Heat and Light by Ellen van Neerven Read Free Book Online Page B

disappeared from the house, but Marie knew he’d grow up Kresinger; she knew how to do it right.

Crash
    Two cars raced up the mountain in the night. A white Subaru and a grey four wheel-drive. There was just the one road, a steep, winding one, with none of the safety rails or signs you see implemented now.
    The first car, the white one, was driven by Lena. Lena, Mrs Kresinger, was thinking of the last thing her husband said to her. He’d come home with the eggs she needed for the pastry, none of them broken, he’d put a hand on her waist and said, ‘Lena, I’m going to take you for a drive soon. Just the two of us.’
    She had smiled in surprise, that small moment spurring something. She had loved him for ten years and he still did that to her.
    Janet Jensen had loved him for the same amount of time. She’d never admit to him she noticed him first. Dark seductive eyelashes, long hair, and that body. She watched him from her office on George Street; bare-chested, he led protests against anti-march laws, holding signs and swearing through a microphone. At night, when she finished late she saw him, now with a shirt on, stumbling out of bars, always followed by a blonde white girl, both off their faces. She’d seen him swagger around the city and thought, that’s the kind of man I want, but I know that’s all wrong.
    She worked as a junior clerk at the law firm. She’d been highly ambitious from a young age, and raised in a well-off family, which gave her the opportunity to study with some of the groundbreakers of the time at the University of Queensland, and it wasn’t too long before she was a qualified lawyer.
    Charlie and two of his mates, Doug Hall and Ronnie Blake, were fighting charges of assault on police in a demonstration. She noticed the surprise in his face when she was introduced as their lawyer. His first words to her were a challenge: ‘What does a pretty rich white girl like you know about politics?’
    But she ended up being his match. Quiet, with a biting intelligence, she spoke slowly and with grace. He learnt to listen. She was never going to say anything that would land her in trouble, but he got her talking dirty.
    She was behind the wheel of the second car, the four wheel-drive . Her husband, Gary, said women were ill-suited to drive a car like that. Janet had found some recklessness in her forties.
    Both women had heard Charlie Kresinger’s bike had tumbled off the top. Not long after a passer-by had called Emergency, the news had travelled through the town. Call it Goorie grapevine or women’s intuition, but they both knew fast.
    Janet Jensen hadn’t been in town long. Her husband had bought a holiday home, on the bay, with a view of the ocean. They’d had the place for over a year but this was the first time Gary could get away. The kids were on school holidays. Janet was catching up on her reading, and catching up on Charlie, finding out all about him through the chatty locals.
    Janet hadn’t seen Charlie for years, but just the day before, they’d run into each other in the organics store. He had cut off his dreads. He still looked thirty, fit – the bronzed young warrior she remembered. While they stood together in the aisle, she recalled how she would always push his dreads to the side, an unconscious habit when they were talking. She put her hand up, but now she had to touch his cheek. Firm, large. A man’s cheek.
    He didn’t flinch. He looked at her with his dark eyes; he reminded her of an American Indian. When she looked at him she remembered him, remembered his dreads flicking in her face as they kissed on the waterfront, a decade ago. The dreads had a stretch of pure silver in them, like the edge of a wave. He kept them in a ponytail only when he surfed or rode, and wore them loose when he walked around town, relaxed and salt-silly from a duck-in, seawater on his lips.
    Charlie touched his face where Janet had touched him. She noticed a dark mole on the opposite cheek that