by Steven Lang
It was possible that over the weekend each and every guest had individual time with Peter, but if so he didn’t notice it. They had played tennis early one morning, on a court whose outer edge, like an infinity pool, gave way to a view of untrammelled ocean, albeit with a high fence to catch balls. Lamprey had once been an okay player, and found he did not need to be embarrassed, indeed, towards the end of the first set he was up five games to two, all but wiping the court with his opponent. At set point he pushed Mayska outside the back lines with a series of long shots. His host just managing to lob his return over the net. Guy ran forward, scooping up the ball, preparing to drop it on the other side. At the last instant he decided to knock it back to the man. No need to defeat him so forcefully. It was the turning point in the match. Mayska took immediate advantage. He went on to win that set and the next one. No matter what Guy did he couldn’t regain the lead, and the more he tried the less successful he became, furious with himself when shot after shot hit the net or went outside the line.
Afterwards, sitting on the little patio of the tennis house, they drank cold sparkling water from bottles and talked, although, Guy couldn’t help but notice, Mayska once again tended to dominate the conversation.
‘I don’t doubt that you think men like me are limited in our interests, that money’s everything,’ he said, glancing at Guy. ‘It’s not so. Money has for me only ever been a means to an end. It allows me to hold a house party like this: artists, writers, CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies. Courtesans and catamites to entertain. What money does is buy me a better class of associate.’
Guy, still deeply pissed at both losing two sets to zero and at the delight his host clearly took in winning, mused to himself that in reality what it bought Mayska was a better class of audience. Remarking, however, what he’d begun to suspect about the presence of the beautiful young people.
‘You don’t mind if I philosophise for a moment?’
‘Go ahead,’ Guy said, smiling through gritted teeth.
‘There are two streams of thought about how we’ve got to be where we are,’ Mayska said. ‘The first is that the problems humanity faces are both intractable and interminable; when one is solved another takes its place.’
Guy had thought Mayska was being metaphorical when he referred to philosophy, but here they were, before breakfast, discussing humanity.
‘The second,’ he continued, ‘is that the problems are solvable; if you could only legislate with enough sophistication, then the great issues of poverty and greed, health and welfare, would be resolved. The utopian ideal, if you like. What we saw during the last hundred years was this divergence, a separation on a global scale, into these points of view. On the one hand you had totalitarian regimes who believed that if you could only set up society correctly everything would be all right. I don’t need to remind a man like you where that got us. On the other you have what I like to think of as the Western ideal, which if you’ll permit, I’ll sum up as the problems will always be with us. We’ll conquer one and be faced with another and we’ll always be failing, always nearly tipping over the edge of the abyss. The belief that if we have faith in ourselves and our ingenuity, never mind our moral failings, we’ll get through.’
Stretching his long thin legs out. Socks around the ankles, barely worn white trainers. Not a gram of extra flesh on him, which, incidentally, made his face somewhat gaunt, or driven, even when he was, as now, pleased with himself. Giving history lessons. Guy waiting for him to come to the point. Expecting that somewhere along the line an explanation would be given for his invitation to the island. What the cost was going to be.
‘This belief is central to my business,’ Mayska said. ‘The larger it becomes, the more problems I encounter, but at the same time it also means I can engage better minds to provide solutions.’
Why was it, though, that these self-made men were always so determined to tell people about their business models?
‘So why,’ Guy said, ‘the interest in security services?’
‘You have been doing your research.’
‘I’m a writer. I follow things through. I don’t mind spending a bit of time doing it. I made it my business to read about you, that’s all. Except there’s not so much that’s, how can you say, freely available.’
‘But you heard about our acquisition of CoSecOr?’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘Well it made me curious. I can see the advantage of it financially, if you have to pay for security you may as well own the company, and, in the present climate, I can see the business growing, even exponentially, but I can’t see how it fits with what you’ve just said.’
‘But it’s entirely consistent,’ Mayska said. ‘Remember your Hobbes? The Leviathan? The State shall have the monopoly on violence and thus eradicate it from the population?’
‘Words to that effect.’
‘The curious thing is that it’s a lesson our government seems to have forgotten. It could be an effect of the long peace, of course, but they’ve become so enamoured of this idea of “small government” that they’ve taken to subcontracting out the instruments of law enforcement – domestic and international – to the private sector. Not just here in Australia, all over the West, in the US particularly. What they’ve failed to recognise is that if you give the monopoly of violence to someone else, even under contract, you no longer have it yourself. Now, that might be okay, as long as the interests of the private sector are concurrent with that of the body politic. But what if they’re not? Personally I don’t want the Leviathan in the hands of people I have no control over. I’d rather be the one holding the gun.’
‘Now you’re sounding like the NRA,’ Guy said, and laughed, as much to defuse what might be seen as an insult as anything else.
Mayska laughed, too. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s true. But I’m not some piece of trailer trash living in Oklahoma, am I? What concerns me directly are security corporations who, given the chance, will put their own interests ahead of my own.’
