Chapter 16

chapter sixteen

Last September

Troy Delaney watched the streets of his childhood glide by from the passenger seat of Logan’s car: lush lawns, sharp-edged hedges, ivy-covered brick walls. A postman on a motorbike slid a single letter into an ornate green letterbox, a magpie swooped violently towards a cyclist’s helmeted head, a dog-walker trotted after three little designer dogs, a young mother pushed a double stroller. There was nothing wrong with any of it. There was nothing to complain about (except for the magpie, he hated magpies). It was all perfectly nice. It was just that the unrelenting niceness made him feel like he was being lovingly suffocated with a duvet.

He closed his eyes and tried to recall the cacophony of noise and canyon-like streets of New York, where he’d been twenty-four hours earlier, but it was like Sydney suburbia cancelled out New York’s existence. Now there could be nothing else but this: this soft, bland reality, his older brother driving, a tiny, smug grin on his unshaven face, because Logan knew Troy didn’t want to be here.

‘Love the scarf, mate,’ he’d said, predictably, when he saw Troy, who’d worn it just to annoy him. ‘You look really intimidating.’

‘Pure cashmere,’ Troy had answered.

‘This is really very kind of you guys,’ said a low female voice from the back seat.

‘It’s not a problem.’ Troy turned and smiled at the girl sitting composedly behind them in his brother’s shitbox of a car.

Savannah. His parents’ bizarre little charity project. She sat upright, her hair pulled back in a schoolgirl ponytail to reveal slightly protruding, tiny ears, like an elf’s. Her pale face was make-up free. She had the kind of thin bony body and hard face that speaks of addiction and the streets. There was a nearly healed cut over one eye with faint purplish bruising, and Troy tried to feel the sympathy she obviously deserved, but his heart was as hard and suspicious as an ex-girlfriend’s.

Troy’s parents had no idea that being abused didn’t automatically make you good. Savannah could be a petty thief, a psychopath, or just an opportunist who had seen their big house and soft elderly innocent faces, and thought: Money.

He and Logan were ‘the muscle’ in case the boyfriend showed up. Troy covertly checked out his older brother, who didn’t have a gym membership but still looked gallingly buff, although he’d stacked it on around the belly. He wondered what Logan could bench-press if he could ever be convinced to bench-press.

How would they handle it if this guy did make an appearance? When Troy was in his ‘angry young man’ stage he would have relished the opportunity to hit someone with justice on his side, to defend a wronged woman, to blow off all that angry energy, but he no longer walked around with his teeth clenched as tight as his fists, looking for someone to blame. That stupid angry kid no longer existed. Now the thought of being involved in a physical altercation seemed grotesque.

He gripped his fist, watching his knuckles. Did he still know how to hit someone? What if everything went pear-shaped and he got charged with assault? He imagined a twenty-year-old cop handcuffing him and leading him away, hand firm on the back of his neck. To lose control of his life would be unbearable.

If he got arrested he’d no longer be able to travel back and forth between Sydney and New York. He knew how lucky he was that he didn’t have a youth criminal record to cause difficulties at the borders, which he sailed through with such ease and regularity. It was all thanks to his mother that he’d been let off with a caution when he’d got caught with cannabis during his ‘entrepreneurial days’. She’d arrived like the cavalry, following a phone call from Troy’s girlfriend at the time, and launched a full-on Joy Delaney charm offensive that had taken down the older of the two police officers.

Troy had just ten minutes earlier made a profitable sale to the school captain of an ‘elite’ school, which meant he had a lot of cash on him but only a small amount of drugs: small enough that he could argue it was for personal use. Troy could tell the younger officer badly wanted to charge him, that he represented something that guy couldn’t stand. ‘Your luck won’t last forever, mate,’ he’d said to Troy, hatred in his eyes.

‘Don’t talk to me, don’t even look at me,’ his mother had said, rippling with fury, on the drive home.

His mother was also the one who’d somehow magically convinced Harry Haddad’s father not to call the police when Troy punched the kid in the face for cheating.

‘If I’d been there I would have called the police on you myself,’ Troy’s dad had said.

‘Your dad would never have done that,’ Joy had told him in private. ‘He’s just upset.’

But his dad had said those words and never taken them back.

Apparently Harry Haddad was going to release an autobiography next year. Troy wondered if he’d include the story of how his first coach’s son jumped the net and nearly broke his nose for cheating. Presumably not. Didn’t fit with his wholesome brand. Troy wouldn’t be reading the fucker’s book anyway. He hated Harry for dumping his father even more than he hated him for cheating.

