to them. Mum and Dad.’ She looked up quickly. ‘It’s six years since Josh. Since – you know.’
    Mari had an older brother, deceased. He got killed in Oz, some shitty outback town, murdered, a mugging gone wrong.
     ‘I never told you about him,’ she said. ‘Not properly.’
    I knew Josh from the blurry snap of a blond, sardonic beach-bum in a wife-beater and yellow board shorts that occupied our living-room bookcase, and from the pious annual tribute that Mari’s mum paid him in the photocopied round-up of Somerville family news that accompanied our Christmas card.
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘You didn’t.’
    She drained the dregs of her whisky, took a slug of pinot, leaned forward and started to talk about him. There were five years between them. Josh had been more like a cooler, younger father than a brother. He bought her little presents, taught her how to surf, throw a rugby ball. Taught her how to fight. Josh had been her best friend right through her childhood, walking her to school, vetting boyfriends – terrorising them, it sounded like – and generally looking out for Mari, in so far as a GP’s daughter in a high-decile harbourside Auckland suburb needs looking out for. Then he left home. Bright but lazy, he finished school at sixteen, worked in a Huntly coalmine, played league on the weekends. He liked the life but the wages were shit and pretty soon he followed his mates across the Tasman, the big Kalgoorlie gold mine out in Western Oz. Big money. Coming home at Christmas with presents for everyone, laptops, digital cameras.
    Then one Boxing Day morning Mari saw Josh