The Disestablishment of Paradise

by Phillip Mann

  Meanwhile, Mack had been investigating. The water was trapped between the walls and under the floor plate. They could hear it slop back and forth. When it eventually rose above the companion walls it would start to enter the cabin, and that would signal the end. They could not pump it out. The pump was linked to the electrical system and with that not working there was nothing they could do. Madness! thought Hera. The Courtesy of MINADEC, gutsy as she was, demonstrated what happens when you put too much faith in a single system.

  The immediate problem facing Hera was where to put in to shore. The coast was almost unrelieved – cliffs and reefs, and where she could see shingle bays they were protected by lines of sharp grey rocks.

  Hera had sent Mack down below to pack their equipment. The understanding was that if she found a place to put in, she would do so. It was up to him to be ready. Ideally she would beach the craft, but if that were not possible, they would have to swim and tow their things behind them. Fortunately the water was not cold, as seawater went, and they could certainly make it to shore, but the prospect of putting damp clothes onto an already wet body was not enticing, to say the least. So Hera balanced the remaining buoyancy of the boat against its ability to keep moving forward.

  They rounded a point of rocks and for the first time a pale sun shone out and made everything silvery. There was a bay. The heavy swell from the storm made tight little waves against the shore, and these turned on themselves when they reached the shingle, almost like wheels. Hera read this as evidence of an undertow. It was nothing like the vicious rip tides she had seen, but it would make wading ashore difficult. What was more, she could tell by the way the water swirled and rippled at the entrance to the bay that there were rocks just below the surface. She hoped that the swell might lift them over. Hera called to Mack: ‘On deck, sailor. I want you up front looking for rocks.’

  Mack came up, dumped their backpacks and other bags on the deck and scrambled to the front of the boat. They got over the first reef with a bit of scraping. They got past another rock which had just its snout showing above the water and which rasped along their side. Then the water was flat and Hera steered for shore.

  Mack was ready. As soon as the keel hit the shingle he threw their belongings high up the beach and jumped off. Hera followed. The boat was already slipping back, and Hera sank up to her ankles in the soft shingle. She threw her weight forward; Mack caught her arm and pulled her up the beach. With the next swell, The Courtesy of MINADEC lifted back off the shingle and slipped heavily out into the small bay. She turned when the wind caught the sails and drifted slowly towards the rocks. One more swell saw her lifted onto the reef. As the wave spilled away, with it went any remaining buoyancy. The weight of the boat dragged her down. She tore open along one of the laminated seams. Prow hooked on the rocks, she settled lower. With the next wave, the end came. She filled with water. Bubbles boiled to the surface. Cushions and papers floated away from her. She lifted briefly and then the stern went down and The Courtesy slowly slid under the waves. The tip of her mast, and part of the sagging jib sail, canted over at a steep angle, was all that remained visible. The cutter was grounded and would break up with the pounding of the waves. The next two-moon tide would see what remained lifted and smashed on the rocks.

  The two people huddled on the beach paid The Courtesy of MINADEC the respect of watching her dying movements before gathering their things and heading inland and out of the wind.

  Hera led; Mack followed. And then he turned and stared out to sea, his hair and beard blown back by the wind. Perhaps he had heard something. Certainly, in those few moments, he saw a pattern move across the surface of the sea. Briefly the waves moved in unison, stirred from beneath, as they lifted and broke on the shore.

  31

  Concerning Mack

  Had Dickinson, or Annette Descartes, or any other member of Mack’s team, seen him at that moment as he faced the sea and saw that swirling pattern suddenly shape the waves, they would have been surprised at the look of fear in his eyes. They knew him well, their quiet leader. They knew him as a man who rode with situations when he could, and confronted them only when he could not. They knew him as a man who had faced danger many times, liked it even, but they would never have seen that hunted look. They knew him too as a private man, one who rarely spoke about himself. He carried his history within. An interesting man. Unpredictable but dependable. Complicated too. It is time to learn more about him.

  When I first asked Hera about Mack, she threw her hands in the air – one of her characteristic gestures – expressing impossibility. The following is extracted from several interviews I held with Hera.

  Hera Hopeless. Getting Mack to talk about himself when he didn’t want to was like pulling teeth. He’d tell stories – and he had a lot of them, funny and tragic – usually against himself, but something got in the way when I asked him even simple questions about himself, about his own feelings. He would deflect enquiries with a joke. At the same time, when the pressure was on him – like when he was afraid of being captured by a Michelangelo – his feelings just poured from him, and I was glad.

  I suppose I could have asked more, but I felt we were living on borrowed time – and we were. I made him promise once that when we escaped he would let me ‘debrief’ him properly. And he agreed on condition that he could do the same with me. Do you see the problem in getting a straight answer?

  Nevertheless, some facts did emerge.

  Mack was the elder of twin brothers. They were not identical twins – in fact it is hard to think of twins being more dissimilar. Mack’s birth name was Arnold, a name with which he did not identify. His brother was called Jason, and that seems quite appropriate. The family name was Lorimer. ‘Mack’ was a nickname he was given when he was in prison. It was slang. Evidently anyone who was big and tough and used a knife was called Mack. The name stuck, long after he had left prison.

