by Toni Jordan
‘Was it? Odd.’ He looks especially spiffy today. He is wearing a new silk cravat in blue and green tucked under his white shirt and tweed blazer, and his hair has a brilliantine shine. I think he has even lost a little weight. He walks to the end of the hall and closes the door after Beau comes in. ‘That must have been your brother,’ he says. ‘I’ll speak with him directly.’
My brother. Sam is sloppy about many things, but not about that. ‘Dad,’ I say. ‘The locks.’
‘The locks? Of course.’ And only then does he deliberately fasten each of them. ‘No need for that look on your face, young lady. If you saw the door was open you should not have come in. You should have gone directly to the safe house, and taken Beaufort with you. It might have been a drill, to rehearse our movements if we should become compromised. It behooves us to practise now and again.’
First Sam was to blame for leaving the door open. Now he has almost convinced himself it was deliberate. I bend down to look in one of the boxes. ‘And what is all this stuff ?’ I say.
‘This?’ He chuckles in a way that sets my teeth on edge, and takes my shoulders to move me aside. ‘No peeking. Not yet. This is the apex of my career, Della. This is the grandest, most magnificent scheme I have ever devised.’
‘You talk to him,’ Ruby says. ‘He won’t listen to me.’
I sit on the arm of the couch and rest my elbows on my knees. I’d never noticed before, but the leather is cracking and this part of the frame is coming away from the back. After all these years it might be ready to collapse under our weight. ‘What scheme?’
‘Ah,’ he says, folding his arms. ‘That would be telling.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ I say. ‘It would be telling. That’s why I would be asking.’
‘See?’ says Ruby. ‘He’s impossible.’
‘No sense being premature about these things. Things must progress to their natural fruition. I just need a little longer to finalise my stratagem,’ he says. ‘Beaufort is helping me, aren’t you boy?’ He winks at Beau, now standing in the hall.
‘Yes, Uncle Laurence,’ Beau says, and I can see him stand a little taller and straighter with this knowledge that he has and I haven’t. He folds his arms, too, the mirror of my father, and looks at me with something like defiance. I see now I should have answered his questions in the car.
‘That’s not how it works,’ I say. ‘That’s not how you taught us. Every job is raised at the weekly meeting and we all decide whether to proceed. We don’t go off by ourselves, you always said. It’s not smart and it’s not safe. That’s one of your rules.’
He avoids my eyes. One of the cardboard boxes is partly open; he bends over and folds closed the flap so I can’t see what’s inside, then when he straightens again he holds one hand on the small of his back and puffs like he is blowing out candles.
‘Ask him how all this junk got here,’ says Ruby.
I don’t need to ask him. The look on Ruby’s face tells me.
‘Dad. Did you have all this stuff delivered here? To our home address?’
He is fussing around his boxes and for a moment it seems he doesn’t hear me. ‘Hmmm? Once in a lifetime opportunity, this is. The normal rules do not apply. Ruby worries for no reason.’ He drops his voice to a whisper. ‘It’s the change of life. Makes her edgy.’
Ruby throws her hands in the air and stalks back to the kitchen.
Our home address is never used for business, not ever. We have worked from post office boxes and self-storage units and vacant lots and empty houses and shops waiting to be leased, but we never use our home address for a job. We must be untraceable. And we are so careful. Uncle Syd is responsible for our props department, and only the most innocuous or easily hidden are allowed to stay here. Uniforms, decals for vans in the names of telecommunications and utility companies, identity tags, spare mobile phones and scanners and printers, paper of all types: these can stay, if they fold flat or have an innocent purpose. But nothing else.
Even in the glory days of the eighties when my father sold pallet upon pallet of slimming tea and we went to Portsea for a holiday with the profits and ate at posh restaurants every night, the tea never came here. It was always stored in a dusty anonymous warehouse where we would sit at trestle tables in a familial production line, one day packing and addressing and stamping boxes to be sent all over the world, the next day processing cheques and money orders and cash. The only slimming tea that made it here to Cumberland Street were the packets that Ruby brought home in her handbag and sipped religiously every night.
