Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Oh, Anna, you wouldn’t. Please say no to continuing in the business.’

  ‘Don’t be impatient, Nicholas. As it turns out, a relocated Madam Butterfly won’t be possible.’

  ‘But by agreeing to the deal, you now only get five per cent when you own all the properties but one. That’s bloody crazy.’

  ‘I agree, it would be crazy, insane. But I wouldn’t work like that. My only reason for agreeing is to have the Madam Butterfly building included. That guarantees that McVitty, Swan & Allison will nominate the site I own for the Nauru House development. If I went in alone and tried to buy the building from Stan he’d make me pay a ridiculous price for it, or out of sheer spite he’d simply nominate the alternative site.’ Anna spread her hands. ‘No Madam Butterfly building, no deal – simple as that. Stan McVitty holds the key but he doesn’t know it.’ She took a sip of champagne. ‘But there’s another way.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ll agree to be his straw man and set up a company in my name, buy the nineteen lots I already own in the name of the new company for exactly what I paid for it, not a cent more except for the legal fees and stamp duties. This is going to take a period of at least a year. So every month or so, one or another of my properties will appear as sold to the new holding company, including the premises Madam Butterfly occupies, which will naturally be the first to be sold at Stan’s insistence.’

  I frowned. ‘Anna, I don’t get it.’

  Anna ignored me. ‘Then, I’ll sell the whole parcel to the Nauruans for roughly ten times as much.’

  ‘And only get five per cent of the value? That’s bullshit, you said so yourself.’

  ‘Shush, Nicholas, listen. I keep all the money. Around four and a half million dollars. All I give Stan McVitty is the $500 000 he gave me to buy my own properties for the new company plus the money the new company paid for the Madam Butterfly building. He hasn’t lost a cent. I’ve even allowed his money to earn bank interest, which is what we agreed. He has his entire original investment back, plus the money he made on the Madam Butterfly building. A nice safe little profit on the money invested. Or as I will put it to him, “A nice tidy little package, Stan”.’

  ‘Holy Moly! And there’s no contract between the two of you? That right?’

  ‘Right. Not a single scrap of paper to interfere.’

  ‘Anna, he’s a lawyer, a smart one according to you. Is he going to buy this?’

  ‘Buy what? It’s his suggestion, not mine. He made me a loan at current bank interest. I have a piece of paper, a loan agreement, to prove it. It’s the only documentation in the entire project between us. He demanded it in case something unforeseen went wrong.’

  I chuckled, not sure I approved. ‘And something unforeseen did happen?’

  ‘Darling, as W.C. Fields once said, you can’t cheat an honest man.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll kick up a fuss when all this comes out in the wash?’

  ‘Nicholas, the operation has been going for a year. I’m supposedly frantically buying up the properties I already own and the investment company in my name is duly registered and already has ten lots in its portfolio.’

  ‘Anna, the McVittys are Melbourne establishment! Aren’t you afraid of what he might do? These people, they stick together, you know. Besides, you mentioned the heroin and the madam thing.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘Of course you can’t be too careful, but as I told you once before, it’s who you know, and I feel sure that the VIP list I’ve roped in over twenty years with never a whisper of impropriety is enough goodwill – that will go further than any influence he may have. A quiet word here and there, an exposure in the Herald or The Age and the attempted scam will be all over town.’

  ‘Nice work, darling.’

  Anna was more than a little elated and I realised that she’d told no one up to now, that letting off steam in the plane to Japan with a glass or two of good champagne was exhilarating. ‘The arrogance of males never ceases to surprise me,’ she went on. ‘Stan McVitty is so smug he hasn’t even taken into consideration his personal reputation. Besides, there’s Peter McVitty in Canberra. I’m told he’s a candidate for a safe seat in a coming by-election, that they want him to be the new Minister for External Affairs. He certainly isn’t going to allow a family scandal of such proportions. Can you imagine, the scion of one of Melbourne’s most respected families and a principal in a leading law firm being implicated? What’s more, there’s the implied nepotism Peter showed towards the family law firm appointed to broker the building of Nauru House. Then the inside knowledge of the deal his brother attempted to exploit. It all adds up to a huge mess.’