  Both parents died when he was a boy. His father, Sergeant Tikka Lorimer, was Australian and a member of the UN Land Reclamation Force assigned to Bangladesh. Mack had a picture of him, and there was no mistaking father and son. Barrel-chested, same big frame, same gap in the front teeth, same curly hair – Mack was the image of his father.

  The monsoon rains were late in Bangladesh that year. Then, when they did come, they just didn’t let up. The result was a disastrous flood which took out some of the new dykes the UN had been building and buried crops in silt. Tikka Lorimer was helping families fleeing along a dyke top. He stayed too long and was swept away when the dyke collapsed. His body was never found, and all Mack retained was his picture and a letter.

  Mack’s mother was called Diana and she was quite a beauty, very striking with long dark hair. She was twenty-one when the twins were born. After Tikka died she received a pension and moved from Sydney to Perth to be closer to her mother. A few years later she was diagnosed with poly-cystic kidney disease syndrome and she died of renal failure after only a few months’ illness.

  A personal memory that Mack did reveal to Hera concerns the time he was taken to see his mother in hospital, shortly before she died. It seems he did not recognize her and cried and struggled when she reached out to hold him. A wasting and darkening of the skin, as well as hair loss, is one of the terminal symptoms of Larson’s syndrome. In Hera’s view, that experience marked him for life and perhaps explained his fascination with her hair. After the death of his mother, Mack and his brother were brought up by their maternal grandmother, herself a widow and a fortune-teller with a great love of poetry.

  Mack’s school career was not distinguished. He gave the impression of being a dreamer and was irresponsible. He was often late for school, failed to complete homework and frequently cited for truancy. By contrast his brother was a high achiever, outstanding in both sports and academic work.

  Olivia I’m interested in why Mack never learned to read. I would have thought that a woman like his granny, who seems to have enjoyed literature, would have made certain that he did
.

  Hera Yes, well. You don’t know Mack. My impression is – though I emphasize he never said this – that he deliberately decided not to learn to read. I believe he also actively fostered the impression that he was a bit simple.

  It was protection. He knew he was different from the other boys. He was experiencing horrific dreams of being possessed and of sometimes being outside his body, and so to protect himself he played dumb. He was the one allowed to sit at the back of the class and doodle while the rest got on with their lessons. But he was quite good at maths. He must have been a difficult boy to understand. On the one hand he was indolent and dreamy, but yet he had enthusiasms and gifts. Also, he had this habit of disappearing.

  Olivia Disappearing?

  Hera Yes. He’d go walkabout. Wouldn’t tell anyone and just go. He once let slip to his grandmother that he had gone off with a friend – and she knew that wasn’t true – and that she was never to worry about him because his friend would take care of him. It was a spirit friend, you see.

  There was his size too. He grew very quickly – he was already six feet tall when he was fourteen, and he had some kind of breakdown. He didn’t remember much about it, or at least that was what he said. I think it was puberty more than anything else. I think he was going through a bigger change than most. Anyway, when he came out of hospital he became interested in bodybuilding – a lot of boys do, and he just bulked up naturally.

  As soon as he could, he dropped out of school. He told his grandmother one time he was going on a ‘long walkabout’. That was when she gave him the ring. It had been her mother’s before her and her mother’s mother’s, and so on. She reckoned Jason would do all right, but Arnold was the one who needed protection. And off he went. Into the desert.

  I suppose it was a kind of pilgrimage or a retreat. He moved around, getting odd jobs, experimenting with his life. He lived with a woman in a caravan for a while and she gave him his first sexual experiences. She was an alcoholic and used to steal from him to buy cheap sherry. He didn’t mind. He reckoned he was getting the best of the bargain. But the thing that struck him was that when she was drunk she was a different person, in fact several different people, and she would move from being comic and fun, to being broody and resentful, to angry and sarcastic, to crying, to comatose – all in the space of two hours. And he would put her to bed. The next morning she would wake up and not remember any of it.

  One day when he was out doing a job, chopping wood or some such, he had one of his hunches. It was so sudden that he almost chopped his foot off. It was one of his rare visual premonitions, and in it he saw himself lying dead outside the caravan with a wound in his throat. So when he finished work, instead of going straight back to the caravan like he usually did, he went to a bar. Apparently the time after work was when they had sex. They’d got things worked out quite well. He’d leave in the morning before she had woken up. She’d wake up sometime, slop about, do some shopping, get the place tidy, and start to feel randy about four o’clock. By the time he got back after five she was ready to tear the pants off him. Have you ever behaved like that, Olivia?

  Olivia Get on with the story.

  Hera Well he stayed at the bar until it was late and then he walked to the caravan park. There were police all over and an ambulance, and he saw the woman being carried from the caravan on a stretcher. There was a man dead.

  The caravan was sealed but his possessions were in there, so he did his dumb act and spoke to one of the police officers and got the full story. The man was the woman’s husband and he’d heard about Mack, so he’d come to the caravan park with a gun, intending to shoot him. When Mack didn’t come home, he broke into the caravan, found his wife half naked and already into her first bottle. They had an argument. He shot her and then himself.

