by Fiona Capp
The second time was at the Anchorage. The only person who knew about Stone’s visit was Stone’s pilot and the next-door gardener, Jeff. As nothing was discussed during the flight, it can’t be the pilot. And Jeff was mowing when they were talking. He couldn’t possibly have heard a thing. The deal was finalised during a brief, cryptic phone call when Morrow called Stone to confirm that the approval had gone through. He had thought he was alone in the office, but when he was leaving he saw that Howard, his chief advisor, was still there, working late. He must have been in the men’s when Morrow checked to see if everyone had gone. But what could Howard have heard? His office door had been closed during the conversation. Then he remembers what Stone said about Howard, how he’d seen him talking to McCarthy at the conference, and that McCarthy has a house at the other end of Millionaires Walk.
It is one of those dreamy autumn mornings, sunny and still. As he walks down the familiar streets, the streets he walks every day, everyone knows him, everyone smiles and he must smile back. The solid houses behind their high fences don’t look so solid any more. Bricks and mortar are easily breached. A letter slipped into a letter box, a message left on a phone, an email blinking on a screen. As he walks, he goes over the letter in his mind, over the details and the phrasing. He thinks about those who might want to ruin him – certain sections of the media, the opposition, even some colleagues. Like McCarthy. You couldn’t avoid making enemies in politics. He even finds himself wondering about Veronica. As far as she was concerned, he had chosen the Anchorage over their marriage. She resented the money he planned to sink into it and had every reason to be bitter. But how would she know what he’d done?
By the time he has reached his office above a jewellery store on the main street of his electorate, he has started to hear faint echoes of familiar voices in the letter, voices of people close to him, his people, people who know things that no one else could. The glass doors slide open and he reluctantly steps inside. The single flight of stairs to the office has never felt steeper, his legs so stiff he has to will them to bend and lift. As his head emerges into the open-plan space, he has the urge to duck from friendly fire that might be coming his way. A familiar sensation at press conferences or in parliament – where the fire is not so friendly – but never here, among his own.
Caroline, her hair lacquered gold like her bling, her tanned skin stretched tight over her cheekbones, is already at the espresso machine, frothing the milk for his first caffè latte of the day. She beams him a smile full of teeth so dazzlingly white he wouldn’t be surprised if they glowed in the dark.
‘Richard, darling,’ she cries, coming towards him, coffee in hand. She air-kisses the sides of his face. ‘I’ll just put this on your desk.’ And disappears into his office.
Morrow raises his hand in a half salute, as he always does, at the already assembled troops, looking from face to familiar face. Royce with his receding hairline and furrowed brow, the office policy-wonk, his nose always buried in some white paper or other. Howard, his speechwriter and chief advisor, with his polished, schoolboy cheeks and perfect diction, a picture of concentration as he taps furiously at his keyboard. And the unflappable Sandra, his media officer, scanning the papers while checking out her iPhone and some breakfast show on TV. All of them have been with him for years. Everything is humming as usual and yet nothing is the same. Since his divorce he has come to think of his staff as his de facto family, the people who look after his back and keep his world turning. He can’t really believe that any of them are behind it. But the damage has been done; doubt has crept in.
He sits down at his desk and reaches for the stack of abalone shells that he collected from the surf beach as a boy, when the Anchorage was still in the family. The crusty outer casings of a creature whose flesh is now as valuable as gold. But it wasn’t the creature that mattered to the young Morrow. It was its house, the nacreous interior of pearly pinks, greens and sea blues. Over three summers he found eight of them, intact, each shell a little smaller than the last so that their foetal curves fitted perfectly inside each other like babooshka dolls.
He lines them up in front of him from the smallest shell, the size of his thumbnail, to the largest, which fits into his palm. Then he puts them back inside each other, one by one. They fit together with such precision you’d think they’d been designed for this purpose, that they’d been tossed up on the beach especially for him. To remind him of the order in things and of his place in it. The rightness of it. Something he had never questioned, just as he had never questioned that one day he would get the Anchorage back.
