SEVEN

ON THE JOB Marijana wears not a nurse's cap but a head-scarf, like any good Balkan housewife. He approves of the scarf, as he approves of any token that she has not wholly cast off the old world in favour of the new.

Aside from assorted war criminals and the tall tennis player with the big serve whose name escapes him (Ilja? Ilic? Roman Ilic?), Croats are an unknown quantity to him. Yugoslavs are another matter. He must have crossed paths with dozens of Yugoslavs in the days when there were still Yugoslavs; but of course it never occurred to him to ask what variety of Yugoslav they were.

Where does Marijana fit into the Yugoslav picture, Marijana and the husband who assembles cars? What were they fleeing when they fled the old country? Or was it simply the case that, growing sick and tired of strife, they packed their goods and crossed the border in quest of a better, more peaceable life? And if a better, more peaceable life is not to be found in Australia, where is it to be found?

Marijana is telling him about her son, whose name is Drago but who is known to his mates as Jag. For his just-passed sixteenth birthday, her husband bought Drago a motorcycle. A big mistake, in Marijana's opinion. Now Drago stays out every evening, neglecting his homework, missing meals. He and his friends hang out on the back roads, racing each other, practising skids and God knows what else. She is afraid he is going to break a limb, or worse.

'Your son is a young man,' he tells Marijana. 'He is testing himself. You cannot stop young men from exploring their limits. They want to be the fastest. They want to be the strongest. They want to be admired.'

He has never met Drago, probably never will. But he enjoys Marijana's performance, enjoys its transparency: too well-mannered to boast about her boy, she complains instead about his unruliness, his recklessness, his joie de vivre, about how he will be her ruin.

'If you want to give Drago a fright,' he suggests not entirely seriously, 'bring him here one day. I'll show him my leg.'

'You think he will listen, Mr Rayment? He will say is nothing, is just bicycle accident.'

'I'll show him what's left of the bicycle too.'

He still has the bicycle in the store room downstairs, the back wheel folded in two, the stays jammed into the spokes. No one bothered to steal it after all, that day on Magill Road, though it lay by the roadside till evening. Then the police took it in. They rescued the plastic box too that had been strapped to the carrier, along with a fraction of the morning's purchases: a can of chickpeas with a dent in it, a quarter kilo of Brie that had melted in the sun and then congealed. He has kept the can as a memento, a memento mori. It is on a shelf in the kitchen. He will show Drago the can, he tells Marijana. Imagine if that was your skull, he will say to him. And then: Spare a thought for your mum. She worries about you. She's a good woman. She wishes you to have a long and happy life. Or perhaps he will not say the bit about her being a good woman. If her son does not know, who is he, a stranger, to tell him?

The next day Marijana brings a photograph: Drago standing beside the motorcycle in question, wearing boots and tight jeans, in the crook of his arm a helmet emblazoned with a lightning bolt. He is tall and husky for a sixteen-year-old, with a winning smile. A dreamboat, as girls used to say in the old days, just as his mother must have been a peach. No doubt he will break many hearts.

'What are your son's plans?' he asks.

'He wants to go to Defence Force Academy. He wants to join navy. He can get bursary for that.'

'And your daughter, your older daughter?'

'Ah, she is too young for plans, her head is in sky.'

Now she has a question for him, one that has taken surprisingly long in coming. 'You have no children, Mr Rayment?'

'No, alas not. We did not get around to it, my wife and I. We had other things on our minds, other ambitions. And then, before we knew it, we were divorced.'

'And you never worry about it after?'

'On the contrary, I worried about it more and more, particularly as I grew older.'

'And your wife? She worry about it?'

'My wife remarried. She married a divorce with children of his own. They had a child together and became one of those complicated modern families where everyone calls everyone else by the first name. So no, my wife does not worry about our childlessness, my childlessness. My ex-wife. I do not have much contact with her. It was not a happy marriage.'

It is all within bounds, what is passing between them, within the bounds of the impersonal personal. A conversation between a man and a woman, a woman who happens to be the man's nurse and shopping assistant and cleaning woman and general help, getting to know each other better in a country where all persons are equal, and all faiths. Marijana is a Catholic. He is no longer anything. But in this country the one is as good as the other, Catholicism and nothing. Marijana may disapprove of people who marry and unmarry and never get around to having children, but she knows enough to keep her disapproval to herself.

'So who is going to take care of you?'

An odd question to ask. The obvious answer is, You are: you are going to take care of me, for the immediate future, you or whoever else I employ for that purpose. But presumably there is a more charitable way of interpreting the question – as Who is going to be your stay and support?, for instance.

'Oh, I'll take care of myself,' he replies. 'I do not expect a lengthy old age.'

'You have family in Adelaide?'

'No, not in Adelaide. I have family in Europe, I suppose, but I long ago lost touch with them. I was born in France. Didn't I tell you? I was brought to Australia when I was a child, by my mother and my stepfather. I and my sister. I was six. My sister was nine. She is dead now. She died early, of cancer. So no, I have no family to take care of me.'

They leave it at that, he and Marijana, their exchange of particulars. But her question echoes in his mind. Who is going to take care of you? The more he stares at the words take care of, the more inscrutable they seem. He remembers a dog they had when he was a child in Lourdes, lying in its basket in the last stages of canine distemper, whimpering without cease, its muzzle hot and dry, its limbs jerking. 'Bon, je m'en occupe,' his father said at a certain point, and picked the dog up, basket and all, and walked out of the house. Five minutes later, from the woods, he heard the flat report of a shotgun, and that was that, he never saw the dog again. Je m'en occupe: I'll take charge of it; I'll take care of it; I'll do what has to be done. That kind of caring, with a shotgun, was certainly not what Marijana had in mind. Nevertheless, it lay englobed in the phrase, waiting to leak out. If so, what of his reply: I'll take care of myself? What did his words mean, objectively? Did the taking care, the caretaking he spoke of extend to donning his best suit and swallowing down his cache of pills, two at a time, with a glass of hot milk, and lying down in bed with his hands folded across his breast?

He has many regrets, he is full of regrets, they come back nightly like roosting birds. Chief among them is regret that he does not have a son. It would be nice to have a daughter, girls have an appeal of their own, but the son he does not have is the one he truly misses. If he and Henriette had had a son right away, while they still loved each other, or were enamoured of each other, or cared for each other, that son would be thirty years old by now, a man in his own right. Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined. Imagine the two of them, then, out for a stroll, father and son, chatting about this and that, men's talk, nothing serious. In the course of that chat he could let fall a remark, one of those oblique remarks that people make at moments when the real words are too difficult to bring out, about it being time to pass on. His son, his imaginary but imagined son, would understand at once: pass on the burden, pass on the succession, call it a day. 'Mm,' his son would say, William or Robert or whatever, meaning Yes, I accept. You have done your duty, taken care of me, now it is my turn. I will take care of you.