Read Online The Serpent's Sting by Robert Gott - Free Book Online

signed nothing.’
    â€˜You don’t seem to be looking for work.’
    â€˜How would you know?’
    There was no point discussing this matter further. I didn’t want to argue with Brian. We’d grown close during our tour of the north, and it was a great disappointment to me that he was willing to have any kind of relationship with the arseholes in Military Intelligence.
    â€˜All right, Brian. Let’s not talk about this anymore. What day would suit you to come to the theatre?’
    â€˜How about tomorrow arvo?’
    â€˜Goodo, and I’ll get you tickets for the Tivoli show afterwards. I know you’re inexplicably fond of the Tiv shows. There are three sisters in this one whose gifts are truly astonishing — but not in a way that anyone would celebrate or emulate.’
    Brian smiled and switched the radio back on. I decided to take a walk in Princes Park. One of the few wonderful things about growing up in the Power household was its proximity to Princes Park. It was just a few steps from our front door. I was so familiar with it that I’d felt comfortable and unafraid to wander it even at night from an early age. I was unaware until I was an adult, and had had to politely decline the invitation from a priapic young man, that one section of the park served as a meeting place for the dangerous desires of homosexual men — dangerous because the police would occasionally use entrapment to extract exorbitant hush money from terrified married men, pastors, and other upstanding members of the community, who enjoyed physical pleasures that couldn’t be satisfied by wives or girlfriends. An actor I know, who witnessed one such capture from behind a fig tree, said that it was curious that the two policemen who were using themselves as bait made no move to declare themselves until, as he rather biblically put it, they’d successfully spilled their seed upon the ground.
    As I crossed the road and headed into the park, I thought how one’s life turned upon the smallest and most unexpected of chances. If I hadn’t been with Joycey Dovey at the moment the assistant stage manager had come to her with a vomit-stained bodice, I wouldn’t now have a salary sufficient to allow me to escape my mother’s house. The untimely (for him — not for me) death of Jim Stokes was a stroke of luck, and an even grander stroke of luck was my meeting Geraldine Buchanan, who would return from Puckapunyal in a day or so. I was looking at the ground, so I didn’t immediately see the person who called out, ‘Hey, you!’
    I looked up to find Peter Gilbert’s son, John, leaning against a tree with his hands in his pockets. I walked towards him. He detached himself from the tree, and stood with his feet apart and with a surly expression on his face.
    â€˜If you’re here to apologise for your behaviour on Thursday,’ I said, ‘it’s not me you need to apologise to.’
    He gave a derisive little laugh.
    â€˜I haven’t come here to apologise to you or anybody else. But it is you I want to talk to.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜A couple of reasons. Your mother said something about you, and so I thought, even before I’d met you, that you might be useful.’
    â€˜Useful? You make me sound like a piece of plumbing.’
    â€˜I had second thoughts when the first thing I saw of you was your plumbing.’
    â€˜You have to expect that if you burst into a person’s dressing room.’
    He waved this away.
    â€˜Forget about that. I’m certainly trying to. I want you to tell me about my dead brother.’
    â€˜Your manner isn’t really very inviting, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
    â€˜I’m not here to charm you. I want to know about my bastard brother.’
    â€˜Ah, there’s the rub. Fulton’s birth offends your religious beliefs.’
    â€˜I don’t have any religious beliefs. I lost my