  I grinned. ‘Even the law wins. Stan McVitty would most certainly have to retire from his law practice, the Nauru government business would leave the firm, removing a source of future profit, both honest and suspect.’ I shrugged. ‘Anna, what can I say, you seem to have worked it all out, but you’re getting in awfully deep.’

  Anna shrugged in turn. ‘Nicholas, gold is a heavy metal and it sinks to the bottom of the harbour. But there is another small matter.’

  ‘Aha, and what does that mean?’

  ‘Well, I added another element to the deal when I agreed to be the straw man for Stan McVitty. I asked for the lease of the five floors of parking in Nauru House at a price always to be competitive with that currently charged for inner-city parking space. It was a contract that had to be signed by the Nauru government, a legal document, or I wouldn’t agree to the rest of the deal.’

  I looked at Anna strangely. ‘Parking space? Are you sure? What’s wrong with the street? Melbourne has these big wide streets . . . besides, most people come into the city by tram or train.’

  ‘Stan McVitty said the same thing. He laughed and agreed immediately and got the paperwork done with the Nauru people.’

  ‘But car parks. Why?’

  ‘My Japanese clients tell me that Nissan, Toyota and Mitsubishi are planning to flood the market with cheap motorcars, and there is General Motors Holden of course. This will force down car prices. It seems logical. With people owning cars they’ll not only use them for Sunday picnics.’

  ‘Nah, public transport, that’s the Australian way. You’ll never get rid of the buses and trams,’ I said, dismissing her observation. Anna was smart, but I reckoned in this instance she was way out of her depth. Cars are a man’s business after all.

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps not . . . Anyway, I have given Stan McVitty fifty per cent of the twenty-five-year parking franchise in Nauru House.’

  ‘I’ll bet he was impressed,’ I said with a good dollop of sarcasm. ‘Anna, let me assure you, if you and he hope to make a quid out of inner-city car parks you’ve got Buckley’s.’ I shook my head. ‘Underground parking? No way.’

  Anna had hitherto been polite about my criticism of the car-parking idea. But now my rude rebuttal prompted her to protest. ‘Why, Nicholas, it makes perfect sense. All the architects and planners are building car parks in excavated space under the new high-rise buildings going up in Sydney. They must know something we don’t. Think about it for a moment. All a car park is . . . well, is space, lights and concrete. No upkeep, no painting, no depreciation, no fixtures, no windows, no people to complain about the neighbours, a few yellow lines, a power bill once a quarter, exit and entry signs and an attendant at the gate. And every month, rent from the tenants and cash from the casuals.’

  Anna would one day own the parking franchises for twenty per cent of Australia’s high-rise buildings, worth millions of dollars annually, and the odious Stan McVitty did eventually get the profit he’d hoped to make on the site for Nauru House, without it costing him a penny beyond his fifty per cent share of the maintenance costs and painting a few yellow demarcation lines on the concrete. As for smart arse, bloody good thing I lived in a place in the sun for shady people, where you didn’t have to think too hard to make a buck.

  Anna also took out twenty-five-year leases on the plan on seven prime loc
ations within the Ala Moana Shopping Mall in Honolulu, another major asset the Nauru Government acquired and the largest mall in the world at that time. Then she flew to Paris and signed up Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton, Charles Jourdan and Pierre Balmain, then over to Italy to visit Gucci.

  And, of course, she got away with the redevelopment scam without a breath of the near scandal reaching the Melbourne establishment. Moreover, she went to see Peter McVitty, now the Minister for External Affairs, and briefed him on what she’d done. He was to become a grateful and firm friend in the years to follow.

  You could say that, for Madam Butterfly, this was her first really big flutter. To give you some idea, in today’s property values, the five million or so dollars paid in 1971 for the development site where Nauru House now stands is the equivalent of a profit of seventy million dollars.

  Madam Butterfly, the establishment, closed with the sale of the building site. A year or so later several of Anna’s girls, her dominatrices, opened another house of bondage in St Kilda named Moths to a Flame.

