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.Ageless impressionist subject matter.You’ve also spotted the scene in a hundred atmospheric summer photographs: skinny showoff boys caught mid-air, spread-eagled between jetty and water.Even at my age I envied them.Already my shirt was sticking to me from all that trudging after the missed balls.The buffalo runners had an annoying way of gripping the ball and stopping it from rolling back down to me.‘Don’t be a bad sport,’ I told him.I was feeling disheartened as well as hot.Anthony was ruining the party mood.As I threw the ball back to Brian, I said, ‘Don’t bowl any more until the spoilsport walks.’Brian looked for direction to the women with the spritzers and balloons.In the shade of the peppermint trees the Miller sisters had taken off their sunhats, revealing three different hues of red hair in gradations from vivid orange-peel to mercuric-sulphide pigment to dark rust.They had cigarettes going, too, which interfered with their balloon-blowing efforts, and every now and then one of the women would gasp and giggle and her half-inflated balloon would escape, spinning, blurting and farting crazily over their heads.The dark-rusty one, Liz, Anthony’s mother and my stepmother, glanced at us.‘I hope you’ve got sunscreen on, Ant,’ she said.Brian looked back at me uncertainly.‘Show him again how to hold the bat.’Jesus, Brian was being avuncular.He was twenty-eight, married to the youngest Miller sister, Jeanette, and in our occasional dealings the seven years he had over me seemed to give him the advantage.But in the matter of Anthony, I felt I had the upper hand.Brian was only Anthony’s uncle by marriage, and even less related to me, not my family at all.Anyway, I had deaths on my side.Two deaths gave me the edge.‘Here we go again,’ I said.I gripped Anthony’s narrow shoulders and spun him side-on to the bowler.The panther emblem was stamped on the bat as well.I twisted the bat handle around in his hands.‘This is your last ball,’ I said.‘Keep a straight bat.See that panther on the bat? It should face your right leg.Defend your wicket.Take it easy.Don’t swing like a dunny door.’He squirmed free of my hands and shuffled back to his incorrect stance.If he swung the bat from there he’d not only miss the ball again but knock his wicket over.His eyes had an oddly familiar shine.My father’s old Dewar’s glint, his Johnnie Walker midnight-aggressive glint.‘Go shit-fuck-shit away!’ Anthony growled.‘I don’t have to take any notice of you!’My God, he needed a smack.‘That’s not even proper swearing, Paleface,’ I said as I walked off.When I arrived at the restaurant, an outdoor seafood place in the Fremantle fishing harbour, he was already seated.An unusual choice for Anthony, I thought; not fashionable, overly marine-themed, with a table of bluff Yorkshire accents and porky pink skins on one side of us, a tidy arrangement of Japanese on the other.There was the usual network of wires strung above the tables to discourage seagulls, and several pleading Please Don’t Feed the Birds signs.The tourists were ignoring these deterrents and hurling their chips into the harbour, where diving and wheeling gulls enjoyed uninterrupted and raucous access.I’d suggested the lunch at my stepmother’s behest.‘What’s he doing with his life?’ Liz moaned.‘Can you find out and give him some advice, put him right?’ According to her, Anthony had abruptly left Angela and their two children, tossed in his partnership with Fairhall Burns Corrie, turned vegetarian, and was ‘living with some hippie witch in a mud hut up in the hills’.I think she thought I was more in tune with low-life ways.Painting and bohemia and all that.It sounded like an early midlife crisis to me, a middle-class cliché, but at this stage Liz was phoning me in tears every night with news of Anthony’s latest New Age transgression.‘He’s killing me.I don’t understand him anymore.He’s acting all superior to everyone, angry and touchy-feely at the same time.The hippie witch must have some eerie power over him.’I heard deep raspy breaths; she was drawing heavily on a cigarette and even over the phone she sounded old and needy
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