Troy shifted in his seat, kicked at an old Subway wrapper caught on the tip of his shoe from the floor of Logan’s car, and for no reason at all found himself considering what had happened in New York, even though he had not given his brain permission to consider it – in fact he had expressly forbidden himself to think of it again for another twenty-four hours.

His ex-wife had met him for a drink and presented him with an ethical dilemma so excruciating he thought it might have given him an instant stomach ulcer. Did people still get stomach ulcers? Nobody seemed to talk about them anymore. The word ‘ulcerate’seemed appropriate for the sensation he experienced at that moment: like a tiny cyst had burst and flooded his stomach with corrosive acid.

‘This is not about evening the score,’ Claire had said with a tremulous smile, after she’d taken a sip of an overpriced, over-accessorised cocktail. She’d flown in from Austin just to talk to him.

Logan turned onto the highway and stopped at the first traffic light. A dead bat hung from the powerline. Whenever Troy left his parents’ place he got a red light here, and thought, I always get a red light here, and then he looked up and thought, Isn’t that dead bat always there? He got trapped in a permanent loop of pointless thoughts.

Further down the road a bus had stopped and a handful of people disembarked. Troy saw an ancient old lady totter towards the bus stop, face desperate, arm raised. She reminded him of his long-dead grandmother, who’d drunk too much and was spiteful to his mother, but Troy had adored her. She had a scar from when her husband, the grandfather Troy had never met, threw her across the room. She wore the scar with pride, like a tattoo she’d chosen for herself. ‘I threw that bastard out of my house,’ she told her grandchildren. ‘I said, “I never want to see your face again.” And I never did.’

The last passenger emerged from the bus. The old lady picked up the pace.

Troy reached across Logan and banged his fist hard on the horn to get the driver’s attention. Too late. The doors slammed shut. The bus took off. For fuck’s sake.

Logan looked at him sideways. ‘She’ll get the next one.’

Troy kicked again at the Subway wrapper. ‘Eeuuuuw. Christ almighty. It’s stuck on my shoe. Oh God, that yellow fake cheese will stain.’

‘Looks like you’re due for some new shoes anyway,’ said Logan.

‘They’re brand new Armanisuede loafers!’ protested Troy.

Logan smirked.

Troy reached down and grabbed the Subway wrapper, scrunched it into a ball and shoved it in the side pocket of the car door, which was filled with coins, a pair of service station sunglasses missing a lens, and a CD without a cover. ‘When did you last clean your car? Sometime back in the nineties?’

‘Troy would rather not be seen in my car.’ Logan looked at Savannah in the rear-vision mirror. Wait, did he just wink at her? He wouldn’t be flirting, because he was in a long-term relationship with Indira. Indira was way out of Logan’s league, as far as Troy was concerned. It was a mystery what these women saw in him.

The only skill Logan had was recognising the good ones. Sometimes, Logan saw something in a woman that Troy didn’t see straight away. When they were in their late teens they’d both dated girls called Tracey, and Troy developed a secret, shameful crush on Logan’s Tracey. She was the superior Tracey! The worst part was, Troy had met Logan’s Tracey first, so he could have made a move, but he didn’t see her appeal until Logan saw it.

‘You’ve got a fancy car, Troy,’ said Savannah. ‘What type is it?’

They’d taken Logan’s car because he had a bigger boot for Savannah’s stuff. Troy was happy not to park his car outside Savannah’s flat, which he assumed was in some crummy low-rent area where it would get keyed within five minutes.

‘It’s a McLaren 600LT.’ Troy tried to say it in a neutral tone and ignored Logan’s inevitable faux awed whistle.

‘How much does a car like that cost?’ asked Savannah. ‘Is that rude to ask?’

‘Are you kidding?’ said Logan. ‘He’s always looking for an excuse to bring his net worth into the conversation.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Troy, because as a matter of fact the very last thing he wanted discussed in front of this potential con artist was his net worth.

‘What do you do, Savannah?’ He turned around to look at her again. ‘For a living? Is that rude to ask?’

Savannah turned her head and spoke to the car window. ‘Bit of this, bit of that.’ Her nose piercing glinted. ‘Mostly retail. Hospitality.’

So she’d worked as a check-out chick and a waitress.

