The Offer

"I used to think bad news came dressed in warning signs. Turns out, it just rings and asks for a favour."

I stood under the water longer than I needed to. The cylinder only held so much and I'd pay for it later in a cold rinse, but I stayed put with my head down and let it run hot across the back of my neck, where I seemed to carry everything these days. My hands had stopped coming properly clean a while back — a grey had got into the knuckles years back and stayed, galvanised dust and clay and the ghost of every post I'd ever set, and the hot water couldn't shift it any more than it could shift the rest. The old copper knocked once in the wall when I moved my weight and the pressure shifted with me. I'd been meaning to bleed that line the best part of a year. One more job on a list that never got shorter, except this was the only house left on it I wasn't being paid to think about.

The numbers were where I'd left them. They were always where I'd left them, waiting, patient as rot. Eleven grand to Coastal by the end of the month or Sam Lovell put it in his solicitor's hands, and he'd already had the letter drawn — it was sitting unopened in the door pocket of the ute because I couldn't make myself slit the envelope and read my own name done up in that language. Bill Henderson at the timber yard still carrying me on trust, because he'd known Dad and couldn't help himself, and that was the worst of the lot. Sam Lovell chasing me I could be angry at, and anger's a handhold. Bill gave me nothing to grip. He just kept telling me to pay him when I could, in the same voice he'd used asking after Mum near the end, and every time he said it I felt the ground give another quiet inch under me.

It had started as one wrong figure. That was the thing I kept coming back to in the dark — not a theft, not a gamble, nothing I could have pointed to and called a sin. A number put in the wrong column two years back, carried forward, built on, the whole structure raised true and square on top of a footing that was out by a fraction nobody had thought to measure. You can't see that kind of fault from the outside. The fence looks straight. Then one day you lean on it.

Jenny knew the shape of it and not the size. I'd seen to that. She'd sit across the table of a morning with both hands wrapped round the mug for the warmth of it, because we'd stopped running the heater past eight, and she'd tell me we'd be right — and she meant it, which was the part I couldn't stand. She still believed the man across the table could fix it. I'd been that man the whole ten years she'd known me. I wasn't any more, and I hadn't found the way to say so, so I said nothing and let her go on believing, which was its own sort of lie and the only kind I'd let myself tell her.

I shut the water off. The house came back around the quiet — the pipes ticking as they cooled, rain feeling its way over the weatherboards, and that Fern Tree cold that lived in the walls all winter and came up through the boards into the soles of your feet no matter what you laid down over them. We sat high enough on the mountain that the weather found us before it found the town; you could watch a front come up the Derwent and know you had about four minutes. I towelled off on the mat, because the tiles were like a slab in July, and the smell of the place settled around me — eucalyptus off Jenny's shampoo, the old-pipe tang the plumber reckoned would cost more to chase than to live with, and under all of it the rain itself, cold and salt-edged, come up off the water and laid over the whole of Hobart like a wet dust sheet.

The mirror had gone to fog. I cleared a band of it with the edge of my hand and got half a look at the bloke behind the glass — wet hair, three days of stubble, a face keeping older hours than the thirty-two years I had on it. Dad wouldn't have hidden from a phone. Gerald Triffett took a boat out into weather that kept smarter men tied to the mooring, and came home because he'd decided to, and if he'd walked in and found his boy standing here dripping and gone still over a bit of plastic on the basin, he'd have said nothing at all. He never did have the words for a thing that mattered. He'd just come and stand in beside me and put the next tool in my hand, and that was how he said everything he ever meant to.

The phone went off against the basin, buzzing itself half around on the porcelain. I let it ring twice — a swell's grace, Dad would have called it, the pause before you put the boat about — then reached over and turned it face-up. Luke Smith. I hadn't put that name to a face in two years, and there it was on the screen like it had every right to be.

