Dark Clouds on the Mountain. John Tully

point at the sink by the back window, Helen could see white puffs of smoke drifting up from behind the shed. They evaporated lazily over the terraced lawns in the foreground and the blue bulk of the Mountain behind. It was a real Indian summer, windless and cloudless and it couldn't last. She smiled wanly, her wide, full lips pulled to one side, picturing her husband sitting there, puffing furiously on a full-strength Marlboro in the late autumn sun, the dog, Rosie, by his side: an athlete gone slightly to seed. He'd wreck his lungs. A good chance of emphysema by the time he was fifty, if not something worse. A typical copper - detective anyway - stressed out most of the time, running on adrenaline, nicotine and coffee. Booze too, but not as much as some of his mates. Running to flab from a diet of meat pies and sauce, chips and the deep-fried dog's turds they called chicken rolls, gobbled down on the run between cases, ingesting cumulatively lethal doses of salt, sugar and saturated fats. Diluted with caffeine and alcohol.

      Not that nurses were much better, she ruminated. She had smoked until five years ago herself, until a stint on the cancer ward had quite literally put the fear of death into her. 'I was your age once,' a woman of a certain age had croaked, coughing up her lungs, still sneaking off for a smoke when nobody was looking, crying by herself on the balcony. Helen had hugged her tight, this walking confirmation of inevitable mortality. Anyway, here Helen was again, the meat in the family sandwich: Jack was out there sulking and Wendy was in her room, damaging her eardrums with loud rap music. Sulking. The latest row had blown up suddenly, like a squall off the Derwent estuary, scattering their plans for a quiet night with friends in the garden. Their friends - her friends if she admitted it - would be round in an hour or so; perhaps there was time to cool down the warring parties and salvage the night. She drained the sink and dried her hands on a towel before reaching out for her glass of wine.

      'Mum!' Her daughter's distant voice cut into her thoughts. Why do they always do that? Helen thought. Why do they call out from the other end of the house? Jack was just as bad. Perhaps there really was something in what her women's studies tutor was saying about the married woman as drudge.

      Helen had started part-time at the university that year. She'd thought about enrolling for years, but probably wouldn't have got round to it but for Wendy. Jack was okay about it. He wasn't closed minded like some of the coppers she'd met through his work. His mates Fuller and Langdale for instance, they were positively medieval about women's rights, and Duncan Snodgers was the archetypal male chauvinist pig, a puritanical Scot weaned on John Knox's doctrines: 'First blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women'. Typical Prod, too, her mum would have said. As for that fat-faced goon Sergeant Paisley, he didn't bear thinking about, she shuddered.

      Jack wasn't like that and if things had been different, he could have gone on with his own studies. He was well read, better read than she, always with his nose in a book when he got the chance and at times she sensed a bitter resentment in him that he'd missed his true vocation. Not that it stopped him being obsessive about his job, but underneath the cynical patina of the hard-boiled professional policeman there was something donnish about him; from the tweed coats and corduroy trousers to the slightly astigmatic and short-sighted way he'd peer at his surroundings, walled in with his own thoughts. What other cop read books about the Renaissance, she wondered. Most of them would think it was a horse at Caulfield or something...

      Wendy was calling out again, her voice muffled by the intervening walls and the sound of the water she was running. She sounded indignant. 'I can't hear you,' Helen replied, raising her voice rather louder than she would have wished. 'You'll have to come in here, I'm afraid.' The reply was an incomprehensible gurgling sound, as if the girl was speaking through a mouthful of toothpaste. She'd have misplaced something. 'What is it? Socks? T-shirt? Earrings? Knickers? ...Head?' Helen called, moving to the kitchen door, her tone less hostile than the words might seem. 'You'll have to come here, darling.'

      Wendy came out and stood in the doorway, dabbing at her wet brown rat's tails with a bath towel, clad in jeans and sloppy jumper. She regarded her mother quizzically with piercing sky-blue eyes; her father's eyes. 'I haven't lost anything,' she pouted; her lips full and wide like her mother's. 'I just wanted to know where Dad went.' She wasn't wearing a bra and that was bound to piss him off; probably was intended to.

