Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  A moment’s silence followed, then Anna rose and placed her glass on the bamboo table between us and reached for the melancholy bottle. She lifted it from the ice bucket in a clatter of melting ice cubes and upended it over my head. I could hear the gurgle of champagne and felt it fizz as it poured over my head, neck, chest and shoulders. ‘Get fucked, Nick,’ she said, then she dropped the empty champagne bottle, retrieved her own glass and jerked my waistband away from my waist and poured the contents down my trousers. ‘That’s the only French love you’re going to get from me tonight, you bastard!’ Without another word she walked calmly from the verandah into the house.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I called, suddenly sober, soaked, and feeling desperately ashamed of myself.

  ‘To chase the dragon, arsehole!’ Anna called back.

  I wakened the next morning lambasting myself, using every unsavoury epithet I could think of, wincing at the thought of my behaviour the previous evening. I spent the first half of the morning preparing Madam Butterfly to sail and instructing cook to roast a chicken, bake a canary cake, Anna’s favourite, and pack a picnic hamper. Sailing to Coffee Scald on the morning after her arrival was another of our traditions, although, like the melancholy bottle, I wasn’t at all sure we would now be following it.

  Anna appeared on the dock at about eleven and I was somewhat relieved to see that she wore white shorts and a sky-blue shirt, another tradition; it was the outfit she’d worn when I’d disastrously attempted to kidnap her and she had tossed scalding coffee over me. It suggested that she might agree to come along.

  ‘Morning,’ I called. No answer. I waited until she came closer and said with a shrug, ‘What can I say? I was drunk and out of order. I apologise.’

  ‘Accepted,’ she replied crisply, though without even the hint of a smile.

  ‘Anna, I really am sorry. It was a beautiful poem and it obviously means a great deal to you; to belittle it was unconscionable. We have an agreement that I don’t pry into your past and I broke it. What can I do to make it up to you?’

  ‘You can stop this longwinded and pathetic apology, Nicholas!’ she said sharply, then added, ‘And you can start looking for another girlfriend, one with a less unfortunate past.’

  ‘You’re back on the smack then? You never intended to give up, did you?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  My father had once counselled me as a teenager, when he’d caught me arguing vehemently with a friend over a matter of no consequence: ‘Nick, most emotional arguments have one of two obvious conclusions: you either win or lose. So, before you open your big mouth, ask yourself: if I win this argument will it change anything, and what are the likely consequences? You will discover that, except in very rare circumstances, nothing positive will come from it either way and you may have lost a friend and changed very little else. Emotional altercations rarely have great potential for turning out well. Argue emotionally only when there is a deeply held belief at stake that you would only forsake if God required you to do so.’

  Sometimes having a bishop as your dad becomes a bit tedious. ‘But then I would appear to be weak in the eyes of my opponent,’ I recall protesting.

  ‘Ah yes, peace and goodwill always demand compromises. War occurs when we are no longer able to accommodate an adversary. True strength is knowing when that moment of principle arrives and our sense of truth has been betrayed.’

  I was sober and contrite and I wasn’t going to pick a fight, even if Anna used every foul imprecation known. ‘Are we sailing to Coffee Scald?’ I asked quietly, not looking directly at her and pretending to thread a length of rope through a brass eyehole in a sail.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fifteen minutes?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Good, I’ll fetch the picnic hamper. Cook’s baked your favourite canary cake.’

  A tiny smile. ‘You’re pathetic, Nicholas!’

  The wind had been fairly strong and changeable so that I was kept busy with the sails while Anna manned the tiller. There hadn’t been much conversation between us on the way to Coffee Scald; in fact, apart from calling out the odd instruction, we had exchanged not a word.

  Anna splashed ashore lugging the picnic hamper and proceeded to prepare lunch in the shade of a large coral outcrop while I tied sails and set the shallow-water anchor. She was waiting for me, seated on the beach and holding out a glass of white wine. I dropped to my haunches beside her to accept it. ‘Fair wind. I think that was just about a record run,’ I said, as a throwaway opening gambit, then, extending my glass, ‘Cheers.’

  ‘No, Nicholas, it was an ill wind and it brings no good,’ she said, her glass un-clinked.

  ‘Anna, please . . .’

  ‘No, Nick, I cannot continue! I must go away from you. I cannot be your woman. I am useless!’ She looked forlorn. ‘I must let you go. You must find another woman to love you. But only understand, no one can love you as much as I do. It is not possible.’ Then, heartbroken, she started to cry in earnest. It was the first time I had witnessed her howl. The usually self-contained Anna was now an abjectly miserable creature bawling her heart out, the wine glass abandoned, its contents spilled into her lap.

