2. Heartbake

It took all sorts. Harley helped Quint with his suitcase – “Full of bricks, is it?”, realigned his GPS so he could see it over the curve of the steering wheel, and u-turned the cab smoothly around, heading back up Monash Drive. Morning tea time, and the bakery at Campbell shops made the best coffee in the world.

Not to mention a superior rock cake. Their pies had won prizes too.

“Flat white, please. Hot. Big.” His hands sketched out a shape approximately the size of a beer keg. “And a stone-cold rock cake.”

The barista, an altogether too handsome young man, smiled politely behind his mirror-gleaming machine. He’d seen Harley’s comedy routine far too many times. He wished he had a dollar for every time he’d heard the same jokes.

Harley paid and took his coffee and cake outside. Cold in July, but he could keep an eye on the cab. One other hardy soul sat at a table, his chair angled to catch the sun, steam curling gently from a mug. Eighty years old, at a guess.

Harley glanced at him, sensing a kindred spirit. The signs were there for those who knew the code.

“Where’d yer do yer laggin’?”

The elderly gent looked up, a trail of blue tattooed tears faintly visible dropping from the corner of one eye.

“All over,” he replied. “You?”

“Goulburn, in the main.”

“Did me first laggin’ there. Evil place, that.”

“Not going back.” Harley stuck out his hand. “Harley Barnardo.”

“Sharkey, they call me.”

They shook. Harley set his coffee down on the table and turned to face the sun.

“It doesn’t get much better than this, eh?”

“I should be on the Gold Coast with the bikini birds,” Sharkey said. “Not stuck in this cold old hole.”

Harley raised his cup. “Let’s both bust out, hey?”

Sharkey shook his head. “They only let me out of Humane last month. Gotta stay in the Territory for a year. Gave me a room in that place.”

Harley glanced over at Erstwhile Garden Retirement Village, a grey slab with windows. “Looks like X-Block without the bars.”

They chatted on, a shared brotherhood of crime. Sharkey told of the old days in Goulburn, when as a teenager he had been assigned a cell with one of the last bushrangers, a man who had ridden with the Governor gang in his youth. The nation had been founded on other peoples’ convictions, unbroken chains of sentences and cant stretching back to the old lags on the First Fleet.

A woman within a sniff of thirty came out of the grocery, pushing a stroller with a couple of infants. Her arms were laden with plastic bags full of disposables, and the children were barely visible noses poking out of hooded garments, eyes gleaming in their caverns. Her own face was grim.

“Ever get married, Harley?”

“I run too fast,” Harley grinned, taking a bite of rock cake.

“Three times for me,” Sharkey sighed. “and me girl’s inside watching telly.”

“She should be making you coffee.”

“She only does instant. Instant everything. Microwave crap and boiling water. Not like the old days.”

“Never is nowadays.” Harley took another bit of rock cake, working his way around the cherry in the centre. “My Mum could make a rock cake so hard you’d be spitting out fillings for a week after.”

“Sounds like me first missus. Scones of Stone, I used to call ‘em.”

The door of Ounce Books opened and a woman emerged with an armload of books. One look at her and you could tell that a life of books, cats and chocolate was a comfortable one. She was smiling, and her t-shirt had a bust of Mark Twain on the front.

“Nice set of buns right there.”

“Nice all over,” Harley agreed. “She gives out free books. Can you credit that? Runs a bookshop and hands them out for nothing!”

“Oh yeah? I could do with a bit of that. Don’t mind a good murder, meself.”

“She fills up a shelf in the bakery. Up the back it is. Only catch is that you have to go on the internet and make a note or something.”

“Bloody computers and internet. It’s just another way of ripping off the little guy,” Sharkey said. “Me girl’s always chatting away to her mates. Twittering, she says.”

Harley took another mouthful of rock cake. The sultanas slipped under his teeth. As a kid, he’d pulled them out and set them aside, worried that a blowfly might have found its way into the mix. One Christmas, he’d spent ten minutes working on a pudding so full of dates and prunes and currants and cherries that all that he could get out of it were tiny shreds of duff. After that he hadn’t bothered.

Life was too short to worry about the little things. So what if a nut got into his cab? He’d be out again in a few minutes, and Harley could drive on in the sunshine. Canberra was a good place to be a cabbie. The roads were wide, the traffic flowed smoothly, the passengers were well-behaved.

And so what if they were putting up an ugly building at the end of the street? There’d be work coming out of it. Engineers and architects needing cab rides while it was going up, and public servants when it was in business. The more passengers in his taxi, the more money in his pocket.

He drained the last of his coffee. Life was good and the future was better. It would be spring soon. He popped the last fragments of rock cake into his mouth, feeling the preserved cherry slide under his teeth, sweet and delicious. That was the best part.

Sharkey was looking at him, smiling.

“Got to get back on the road, mate. Make a quid.” Harley said, putting his coffee mug down firmly. “Good to meet you!”

“Yeah, you too, cobber. Look, I might have something you can help me with.”

Copyright © 2009 Peter Mackay