by Steven Lang
The girl slips into the room crabwise, stopping just inside, against the wall, waiting to be invited forward as if she were a schoolgirl in the headmaster’s office, her movements accompanied by the jingle of a small bell on a woven thread around her ankle, the sort of thing you’d put on a cat to keep it from birds. For she would have music. Small, dusky and dusty, dark-eyed, her hair in dreadlocks, carrying with her, for all her shyness, a wild uncouth assertiveness.
He introduces himself, indicates she should come forward, take the chair at the end of the desk. As she sits she shrugs off her jacket, a soft pretty thing of many colours, revealing a cross-tied garment beneath made of something that’s not suede but appears to be so, and also that she doesn’t shave beneath her arms either, a natural woman this. Giving off a curious salty smell. A silver ring on the longest toe of her left foot.
‘What seems to be the trouble?’
‘Well, see, I’ve been having sex with this guy,’ she says. ‘And now I’ve got this sharp pain when I, you know, pee. It’s come on real quick. I’m trying to figure out if it’s because we’re, you know, not simpatico, or if it’s just a natural thing, hey?’
‘A natural thing?’
‘Yeah, see,’ Ange says, ‘I’ve never had this before. With anybody. I live really pure, no drugs, only organic food, I focus my mind on good things, concentrate on my music.’
‘So you think he’s given you an infection?’
‘Well, maybe. But there’s other stuff. I’m worried it’s a sign.’
‘Of what?’
‘That we shouldn’t be together. You know, that we’re on a different level, vibrationally.’
Best, perhaps, to tackle the symptoms.
‘So, tell me about the pain. How would you describe it?’
‘Hot, you know. Like burning.’
He gives her a urine bottle and asks if she’d be able to produce a sample. She says okay and goes out to the toilet, coming back several minutes later looking slightly pale, a urinary tract infection clearly running rampant. No blood in the sample though. Sits down again.
He checks her temperature and blood pressure, that salty smell stronger when he’s up close, not unpleasant, just unusual, feral. Running through the standard questions: use of antibiotics; the pill; IUD; sexual partners; history of menstruation. Hoping to exclude alternatives – conscious of his time, the waiting room that will be filling even as Ange takes each enquiry as an opportunity to go off on tangents.
‘Will’s kind of cute,’ she says. ‘Buff, eh? Works out with his friends, goes running in the early mornings. He was in the army. Not the kind of guy I normally go with. I figure he’s come to me for healing. I’m kind of an empath, you know, I feel the illness inside people, the suppressed hurt at the base of disease. I have to be careful ’cos I take it on. I just don’t know if I’m strong enough to deal with his, I’m wondering if that’s why I’m getting sick.’
‘You mean he was injured? Fighting overseas?’
‘No, not hurt like that … inside. It might have happened before he joined up, but being in there hasn’t helped, you know, he thinks he has to be tough about everything, which is okay when you’re in bed, hey, it’s kind of refreshing to find someone like that. But not everywhere else.’
Unusually frank.
‘The thing is,’ she says, ‘I think Will needs me. It’s like he’s waiting to be rescued.’
‘And you’re the one to do it?’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant,’ Nick says. ‘I don’t know Will. I was just wondering if this was something you do, you know, rescue people, if that’s your nature?’
‘It goes with being an empath,’ she says. ‘When I was at school, hey, everyone used to come to me with their problems. Sometimes all a person needs is to be listened to.’
She gives more examples, and Nick attends, but only half-heartedly. Whatever else Ange might be, he thinks, unkindly, it isn’t generous with herself. This darkly tanned little girl with her curious smell is someone, he thinks, who puts her own interests first. Feeling sorry for the hapless Will.
‘I’m going to prescribe some antibiotics,’ he says. ‘We’ll send your sample off for testing. But you’ll need to keep your fluids up, too. I know it hurts to pee but the less you drink the worse it’s going to get. Cranberry juice helps.’
Writing her a script.