  He must have been a bad shot as he only wounded her, but he managed to blow his own head off. ‘So you were bloody lucky, mate; you stayed in the bar.’ That was the policeman’s verdict.

  Olivia What happened to Mack?

  Hera Nothing. He was the intended victim, but otherwise he wasn’t really involved. The police kept his things and he was supposed to be able to pick them up after the enquiries were over. But he didn’t bother. He went walkabout again.

  Olivia How old was Mack at this time?

  Hera Sixteen. We then lose three years of his life. I think he was in the desert. Just drifting. There was always work for a ‘big fella’ – as he put it. And not too many questions asked, because anyone who went bush had their reasons. They were sorting themselves out and the desert was a wonderful place to be alone. Life on the margin, Olivia, an interesting place.

  Olivia So when next do we catch up with him?

  Hera Nineteen, going on twenty, high summer, northern Queensland, into drugs. ‘A good time and a bad time’ was how he described it. He was picked up for robbery, and the comic thing was that the drugs he and his partner had found had actually been stolen.

  So he found himself in prison for seven years, and that saved him. That was when he got the name Mack, and it stuck. He went through a lot of hard times. He was very angry but he wasn’t stuck in his anger – it was something that was passing through him.

  You asked about him not reading. Well, in prison he had ample opportunity to learn to read, but he didn’t. By now he had the idea that if he learned to read it would stop his inner life.

  Olivia His intuition?

  Hera Yes, something like that. What do you think of that? Has that idea got any merit?

  Olivia Well, I’ve always thought of reading as stimulating the imagination –

  Hera Perhaps Mack didn’t need stimulating.

  Olivia – and of helping you find the inner you, apart from the pleasure it brings. Access to ideas, new experiences, new thoughts. Look at young Sasha, finding her way.

  Hera That’s writing. And that’s if you want to communicate. Mack didn’t want to communicate. He had nothing to say. He was living too intensely. When I was a girl, I was a bit like Sasha – well, in some ways, in my interest and my curiosity. I sometimes think now that I would have been happier if someone had sat me down and said, ‘You don’t have to do anything, Hera, you don’t have to explain or make judgements; just sit and look at this painting, and let the painting look at you.’

  Olivia Inner knowledge, waiting to be born.

  Hera Higher knowledge, possibly. You see, what’s interesting about Mack is that he could do numbers, and I think that is a more important skill than reading. It gave him access to the abstract, but in a purer form than words. Words are so loaded, Olivia, and most of all when written. It’s so hard to strip them to their essentials, that’s what writers and poets—

  Olivia Let’s get back to Mack. He’s in prison and . . .? What did he find hardest?

  Hera The hardest was not having access to a woman – women. Hell, he was only twenty and he was fizzing. But being close to so much anger and hatred was very hard too. He could feel it like a burn. And so he kept to himself, and if anyone caused him trouble, he did his dumb act. And if they persisted he waited for his moment and hit them hard. Hit so he broke something. Hit so they had to be sent to hospital.

  He had it all worked out. He trained in the gym – a lot. He kept himself very fit and he met men there who taught him about fighting. After a while he was respected, and they knew he wasn’t so dumb.

  Olivia OK. So what turned him round?

  Hera Two things. The first was he learned a trade. Halfway through his time he was moved to a more open prison, an occupational prison. He became a mechanic. He could scribble his name if he needed to. Most of the manuals in the workshop had little drawings and so he could follow them. And the teachers . . . well, some of them were former inmates, and they said things like ‘If you’re a mechanic you get your hands dirty, and if you get your hands dirty you can’t turn pages in a manual because you get the book dirty, and if you get the book dirty you can’t read it anyway – so learn it in your head, Mack.’


  Suddenly the days started to whizz past. He learned how to maintain the big magnetic torque trucks. He worked on scaffolding, and that led to platform construction, and that led to elementary space technology. He was a welder and a fitter. He took every diploma he could – and he could do the maths.

  I mean . . . Let me put it this way, Olivia: if he had needed to read and write, he could have, I suppose, but he got through without it, and I’m not sure what that says about the system or our culture. There were always people on hand to help. Not being able to read became normal to him. Even with his demolition team Polka did the invoices and Dickinson handled any paperwork – and Dickinson, make no mistake, was very sharp. It was not until Mack met me and wanted to share more in my world that he decided to make an effort, and wasn’t he lucky?

  Olivia You mentioned two things that helped him.

  Hera Yes, the other is a bit strange. One day one of the warders came round looking for volunteers to attend an experimental counselling session. Now all of them were used to this kind of thing, being guinea pigs for social experiments or prison reform studies or criminologists doing their PhDs and the like. And they used to sign up because sometimes it meant you got to go out on a visit and see women. So they were taken into the lecture room and sat down in rows.

  After about five minutes the door opens and in comes this Buddhist monk all in his robes and with his head shaved. In fact he looked like one of them. This little monk sat down on the floor in front of them and just looked at them. He didn’t say anything for a long time. He just looked.