      'The same place he always goes,' replied her mother. 'Out the back, drawing on a gasper, as he calls the wretched things. You going to make up with him?' Wendy grinned lopsidedly and Helen raised an eyebrow, tossing back her strawberry-blonde hair. 'You know what the problem is...

      'Yeah, yeah, Mum,' her daughter cut in, not quite managing to mask the irritation in her voice. 'We're too much alike: hot Italian blood and all that. You've told me a million times before.'

      She sloped off to her room. Loud rap music erupted again. Helen had been shocked when she actually listened to the words of one song (if you could call it a song): 'fuck this, fuck that, fuck you'; violent, misogynist, homophobic, 'fuck you doggy style, bitch, faggot.' Yuk. It was a good job Jack couldn't understand the words. Had he done so, it would have nodded agreement with Nietzsche that 'only sick music makes money today' and tried to confiscate the tape. A funny bugger like that. Being a cop hadn't done anything to tone down the authoritarian and puritanical streak in his nature. Helen sighed, splashed more white wine into her glass and went out the back.

      There was just the faintest chill in the air. Summer had gone, but they were at the end of a glorious autumn day: a real surprise after weeks of glowering Roaring Forties weather that sent the leaves shivering and swirling up into the sky where the birds circled endlessly before heading north. Helen's garden spread out before her, rising in a series of stone-walled terraces planted with native evergreens - wattles and gums, blackwoods, man ferns in the shady spots - interspersed with the fruit trees Jack liked. The latter were heavy with apples and pears that they'd really have to pick soon, maybe this weekend, or they'd fall to the ground and spoil. The Mountain was in a serene mood, rising blue and massive under a cloudless sky, the lower slopes darkly forested and mysterious in the late afternoon shadow, the tops of the Organ Pipes catching the thinning sun four thousand feet above the town.

      She took a long sip of wine and leaned back against the kitchen table, luxuriating in the warmth, letting her mind wander back over their lives. They'd been happy here in Darcy Street, and although the house had been a wreck when they'd first moved in almost fifteen years earlier, they'd restored it to its Edwardian splendour with leadlight windows, polished Baltic pine floors and tasteful paintwork. The extension was okay too for all that Jack called it the Scout Hall on account of its vast proportions and rectangular shape. If you stood at one end and yelled, your voice practically echoed off the far wall! They were in a good location, too; the Sandy Bay shops were not far away down precipitous Lynton Avenue and the city was only a couple of kilometres away. Well, they'd been as happy as could be, she supposed, with a husband who was always on the go, called out at all hours.

      Her own shifts didn't help. She stifled the old resentment as she caught sight of the old bugger sitting dejectedly before her on the rustic bench he'd made in his workshop. One of the only things he'd made, though he had enough power tools to set up in business as a carpenter and joiner. The time just drained away through his fingers. The dog's tail thumped on the sandstone flags. She came up behind him and put a hand on Jack's shoulder, averting her face from his cigarette smoke, and said softly, 'G'day, Jack'. He looked up and managed a smile. One of his front teeth needed filling and he looked tired, with black pouches under his eyes and a grey complexion in startling contrast with the blue of his eyes.

      'How's the time going?' he asked, more to say something than anything else. Helen angled her wrist so that he could see her watch. He grunted. The Rattray-Spencers would be here soon and he'd have to light the barbecue. His digestive juices prinked inside him at the thought of the coming meal: steaks, chops, sausages from the 'Wursthaus', thick ketchup or mustard, 'Blue Banner' pickled onions, and salad. All washed down with a decent red. His stomach rumbled audibly and despite himself his mood lightened. Wendy was a vegetarian, but he'd bought some veggie burgers should she choose to 'dine in' with them that evening. Although he'd never admit it, he sympathised with her abhorrence of meat. Years before, over in Melbourne, when he was a sparky, he'd done a job out in the abattoirs in Footscray and it still turned his stomach when he thought about what went on there. He'd even tried eating that tofu stuff, but it was tasteless fare beside