She turned away from the window and looked at him deliberately, her chin lifted. ‘We’d only just moved here to Sydney, so I hadn’t lined up any work yet. Obviously, I will, once this is . . .’ She gestured at her forehead. ‘I’m not intending to sponge off your parents forever, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Troy, embarrassed and wrong-footed, and irritated that he’d been made to feel that way. He turned back around to face the front and shifted in his seat as he tried to straighten his legs. He thought of the lavish leg room on his Emirates flight from JFK, the stunning flight attendant leaning down to refill his wineglass, bringing with her a cloud of seductive perfume (Baccarat Rouge 540: he knew he had it right, but had checked to be sure), and now here he was, in a car that smelled of bacon.

He shifted position in his seat. Shifted again. He sensed Logan noticing and made a decision not to move for the next minute. He counted it in his head. One elephant, two elephant, three elephant. He made it to thirty seconds and then he had to move. He was eleven years old, the Delaney kid incapable of sitting still.

‘SIT STILL, TROY DELANEY!’ his teachers used to roar, and sometimes, if he liked the teacher, he would try to sit still, he would try so hard, truly, but his body just moved of its own accord, as if he were a puppet with a malicious master tugging strings to jerk his limbs.

He gave up trying and let his legs jiggle and his fingers drum against his thighs.

‘And what do you do, Troy?’ said Savannah. ‘For a living?’

‘I’m a trader,’ said Troy.

‘What do you trade?’ she asked.

He knew she’d lose interest in a moment. Everyone did. ‘Anything that moves.’

‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Savannah humbly.

‘Nobody does,’ said Logan.

Troy didn’t look at him. ‘It means anything with volatility: interest rates, equities, currencies, commodities – that’s my bread and butter.’

‘You’re a risk-taker, then,’ said Savannah, and he looked at her in the rear-vision mirror again and saw that she had her head bowed and was examining her fingernails.

‘A calculated risk-taker,’ said Troy. His family thought he played blackjack all day long.

Logan said something under his breath.

‘What?’ Troy looked at him.

Logan lifted a shoulder. ‘Didn’t say anything.’

How could he have that smug grin while driving a car filled with Subway wrappers?

‘Do you have a . . . partner?’ asked Savannah.

‘He’s straight,’ said Logan. ‘Just likes to act camp.’

‘Do you?’ said Savannah to Troy. She’d lifted her head, interested. ‘Like to act camp?’

‘Apparently so,’ said Troy.

He didn’t care when people thought he was gay. He kind of liked it. Kept everyone on their toes. He didn’t do it on purpose. Or maybe he did. To differentiate himself from Logan, who was a ‘man’s man’. Logan thought there was only one way to be a man: their father’s way.

Silence filled the car as they drove down the highway, every traffic light inevitably turning red as they approached, causing Troy to just about lose his mind. Logan hummed under his breath, elbow halfway out the car window, head back against the headrest, as if he were a layabout teenager off to the beach with his friends. He probably still went to the beach with his friends. They probably had barbeques and played beach cricket. Logan was still in touch with his entire circle of high school friends, which made Troy feel both contemptuous – how parochial, how very Sydney – and envious.

Troy liked the idea of old friends, just not the reality. When old friends tried to get in touch with him, he always shuddered. It was like they were trying to take something away from him, to peel off an outer layer and show everyone the uncouth, unsophisticated kid he used to be. He was always kind of surprised old friends still existed.

Logan continued to whistle. The guy needed a haircut, a shave, probably a shower, for fuck’s sake.

It was the same toneless, two-note tune Logan used to hum on long car journeys to tournaments when they were kids, the tune that would malevolently worm its way into Troy’s consciousness until he had no choice but to resort to violence, because come on, now, how many times did he have to ask him to stop?

‘Don’t.’ He touched Logan’s shoulder. ‘Please don’t.’

Logan stopped humming abruptly. He glanced once at Troy, switched on the radio and changed lanes unnecessarily.

Troy closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see the next traffic light turn red, and it occurred to him that maybe Logan’s humming was a nervous tic, and in the way that a random thought about your childhood can suddenly offer a startling new adult clarity, he saw in a flash that this was true: Logan hummed when he was nervous. He had hummed on the way to tournaments because he was nervous and Troy couldn’t stand the sound of it because he himself had been suffering pre-game nerves.

So Logan was nervous right now.

It wouldn’t be the threat to his own safety worrying him, but the possibility of being involved in a disagreement. Logan had a severe conflict allergy. He’d pick up his cutlery and eat rather than tell a waitress, ‘That’s not what I ordered.’ Even if it was vegetarian. When he used to play the most notorious cheats on the circuit, he never questioned their calls. It was his brother’s most significant and, for Troy, most mystifying flaw.

