Coda by Thea Astley Read Free Book Online

compliance.’
    She had said, ‘I will truly vomit if I don’t get my jaws round a hunk of steak, medium rare.’
    Shamrock had married before the necessity to work had claimed her, ironically enough, another lawyer who had given up his practice to enter parliament and whom Kathleen immediately dubbed the minister for transports.
    â€˜This makes me wonder about the ultimate charity of fate,’ Kathleen whispered to Brain as they stood with fixed smiles in Cathedral gloom waiting for Shamrock to be legally joined to her ambitious backbencher. Despite the many junctions before the religious ceremony, Shamrock flaunted herself in glaring white, tossed bouquets to prismatic bridesmaids, caught Brain’s mocking eye and fast-bowled him with a posy. Blush. Giggle. At the city hotel reception, in a spate of clichéd well wishes and lewd telegrams, she kissed her mother sparingly on the cheek and then vanished on a Barrier Reef honeymoon without a word of thanks.
    â€˜For what?’ she might have asked if prodded. ‘For this pagan mockery?’ Now Kathleen merely writhed uneasily, trapped in a clawing landscape.
    She was paying off the loan for the wedding for the next three years. That girl, she told herself, can’t even spell matrimony without an ‘e’.

‘Can’t seem to get my act right, Mum,’ Brain moaned. ‘What the hell goes wrong?’
    â€˜Don’t look at me!’ his mother said.
    After university he had been offered the management of a motel in the far north by a friend of a friend. The motel closed a year later. He became a working partner on a prawn boat and was deckhand, odd-jobber and maintenance johnny. He had to keep assuring himself he was expanding his abilities, stretching his limits. One burning, slashing day in the Gulf at the height of the season, the refrigeration plant failed. Nothing he did could save the catch, not even red-eyed panic. The stench around the body. The business lost over fiftythousand dollars on that one disastrous trip.
    He moved to Townsville where, brooding in the choking air of a Belgian Gardens flat during a strike by sanitary workers, he mentally perfected the notion of solidifying dunny contents in a kind of Araldite so that the entire pan appeared as some exotic dish set in aspic. He found no backers. Peughh! Urk! Nutter!
    People were beginning to laugh at each new proposal. He had lost nearly all his small savings.
    The minidepression.
    The boom.
    Nascent charm saved him.
    Bosie was an accident, a fleshing of the fantasies of sweat-filled solitary nights, a come-by-chance at a luncheon in a very expensive seafood restaurant in Brisbane where he had returned to complain to Kathleen and lick his financial wounds. The restaurant was the latest trendy place to be seen. Diners were neither put off nor rendered vomitous by the window’s street decoration of a monster two-foot carp floating listlessly in a tank six inches longer than its body and suppurating slowly in its own juices, despite the languid efforts of a pump and a few strings of watergrass.
    From the table behind. Bosie managed to spray her future husband with a laughter-disgorgedmouthful of peppery riesling. Apologies, little wipings, flutterings. Vowels so rounded they almost, but only almost, came out flat. It was too tedious, Brain—for the name started not long after that, snapped up by mother with crude guffaws—decided in later years. And horribly inevitable.
My God!
he often murmured to himself.
Crook wine at midday! We both had it coming
.
    She was the daughter of a speculator who had made a killing selling swamplands for housing estates near the Gold Coast and who had conveniently died, leaving everything to his doted-upon child. For a time his financial agonies were eased. But he had reckoned without his wife’s spending abilities. Bosie (after two years he had forgotten her birth name) had private-school assumptions as well as