I had the job before I had the reason the name bothered me. Berriedale, a couple of winters back: a straight run of paling along a back boundary, decent ground, no surprises waiting in the post-holes, and a bloke who paid the day I packed up and pressed a cold beer on me I hadn't asked for. There'd been a dog, one of those flat-faced little things that spent three days certain it was on the crew, planting itself under my boots every time I turned with a rail on my shoulder. I couldn't get its name back. Biscuit, something soft like that. A clean job. You remember those fondly, because none of them cost you anything you didn't get back. So there was no earthly reason for the name to sit wrong on the glass, and it sat wrong all the same. I'd sighted down enough boundary lines that looked dead straight and weren't; this had the same quiet lean to it, felt before it could be seen.

I pressed the button before I could argue myself out of it. "Hello, this is Nial." The client voice — level, easy, the one that held its shape when the rest of me wasn't holding much.

A breath of static, and then him, unhurried, setting each word down where he wanted it before he reached for the next. "Hi, Nial. This is Luke Smith. Not sure if you remember me but you did a small fencing job for me a few years ago, out in Berriedale."

"With the small dog that followed me like a shadow and had to keep poking his nose into everything, yeah?" The whole afternoon came up on the back of it — sawdust and wet clay, the ring of the driver coming off the star pickets, that warm weight leaning on my shins.

"That's the one," he said, and laughed, and it was the easiest sound I'd heard in a week.

Something in my shoulders let down a notch. I'd been awake since half five with the figures going round and round in the dark, and here was a voice out of a season when a job was just a job and I drove home from it feeling like I was good at something. "I remember it well," I said, and I did. Clean work. Honest. The whole of what the trade had been, before it turned into a thing I did in the gaps between phone calls I was frightened of.

"What can I do for you?" I asked, and heard it come up out of me brighter than it had any right to be.

His end changed. A hitch, a rustle, the hush of him carrying the phone off from a room before he'd talk into it. When he came back the friendliness was still laid over the top, but there was a thread drawn tight underneath it now — he'd got a clock on him, and it wasn't one I could see.

"I have an urgent job I need done in the next couple of days."

I watched a bead of water pick its way down the tile while I caught up to that. A couple of days. You don't stand a fence in a couple of days — not one that's still true when you drive past it in ten years. There's stock to order and wait on, ground to read, a line to set out and check and set out again, posts to plant and concrete and then leave well alone while it goes off, because concrete keeps its own hours and doesn't care whose weekend you've spent asking it to hurry.

"Hmph. Sorry, that's not enough lead time. I need at least two weeks." The professional in me set the words down flat and square, a post rammed into firm ground. And I was being generous at that — a job worth its own name was three weeks, four. Two was the floor, the everything-falls-right number, and nothing ever fell entirely right.

Underneath, though, something had turned over and wouldn't settle. There'd been a note in his voice I knew from the inside, because I'd been hearing it in my own for months — the flat, careful evenness I put on with Bill, with the bank, levelling the words out so the wanting wouldn't show in them.

"You'll be well compensated for it."

Compensated. The word arrived in a collar and tie. Blokes on the phone said they'd sort me out, said name your price, said they'd see me right. They didn't say compensated. That was a word for after something had already gone wrong — money sent in behind a loss to square the books and buy a bit of quiet.

"How much?" Out before I'd decided to ask it.

A pause, and when he spoke his voice had come down low, like the figure was heavy enough that he had to mind how he set it down. "One hundred thousand dollars." Then, into the gap he'd left: "In cash."

"Shit!" It was out of me before I knew it was coming, hardly more than breath, and I stood there gripping the phone while the fog closed back over the glass in front of my face. A hundred thousand. I did the one thing I know how to do with a number, which is measure it against the ground it has to cover. It cleared Coastal. It cleared the overdraft. It cleared Bill and took that look off his face for good. It was more than the business had turned over in half a year, and it fell on the wrong side of every line I'd spent eight years learning to trust — because no straight job pays a fencer that, and no straight man hands it over in cash.