Of course, Logan’s conflict allergy hadn’t applied to Troy. The two of them used to fight to the death. Troy traced his finger down the faint white line on his forearm. Sixteen stitches. He and Logan had smashed through a window onto the front lawn while they were fighting, like a scene from Die Hard. Logan had a similar scar on his thigh. It was one of Troy’s favourite childhood memories: the two of them looking at each other with shocked, thrilled eyes, bloody limbs, glass fragments shining in their hair, their poor mother screaming her head off.

Now Logan competed against Troy by not competing, which was fucking genius. You couldn’t win if only one of you was playing.

Savannah spoke up from the back seat. ‘When I said that about not sponging off your parents, I hope I didn’t come across as . . . ungrateful.’

Troy opened his eyes. ‘Not at all.’

He slid the words ‘at’ and ‘all’ together to make the one word ‘a-tall’, a linguistic habit he’d taught himself as a teenager, when he’d heard it used by someone on the radio and decided it sounded sophisticated. It still gave him pleasure. Like a fashion choice.

He saw the harbour and his heart lifted at the sight of apartment blocks, office towers, skyscrapers, the Harbour Bridge: civilisation, even if it was only Sydney civilisation, not proper civilisation.

Savannah continued talking. ‘Like, I’m really grateful to you both for doing this, and to your parents, your parents are fab.’ Fab. Odd choice of word. Circa 1990? ‘They’re, like, one of a kind. Amazing people. Truly.’

Amazing people. Troy looked at Logan. They’d heard a lot of that growing up: Your parents are so cool. Your parents aren’t like other parents with boring office jobs. We wish we had parents like yours.

‘It’s all good,’ said Troy. ‘No problem a-tall.’ He twisted around to smile his most dazzling smile at her. She smiled back. A girl had once told Troy that he had a ‘devastating’ smile. He secretly treasured that compliment. Devastating.

‘So we take a left here, right?’ said Logan.

Troy jerked his head. He had not bothered to ask the location of Savannah’s unit, but had assumed they were heading over the bridge to some suburb he’d never heard of, way out in the boondocks, right under a flight path or two. Instead he saw they were driving through a hip harbourside neighbourhood where he himself had lived in his twenties. He’d had after-work drinks at that pub on the corner. He’d taken dates to that little Thai restaurant. This was an area for IT guys in hoodies, junior execs in high heels and law graduates in new suits. People here were too young and happy, attractive and cashed-up to hit their girlfriends.

‘Go straight at the roundabout,’ said Savannah. ‘And then it’s the big apartment block right there. That’s it. There’s heaps of visitors’ parking.’

Troy craned his neck. ‘You must have good views?’ He realised he was now feeling more sympathy towards her, as if someone who lived in this suburb really didn’t deserve a violent boyfriend. His neck turned red with shame.

‘Our unit doesn’t face the harbour,’ said Savannah. ‘It’s just a one-bedroom. They reduced the rent because it’s got a really crappy kitchen and bathroom. It’s the only un-renovated apartment in the building.’ It was like she was explaining how they could afford to live here, like she’d seen his neck and read his thoughts.

Logan parked and he and Troy got out of the car, unwinding their bodies with relief, the way men of their height did when released from cars and aeroplanes.

Logan removed from the boot a couple of supermarket cardboard boxes that their mother had given them for Savannah’s belongings, while Troy stuck his hands in his pockets and kicked his heels against the pavement. He looked about for any nefarious types but the place was deserted. Everyone would be at work right now. This wasn’t an area for young families.

‘Um . . . is she getting out?’ Troy said to Logan after a moment.

Logan shrugged. He ducked down to look. ‘She’s just sitting there.’

‘Should we give her a second?’ said Troy.

Logan shrugged again. It was like his default gesture.

They waited.

‘How’s Indira?’ asked Troy.

‘She’s fine,’ said Logan, his face blank.

‘You still living –’

‘Yes.’ Logan cut him off. So they were still crammed together in that crummy one-bedroom townhouse Logan had bought decades ago. Troy’s mother had mentioned that Indira wanted to move a few years back but that had obviously gone nowhere.

‘How was New York?’ Logan asked, without discernible interest.

‘Great,’ said Troy.