He returns the shells to their spot on the desk. They are reassuring in ways he finds hard to fathom or explain. But it would only take one of them to be dropped or knocked, one of them to crack or break, and the whole sequence, and the satisfying completion they represent, would be utterly ruined.
11.
Ned is hidden by the vines covering the pergola in the garden next door to the Anchorage, when a black Jaguar with tinted windows purrs up the gravel driveway and comes to a stop at the front of the house. As he watches, the driver’s-side door opens and Richard Morrow steps out, peeling off his suit jacket and tie and tossing them into the car before walking slowly up the main path that bisects the deep green lawn that’s bordered by a ragged hedge, absentmindedly undoing the top button of his collar as he goes. He stops and looks up at the house, his eyes travelling over every part of it, lingering on the blemishes: the rusted wrought-iron lace and the sagging boards of the veranda, the peeling paint of the window frames, the missing tiles on the porch, the rusted guttering and downpipes. The once-grand lady now down on her luck.
Standing there in his crisp white shirt he might be a real estate agent appraising the house’s market value – except for the expression on his tanned, chiselled face. An expression that makes Ned think of a mother studying her adult child with his paunch and greying hair, her face a mixture of love and bewilderment as she searches for signs of the fresh-faced boy he once was, and wonders where all the years went. A look absorbed by what has gone, as much as by what is there.
Ned half expects Morrow to turn around and call him out, but the politician is too preoccupied to be aware of anything else. He stands like this for some minutes, his eyes restlessly roving the house and the garden and then back to the house, as if recalling memories or tallying costs. A magpie carols in a nearby tree. A puff of wind brings with it the mineral smell of the bay. Ned watches Morrow take a deep breath. His face slackens. As he continues down the path to the front door, he passes a lavender bush and one hand goes out and idly crushes a flower head and raises it to his face to take in the scent.
He stops at the tiled porch. Instead of opening the door, he does something Ned has never seen anyone do. He goes to the front wall of the house and gently places his hands on the rough-hewn limestone, presses his nose to the chalky surface and inhales. Deeply. Ned can’t help smiling. He knows the power of these odours and the memories they can unleash. The smell of the place was always the first thing that hit him whenever they arrived at the fibro shack each summer. The metallic tang of ozone, the spicy aroma of the ti-trees and then, when you opened the door, the biscuity whiff of the lino and the stale mustiness of the closed-up house.
Morrow brushes the pale chalk from his hands and lowers himself ceremoniously into the rattan chair by the door, clearly in no hurry to go inside. At first, he sits upright, a king on his throne, his hands resting on the arms of the chair, his back straight, staring out over his domain. For all this, he looks infinitely weary, like a man who has been robbed of the power of sleep. He closes his eyes. His shoulders drop. Having given his body permission to relax, he begins to slump, as if drifting off. Soon, his chin falls to his chest. Then gravity takes over and he topples forward. Just in time, he jolts awake and his hands find his knees. He sits back upright and looks wildly around as if to remind himself where he is.
Ned looks away. He’s seen enough. Long, late afternoon sh
adows are stretching across the lawn. The bay has turned ash blue. He climbs down the gnarled trunk of the old vine and when he gets to the bottom, he realises he forgot to pick the grapes.
It’s clear to him he can’t stay in Morrow’s boatshed any longer. Too risky with Morrow around, now that the letter has been sent. He had assumed it would be like before; that Morrow would be too busy to come. He never imagined he would be witness to Morrow’s turmoil or soul-searching or whatever it was. Or find himself pitying the man. It is a complication he can do without.
Around this time of day he would normally start making his dinner, but he needs to find somewhere else to eat and sleep. The tide is low enough for him to walk over the rocks at the base of the headland around to the long beach on the other side. There are plenty of boathouses there; bound to be one that he can make use of. He is not interested in anything elaborate, like the miniature castle or the Hawaiian bar. He wants something as unobtrusive and neglected-looking as possible. Somewhere he can squat in peace. Somewhere away from Morrow and Millionaires Walk.
