Atomic City

by Sally Breen

  The mosaic ceiling, the intricate detail of the Versace trademark, overwhelms – the kind of cracked-open extravagance that reminds me of an acid-laden skin. I try not to look up. Harvey’s form, too, seems to shrink from the grand portraits, to hunch under the hotel’s looming grandeur – the gold ribbing edging everything, all this split-apart history, the imported scenes held together by the thin signature of an old Italian master. But Jade seems to open up underneath the spectacle, to allow herself to glow, architect of her own movement, clearly able to manipulate the multifaceted shades of her own moods and demeanour, to alter the stances of her body so convincingly that I realise it is sometimes difficult to recognise her.

  At first I don’t see that the girl she is playing for Harvey reminds me of Camille, of how Camille used to be, before my bad-boy act wreaked havoc all over her system. Camille had been assured, convinced of her own worth, born to that kind of knowing, and back then I was proud of her – my private-school girl with the rare green eyes and the blonde hair. The more I watch Jade the more I see Camille, moving like her feet are weighted more firmly to the ground. Her hands have a graceful flow not normally there and her speech is natural despite the fact she’s making an effort to contain her usual tone (the lilt and attitude of a much rougher education). Jade never swears with Harvey. Never cuts short her syllables or sentences. Sometimes she becomes very playful, imbuing the charade with innocence just to convince Harvey she’s been shielded and protected. She is very affectionate towards him but never hangs off his arm or body. The effect is perfect. People like her; they trust her because even though she dresses very casually, her gestures and her posture imply a genuine mannered taste. And despite the uneasy connotations, the parade is wonderful to watch. I like this game we’re playing with Harvey’s ignorance.

  Jade sends me signals, tiny signals, indications of her state of mind and the state of play. She keeps me in tow as she leads Harvey along, gesturing to me, like a baseball pitcher, her intentions to strike. We have invented these signals not just for the fun of it but so she can warn me of changes of direction, of plans, when she wants me to come closer or when I should back away. Signals are easier than trying to get away with communication on a mobile phone, though that wouldn’t be hard. Harvey has his own ear on one half the time. His business requires it. Calling Jade would only leave a trail to me that he or someone else might find.

  I follow for the fun of it and just in case Jade wants to pull a sting. In my car, on foot and yesterday, because they were taking a long walk, I tailed them on a bike. Harvey’s life seems to be filled with these pockets of recreation even during the week. Nearly every evening they venture out. I watch them mainly on weekends before I head to work, shadowing them on the languid days they spend circulating in a world full of people who look like model citizens, with their expensively cut clothes and cars, but who are actually all crooks. That’s all it takes to make money in this city – a good-looking front.

  Harvey and Jade decide to take lunch at Versace’s boutique restaurant on the marina. They are shown to a table on the wooden deck stretching out over the water, parallel to lanes of expensive moored boats, rocking gently and glaring white in the sun. I sit further inside, my back resting against a wall sheathed in suede, and even though I’m more protected in here I can still see them clearly. The sightlines are open. Jade has chosen our venue well. Cut-out walls and panes of glass. A Saturday, a late lunch. Jade’s having the nori-salted tuna with shaved cucumber, wakame and fried ginger vinaigrette; Harvey’s having the fragrant beef-cheek curry with wilted spinach, shaved coconut and fried chilli sambal; and I’m enjoying a whole baby barramundi with lemon oil and whipped truffle cream. Harvey has his back to me, facing the water. Jade can see me five tables away over his shoulder. I never know if my presence is going to result in a score or if I’m just here as an audience. From the look in Jade’s eyes, taunting me over the rim of her oversized wineglass, a score does look likely.

  The ‘dining filch’, as we like to call it, is my favourite scenario. It’s not really big-time but I find it excruciatingly pleasurable anticipating the flavour and design the score will take as the textures and the tastes in my mouth meet the anxiety in my gut. With every mouthful I speculate on how Jade will manoeuvre. Whether she’ll exchange some of Harvey’s cash with me at some point, send a waiter over with a present or slip something into my hand; maybe one of his credit cards will come my way with instructions or without. Once I found (wrapped in a napkin) the keys to his house with a drill on what to take. For every angle, the desired result can vary. Either Harvey is made aware of the robbery or he might be led to think he has merely lost something. What is called for depends on Harvey’s blood-alcohol level, the setting, the time factor and the risk. Jade can conjure anything and she doesn’t really need me to pull it off. She’s capable of staging these small-time heists on her own, and I’m sure she does when I’m not around; it’s just that we have so much fun doing it together. Harvey’s the kind of guy you just love to rip off. A local conman with an international ego.

  The waiter delivers more wine and begins to uncork the bottle. Jade reaches for the white napkin in her lap and folds it slowly, placing it beside her partly finished plate. She stands, and I lay down my knife and fork and wait. Zigzagging her way towards me, Jade’s body begins to take up more and more of the light. Her movement mimicked by the moored yachts swaying in the current beyond her. The sound the rigging makes hitting the masts tinkles like the movement of cutlery against china, the clink of glass inside the restaurant. She passes by my table so closely I can smell her and her hand motions subtly for me to follow. I wait. Harvey stays facing the marina. The waiter pours more wine into his glass.