She keeps talking. ‘This crowd he hangs out with,’ she says. ‘There’s this guy, he’s like Will’s guru or something, has this big house out of town. Rules the roost. Ex-army, a whole bunch of guys, fawning at everything he says. Some sort of Christian thing. Real creepy, crucifixes tattooed on his arm.’
Nick stops writing.
‘Will lives with these guys?’ he says, as casual as possible.
‘Sure. I’ve been staying there. Listening while they sit round drinking and smoking. Scheming.’
‘I thought they were into exercise.’
‘That’s in the morning. In the evenings it’s different. In the evenings it’s sex’n’drugs and rock’n’roll. In the evenings they sit around and talk about which guns they like. Sorry, weapons. They’re very serious about that shit. I guess if you lived with a gun next to you for years you might be, but it’s weird, hey. After a few drinks one of the guys got stuck into the camp. Said the hippies shouldn’t be there, telling locals what they can do. Jaz shut him down, told him to shut the fuck up. The thing is,’ Ange says, ‘Jaz wasn’t saying it to be nice to me or anything, he just didn’t want me to know what they were about.’
‘Which is?’
‘I don’t know. Something but. You can be sure of that.’
‘What do you think?’
‘My guess?’
‘Yes.’
She leans forward. Delighted to be asked. A girl who could be quite pretty if she wasn’t so determined not to be. Bra-less breasts curving beneath the ersatz suede, something a bit pugnacious around her wide mouth, a mouthy girl, is what she would have been called back in the day, not even so much for what she looked like as for having opinions, for talking too much. Not sure from where in him such prejudices arise. Wouldn’t have taken himself for a person who makes judgements because a girl enjoys rough sex.
‘Jaz has got himself in trouble, see. I know this, ’cos Will told me. He’s looking for a way to get back on his boss’s good side.’
‘Who’s the boss?’ he says, ‘God?’
Ange laughs. ‘No, his boss at the church. Jaz wants to fuck with the anti-dammers so as to make good. That’s why he didn’t want me to know.’
‘Because you’re against the dam?’
Dark-eyebrowed contradictory Ange looking at him with a bit more attention. ‘Yeah, ’cos I was at the camp before, see.’
Another of these people who believe in conspiracies. As if life isn’t interesting enough the way it is, there has to be another layer or two of intrigue beneath the surface. Which sometimes there is, of course, that’s the thing. Who really knows? But you’d be unwise, he thinks, to take advice on it from Ange.
He glances at his watch. It’s all gone on far too long. Joy will be fretting. He tells the girl what he’s done about her infection, what she needs to do, making sure she understands she needs to take the pills to the end, and to come back to see him if she’s not better in forty-eight hours.
‘So you don’t reckon it’s to do with Will?’ she says.
‘It’s caused by bad bacteria in your urethra,’ he says. ‘That can happen lots of ways, but most often through sex. Best thing to do is get up and have a pee as soon as you finish. Flush anything out that’s got in there by accident. That and give yourself a wash. It happens to a lot of women.’ Resisting the temptation to say that it’s unlikely God is micro-managing the bacterial communities of her vagina to communicate directions about love. Or that even thinking certain thoughts – never mind external forces – might cause bacterial overgrowth. But then these last few days he’
s not been so immune to these diversions himself. Looking everywhere for guidance.
She gets up, dismissed, pulling on her jacket.
‘Thanks,’ she says.
‘You’re welcome. I enjoyed hearing about these guys.’
‘You did?’
‘Sure.’
‘I could tell you more.’
‘I bet you could, but I’m out of time.’
‘I think I know what they’re going to do,’ she says.
Intent on getting her out of there. Walking her to the door, prepared to escort her, if need be, all the way to Joy’s office. ‘Who’s going to do what?’ he says.
‘See, there’s a rare frog in the creek. I reckon they’re going to kill it.’ Stopping in the doorway.
‘How?’
‘Put chemicals in the creek.’
‘If you think that shouldn’t you tell someone?’
‘I just did.’
At around eleven he takes a break. He makes the coffee himself. Joy comes to check on him in the kitchen, see he’s doing it right. Taking up the whole door space with her frame, breathing heavily.
