The Tattooed Man by Alex Palmer

thought it was the only school in Sydney. She paid the fees to get me in, which was pretty much all the money she had. Then my mother worked two jobs day and night for the next six years to keep me there. She was a pantry maid at Balmain Hospital in the morning and a cleaner in the city at night. She started work at 6 a.m. every day. She got up at four in the morning. It didn’t matter what else she had to do, she always left me a clean uniform, ironed to an inch of its life, waiting for me to wear.’
    ‘Oh my God,’ Grace said. ‘You had to succeed under that kind of pressure, didn’t you?’
    ‘I had no choice.’
    She lay there without speaking.
    ‘Have you put me together?’ he asked.
    ‘Maybe a little,’ she said, her voice drifting in the soft light. ‘It’s time to sleep on it.’
    She curled up and slipped away. He turned out the light and lay awake a little longer. In the dead hours of the night, he woke. Some dream was troubling him, some half-remembered image that faded from his mind as soon as he opened his eyes. Nothing. Nada. His first whispered thought while he stared into the shadows. Instinctively, he touched Grace to see if she was still there or whether he had washed up on some blank shore in the land of the dead. He felt her ribcage rising and falling with her breathing, imagined he could hear the sound of her heart. He slept again.

5
    I n the partial darkness of his kitchen, Harold Morrissey picked up his telephone and dialled a number he rarely called unless he had to. While he listened to it ring, he glanced out of the window. Dawn was beginning to break along the low undulating skyline, a clean transparency edging against a darker, fading blue. Once more it would be a clear, fine day. Finally his call was answered.
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Stewie. It’s Harry. You’re still alive.’
    ‘Of course I’m fucking alive. What the hell is this? Don’t you know what time it is?’
    ‘I just heard on the radio there’s been a shooting up at Pittwater. Four people dead. They didn’t say who they all were, just that one of them was Natalie Edwards. I wondered if maybe one of the others was you. Wasn’t she the woman who was here with you and that other bloke last week?’
    ‘Let me tell you something, Harry. If anyone asks, none of us were there including Nattie. If you tell anyone we were, I’ll say you’re fucking hallucinating. I’ll take you to the law. Then you’ll lose everything you’ve got. So keep your mouth shut.’ Stuart put the phone down.
    Harold hung up, thinking that he should have expected as much. In its own way, the early morning call had summed up the relationship of the two brothers to perfection.
    Harold left his farmhouse to start the day’s work, stepping into a still faintly cool air. An oleander bush bloomed a hot summer pink near the back door, while the house fence was covered with gnarled wisteria and thick-trunked grape vines planted by his grandmother eighty years ago. These days, the vines were almost leafless, some of them already dead. Like the land around him, they had been stripped bare by the drought and the heat. The only green came from a stand of old well-grown pepper trees stretching along the south-western side of the rambling wooden farmhouse, their bright foliage almost shocking in the dryness. On the north-eastern side, the sole shade was given by a self-sown sugar gum growing too close to the veranda, its white trunk arching over the bull-nosed roof.
    In the pale light, Harold walked out the gate into the main yard, heading towards the kennel where his dog, Rosie, had spent the night chained up. Her enclosure was sheltered by an old moonah bush that was still holding out in the drought. Some twelve years ago his father had walked this same distance, unexpectedly falling into infinity when his heart had stopped mid-step. Since then Harold had supposedly shared the management of their property, Yaralla, with his older brother, Stuart. Almost as