As far as Troy knew, Logan had never been to New York. Imagine never having been to New York and acting like it didn’t matter. Did Logan even have a passport right now? The thought of not having a valid passport made Troy hyperventilate but Logan seemed to live his life within the confines of a tiny radius encompassing his workplace, their parents’ house, and the homes of his married-with-children high school friends. Today’s exciting adventure to Savannah’s apartment might be the furthest Logan had travelled in years.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t had the opportunities: Logan was offered a tennis scholarship to the University of Chicago, two years before Troy was offered one at Stanford, but he’d turned it down.He’d said, No thanks, I’m good, without apparent regret.

In fact, all four of the Delaney children had been offered tennis scholarships to prestigious American universities. Troy was the only one with the brains to take the offer, the only one capable of seeing what a chance like that could mean to a Sydney public school kid. It still infuriated him. His brother and sisters could have changed the direction of their lives. They thought it was a decision about tennis.

They didn’t get that tennis was merely the key that unlocked the door to a bigger, shinier world. Tennis didn’t just get Troy into Stanford, it kick-started his career. His family enjoyed that story. Once he’d even overheard Logan recounting it: how Troy was in New York doing a summer internship competing against a group of terrifyingly slick young graduates for a coveted permanent position, when one day a grey-haired guy came into the office and said, with quiet menace, ‘Which one of you kids is the tennis player?’Troy raised his hand and the guy said, ‘I’ll pick you up after work. Full whites please.’ Troy had to run into Macy’s in Times Square (it wasn’t Times Square, it was Herald Square but he’d given up correcting his family, his mother said Times Square sounded better) in his fifteen-minute lunch break and buy the first white clothes he could find, no time to try them on. A shiny black car took them out to a pompous tennis club where they played doubles against two guys – one old, one young – who they decisively beat: 6–0, 6–0. Turned out the scary grey-haired guy was the big enchilada and he hated the other old guy, for a reason never explained. There were a lot of hard-eyed smiles that day.

Guess who got the permanent position?

Yes, his family loved that story. They loved any story where a Delaney won a match, or won anything. But it was almost like he needed each of his siblings to say: I should have taken the scholarship like you,Troy, then I’d have a life like yours,when in fact all three of them seemed to view Troy and his life’s choices not with envy but with a kind of amused, detached superiority, as if money and success were shiny, childish toys, comical and absurd.

It was true that Brooke’s migraines gave her hell when she was a teenager, so she had no choice but to quit tennis altogether and stay in Sydney to study. Amy was Amy. She couldn’t cope with the stress of competitive tennis. He never got his older sister until the day she explained it: ‘Think of your worst pre-match nerves. Except there’s no match. It’s just Tuesday morning. That’s how it feels to be me.’ But Logan should have said yes to Chicago! He’d been smarter than Troy at school, and he had that incredible forehand. Did he ever do anything with that brain or that forehand?

Troy tried to imagine his brother in a classroom teaching. Who exactly took these classes? And what exactly did he teach in ‘business communications’? How to format a business letter? How would Logan know? Had he ever sent one in his life? People emailed these days. He imagined Logan wearing a cheap Kmart tie, one their mother had probably given him for Christmas, standing at an old-fashioned blackboard scribbling in chalk: To whom it may concern, Yours faithfully, Dear Sir/Madam. And then shrugging whenever a student asked a question.

To be fair, he was probably a good teacher. He’d been the best out of all four of them at coaching, and the only one who seemed to actually like it. He got that same fixed, focused look on his face as their dad did when he watched a kid play. Any kid. Even the useless ones. Logan was probably only fourteen when Troy heard him say, ‘You look away from the ball at the last second’ to a little kid who Troy would have written off as having no hand–eye coordination.

But that was tennis. Logan couldn’t feel passionate about spending his days teaching business communication skills to help little wannabe businesspeople enter a world Logan had no interest in entering himself. It was just . . . wrong. Logan was leading the wrong life and didn’t care, and for fuck’s sake, why did Troy care that he didn’t care?

When he was a kid all he’d wanted to do was beat his older brother, in anything and everything. It was the point of his entire existence. Winning his first match against Logan had felt like a cocaine high, except, just like cocaine, it also made him feel sick. He always remembered, with resentment and mystification, how nausea had tainted the edge of his win, how he’d gone to have a shower to cool off and thought he was fine, but then he lost his temper with a tennis kid who had wandered through the back door into their house. (He hated it so much when kids thought their kitchen was a clubhouse facility.)

It was almost like he’d felt guilty for beating his brother, as if being two years older gave Logan a lifelong right to win against Troy.