  I follow Jade down a hallway curving out of view. At the end, a tinted glass door leads outside to where the restaurant joins the eastern side of the hotel. She is waiting for me. In the fresh air she pulls me away from the door, and from out of her bag she produces a set of keys.

  Harvey’s car, she says. In the boot is Harvey’s briefcase. Unlocked. The yellow folder. Inside there are twenty-five cash cheques all signed, all blank. Take three. Not consecutive numbers. When you’ve got them, lock the car and leave the keys with reception.

  I give her a quizzical look.

  I’ll collect them when I go to the loo next.

  Okay.

  And don’t come back; pay your bill before you leave. I’ll meet you at my place in two hours.

  She turns and disappears back inside.

  In Jade’s apartment I give her the cheques and I get the story. As it’s coming out I realise we’ve switched roles. Jade is in the driver’s seat and I’m tagging along. She has the thread to Harvey and we rely on this line. I haven’t asked her yet what she’s working towards; Jade seems to have stalled on this joker and I’m not convinced he’s the right cause but as she fills me in on the cheques, the tone of her voice starts to reassure me, keeps me quiet. I’m always worried she’s going to slip but her efficiency swings me back every time.

  As yet Jade hasn’t been able to get near the cheque book. Soon, she tells me, Harvey’s going to promote her to head office working side by side with him as his very ‘personal’ assistant. By then she’ll be administering the cheques herself. This will give us ready access to money when we need it, but in the meantime these first three cheques, which she has laid out on the couch, are a good start.

  Just think of them as petty cash, she says. No receipt required.

  Jade explains the cheques are used to pay employees of Paradise Holdings International. This kind of payment system means they’re not technically employees but private contractors, responsible for their own tax. Harvey doesn’t usually bother to explain to those ‘contracted’ that this deems them self-employed. It’s too much hassle and besides, who’s going to fess up anyway? Except for the gaggle of cubicle queens on contracts most of the people working for the company are tourists, backpackers, welfare recipients or transients of one for
m or another. Usually they don’t last longer than a few weeks. Only management and a handful of staff are on the official payroll. Once a week everyone else gets a cash cheque administered by Harvey. These cheques can only be cashed at a bank in Surfers Paradise. Paradise Holdings has a deal going with the bank and they are aware of the general volume of workers and when payments are due. Cheque recipients aren’t required to sign or produce any ID. Nor do they, Jade says, take a record of who’s cashed their cheque and who hasn’t; all you have to do is sign the back.

  Why this is going to work for us she’ll explain to me later. First, she says, we have to decide how much money we want. It’s good, obviously, to stick close to a figure someone could earn in a week. The workers operate on a retainer–commission basis; the most successful marketers usually clock in around eight hundred weekly. The bottom line’s about two-fifty.

  Jade tells me I’ll have to go to the bank on Monday to cash the cheques, she’d prefer it that way, she wants to protect her image in the bank and she’s been in there with Harvey. The fact they’ve never seen me before is not a problem. We’re talking about a telemarketing business; they’re used to new faces. By the time Harvey’s worked out the money’s unaccounted for, there’ll be no trace and no recollection. We know his current relationship with company books and records is, at best, elastic. Jade tells me he takes money out of the accounts all the time using fake names so his business partner doesn’t know, using the excess to roll his weight around town and on his predilection for expensive whores. Even if he does report the fraud, the last thing he’s going to want is a thorough investigation that might highlight his own suspect activity.

  This is exactly what I like about Jade’s gaming logic. She’s not cheating thinking she’s going to get away with it. Most likely her trail will come out in the end, but only so far. Jade reasons when someone eventually does find out, the best way to play, to avoid getting stung, is to play off other cheats. You can protect yourself by making sure your operations are plugged into other covert systems. Every system is protected by another. The key, Jade says, is to remain peripheral but connected.

  There will always be assemblages bigger than your own, systems you can’t see because they encompass you, but conversely there will always be sections of the grid you can see, places where you can operate.

  You never warehouse, Jade says, in a white elephant.

  She seems excited. She lies back on her floral couch in a very sensual way, as if telling me all this has given her pleasure. I’m impressed by the sophistication of her planning, of her strategy.

  Jade says that in the scheme of things it’s best to keep a perspective, remember your place. To make sure if you do go down you’re connected to a system that will cut you some slack, regenerate you, to guarantee flow. And I realise quietly, with a private smile, just how much my girl’s blossoming into the professional.

  Jade and I are in a video store. We’ve decided tonight to invest in some clean living, the kind of activity couples do everywhere, except we’re not a couple, not in any conventional sense. Jade spent last night with Harvey. I was suspicious when she said she needed to go ahead alone, that she needed to treat him because he was starting to lose interest. I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now but I’m willing to let it slide because tonight she looks like she needs some rest.

  We’re in Surfers near Jade’s apartment and we’ll go to her place tonight because we always do. Jade has never been inside where I live. I’ve never invited her and she has never expressed any interest. Evasion of intimacy is the tacit rule between us; we will only ever hang in the spaces that remind us of nothing. My place is too established, too long term and too close to me. Hers is the venue for floating.