  ‘Anna! Anna!’ I threw my glass aside and dropped to my knees, holding her to my chest as she continued to weep, her breast and shoulders shaking against me. ‘Darling, no! Not ever!’ I cried, close to tears myself. ‘Don’t you understand, I love you. I don’t want anyone else. They, the others, mean nothing!’ I kissed the top of her head, her forehead, her hands covering her face, her ears. ‘Sweetheart! Darling! Please!’

  In an adult storybook I would have held her, comforted her and then made love to her on the lonely island beach, waves lapping at our feet, Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity. But of course no such thing happened. Anna eventually quietened down then pulled away from me, brushing away her tears with the fingertips of both hands, regaining her dignity with this one small gesture. ‘No, Nicholas,’ she said quietly, ‘we cannot continue.’

  The next day Anna caught the DC-4 leaving for Sydney via Noumea. No tears and a peck on the cheek at the airport. ‘Nice, Nicholas,’ she said softly, and turning, walked across the tarmac to the waiting aeroplane.

  My final view of her, seen through a blur of sudden tears, was of a perfectly contained Anna, the dark sheen of her hair, her trim figure in a beautifully cut grey business suit, the skirt just above the knees, nylon stockings and the click, click, click on the tarmac of the six-inch stiletto heels of her black leather shoes. The little Anna I’d seen on Coffee Scald was safely tucked away deep down where hurt couldn’t reach.

  The next month I was in turn angry, remorseful, tearful, drunk and belligerent. I picked fights, screwed around, paced the bedroom floor in the small hours of the morning, stopped myself reaching for the phone to call Melbourne on a thousand occasions, was consumed by self-pity and generally made a bloody idiot of myself. Until one night Joe Popkin, who must have heard about my pathetic carryings on, arrived by boat from Port Moresby and found me pissed as a newt in Le Club Français. Lifting me bodily (I weighed round 190 pounds) he carried me over his shoulder to a waiting taxi. Once home he dumped me under a cold shower then threw me, still wringing wet, into bed.

  The following morning, bleary-eyed and hideously hungover, I stumbled onto the verandah where cook was serving Joe breakfast. ‘Nick, mah man!’ he exclaimed cheerfully. ‘Sit you down, Champ. Take yoh’self a chair, boy. We got ourselves good news. Yeah, man . . . real good news!’

  ‘You’ve arranged to have me shot? Put me out of my misery,’ I muttered, plonking myself down heavily in the wicker chair, the smell of eggs and bacon causing my stomach to turn.

  ‘Juice.’ He handed me a glass of orange juice then turned to the cook. ‘Cookie, bring masta Nick coffee. Head blong hem sore tumas.’

  I sat with my chin on my chest, my head thumping like the clappers from hell, orange juice in my hand. ‘What good news, Joe?’ I ventured
at last.

  Joe cackled. ‘Well you jes about alive ee-nuff for me to tell you, son. Las night I called Mel-bourne.’ Joe laughed and clapped his hands, sending a jolt through my head. ‘Hallelujah! Tomorrow she’s comin’ back. Dat Sandring-ham, it bringing yoh lover back to yoh arms! Now maybe we can do some shippin’ busi-ness and Kevin, he gonna get offa mah back.’ His voice changed and he mimicked Kevin. ‘What’s wrong wid Nick? The whole goddamned Pacific is crawlin’ wid free pussy and he wants dat screwed-up junkie widda black leather corset, widda thigh-high boots!’ Joe laughed, ‘That’s our partner, partner.’

  Anna had once told me that she worked in a silk evening kimono and I would later question Kevin about the bondage uniform he imagined. ‘Where you been? You ain’t never seen no porn movies, Nick?’ he asked, clearly astonished. ‘Dem punishment dames, dat da standard uniform. Every Joe Palooka know dat, man!’

  In fact, Kevin liked Anna a great deal and moreover respected her for her acuity in business, constantly suggesting that they go into ventures together. Out of politeness Anna had asked me what I thought and seemed relieved when I told her I regarded it as a truly bad idea. Nevertheless he would seek her advice, often making a killing because of it. ‘Soon Bren Gun, she gonna be wearing Gucci from Paris,’ he’d promise after a successful venture, unaware that Bren Gun had been wearing fashion labels for several years and that Gucci was an Italian label.

