Two Men Leaving Early

The farewell for Senior Constable Bryce Tanner was held at the Queenslander he rented in Mollison Street, a block back from Boundary Street. Tanner was leaving Stafford for a posting in Townsville, and most of the station's day shift came, along with his rugby club, his housemates, and whoever his younger sister Kellie had brought from her course at the Southbank Institute of TAFE. By nine o'clock there were more than forty people between the kitchen, the back stairs and the yard.

Senior Constable Karl Jenkins arrived late and in his work shoes. He had not intended to come. Senior Sergeant Graham Mitchell had made a point at the end of shift of saying who would be expected at Tanner's, and Karl had understood that his name was on that list whether it was spoken or not. He brought a six-pack he did not open, stood near the back door, and spoke to almost no one.

Jamie Greyson was eighteen and three months into his Certificate III in aged care. He was there because Kellie Tanner, his closest friend in the class, had refused to go without him. He was the youngest person in the house and among the quietest, and he spent most of the first two hours on the back stairs with a drink he barely touched.

Shane Mulcahy, a front-rower from Tanner's rugby club, had been drinking since the afternoon. When he learnt what Jamie was studying, he made a running joke of it in front of the people gathered at the bottom of the stairs, pressing on the subject of a young man wiping old people for a living and what that said about him. Jamie said nothing for several minutes. Then he stood, put his cup down on the step, and hit Mulcahy in the mouth.

The punch was clumsy, and Mulcahy was twice his size. Karl was across the yard before Mulcahy had finished registering it. He did not pull out his badge or raise his voice. He put himself between the two men, said something to Mulcahy at close range that ended the matter, and took Jamie by the upper arm and walked him out through the side gate onto the street. Several of the Stafford officers watched him go. None of them had seen him move that quickly off duty, or seen his face set the way it was as he passed them.

Neither man went back inside. They walked down to the river and sat on the stone wall at Orleigh Park under the figs, with the lights of the city reach on the opposite bank.

Jamie did most of the talking at first, and none of it was about Mulcahy. He spoke about a house where his parents had stopped pretending, and about the strain of being the one who never caused trouble in it. Karl listened without interrupting. When it was his turn, he admitted that he had wanted to hit Mulcahy himself, and that the wanting had frightened him more than anything that had happened at the bottom of the stairs.

That admission changed the conversation. Each recognised in the other a temper kept under strict management, and the cost of keeping it there. They talked until well after one in the morning. Jamie described the walking tracks he took on his days off, through the forest behind Mount Coot-tha and out along the creeks to the west of the city. Karl had never walked any of them. Before they left the wall, they had agreed that he would.

Karl drove Jamie home, sober, in the car he had parked outside the party. Jamie asked to be dropped at the end of his street rather than outside the house. They exchanged mobile numbers at the kerb.

Kellie Tanner received a text message from Jamie shortly before two telling her he had got home. Bryce Tanner noticed only the next morning that the one guest he had expected to leave early had done so, and that he had not left alone.