Read Online The Family Men by Catherine Harris - Free Book Online

(his culpability in a young woman’s death, the inescapable knowledge that there was always something that could have been done, if only he’d had his wits about him, hadn’t drunk so much, hadn’t scored so much; and that is just the start of it). “I’m in the business of profiles, not hatchet jobs,” the reporter insists, even if the interview subject is the only person to believe it – but you have to have faith, don’t you? That having always been his problem, not lacking the wisdom to know the difference, but the serenity to name the issue, to see things as they are.
    He keeps saying the article’s just meant to be a bit of background, a survey of his career, fluff; the kind of thing you’d read in a doctor’s waiting room or on the bus, two-thirds through and then forgotten. But as the day for the interview approaches, Alan’s back starts playing up again, aching at night, the bulging discs pressing against his sciatic nerve, shooting pain through his buttocks and thighs, so much so that at times he says he feels his knees might give out beneath him, that they might buckle and he’ll crumple to the floor.
    Harry listens to his father muttering to himself, rummaging in the kitchen cupboards for his prescription, barely a wall separating them – there but for the grace of God, or is that an insufficient distance? – preparing Weeties at 4 am (you can’t take those drugs on an empty stomach), the distempered clang of his spoon on the side of his bowl as he absently shovels in cereal while fiddling with his current jigsaw puzzle. Dawn . A cityscape. Or, if he finishes that, he might start on his new one. Ducks at Lakeside .
    Come morning, his dishes line the sink, errant wheat flakes bloated in the milky swill. The cereal gives off a slightly musty smell, the odour reminding Harry of his mother’s camphor chest. Moth balls. The faintly necrotic scent of naphthalene.
    *
    The girl pulled out her cosmetic bag and touched up her make-up, doing her best to disguise fifteen – foundation, lipstick, mascara, blush – the dingy suburbs trailing away faster and faster as the train gathered speed. Not that she needed to worry. Most of the dancers were about her age when they got started, Greta had assured her the first time they seriously talked about it, standing in the Big W car park, the girl gripping Greta’s contact details (a telephone number scrawled beside Upside Entertainment ). It was a standard thing. The blokes liked them young (she herself was barely fifteen when she performed at her first event), no surprise there, and it was harmless really, a bit of fun, and good experience (“You’ll easily get other work once you’ve got this job under your belt,” she’d said), the boss looking the other way when it came to convincing IDs, though everyone was expected to play the game (you might well have been a teenager when you walked through the door but for taxation purposes you had to say you were eighteen).
    â€œYou’d be perfect,” Greta reiterated, uncommonly glamorous amongst the suburban shoppers in her white jeans, oversized tortoise-shell sunglasses, pumps, lacquered bouffant hair. “I can tell. I’ve got a nose for these things.”
    The girl admitted she had some experience. The Eisteddfod, years seven and eight. She loved dancing. And two hundred dollars for two hours’ work, that was a lot of money. You couldn’t make that much at Big W, not even on public holidays. She was meant to be saving for a car; Mr Pyke from next door had promised to sell her his old Volkswagen Beetle if she could come up with three thousand dollars by Christmas (a bargain, it had only driven forty thousand kilometres), but at this rate she’d be lucky to have the money by the time school finished. With this dancing work though she’d easily be able to afford it. She might even be able to save enough for