CHAPTER THREE #2
Pip watched him do it. She'd watched him do it for four years now, the small controlled retreat every time something true got said too near him, and she recognised it, because she did the exact same thing herself, just with a duffel bag instead of a coffee urn, and there was a strange, tender solidarity in recognising your own particular cowardice reflected back at you in someone else's hands.
Down the table, Jax was working his way toward them the way he worked a room every year — slow, unhurried, a big steady man reading forty people's tiredness the way Renz read cups and Josie read charts, the accumulated instinct of a man who'd spent eleven years being the last line of defence between this crew and the worst that could happen to them, and who'd learned, somewhere along the way, that the same watchfulness that kept them alive on a fireground was worth turning, gently, on their ordinary Sunday lives as well.
When he reached the two of them he didn't sit, just stood a moment with a hand on the back of an empty chair — the one Renz had left, that morning, without deciding to, front row, facing the fire — and looked at it, and then at the two of them, and said nothing at all, which from Jax Carter was its own kind of sentence, the specific loaded silence of a man choosing not to say the obvious thing out of respect for how long it might take the two people in front of him to arrive there themselves.
"You're staring at a chair," Renz said.
"Good chair," Jax said. "Someone left a gap right where the fire'll be warmest."
"Spare's a spare."
"Sure," Jax said, and moved on down the table to refill nobody's coffee and check on nobody's kid, because unlike Renz he didn't need a job to justify standing still in a crowd he'd built with his own two hands over eleven years — and left the two of them sitting one chair apart from an empty seat that had somehow, without either of them asking for it, become the most closely watched piece of furniture on the whole headland.
Cole had the middle of the table laughing by mid-afternoon, mid-way through the near-miss story everyone had heard some version of before and nobody ever tired of properly, the tale improving reliably with each year's retelling the way all good crew stories eventually did.
"So the tinnie's taking on water faster than either of us can bail it," Cole was saying, hands doing most of the storytelling, "and Maya's up the front bailing with an empty ice cream container, the only thing we've got, and I'm trying to restart this engine that's about as keen to start as a teenager on a school morning, and meanwhile the swell's just getting worse and worse—"
"Tell them what you said," Maya put in, grinning, clearly delighted by her own upcoming cameo in the story.
"I'm getting there." Cole waved her off, warming to it.
"So I finally get the thing started, right, engine catches, and I look back at Maya, who at this point has bailed maybe half the water out with an ice cream container, mind you, absolute hero effort, and I say, dead serious, 'See, told you it'd be fine' — like I hadn't spent the last ten minutes convinced we were about to become a very short news story. "
"And I said," Maya cut in, unable to hold off any longer, "'Cole, I love you, but if we die today I want it on record that this was entirely your fault for not checking the bilge pump before we left,'" and the table dissolved properly this time, Wes nearly choking on his beer, Tam wiping her eyes, the whole crew leaning into the particular warm communal laughter of people who'd heard the punchline coming and delighted in it regardless.
"In my defence," Cole said, once the laughter had settled enough to be heard over, "the bilge pump was fine. It was the actual hull that had the problem, which if anything is a considerably worse thing to have wrong with a boat."
"Not helping your case, mate," Wes said, still grinning, and the table rolled on into the next story, the easy accumulated mythology of a crew that had survived enough near misses together to have turned most of them into comedy rather than trauma, the specific alchemy of time and trust that let genuine fear soften, eventually, into something you could laugh about on a green headland with the people who'd actually been there.
The afternoon went on the way it always went — food and noise and somebody's kid asleep on somebody's shoulder, Wes and Tam trading gentle insults over a game of cards someone had produced from a car boot, the long slow unwinding of forty people setting a year's worth of danger down on a green headland above the sea — and Renz Kowalski moved through all of it the way he moved through every gathering, useful, unhurried, first to notice and last to be noticed, and did not yet understand that this particular year, this particular weekend, the whole Brotherhood had quietly begun watching him the way you watch a pot you know, eventually, is going to come to the boil.
? ? ?
Sasha arrived mid-afternoon, later than most, straight off a shift by the look of her, still faintly smelling of smoke despite the shower she'd clearly grabbed on the way, and made a beeline for Renz the way she always did, cutting through the crowd with the particular unhurried authority of a woman who'd run this crew for over a decade and had never once needed to raise her voice to be heard.
"You remember your first one of these?" she said, taking the coffee he handed her without being asked, the two of them falling into an old rhythm neither had to think about.
"Which first one?"
"Your first gathering. You'd been on the crew what, six months?
Green as anything. Wouldn't sit still the whole day, kept finding jobs to do because you didn't know how to just be at a party where nobody was giving you instructions.
" Sasha's mouth curved, remembering. "I had to physically take a stack of plates out of your hands and tell you to go sit down for ten minutes.
You looked at me like I'd asked you to commit a crime. "
"I remember," Renz said, and something in his face softened, the particular fondness reserved for an old embarrassing memory that had, with enough distance, turned into something closer to affection for his younger self. "I didn't know what to do with my hands if they weren't doing something."
"You still don't, half the time." She said it without judgment, the observation of a woman who'd watched this exact pattern for twelve years and had long since stopped expecting it to resolve on its own.
"But you were good, even then. Remembered things nobody'd asked you to remember.
Wes's missus was pregnant with their first and you'd already worked out she couldn't do dairy, brought a whole separate esky just for her before anyone else had thought of it.
Twenty-two years old and already running the show without anyone handing you the job. "
"Someone's got to notice things."