He finds a path that wends through the bushes up to the cleared spot on the headland where a monument sits. He had forgotten about the monument – a stumpy stone structure that commemorates the British taking possession of the land and the bay two centuries ago. The first time – so it claims – that the Union Jack was hoisted for this purpose in the country. Ned thinks about what was unleashed, all those squatters who went into the countryside and claimed land for themselves, blind to those already here, whose shell middens were embedded in the cliffs. In his own ironic way, he is carrying on a national tradition, which makes him a pioneer of sorts, claiming a new frontier. It is an amusing thought. And what if the man that he and Mai stumbled across in the park and all the homeless people like him in the city were to do the same? What if the cry were to go out: ‘Unlock the land!’? Or, at least, unlock the doors?
As he stares out over the dusky water, he can imagine flotillas of boat people heading across the bay and mooring at the private jetties, climbing the cliff to Millionaires Walk and fanning out to the unoccupied houses – houses of six or more bedrooms that lie empty for most of the year while thousands sleep in the streets – and making themselves at home. It is something to remember when he finds himself feeling sorry for Morrow, whose family claimed vast swathes of the peninsula in the decades after that flag was raised.
Beneath an indigo sky, lights are flickering on round the bay. Ned walks along the shore, studying the boatsheds set back from the beach. Here, the cliff is not sheer like on Millionaires Walk, and houses have been built at intervals down the slope. Some of the boathouses at the bottom are the size of a modest holiday shack and have fences around them to keep beachgoers at bay.
There is one shed he remembers from earlier investigations, when it occurred to him that it would be an idea to have a back-up if he were forced to get out of Morrow’s in a hurry. It is at the far end of the beach among the native grasses and looks almost derelict. Soft sand swallows his feet as he approaches over the dune. The private jetty that was once attached to the boathouse has collapsed and been claimed by the sea. Only a few stumps poking up through the sand at the tide line remain.
The padlock on the front double doors is so rusted all it takes is one sharp blow with a rock. As he drags open one of the doors, it almost comes off its hinges. Thick cobwebs, weighed down with dust, hang from the rafters. The half-rotted husk of a rowboat and perished foam kick-boards confirm his suspicions. No one has been in here for years. Admittedly, it’s a step down in the world of boatsheds, but he can clean it up. At least he won’t be looking over his shoulder all the time, worrying about Morrow.
He goes back to grab his few toiletries and clothes – and to say goodbye to the shed. He is sure that no one has ever appreciated it as much as he has. Fraser liked to slum it in his ‘getaway’, but only for the occasional night over summer; he had no great attachment to the shed itself. And it’s obvious that what matters to Morrow are the house and the garden. The irony is that while Wainwright senior let the house run down, he repaired the walkway down the cliff, the shed and the jetty. Fraser’s father was a serious yachtsman. Getting to and from the water and safely storing sails and gear mattered more to him than maintaining the house.
Through the open doorway, Ned can see the blinking red channel marker in the middle distance and the orange glitter of the city on the far side of the bay. He will miss being here, but it isn’t worth the risk – apart from the guilt. The symphony will still be playing on the beach beyond the headland. It will just sound fainter and less urgent from his new shack set back from the shore.
He takes one last look around the shed. His shed. The small white enamel basin glows like the pearly interior of a giant clam shell. The ‘new’ shed doesn’t have running water. Another thing he will have to give up. He is getting quite good at this, at finding ways to live without what he once thought indispensable. In this mild weather, it is easy enough. Like an extended camping trip. When the winter comes, it will be another story. And yet, for all the chaos of the past weeks and months, for all the guilt, he can’t shake off the delirious feeling that he has stepped through a sort of looking glass into a world where the old rules, the old laws, no longer apply.
All across the choppy bay, whitecaps flash wicked grins. The incoming tide, whipped up by a blustery northerly, is beginning to thump under the floorboards. It’s time to get going. Suddenly the lights of the city go black as if the powergrid has failed, as if the city has plunged into the sea. The shape of a man, a very tall man, fills the doorway.