‘Fair enough,’ Guy said. ‘But what governs your interest?’
‘Ah, yes,’ Peter said, ‘There’s the question, isn’t it?’
Lamprey waited. Mayska made no attempt to answer. Instead he bent down to adjust first one elegant tennis shoe and then the other, taking his time to get them just right.
It was Guy’s experience that if you wait long enough the other person will despair of silence. You wait, and people speak. Peter, though, seemed immune to this anxiety. The silence prevailed, went on too long, even for him.
‘So why invite me here?’ he said, eventually.
‘Ha!’ Mayska said, sitting up, slapping his thigh in delight. ‘Twice in one morning! I win! You are too soft!’
‘What are you talking about?’ Guy said, although he knew, just hadn’t quite been prepared to believe the man was still playing.
Mayska swung around and punched Guy on the arm, hard enough to hurt. ‘Don’t take offence,’ he said.
Way too late for that.
‘Stop,’ Mayska said. ‘Stop it. I mean it. I order you not to.’ Laughing again. ‘It was a joke. I like you. That’s why I invited you here. No. More than that. I admire you. But when we were playing tennis before I saw you. You let me have a point. In the eighth game, you were 40–15, set point, and you gave it to me. Didn’t you?’
Guy shrugged.
‘But, you see. I was just watching. I was still trying to figure you out. On a good day I think you could beat me, but not if you’re prepared to give away games. Is it maybe a writer’s thing? Empathy? You feel for the other man, you don’t want him to lose? Is that it? I doubt it’s because I’m rich!’
Very few people, certainly not those close to him, had ever accused Lamprey of too much empathy.
‘And then you did it again … You asked a good question, you waited for the answer, but then you let me go.’
‘I did,’ Lamprey conceded, but reluctantly. Unused to being lectured on hi
s failings.
‘Listen my friend. I tell you this because it’s important. You ask me who watches me? People whose judgement I trust, who I hire because I believe in their smarts and that they have the balls to call me on what it is I’m doing. There is no-one else. But right now I need to give you some advice, even though I can see you don’t want to hear it, least of all from me. But listen, please. It is important. Don’t for a minute think that Bain has invited you into the Party because he likes you. There is a man with more killer instinct than the great Khan himself. A vast pile of skulls in his basement. He’s been doing this all his life. He will lift you up just exactly as high as he wants to and then he will squash you just as quickly, if it serves his purpose. For him you are nothing more than a tool.’
‘I thought you two were friends?’
‘Ha!’
‘Why then do you have anything to do with him?’
‘Because he has power and influence in arenas I do not. And I have the means to influence him in some small way.’ Not saying what this was. ‘Listen, I just say this to you. You have come to this late and from a different perspective. You make a mistake if you think these people want you for your wit or intelligence. I mean, they do, of course, why else? But only in so much as these things are useful to them.’
Warned about Bain by two people in the space of a week. Mayska stood up.
‘It’s who Aldous associates with that worries me,’ he said.
‘Lonergan?’ Guy said.
Mayska gave him a sardonic look. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The far Right. The religious ones. He thinks he has them under control, he thinks he has me under control, channelling my funds to their projects, but they’re a horse that’s hard to turn in a tight place.’ Stretching. ‘Come, we need to get some breakfast. And there is a very beautiful actress staying with us on the island. Right now she will feel as if she is being ignored. Which would defeat the purpose of inviting her.’
Lamprey stayed where he was. ‘So, what do you want from me?’ he said.
Mayska had picked up his racquet. He tapped it against his hairy calf.
‘History goes on all over the place all the time,’ he said. ‘The bits that get remembered have good observers, good chroniclers. That’s the only thing that makes them significant. I’m hoping that if you find it interesting you will write about this. How am I doing so far?’
In his armchair in the hotel Guy wondered if Bain knew about the young man who had come to his room. His favourite, Jaydon, had not been available at short notice and the notice had been short because before flying to Canberra he’d thought it inappropriate to indulge himself when Helen was so ill. But the success of the evening had led him to decide to reward himself, vestigial loyalties notwithstanding. Failing to consider how too much wine, too much rich food, and the strangeness of the new boy might affect him.
His inability to perform made him think his original intention had been correct, that the humiliation of his flaccid penis in the face of the beautiful young man was a kind of punishment for yielding to temptation. He felt wrong, dirty, corrupt, useless. Old. He’d declined to take advantage of Mayska’s proffered delights in the Whitsundays, if that was what they were, because he’d not been sure there wouldn’t be a price to pay and he wasn’t yet prepared to sell himself to the billionaire for so little. Was this what he had come to as a writer? The amanuensis of a small man made big by money? A pawn in Aldous Bain’s machinations? Was he deluded, becoming paranoid? Is that what was happening now, in the hotel room? Unable to get it up because Bain’s foot soldiers (or Mayska’s – who knows how large his reach was) might be watching? Nothing like the idea of a camera to dull the spirit. Which did not make it any less demeaning. The boy/man, an exquisite creature, for all his sartorial elegance and slim hairless body, as dumb as a fridge, had ended up kneeling between his legs. Using all his arts. Guy, by no means, an objective participant. He’d had to ask him to stop. The boy had offered to try other techniques. Did he want to be bound? The forfeit of his outrageous fee a small price to pay to be rid of him.