These days their father seemed to be equally impressed – or equally unimpressed – by the careers both his sons had chosen. Brooke was the only one who impressed their dad, because she was his favourite and she was ‘starting her own business’. Stan didn’t seem to notice that Troy had also been his own boss for years.

This was what happened whenever Troy saw his family. He regressed. His emotions started to gallop all over the place. He wanted to beat Logan when Logan wasn’t even playing. He got jealous of the attention his dad showed his baby sister for her little physiotherapy practice. For fuck’s sake, you would think he was Amy. It was humiliating.

‘You were in New York for work, right?’ said Logan.

‘And pleasure,’ said Troy.

There was no point talking about the work part. Whenever Troy tried to explain what he did for a living, his family would get the same expressions of focused yet vacant concentration as they might if they were trying to tune in to an out-of-area radio programme and were only hearing every twentieth word through the static. His mother, bless her heart, had even subscribed to a podcast, Chat with Traders, and took notes while she bravely listened to it, but to date she was still none the wiser.

‘So . . . been on the court lately?’ Troy gave Logan a speculative look. It had been years since they’d played each other.

Logan gave an irritated exhalation, as if Troy had asked this same question multiple times before, which he was pretty sure he had not. ‘Nope. Not for a while now.’

‘Why not?’ asked Troy, genuinely interested. ‘Not even with Mum and Dad?’

‘No time.’ Logan fiddled with his left wrist as if to indicate an invisible watch.

‘No time,’ repeated Troy. ‘What a crock of shit. You’ve got time to burn.’

Logan shrugged. Then he said suddenly, as if he couldn’t help himself, ‘I don’t get how you play socially.’

He said ‘socially’ like the word smelled.

‘I enjoy it,’ said Troy truthfully. He had friends he played with on a semi-regular basis both in Sydney and New York. They were all former competitive players like him. He won maybe seventy per cent of the time. ‘Keeps me fit. It doesn’t matter anymore.’

‘You’re saying you don’t care if you win or lose?’

‘Obviously I play to win,’ said Troy. ‘But it’s not life or death.’

They contemplated each other. They were exactly the same height, although Troy preferred to think he had just a fraction on his older brother. It was probably just his hair. He used mousse.

Logan said, ‘I don’t mind having a hit, but the moment we’re scoring, I start to care if I win or lose, and then I just . . .’ He paused. ‘I can’t stand it.’

He looked warily at Troy as though waiting for him to throw this revelation back in his face.

After a moment Troy said, ‘But you still follow the tennis, right?’

‘Sure,’ said Logan.

‘I don’t follow it. Don’t even watch the finals,’ admitted Troy. ‘If it’s on TV, I switch it off. I can’t stand watching it.’

There were still a couple of guys playing in satellite tournaments who he and Logan knew. Guys they’d beaten. Logan gave a half-smile, half-grimace to show he got it. Troy understood why Logan couldn’t play. Logan understood why Troy couldn’t watch.

Tennis was complicated. For all of them.

‘What about the girls?’ asked Troy, suddenly curious. He should know this but Logan was more involved with family life than him.

‘Brooke plays with Dad fairly often,’ said Logan. ‘I don’t know about Amy. The last I heard of her having a hit was that time she grifted that beach volleyball player.’

They both grinned with identical derision. Beach volleyball. Every now and then Amy dated a loser who didn’t believe it was possible for a woman to beat a man in any sporting endeavour, even if tennis wasn’t his sport. She generally capitalised on their sexism with a cash wager.

They stood for a moment in uncharacteristically companionable, brotherly silence and Troy considered telling Logan what was really filling his mind right now. Something of zero consequence and yet mind-bending significance, depending on how he chose to shift the prism of his perspective.

I saw Claire in New York, he could begin. Logan would raise an eyebrow. He’d liked Claire. Claire had liked him. He would listen, with interest and without judgement. Logan couldn’t be bothered to judge.

But no. Troy wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, and anyway, at any moment Savannah would get out of the car and interrupt them.

He shoved his hands in his pockets. Was the chick going to sit there forever?

Logan began his toneless whistle and Troy felt his mind break free: Fuck this.

He marched around to the side of the car where Savannah was sitting, opened the back door and bent down to look at her. She still hadn’t even undone her seatbelt. She sat with her hands pushed hard into the centre of her stomach, as if she’d just that moment stabbed herself.

His impatience dissipated. ‘Savannah,’ he said gently.

She looked up at him with unshed tears in her eyes. She blinked blonde eyelashes. The tears spilled.