  I recall we were sitting on the verandah at Beautiful Bay watching the sunset, Anna with a glass of her favourite French champagne, when she told me about the new house of bondage.

  ‘How would they obtain the finance? Do you think Stan McVitty is up to his old tricks?’ I asked.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ she answered. ‘They loathed him.’

  I hesitated. ‘You? Anna, you didn’t . . .?’

  Anna gave me a wide-eyed look. ‘Nicholas! Don’t be ridiculous! I don’t know what you could possibly be thinking.’

  ‘Oh, Anna, Anna! Shame!’

  ‘Nicholas, a little more bubbly, please.’

  Relationships are built on trust and yet the dichotomy between Anna and me meant that there were some things she admitted to me and some things she didn’t. It wasn’t duplicity. It was just that she lived a part of her life where I simply could not go. The fact that she’d told me about the McVitty incident and other aspects of her business life showed that she wanted me to know some of her secrets. But by not admitting to financing, perhaps even owning, Moths to a Flame, the new house of bondage, she excluded me from other areas of her life.

  But there was one exception. Anna, born and raised on an island, was fascinated by island politics. She never wearied of hearing the ‘who, what, how, why and when’ about the prospect of self-government for any of the various Pacific nations.

  I guess she’d been brought up under an oligarchic colonial island regime and suffered under another even more despotic one with the Japanese. She longed to see something good happen for the islanders, so people would no longer be under the dictates or whims of a nation other than their own. ‘Nicholas, they need to make their own decisions, their own mistakes, follow their own customs, govern in their own right – that is the only true freedom.’

  Anna, to my knowledge, never lied to me; she simply didn’t tell me everything. I admit, from the beginning of our re-acquaintance we agreed that the so-called nefarious aspects of her life were not brought into our shared life. But when you love someone, knowing there are secrets can create tensions and cause you to speculate, fear the worst, without being able to resolve those fears.

  I imagine it is like being the partner of a crime boss. You don’t ask questions and you try to live your life as normally as possible, bring up the kids with all the right values, pretend everything is hunky-dory when you know it isn’t, know that at any moment something horrible might happen. In my case, of course, there were no kids and I was a male, but my anxiety about Anna’s covert life was much the same.

  The fact that we lived in different countries and saw each other for one week every month probably made the relationship possible. For three-quarters of the time we lived separate lives, in some respects as strangers. When I wasn’t at sea we phoned each other almost daily, but we couldn’t question each other’s routines too closely. Plying between islands carting copra, coffee, cocoa and people had its conversational limitations for Anna, and there were also the other women she affected not to mind, while in her life there were many no-go areas for me.

  I wished my life lacked those no-go areas, but we had openly discussed my need to have normal sex and I had made it clear to Anna that this was desirable on two counts: first, I spent three weeks a month away from her, and second, she was unable to have penetrative sex.

  Faced with reality, she’d finally agreed to see Dr Denmeade, the Melbourne psychiatrist I’d first consulted about her problem, apparently without any positive result. Because we weren’t married and Anna was now his patient, he wouldn’t discuss her case with me other than to confirm that she most definitely suffered from vaginismus. So I’d brought the subject up with Anna and she’d merely shrugged. ‘It’s still mumbo-jumbo, Nicholas,’ was all she would say.

  ‘Okay, then will you see a gynaecologist? Maybe it’s physical and not something in your head.’

  ‘Okay, you find one and I’ll see him, that way you’ll know I’m not cheating,’ she’d added unnecessarily, indicating how fraught with difficulties the issue had become.

  Unbeknownst to Anna, I’d found a specialist in Collins Street with the help of Marg, who at the time was still married.

  Marg and Anna hadn’t exactly taken to each other, which was hardly surprising. Both were strong, organised, independent, and differed in almost everything they believed. Anna, of course, knew about my original relationship with Marg. At that time, Marg’s husband was still alive, so there was no question of anything going on between us. Over the years she and the children had spent several holidays with me on the island and we had simply remained the best of loving friends. Now, with Anna’s problem, I knew I could trust her to find the right physician.

