“Take all the time you need. We’re not going anywhere… apart from bloody London, apparently. Big thing on your part. We know that. But if you want to do it, just pick up the phone.”
McLoughlin was too overcome to speak further. The generosity being shown towards him was, for the moment, literally turning his stomach into a knot. He left the house and walked outside. Kazumi joined him. A short distance from the house he turned to his intended bride.
“What do you think?”
She buried her head into his chest. “I’m your woman now,” she answered softly. “I go along with what you say.”
“No,” he told her. “This is about us. It’s what you want too…”
“I want what you want, Sergeant Ken. I live anywhere just as long as I can be with you and make you happy. You want my body? You have my body anytime. You want my soul? You have my soul. You want my touch? You have all of my touch…”
“Ssssh,” he told her. “I want you as my best friend. My lover. My soulmate. I want to laugh with you and if need be, cry with you. I want to love you and for you to love me. I don’t even want to piss and know you’re more than five feet away.”
“Sergeant Ken, I be with you forever.”
“What about living here?”
“You say six months. OK, six months we talk again.”
“You want to come back to Mildura with me for a week or two?”
She turned to Katie. “That OK, Miss Katie…?”
“I’ve already talked to her about that. There’s a young woman in town who’ll fill in for you when you’re not here.”
“OK, I go to Mildura.” Then Kazumi’s eyes opened widely as she looked up at him. “And London in three months?”
“London in three months.”
* * *
McLoughlin rang his boss in Mildura, Inspector John Purseley, and the Police Commissioner in Melbourne to tell them he’d be returning from his holidays earlier than expected but would need two weeks off to go to London and get married in three months’ time. Neither had a problem with any of it.
“So we’ll see you back here next Monday week?” Purseley confirmed.
“Indeed.”
Four days later, McLoughlin and Kazumi left Katie’s Place to drive to Mildura. “I have special question, Sergeant Ken,” she said to him a short time after they’d gotten underway. “You never tell me anything about you. I don’t know if you’ve ever been married. Family. You know. Brothers, sisters, parents?”
McLoughlin laughed. “No. No skeletons in the cupboard. My life has been pretty much a ‘come-day, go-day’ sort of existence. No wives. A girlfriend here and there, but nothing too serious. I’ve just been a policeman all my working life. All my friends, well most of them anyway, have been divorced because this job isn’t conducive to happy marriages. The only reason I reckon we can make it is my time is nearly up and you won’t have to be a policeman’s wife for very long. But apart from that, my parents are both gone. My mum died of a stroke when I was forty. And ten years later my father died the same way. I had a brother, no sisters. He was my twin. Harold. Big bugger too. When he walked through a door he darkened the room. He was killed in Vietnam one week after his nineteenth birthday. His number came out of the barrel and mine didn’t. I wanted to join up but my mother said, ‘No Way!’ When we got word Harold had stepped on a mine, Jesus! It damn near killed her. Pop too! All of us, really. Harold and I were really close. Did all the boy-stuff. Chased girls, fooled around with old cars. Probably drank too much beer.” He gave a slight snigger. “Actually, we did drink too much beer. Went fishing mostly. It took a long time to get over that. And you know, I don’t think you ever really do,” he told her, not taking his eyes off the road.
“So you had a typhoon in your life too?” she replied sadly.
McLoughlin forced a smile. “Yes, darling girl…I had a typhoon in my life too.”
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