‘That girl,’ he says.
‘I know,’ Joy says, ‘she really could have done with that bath. And a haircut. But you can’t complain really, can you? Heart’s in the right place. Camping out there in all that dirt.’
‘I don’t think she’s at the camp anymore. She seems to be in a share house with some ex-army types now. Full of some story about messing with the anti-dam mob.’
Pushing down the plunger.
‘Here, let me at that,’ Joy says, coming into the small room. ‘Hurting them?’ she says.
‘Not the people. Something about a frog in the creek.’
‘How’d she know about that?’
‘You’ve heard of it, too?’ he says.
‘Of course I have. My brother’s place is in line of the dam. Marcus Barker. What did she say?’
fourteen
Guy
After the young man left he stayed exactly where he was. Unable to move. Eventually he roused himself enough to turn on the television, flicking through the channels, failing to be caught by either the late news or an old Al Pacino film, one of the ones from before the actor began to see himself as a serious contender for Shakespeare, although, perhaps that was unfair, maybe he had always been one, what did Guy know, he who’d had the temerity to believe he might prove most royal were he put on, but now found himself sitting in a hotel room, naked from the waist down, a man in his mid-sixties, grey hair on his chest and belly, around his scrotum, useless balls hanging ever lower with age, another whisky in his hand, his eyes glazing at the very existence of film or television, too numb to turn it off.
This anomie, he tried to tell himself, was no more than the result of thwarted sexuality turned upon itself. He had reason to be optimistic; the dinner with members of the Party had, after all, been more successful. He’d forgotten, until he arrived at the restaurant, that Bain had told him the owner was once married to Nick Lasker, Helen’s doctor, and that, in one of those peculiar coincidences life seems to delight in throwing up for no special purpose, Bain had even bumped into him there several weeks earlier. No apparent meaning to it, but it must be said that Lasker seemed to surface with unnerving regularity, as if determined to communicate something.
A table set for ten, to celebrate his imminent acceptance on the Senate ticket, and to introduce him to several other Senators and power players. Nine men and one woman, the latter being head of communications to the Leader of the Opposition himself and, by all accounts, a terrifying individual, rumoured to possess an unerring capacity to wound, surprisingly young and, on this occasion, very pleasant, introducing herself as an admirer; but then he had, as yet, lacked the opportunity to do anything to attract her ire. The room just large enough for the table and a small area at one end where they mingled, fine wine flowing generously before the food arrived so that even the hardest of heads must have begun to swim. The place lined, floor to ceiling, with black shelves containing bottles of olive oil gathered from around the world.
He spoke for a time to Alexis Corwen, Shadow Minister for the Environment, with whom he’d corresponded but never met, a short neat man also surprisingly, even unnecessarily, young, with the reserved manner of one trained to the sciences who, by the way he held himself, also spent time in the gym, or perhaps jogging around Lake Burley Griffin. Dressed, like all of them, in an exquisite suit, begging the question of tailors; there must be whole workshops of them kept in business by senior members of the government alone.
Guy took the opportunity to put Corwen right about certain anomalies in the final report on the dam, the sorts of things he believed should never have seen the light of day – he’d done little else than research the subject for the previous month, getting on top of it, if only to forestall more disasters. Corwen, though, interrupted him before he could get far, steering him away from the others as much as possible within the confined space.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I have good news on that front. I had lunch with my opposite number just today. We seem, remarkably, to all be on the same page on this one. A rare moment of bipartisanship, largely due, I think it’s fair to say, to your efforts.’
Guy washed by a hot glow of satisfaction that had little to do with the wine, struggling to retain his composure, shaking Corwen’s small hard hand as a way of expressing his pleasure.
‘The report will come out next week, or the one after, depending on the cycle,’ Corwen said.