  Marg, as usual, wasn’t willing to fly blind. ‘What is it, Nick?’ she wanted to know.

  I replied in the clumsy manner of a bloke, even though I could probably have addressed a roomful of doctors on the subject. ‘Um . . . er, you know, something down there.’ Then added by way of further clumsy explanation, ‘Women’s stuff.’

  ‘Hardly a clinical description,’ she sniffed. ‘C’mon, you can do better than that. If I have to find the right chap I want to know what the problem is.’

  ‘I think it’s vaginismus,’ I replied, grateful for the word because it avoided going into further detail.

  ‘Think?’

  Not wishing to go into graphic details with Marg I feigned impatience. ‘God, Marg, how would I know. It’s difficult for her to, you know . . . have sex.’

  ‘Sex? Could be lots of reasons, Nick,’ she said sympathetically. ‘Anna’s been through a lot.’

  ‘Yeah, but let’s start with the physical side,’ I said, putting a stop to any further probing, if that’s the right word in this context.

  Marg was as good as her word and found, she assured me, exactly the right chap if it was vaginismus. ‘If it isn’t we’ll see about somebody else I have in mind.’ Marg was always pretty thorough, if formidable, in pursuit of a solution to any given problem.

  I travelled to Melbourne to be with Anna on the day of her appointment, but when I volunteered to attend with her she refused. ‘Nick, I’d feel more comfortable on my own.’

  ‘You’ll tell him everything, won’t you, darling?’ I begged. She nodded, but I knew she wouldn’t or, more specifically, probably couldn’t.

  Later, back at my hotel, I asked her what the gynaecologist had said.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me physically, Nick. He found nothing specific,’ she answered.

  ‘Found? You mean he was able to do an internal examination?’

  ‘No, not at first, then he gave me a local anaesthetic.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘He didn’t say. He agreed it probably is vaginismus, but said there was no apparent physical cause for my condition.’

  ‘You mean the spasms?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What, that’s all? He didn’t
suggest anything?’

  ‘Only that I should keep trying to have sex.’

  I sighed. ‘And will you?’

  Anna drew back. ‘No, Nicholas! We’ve tried already, a hundred times. I can’t. I just can’t! That’s all.’ I realised then that Anna wasn’t generalising, that she’d actually decided to make a hundred separate attempts to allow me to enter her and now she had given up.

  ‘Anna, you’re not alone in this,’ I said evenly, trying to rally her a little.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Me. I’m a man, I have needs; we’re partners,’ I replied, trying not to show any emotion, to keep my voice matter of fact.

  Anna started to cry. For once I said nothing, waiting, not drawing her to me. ‘But you’re allowed to have other women,’ she sniffed. ‘We agreed.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t love them. It’s simply getting rid of my frustrations.’ I paused, upset as hell. ‘Anna, I don’t want them! Just fucking is not enough. They mean nothing to me. I want you! Okay, you didn’t like Dr Denmeade. Can’t you see another shrink? Maybe next time you’re overseas? Swiss doctors are supposed to be good at all that psychological stuff.’

  ‘Nicholas, I love you more than my life. But we have tried a hundred times. I can’t!’ Her voice kept rising. ‘I simply am unable! I spasm! Tighten! Lock up! It isn’t you! It’s me! If it’s in my mind there’s nothing I can do about it!’ she shouted. Then as suddenly she grew calm again, took a deep breath and shrugged, her blue eyes glistening with tears. She looked directly at me and said quietly, ‘That’s all.’

  What I wanted to say was that while my need for proper sex hadn’t diminished, it was becoming less and less meaningful to me. I wasn’t sleeping with whores, but I might as well have been. It wasn’t fair to these other women, who were pleasant and loving, but sex without love does something to the male psyche, or at least it did to mine. I was trying hard to be decent to these generous and, I think, often caring women, but was finding it increasingly difficult to fake something I didn’t feel. Intimacy is complex and the notion of getting rid of a build-up of semen is macho bullshit; wanking can do this just as efficiently with no complications.