O, Fortuna

Chapter 18

With his usual professionalism and attention to detail, Liam could not allow the bikes to go home to their owners before they were not only mechanically sound but looking the part also. He knew perfectly well that when the young teenage Bayliss boys did use them next, it would be for bashing around their father's back paddock in dirt and mud but that did not mean Liam would be handing them over to their father the following morning in anything but showroom condition and so spent twenty minutes ensuring both motorcycles were pristine.

Liam had just loaded the second bike back up onto their trailer and turned to cleaning up his workspace when he heard the first hint of conversation out on the front veranda. A brief glance at his watch told him it was a little after eleven and he groaned heavily, caught between his fatigue and the realisation that his sister was right in wanting to tell Grace everything she knew about June, even if he was still grappling with the idea of talking about things he had heard over the years. No smoke without fire, as the saying went, but Liam also understood how wild some people's imaginations could get and that inevitably fanned the flames.

He moved toward the lockable storage cabinet, both hands full of tools that he needed to return to their rightful place within it, as he began doing so, realised that the one thing that annoyed him more than anything about having to speak of what he heard in the past was that he had started thinking not only in terms of June's life but that of his family, his mother's departure and his father's recent admission about being with June. Far from being indifferent to all the machinations as he might have claimed in the past, Liam now understood that was not the case, like something had rammed into the wall he liked to hide behind in life and it was beginning to crumble. Afghanistan might have started the demolition process but June's death seemed to be putting in the long hours to finish tearing it all down.

He also found himself quietly concerned about Deanna coming home early, though she explained at the dinner table that Will had gone back to Amberley for a farewell piss-up that evening ahead of his return to duty on Monday, Liam was convinced there was something more. She was good at hiding her inner frustrations and worries, or at least masking them with flippant sarcasm but of late, her husband’s name had not come up a great deal in conversation. Deanna understood that Will was not her brother’s favourite person in the world and vice versa, but that had not prevented her from talking about her husband at considerable length in the five years since she had met him. Since the start of the year though, Will had been to Faridah only twice whilst on leave and more often than not, Deanna had returned from her time with him decidedly taciturn and it would be a few days before she would be her old self again. It had actually been a relief to find her in such a gregarious mood that afternoon, even if she was determined to open a very large can of worms.

He snapped the padlock shut on the garage door and took a deep breath. Alright, he decided as he began making his way toward the front of the main house, so maybe Grace wasn't entirely to blame for his mood in the last few days and perhaps he was making things more difficult for himself, had been, for a very long time. Liam grunted to himself, utterly convinced that what he was about to subject himself to was going to be keeping him up at night long after Grace had gone home and he would finally be able to put her out of his mind properly. Short though the distance might have been between the garage and the main house, he nearly turned back twice to take the longer, alternate route back the caretakers house.

But the moment he turned the corner from the side and onto the front of the house, Liam was in sight of Deanna and Grace, sitting at the top of the stairs on the veranda and his sister, holding aloft the recognisable lines of a rectangular-shaped bottle of Bundaberg Rum and having, apparently, already taken quite a dip into, rather too loudly called to him

"Want a glass, then?"

"Think I'd better" Liam responded as he moved up the stairs "before you have another one. And keep the noise down, they can hear you on the Gold Coast, Jesus!" Deanna snorted derisively as she reached for the spare glass.