None of my father’s jobs ever came here. The engine additive that doubled fuel consumption never came here. The insurance company brochures, the investment prospectuses, the deeds and flyers for the land on the Queensland island that was under water at high tide. None of it ever came here.
Nothing bigger than we can carry in our pocket or flush down the toilet, that is the rule. All my life I have followed the rules. And now he says the normal rules do not apply.
He teeters over to where I sit on the couch. My arms are folded. I glare.
‘Don’t concern yourself, my dear,’ he says, and he tousles my hair the way he did when I was a child. ‘I just need a little more time, and then I shall make a presentation that none of you shall soon forget. There’s life in your old man yet.’
I open my mouth to lecture him, tell him that the rules are for him too but then I stop. For the first time I notice that his eyes are wet with fluid that looks thicker than tears and the bottom lid is puckered away from the eyeball. Rheumy eyes. Old-man eyes.
Tonight will be an extraordinary family meeting. I will present my revised plans for this increased offer from the Metcalf Trust. It is not too late to back out. It will be a long night and I should be relaxing. If we vote in favour of proceeding I’ll barely have time to breathe for a week. I feel too restless to walk, too edgy to drive to the pool for a swim. I have already visited the library and my floor is covered with every book on evolutionary biology and camping that I could borrow. I try to read but until I know for certain that we will vote in favour of my plan, my attention wanders. Every so often I pace. I fluff my pillows, idly dust the window ledge with a tissue. I sit here in my bedroom, sketching plans and ideas.
I have spent my whole life in this room. It is still painted pale pink with bluebell wallpaper along the cornices. Almost everything was bought from Timothy’s father—smart buying for furniture and clothes and other sensible things. Not so smart for electricals: one of the apple sheds is full of thirty years of broken toasters and laptops and stereos that bear the manufacturer’s serial number, which is traceable. We can’t take them for repair.
Here are my computer, printer and scanner. The shredder is in the corner. There is no rubbish bin. As soon as something is shredded, regardless of the inconvenience or the weather, it is walked to the compost heap and stirred among the vegetable peelings and rotten fruit. The wardrobe is cheap veneer with sticky-tape marks from the posters of pop stars I stuck to it in my teens. Inside it are business suits for when I’m a banker, furs for when I’m a millionaire, shabby peasant skirts for when I am a hippy who owns priceless oceanfront land down the coast and isn’t worldly enough to know what to do with it but just requires a wealthy ‘friend’ to pay a bribe to a planning official, usually played by Beau. He’s a brilliant planning official. The bed is single for a little girl, country-style American oak with worn spots where it hinges to the bed head; the dresser is white reclaimed timber that was once merely distressed but is now hysterical. The bedside table is faded antique Queen Anne. The gold curtains clash with the teal carpet. The real crystal chandelier sparkles on the fake cane chair with cheesecloth cushion, on which sits a pile of teddy bears from my childhood.
Now I think how old this house is; that everything in it is old too. All the furniture is wearing and splitting and the curtains are thinning and the wallpaper is lifting and the carpet is a palette of mysterious stains. My father has a short attention span for household effects.
We might have a painting for some months that he declares he loves, then suddenly it will vanish. That old thing? Bored with it, my dear, bored with it. Once we had a dinner service handed down, if not through generations of our family, then certainly through generations of somebody’s. Hand-painted Japanese ladies waving fans on bridges, porcelain so thin the light shone through. Ruby loved it. She would sip tea from a fragile cup and rest a biscuit on the matching saucer. She loved that dinner service, but it just vanished overnight. Can’t stand it another minute, my father said. Either it goes or I do.
I have lived in this house for so long I have not noticed it decaying around me. I am wearing, too. Slipping in and out of different names and lives grates away at my skin. I think about Daniel Metcalf, who is the one person all the time. How simple things must be for him. Like everything in this house, like everything in this room, nothing in my life matches.
‘I don’t like it,’ says Sam. He leans back in his chair and scratches his stomach.