  Early evening in the store and the air-conditioning is ice cold, freezing our skin as the summer sun sears orange against the tinted windows. From the outside no one can see us, pacing the long aisles while a car chase is played out above our heads. Jade covers ground faster than me, intent on working the room as if the maze of aisles is so simple there must be a trick to it. Occasionally something will catch my eye, the images of something I have already seen, reminding me of old scenarios and lap-times before her, perhaps something I have watched in what seems like another lifetime with Camille.

  After passing a few times we pause with the other customers in new releases checking out the levels of intimacy of other couples, watching them watching the wall looking for clues on how to behave. Jade whispers in my ear comments like, He doesn’t love her, while we review how often and where they touch, if they share secret smiles, if they speak at all.

  Jade and I could pass for heavily committed in our comfortable clothes and shoes, evidence of our low-level effort, but we don’t fit in because we don’t touch and we don’t function properly as a unit. We exhibit the same cloistered talk but Jade makes a lot of extra noise, the kind that attracts stares. I think she’s reacting validly to the monotony in the room because only I can comprehend her, translate her signals. She’s checking in from the outer edges, so this place and these people, caught in the flow of the everyday are, to her, absurd. It doesn’t matter what they might really be like; Jade doesn’t want to know. She has to believe that everyone else is not in on the joke, that she is operating in ways they cannot believe in or see. The catch-phrases that explain the fiction for hire are never as creative as the ones Jade mimes in her head. And of course she laughs at me, relishing my role as partner. Leaning into her like I see the others do, mulling over the options, but I don’t push the issue because there’s always a limit to how close she lets me get.

  While Jade is blatantly checking out the porno section, I muse in Foreign Film about doing this with Camille, about how this scene would be different. With Camille I would be like the other men in the room, conscious of how much I wanted her and conscious of other things I wouldn’t necessarily want to know. Like how she is in the morning, how long we have been together, how we’ll fare in the future, and aware consistently of the contracting space between us, how every day I would be becoming her. For the rest of my life is a prerogative I’ve always resisted. Camille is the only woman who has ever made me consider marriage and she keeps on trying. There are two letters from her sitting on my desk at home, invitations, gestures of forgiveness, written on plain white paper sitting on my desk. I haven’t replied.

  In one move I could change everything. I could respond to Camille and rearrange my life. I look at Jade. Nothing’s changed. The risk of losing out still puts me off: the idea that my reward for breaking the game would not be enough and I’m happy to fold on Camille’s marital fantasy. What reassures me is the reverence I experience seeing Jade. She’s not normal. Just watching her reassures me that what we are doing is not simply what it is, what it appears to be. With Jade there’s always room for potential.

  Still, I wonder if I could feel so liberated without her. If I was alone, if she was taken from me unexpectedly, would I slip into contemplating the sound, the healthy and the customary, to wanting what they tell me to want? The idea worries me and I put back the DVD I’m holding. We can’t settle on anything so Jade buys a life-sized cut-out of Arnold Schwarzenegger after haggling over the price with the teenage kid behind the counter. We leave, walking down the street still searing with heat with his 2-D brawn hanging between us.

  ABSOLUTE ADVANTAGE

  THE DEALER

  Indy Carnival. Saturday. Day Two. Jade is there with Harvey. Across from me in another tower. Where she said she would be. I am, of course, not invited. Jade has bought tickets for the inner circle at Paradise Holdings. They are holed up opposite my balcony in the aquamarine matchstick. A building so thin and blue it looks like a wafer made up of waves of transparent glass. How fitting the girl I can’t see through has left herself so exposed.

  Jade’s smiling. Running the show. The apartment she has secured is in the centre of the racetrack, circling Main Beach and its million-dollar real estate. All afternoon people have
been descending and ascending towers. From the seventeenth floor I watch a cordoned-off area become the focus of this city’s attention. Gradually people are filling Jade’s balcony and every other. Underneath and above me stereos pump out either eclectic beats or rock ’n’ roll. I’m alone in one of the older residential buildings, full of young people on acid and ecstasy, jumping up and down on rock-solid terraces. Occasionally their bare arms stretch out into the open air around me like fertilised plants growing rampantly towards noise and light.

  The scenes in Jade’s building are comparatively decorous. Leaning more towards Long Island iced tea than VB. Across the track a gang of bare-chested men hang a makeshift sign off the side of a building: Indy, Indy we’ve got the view, one more beer and we’ll hurl on you. A gang of barely dressed girls responds with a one-word painted sheet: K-Indy. The fusion of their two apartments seems inevitable.

  The Indy track is a fever-pitch of punters and heat. I switch the view from my naked eye to the telecast, to the magnified view through my binoculars, to the giant screens accommodating the on-ground crowds with shots of tight chicanes and pit-stops, and I can’t help but feel charged in this carnival of high-speed voyeurism. Jade is on Harvey’s knee. Jiggling her cocktail. She, too, is charged. The hostess. The queen of her castle, paying for the stocked bar and caviar, generously entertaining the company with its own money. I don’t bother with the race or the drinking; the sight of her well-orchestrated farce is entertainment enough.