Troy couldn’t stand to see a woman cry.

‘You’re safe,’ he said. He hunkered down next to the car so they were face-to-face. ‘You’ve got us.’

‘I know,’ she said.

She wiped her cheeks and fiddled with the tarnished silver antique skeleton key that hung on a cheap chain around her neck.

‘I like your necklace,’ he said. He’d learned this from Amy’s meltdowns: redirect her focus.

‘Thanks.’ She dropped the key.

‘Does the vine symbolise something?’ He pointed at the tattoo on her forearm. Green tendrils curled around her purple-veined, stick-thin arm. He had no problem with tattoos – Amy had a few – but this one, though in itself innocuous, seemed a desecration of her childlike arm. ‘Or did you just like the look of it?’

‘It’s Jack’s beanstalk,’ she said.

‘Huh,’ he said. He tried to remember the fairy tale. Jack climbs the beanstalk and steals the giant’s gold? ‘So . . . it’s about achieving your dreams?’ She didn’t look like the type for self-help books and vision boards.

‘It symbolises escape,’ she said.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘So, speaking of which, let’s get in and out of this place as fast as we can.’ He went to offer his hand, but then thought better of it. Too domineering. He dropped his hand by his side, took a step back and waved his hand in a courtly, over-the-top, ‘this way, madam’ gesture. Give her space. Don’t rush her. Try to understand.

She undid her seatbelt, swivelled and slid from the car, smiling tremulously up at him as she put her thumbs in the loops of her jeans and hitched them up around her waist.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I know you haven’t got all day.’

‘Yes I do,’ said Troy. ‘It’s fine.’ He hoped the boyfriend was here and gave him an excuse to grab him by his shirt and slam him up against a wall like a cop in a movie.

‘Before we go up, perhaps we should check for his car.’ She delicately touched her nostrils and sniffed.

‘Good idea,’ said Troy. Logan didn’t speak. Troy bounced lightly on the balls of his feet. He was suddenly, unexpectedly jubilant.

They followed Savannah to the undercover parking area. She stopped and her shoulders sagged.

‘It’s fine. He’s not here.’ She pointed at an empty space in the far corner.

‘Okay, so that’s good,’ said Logan. ‘Great.’

Troy felt himself deflate. Now this was back to being a boring errand to endure. He looked at his watch. He actually did not have all day.

‘There’s something wrong with you,’ his mother once said to him as she drove him home from school after another suspension. ‘There’s something very, very wrong with you.’

I know, he’d thought at the time, pleased.

The three of them went up in the lift to the third floor. Troy looked at the mirrored walls and saw a hundred reflections of himself and Logan, getting tinier and tinier, but always towering over Savannah.

She led them down a carpeted hallway with the familiar lemon air-freshener smell of this kind of well-kept, mid-level apartment block, and unlocked a door.

‘Please come in,’ she said shyly, as if this were a social visit.

The first thing Troy saw was unframed art leaning against the walls: proper art. Abstracts with violent strokes of paint so thick and textured they still looked wet. He had not been expecting art.

‘He’s an artist.’ Savannah followed Troy’s eye. ‘Amateur artist.’

There wasn’t much furniture: a battered double-seater leather couch faced a television leaning against the wall. A tacky-looking glass coffee table contained half-empty takeaway containers, chopsticks shoved upright into the fried rice, an open newspaper stained with blotches of soy sauce, a half-drunk bottle of Corona with a piece of lime floating in the remaining beer. A stack of unopened removalist’s boxes sat in the corner of the room. This was a man who unpacked his art before he put up his television. A man who carefully cut up a piece of lime to put in his Corona but left his half-eaten takeaway dinner on the coffee table. A man who hit his girlfriend.

Savannah shook her head at the food on the coffee table and made a move towards it as if she were thinking about cleaning it up, then stopped.

‘So these two boxes are obviously yours?’ said Logan. He nodded his head at two of the removalist’s boxes, one of which was labelled SAVANNAH – CLOTHES and the other SAVANNAH – RECIPE BOOKS.

‘Yes,’ said Savannah. ‘Yes, thank you. Much appreciated.’

Much appreciated. The cadences and colloquialisms of her speech slipped back and forth: one moment twenty years old, the next eighty.

‘Let’s get everything out of here and in the hallway,’ said Logan.

He and Troy carried out the boxes. Troy got the box of books, which made him stagger.

‘You right, mate?’ asked Logan, straight-faced.