‘I’ve met him. It’s legit,’ says Greta. She gives me a wan smile. She is supporting me in any way she can, after our little altercation earlier in the kitchen. At first she tried to defend her behaviour this morning with lame explanations about his money and the way he looked. I had calmed down by then. No threats were involved. I just carefully explained that if Daniel’s attentions wander we will all get nothing and we will all miss out and everyone will know who is responsible. This is business. It is not personal.
And it is a wonderful business. We have taken from many of his kind over the years, a small way towards balancing the score of inherited privilege. I have only met Daniel Metcalf twice but I know him well, or as well as I need to. I have met many of his type: idle, with a sense of entitlement that seeps from their pores. No direction. So bored that spending a weekend in the forest with a bunch of scientists seems like a harmless lark.
‘He’s just another rich guy who doesn’t know which end is up,’ says Julius, who often seems to read my mind. ‘You know how much we’ve made from people like that over the years. Rich people. Dumb as planks. It’s the inbreeding, you know. They’ve got the IQ of a floorboard. Metcalf won’t even know he’s been done.’
‘You should have heard him today, at the uni,’ I say. ‘“Glenda will still be around then? She won’t be in the Mojave Desert chasing coyotes?” I could barely keep a straight face.’
‘Now Della,’ my father says. ‘I know it’s tempting to make sport with these fools. But it’s not their fault, remember.’
‘No one just gives away that much money,’ says Sam. ‘Not even someone stupid. Something smells.’
Sam is not normally like this. He is normally up for anything. He’s the one who sees possibilities, not problems.
We have been talking for hours. The blackboard is filled with lines and arrows and lists and figures. It is dark outside now and the brocade wallpaper does not help the light in here. There are three empty bottles of merlot and ten dirty glasses, and take-away pizza boxes in the middle of the table next to the crystal candelabra and months of raised mounds of set candle wax. I drove to the shops and picked up the pizzas myself. I had a sudden fear my father would ask for home delivery.
He had only one slice, despite Ruby’s urging, and no dessert. Perhaps he is feeling unwell. Also on the table are camping-store catalogues downloaded from the web and my piles of books from the library. Occasionally someone reaches for one and flicks through it, as if they were in a dentist’s office.
‘There are all kinds of charitable trusts, when you know to look for them,’ Julius says. ‘Family trusts, trusts set up by private philanthropists, by big business. Trusts that give money for poetry, classical music, art history. There’s nothing strange about it at all. We’ve just never targeted it before, that’s all. I’m seriously thinking about being a violin prodigy from some third-world country for my next job.’
‘I didn’t know you could play the violin,’ says Beau.
‘I’ve hurt my arm. Lifting water from the well. Maybe I need the money for an urgent wrist tendon cartilage elbow stem cell operation to save my career. An arthroscopic hemi-orthomolecular tendonectomy. And here’s a genius recording I made earlier.’
‘I think we can lighten up on the well, Julius,’ I say.
He shrugs. ‘Feeding the goats then. It’s got to be exotic or they won’t buy it. I can’t say I hurt it on my Wii Fit.’
‘Della,’ says Ruby, ‘what do we really know about Metcalf?’
‘What’s to know?’ I say. ‘Daniel is just another over-privileged under-disciplined rich boy.’
‘Now now, Della,’ says my father. ‘Let’s not be prejudicial. Young Metcalf has not had the benefit of your upbringing. He was never trained to live by his wits. He was not brought up to live the rare and wild life of the fox or the eagle. He is imprisoned by values that are not of his making. He is a battery chicken in a gilded cage. He is a gelding with a golden bridle, tamed with a bit of iron.’
‘I don’t think he’s a gelding,’ says Greta.
‘If we’re the fox, I’m pretty sure he should be a rabbit,’ says Beau.
‘It doesn’t matter what he is,’ I say.
‘Unless we’re an eagle. Then he could be a chicken. But he’d have to be a small chicken if an eagle was to grab him, because the eagles around here aren’t that big,’ says Beau. ‘Maybe he’s a quail.’
‘I don’t think he’s a quail either,’ says Greta.
‘It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘For all I care he can be a bloody Tasmanian tiger. All that matters is the money.’