This last referring of course to the news, a reminder that all decisions in this place were contingent, that the choice of which projects got up was tied to grubby back-room deals and clever salesmanship rather than merit, and all of these people, even this taut, erudite young man, were engaged in a constant battle to get their little enterprises up, ahead of anyone else. The trappings, the lovely suits and fine wines, were, in fact, quite possibly designed to conceal this, to give the impression that everything was running smoothly, in the hope everyone might forget both the ugliness of the process and that they were all subject to the whim of the electorate. Politics was, Guy thought, something he’d been born to, not so far from what a writer did anyway, sacrificing one or another character in the service of the larger story. The mystery was why he’d waited so long.
When the food arrived it came as small portions delicately placed on large white plates, hard to fathom how so many of these men carried so much weight if this was all they consumed; perhaps they kept buckets of Ben & Jerry’s in their offices to binge on against the anxiety. The meat, however, was delicious, perfectly prepared and accompanied by exquisite sauces of varied provenance. Guy made a note to mention it to Nick next time they met.
‘When I was born,’ he said, indicating the bottles of oil arrayed on the shelves, and addressing as many as could hear him (the room falling pleasingly quiet when they heard his raised voice), ‘there wasn’t a single espresso machine in the country. Nobody but a refugee would have known what to do with olive oil, never mind an olive, well, except of course, to put it in a martini.’ Quickly recovering from the lack of tact in bringing up the subject of immigrants in this company by launching into an old anecdote about martinis and their construction – raising a generous amount of laughter in response. Basking in the pleasure these people took in his stories, in the possibilities the role presented him, in the defeat of his enemies; the enervating pall which had settled on him during these last years sloughing off; forgetting for a moment or two even to observe those present with a writerly eye.
As the company broke up Aldous took him aside.
‘Well that went well, don’t you think?’ he said, sipping the smallest of short blacks. ‘Now, I’m afraid I’ve still some business to attend to this evening, but before I go I wanted to get you acquainted with Michael, over there,’ pointing to his chief-of-staff at the far end of the table. ‘He has your schedule worked out for the next couple of days. He can run you t
hrough it on the way back to the hotel. We’re going to put you through the ringer, just a little. Get you up to speed. So that you don’t even have to think when you get the difficult questions. I am sorry we have to subject someone like you to this sort of thing, but it’s important to stay on message.’ Clearing his throat. ‘In that regard I did want to have a word. Unpleasant to have to get serious after such a fine meal …’
‘That’s what I’m here for,’ Guy said, so basted with bonhomie that he could bear to hear almost anything.
‘Yes, but these dinners! You mustn’t get the idea we do this every day.’ Leaning forward. ‘What I need to say is that between now and when we announce the ticket you need to watch yourself. And beyond, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m referring in particular to who you associate with.’
‘Does this mean we’ll have to stop meeting Aldous?’
Bain doing him the service of the smallest of smiles.
‘Not so much me,’ he said. ‘You had a couple of nights with our mutual friend a week or so ago, I believe?’
‘Peter?’ Lamprey said.
‘It’s come to Peter, has it?’ Bain enquired.
‘I thought,’ Guy said, ‘Mayska was a friend of the Party’s.’
‘Oh he is, he is, very much so. A good and influential friend. But I’m sure you understand it doesn’t play out so well with the electorate to be seen communing with the zero-point-zero-zero-one per cent. Voters have this ridiculous notion that propinquity to extraordinary wealth will turn your head.’
‘So you’ve been keeping tabs on me?’
‘Not so much,’ Bain said, laughing. ‘But we make that sort of thing our business to know. You can still see him, as much as you like, but not so others notice.’
Guy had spent a weekend in the Whitsundays. Flown there in a private jet, the only passenger, helicoptered on to a neighbouring island then ferried by a man in a thing like a golf buggy to a sun-drenched villa perched on a cliff above the sea. One of several, it transpired, connected to a central building that, in many ways, resembled the one at Winderran, as if they’d been designed by the same architect or at least had the same brief: ultra-modern, lots of glass, polished concrete, re-purposed Australian hardwood. Security systems everywhere, which you wouldn’t think so necessary on a small island. This time there were other guests; captains of industry, an artist or two, a minor film star, a sporting personality and several young men and women who didn’t seem to fit any category other than to be attractive. At times it felt as if he was acting a part in a house party from a nineteenth-century novel.