They came back in to find Savannah squatting on the floor in the tiny kitchen, all the cupboard doors open, as she filled a box with saucepans, frypans and a blender.

‘I like to cook,’ she said to Troy, as if explaining herself.

‘So I’ve heard,’ said Troy. ‘Mum and Dad might keep you permanently.’

‘What else?’ asked Logan.

‘In the bedroom,’ said Savannah. She looked up at them. ‘The glory box at the end of the bed. It was my grandmother’s.’ She winced. ‘It’s rather heavy.’

They went into the musty-smelling bedroom, the bed a tangle of sheets and blankets and pillows, clothes strewn over the floor.

‘This must be it,’ said Logan. He experimentally lifted one corner of the mahogany chest at the end of the bed.

‘What the hell?’ A bare-chested man sat upright from the tangle of sheets.

Troy’s heart leaped. He grabbed the nearest thing he could find from a bookshelf and held it up like a weapon. ‘Don’t fucking move!’

Logan dropped the chest with a bang. ‘Stop right there, mate,’ he said, his demeanour as calm and controlled as a country cop, his voice as deep and slow as their father’s. People often said Troy and Logan sounded like their father, but this was the first time Troy had realised just how much Logan sounded and even looked like their dad.

The man scuttled backward up the bed until he was sitting with his back against the wall, his hands clutching the bedsheets. He was scrawny, pasty-white with lots of black chest hair and he wore a pair of faded checked boxers with ripped elastic. Troy felt a revulsion so visceral it made him shudder.

‘I’ve about a hundred in cash,’ the man said. He reached over for a wallet on his bedside table and held it up. ‘T’at’s all.’ He had an Irish accent. Troy’s first girlfriend once said there was nothing sexier than a man with an Irish accent and Troy had been personally offended by the existence of Ireland ever since.

‘We don’t want your money,’ said Troy, disgusted.

‘What the . . .?’ Savannah appeared in the doorway.

‘Savannah?’ The man picked up a pair of glasses on his bedside table and put them on. Now he looked like Harry bloody Potter. How dare he look like Harry bloody Potter? Harry Potter would never hit a woman.

‘Where have you been?’ he said to Savannah, as if Logan and Troy weren’t in the room. ‘I’ve been out of my mind.’

‘Why aren’t you at work?’ said Savannah. Her eyes darted about the room. She looked terrified, and her terror ignited a flame of red-hot fury in Troy’s chest.

‘I’m as sick as a dog,’ said Harry Potter. He put his hand to his stomach and a queasy expression crossed his face. ‘Dodgy sweet and sour.’

‘Your car isn’t there,’ said Savannah.

‘It broke down on the motorway. In the rain. Everything has gone to shit.’ His face twisted with remorse. ‘I’m so sorry, Savannah, my love. For that night. That was unforgivable, I know, but I wasn’t myself, I was upset about . . . But that’s no excuse, I know it’s no excuse . . .’ He suddenly seemed to remember the presence of Logan and Troy. ‘Who are these guys?’

‘They’re friends,’ said Savannah coldly. ‘They’re helping me pick up my stuff.’

‘Is there much else?’ Logan asked her.

‘Friends from where?’ asked Harry Potter.

‘It doesn’t matter where we’re from,’ said Troy. ‘We’re just getting her stuff and getting out of here.’

Savannah grabbed a suitcase from the corner of the room, wheeled it over to the open built-in wardrobe and began to fill it with clothes, chucking them in still on their coat-hangers.

‘But where are you going?’ asked Harry Potter. ‘Where are you staying?’ He made a move as if to get out of bed.

‘Stay right where you are,’ said Logan.

The guy looked panicked. ‘Savannah?’

‘Don’t talk to her. Don’t say another fucking word.’ Troy walked to the bed and loomed over the little fucker with the full might and power of his fit and healthy six-foot-four body. His nostrils twitched at the faint smells of vomit and sweat. ‘She doesn’t owe you an explanation.’

Troy was showered and clean and wearing a nine-hundred-dollar shirt and a Louis Moinet watch, and he might have made some bad choices in his life and he might right now be facing an ethical dilemma of monumental proportions because of those unfortunate choices, but he had never hit a woman and he never would, he had inherited not a single one of his villainous grandfather’s villainous genes, and he liked the fear and confusion on Harry Potter’s face. Harry Potter deserved to feel fear and confusion, because he was legally, morally and spiritually in the wrong.

It happened so rarely that you knew that you were right and the other guy was wrong; Troy was Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America. He was goddamned Batman.

He had never felt better.