I knew it was wrong the way I knew a post was out before the level went on it. All of it, off true. And I stood there in a cold towel with the water going to gooseflesh on my back, wanting it anyway.

"What sort of job is it?" Even asking, I understood I'd already made up my mind to hear the rest. I told myself I was only taking the measure of it. That was a lie as well, and a better-made one, because I very nearly believed it.

Static, and him again, slower now, picking his way. "It's… uh… it's a pretty big job. Look why don't you meet me in Collinsvale and we can go over the rough plans. Tell me what you think before you give your yay or nay."

Collinsvale. That laid a cold hand on the back of my neck. Up in the hills west of the city, roads that pinched in narrower as they climbed, wet bush leaning in off both verges, reception thinning out a bar at a time until there was none, the next roof half a kilometre off through the timber. I'd worked up that way. Big blocks, long drives in, a quiet you could stand still in and hear.

"Oh, you're not in Berriedale anymore?" Light, I kept it, though it came out with less give than I'd have liked.

"Yeah, I'm still in Berriedale. Just helping a friend out." Easy — but laid down a shade too clean, the answer cut to length before I'd asked for it. And there was the smallest catch in him before friend. I'd run my hand down enough boards that were dressed and planed to pass for straight and weren't; the word had that same false smoothness, with a lean under it.

Helping a friend. Ordinary words. They went through me cold regardless. And in behind the cold came the rest of it, the way it always came once one thing had let it in — Jenny holding her phone at the breakfast table and not reading a word on it; the daycare fees I'd shuffled across three cards last month, robbing the one to feed the next; the invoices squared off on the office desk that I kept squaring off, because straightening the pile was the one thing left about them I could put right with my hands. The fella at the bank with his unsustainable and his risk management and a look on him I'd have taken plain contempt over.

"Cash?" One word, blunt, out on its own in the open.

"That's right," he said, steady, ready for it. "One hundred thousand of it. On top of cost of materials."

On top of materials. That was the part that shifted the floor under me. Labour was labour, but materials on top of it meant scale — a run long enough or heavy enough that the gear alone came to real money, and he'd flicked it off to the side like the tip on a bill. Nobody puts up something that size in two days. Nobody pays a hundred grand cash to have it done with no name on a docket. I had the full shape of the wrongness in my two hands now, turning it over, and I couldn't make myself set it down.

The sense of it was the easiest thing in the world. No job pays that. The timeline was wrong, the money was wrong, the place was wrong, and cash in that quantity only ever meant one thing — no paper, nothing written down, nothing to follow back the way it came. I knew every bit of it standing there dripping, plain as I'd have known it about anyone else's job brought to me for a quote.

But it wasn't anyone else's. It was mine, and I was the one going down, and want is a poor listener. Maybe the friend was some hills money with more of it than sense, wanting a thing thrown up before an auction, or a wedding, or before whoever he was keeping it from came looking. Maybe. It only had to be possible. That was what had gone wrong in me somewhere across those twelve months — I'd stopped needing a thing to make sense. I only needed it to be a door.

And it was only a meeting. A drive up the hill, a look over his plans, a yes or a no said to his face. I'd stood on hundreds of blocks and quoted them; if it stank I'd have the smell of it the moment my boots hit the dirt, and I'd climb back in the ute and come home and that would be that. I told myself all of it, and it stood up on its own, and the ease with which it stood should have been the warning. Nothing I ever built went up that clean and stayed up.

"I'll meet you there in about thirty," I heard myself say.

The words were out ahead of me, decided somewhere well below the part of me that does the arguing.

"Great. I'll text you the address." There was satisfaction under it, quick, and covered straight over.

"Okay." It came out small.

The line went dead and left me with the fan and the drip and the fog crawling back across the glass. I set the phone down on the basin. The face in the mirror had cleared enough to see properly now, and it didn't look rescued. It looked like it was still standing there, dripping, listening for the catch.