‘I can’t believe you can look at him and only see the money,’ says Greta. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Perhaps Della has not space in her affections for any other man,’ says my father. He winks at Sam. Ruby rolls her eyes.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘It was funny the first hundred times or so. Memo to all of you. This business with Timothy has gone far enough.’
‘It’d be better psychologically if you saw Metcalf as a chicken,’ says Beau. ‘Positive visualisation.’
‘I am not going to think of Daniel as any kind of bird whatsoever,’ I say. ‘I’m not going to think of him at all. He’s a mark. That’s it. He’s not one of us.’
‘There’s nothing insulting about being a chicken,’ Beau says. ‘They can be quite intelligent, you know. They talk to each other. If a predator is coming, they can tell another chicken what kind it is. A fox, for example.’
‘“Daniel?”’ says Sam. ‘That’s twice you called him Daniel.’
‘You’re an idiot,’ I say. ‘That’s his name. And you. Forget about the chicken.’
‘It’s not easy being continually underestimated, Della,’ Beau says. ‘I know. I can see it from the chicken’s point of view.’
‘Metcalf is certainly a famous name in Melbourne society circles,’ says my father. ‘It would be a feather in our cap to lighten the young man’s pockets just a little.’
‘I’m for it,’ says Uncle Syd. ‘We should trust Della, whatever she calls him. She knows what she’s doing.’
‘Me too. My granny was a scullery maid for the Metcalfs during the Great Depression, cleaning silver and lighting fires. This is decades of back wages,’ says Ava. ‘And Samson. You shouldn’t tease your sister in that way. It’s an important part of her job, to make men fall in love with her.’
‘I don’t think it’s that important,’ I say. ‘I do have a brain, you know.’
‘Don’t you remember the Kowalski sting, Della? Milton Kowalski, he was in love with you. I think he proposed, didn’t he? And before that, the vicar who was responsible for the parish investments? And he gave investment advice to the whole congregation, remember? That church was loaded. What was his name?’ says Beau.
‘I thought he was going to faint every time he saw you, the reverend. The way he ran his finger around the inside of his collar like it was suddenly too tight. Incredibly phallic, it was,�
�� says Uncle Syd. ‘Don’t make a face, Della. You’ve never objected to playing the femme fatale before.’
‘I’m not objecting. It’s just that there’s more to it than that.’
‘You’re frightened of him,’ says Sam. ‘Metcalf. I can see it in your eyes. You’ve been frightened of him since you first met him.’
‘I’m not frightened of anybody, much less a Metcalf. I’m reeling him in.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ says Aunt Ava. ‘I was young once. I made a good living out of my face and figure in those days. Having men fall for you is an occupational hazard in this business, Della. Just keep your eye on the ball.’
‘I’m not on the game, you know,’ I say. ‘I make a living the same way you all do. I don’t work lying on my back.’
‘Just as well, or we’d all starve to death,’ says Greta under her breath.
‘Excuse me Greta. It’s not that easy to meet someone, you know?’ I say.
‘Stick to your own circle. You’ve got heaps of men to choose from, just in the people we know,’ says Greta.
‘Really.’
‘Certainly,’ my father says. ‘What’s wrong with Tony? He’s always asking me about you.’
‘Which Tony?’ says Greta. ‘The SP bookie? Or the financial planner who does the money laundering?’
‘There’s lots of guys down at the track,’ says Beau. ‘Carl, Louis. The guy with the eczema, what’s his name? The one who trains greyhounds. He’s got a great car.’
‘Thanks so much for the advice,’ I say. ‘Really. You all need to get a hobby.’
‘There’s Omar the loan shark,’ says Anders. ‘I could get you his number.’
‘Decoupage. Bongo playing. Anything,’ I say.
‘You’ve made the right choice anyway,’ says Greta. ‘Tim’s the cream of the crop.’
‘As fascinating as this little digression is, if we could get back to the matter at hand?’ says Ruby. ‘We need to discuss if this job is even feasible. It wasn’t set up as a long con. There’s a tremendous amount of work to be done in a limited amount of time. Now. Metcalf has already seen me, and Greta and Julius.’