Eventually he flicked off the unwatched television, prepared to slope off to bed and tempt the gods of sleep. Reflexively switching on his mobile. Almost immediately it pinged into life. Three missed calls from Lasker. A voice message told him that Helen had had a relapse and been admitted to hospital. Asking him to call, it didn’t matter at what time of night.
Already well past midnight. When he rang the number there was no reply. The phone went straight to machine.
fifteen
Eugenie
The girls dropped up at the bus stop, she started in on cleaning the house, furious with everyone: stacked the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher; picked up clothes in the girls’ rooms and stuffed them in the washing machine (someone else, as it turned out, would have to hang them out); squirted some evil-smelling chemical around the inside of the toilet bowl, hardly believing its claims of biodegradability; did a pick-up in the living area and returned to scrub the toilet, wipe the sink, despair of the shower. Not done yet: going at the floors with the vacuum cleaner preparatory to mopping, the dog standing hang-dog on the veranda while the machine produced its industrial-level whine so she almost didn’t hear the phone.
Joy, from the surgery. Eugenie glanced at the clock on the stove, past eleven – had it taken that long – panic rising that something had happened to one of the girls, that all her ugly thoughts about damp towels, abandoned knickers and used tissues and who got to do the shit work around here had brought catastrophe upon her house (when it hadn’t even been them she was cross with) ready to drop everything and rush into town, forget any other ideas for the day.
It wasn’t why Joy was calling.
‘I thought I better ring,’ she said, ‘and let you know what Doctor Lasker said.’
A different type of panic threatening. Joy, she hoped – assumed – knew nothing about what had been going on. The emphasis on had.
‘There was a girl in here first thing, looked like she was from the camp. Said her boyfriend was planning to do some damage to the creek. I don’t know how serious it is. I tried calling Marcus but he must be out in the paddock. I thought I should tell someone. Just in case there’s something to it.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Can’t tell you much more than that. Something about the frogs? You could speak to Doctor Lasker about it.’
‘Not sure I should do that. He’d be busy wouldn’t he?’
‘Oh, I think you’d find he had time to speak to you.’
Having to note that little gets past a practice manager.
‘It’d be better to speak to the girl, wouldn’t it? Do you have a phone number for her?’
‘I couldn’t give you that,’ Joy said. ‘You know that.’
Staring blankly out through the double doors to where the dog was lying by the railing, her big Labrador’s head resting on the bottom row of wire as if the thin strand of stainless steel was a pillow. ‘Let me think a minute. I’ll call you back.’
Putting the phone down. The vacuum cleaner out in the centre of the floor; a basket of clothes waiting to be folded on a chair. The washing machine coming to a halt, announcing the end of its cycle by singing out what someone must have thought was a merry little tune; something to brighten a housewife’s day. Barely a word from David in all this time. Just a single email to say he’d be gone a while longer. No explanation. A surge now, at the thought of talking to Nick, not of panic, but emotion, which she almost permitted herself to feel before pushing it back down where it belonged, leaving in its wake an emptiness that felt like nothing so much as dread.
If it were to be done then better done soon.
She called Joy back, asked to be put through.
‘Someone’s just in there this minute,’ she said. ‘I’ll get him to ring as soon as he’s free. Shouldn’t be long. You’ll be there?’
Where else? Trapped, now, in a limbo of her own making, waiting for the phone to ring. She
went to put the vacuum cleaner in the cupboard, but the hose and handle refused to cooperate, tumbling back out, twice. The third time she threw it in, slamming the door, cursing. The everyday resistance of inanimate objects. Everything too much. She’d made the mistake of going on social media at breakfast. Someone had posted a link to an interview with Guy Lamprey on the ABC. He’d been talking about the LNP Arts policy, part of his pitch for the Senate, talking up the trickle-down theory of economics when applied to the creative sector: The Liberal Party has a plan for the economy. A strong economy means more money for the Arts. When people have disposable income they can afford … Going on to talk about the dam with equal disregard for the truth: The hydrology reports are in. They show this is an excellent place to build a dam. It’s a great project. Great for the region, great for the economy, great for the environment. The pro-dammers, some of them real people from Winderran, some of them trolls from who-the-fuck-knew-where, crowing in the comments below.
She went out onto the veranda and squatted down beside Leela. The dog rolling back against her as if understanding her need for touch. Eugenie gathering handfuls of the loose flesh around her neck, pushing her fingers through the fur.
Not having to wait long.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘How can I help you?’
‘You called to speak to me.’
‘I did. Yes.’ A pause. ‘I need to tell you straight up this is not about us.’ Best to be clear. ‘Joy told me you had a girl in there this morning.’
‘That’s true. But why did Joy tell you?’
‘Because of my involvement with the dam.’