Ned flinches. ‘Shit!’
In the split second before the dazzle of torch light blinds him, he recognises the man’s slender form. He raises a hand to his eyes.
‘You do realise,’ the man says in a patrician voice, lowering the torch, ‘that this is private property.’
Ned steps backwards. The pulse in his neck is flipping like a fish out of water. Why on earth did he dally when he knew Morrow was up in the house?
‘I thought no one was here,’ he says lamely, knowing he can’t leave it at that. ‘Look, this is embarrassing. I had an argument with my wife and she threw me out. I didn’t know where to go so I just hit the highway and ended up here.’
‘You just ended up here?’ Morrow says with the lofty sarcasm that is the hallmark of his style in parliament.
‘It was somewhere to go. I knew Fraser Wainwright when I was younger.’ He shoots a quick glance at Morrow to see if the name has hit home. The slightest tightening around the politician’s lips suggests that it has. ‘We’d sleep here on hot nights. Fraser called it his “getaway”. He always left the key on a hook under the eaves and I took a punt it would still be there. I’m afraid I thought the house was empty, that it wouldn’t matter if I crashed here for the night.’
Morrow says nothing, just stares through the slits of his eyes at the stranger in his boatshed and lifts his nose, as if sniffing the words to gauge if Ned is telling the truth. He deliberately raises the torch to Ned’s face again and keeps it there.
‘You knew the Wainwrights?’
Ned tries to hold Morrow’s gaze, shielding his eyes with his hands, but the glare defeats him. He has to look away. He clings to the disdain with which Morrow uttered the word ‘Wainwrights’. Morrow more or less told Ralph Stone that the Wainwrights were interlopers, that their possession of his family heritage was illegitimate. This history could work in Ned’s favour – if he plays it right.
‘I was friends with Fraser. I didn’t like his parents, especially his father. He was a cold fish.’
An extra-large wave, probably triggered by a passing tanker out in the shipping channel, detonates under the jetty with an almighty thwack. Morrow shoots a quick glance over his shoulder. Ned contemplates making a dash but decides against it. Morrow is big and he’d never get past him.
He gestures towards the torch which is still trained on his face. ‘Would you mind?’
> Morrow holds it steady and looks at him searchingly, then reluctantly drops his arm so that the pool of light sways at his feet.
‘Not cold. Frozen.’
It takes Ned a moment to register what he’s talking about.
Morrow continues. ‘I was at Grammar with him, Wainwright senior. He was a complete prick, even then.’ His eyes flash; his voice is bitter. He studies Ned as if weighing up whether to believe him. ‘You went to school with Fraser?’
Ned almost guffaws. ‘My parents didn’t have that kind of money.’ Idiot! He shouldn’t have mentioned money. Somewhere during the conversation he has managed to forget that he is talking to the man he is blackmailing. His elaborate justifications seem suddenly ludicrous. Delusory. So much for being an outlaw. All he can do is try to appear plain-speaking and honest, and at least this is something he can be honest about.
‘Fraser liked me because I was different from the people he knew. He didn’t get on with his parents.’
‘Who can blame him?’ Morrow says drily. ‘He seemed decent enough when I met him after the sale.’
Ned nods. ‘I always thought so.’ Until he lost all my money.
Morrow sweeps the torch around the boatshed, and then out over the jetty. ‘Wainwright looked after things down here. But the house – it’s criminal.’ He asks Ned what the house was like when he used to visit and whether the Wainwrights held parties and what they got up to. ‘I can only assume they let everyone trash the place.’
There is a strange kind of energy to Morrow’s hostility, almost as if he feeds off it. Ned could understand it if Wainwright had run off with Morrow’s wife. But this is a house. Just a house – although clearly not to Morrow. Take that ritual of inhaling the limestone, as if savouring a woman’s perfume. And now these questions, as if the house was a long-lost lover with a secret past he’s been excluded from. And which torments him. A lover for whom he has betrayed everything he has worked for: his constituents, his colleagues, even himself. Although you can bet he doesn’t see it this way.