  The fifteen years that followed Anna’s return to the island were not without their ups and downs; she would spend one week of every month with me and I would see her when I occasionally went to Melbourne. Anna was two people, the loving and generous woman who visited the island, and the businesswoman who ran a house of bondage. In our twenties and thirties, when most couples are building careers and having families, she was slowly making a small name as a property owner. She had speculated and gambled on the development of a post-Olympic Melbourne and done nicely without being noticed by the big developers. Her foresight in acquiring the properties around Madam Butterfly was unknown at the time, and she was lumped in with other small speculators under the collective title of slum landlord, those bit players who hoped to gain from the city’s rapid expansion by buying in some of the right locations and making a small killing.

  In fact, she was laying the foundations of a huge fortune. In the male business world of the sixties and seventies, nobody saw her coming. Her often rich and powerful clientele, many from the establishment and propertied elite, were generous with their advice, often boasting or confiding inside information. By slowly placing each building she bought into separate dollar shelf companies to protect her name, she quietly and discreetly built her property portfolio. Anna, for all her beauty, never glittered in public. She remained intensely private and low-key, crouched for the kill, ready for the Nauru property development site.

  However, during the week she spent each month on the island, she let her hair down and soon became immensely popular, not only with the ex-pats but also with the local people, in particular amongst those who would eventually assume the mantle of leadership.

  As a shipping company we clearly knew that ultimately our loyalty lay with the natives and self-government, but we had to appear to be neutral. Anna, who travelled with me around the islands, was investing in the future by supplying funds for education, overseas study and the development of political organisations whose members and leaders could be trained in basic leadership skills, politics, and recruitment techniques. She claimed the brightest kids on every Pacific Island, usually ferreted out from among the most gifted of the initial recipients of Uncle Joe scholarships. They were funded through the various indigenous political organisations she’d helped to create, to take accountancy and economics degrees in Australia, New Zealand, France and the United States. She would chuckle when the white rightwing elements on the island, which was almost everyone, would mutter darkly to one another in the clubs or at private dinner parties, ‘They’re being funded by the Communist party, you know. China and Russia are very involved. Moscow University is chock-full of Africans and Islanders. Jesus, some of the buggers have only just climbed out of the trees and they’re supposed to be taking economics degrees.’

  Anna went to great pains never to accept credit for her largesse. ‘The people who will count in the future know who I am and those who have no future in the islands never need to know,’ she’d say, happy to keep a low profile in these matters. On the surface she appeared to be an extroverted, fun-loving, uncomplicated, witty young woman, a gracious hostess, a loving partner, and, everyone assumed, my beautiful mistress. I lost count of the number of times I heard, ‘Nick, you lucky bugger!’ when I was taking a piss in the club toilet. On one occasion in Rabaul it was the police commissioner, and I wondered what he’d say if I told him the beautiful woman he’d been ogling all night was a heroin addict and a murderer.

  Now sitting in the bar in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo nursing my second Kirin and waiting for Anna I wondered if the halcyon years were over. We’d been together for twenty years, most of them very good. We’d sailed and laughed and cried and shared each other’s misfortunes. It had been my idea that we try to contact Konoe Akira, but Anna’s obvious keenness to do so now concerned me.

  I knew that she loved me in every way it was possible for her to love, but he had owned her in a manner I never could, or would wish to. He had been a part of the enormous damage done to her, although she could not accept this. In Anna’s mind, he was responsible for everything she had become, and she knew with certainty that without him she would be dead.

  The difficult part for me to accept was that this was probably true. He had given Anna sanctuary within the tyranny of the Japanese occupation, while extracting a bitter and selfish toll that denied her the ultimate entitlement of her womanhood.

  However, in the process he had furnished her with a set of finely forged intellectual weapons to survive and even to prosper in a hostile world. Anna couldn’t see that he had warped her mind and stolen the gift of absolute intimacy, the eternal way of a woman with a man.

  Instead, I suspected, while he had no use for her body, she still believed he owned her soul, and that this was a higher state of being. If we located him and they met, I was taking the chance that they might renew their relationship, and come together again to create a far stronger bond than the unconsummated love between the two of us. By now he would be a man in his early sixties and probably at the height of his intellectual powers. Anna, with her own hard-earned, practised and disciplined intelligence, would make a worthy acolyte.

  While I had believed it was necessary for her to face her demons by confronting Konoe Akira, I was taking a gamble with our relationship. I tried to tell myself that if Anna discovered that the bond between them had long since been broken, she might eventually recover. Now, sitting in the bar waiting to hear of her exploits of the previous night, I wasn’t feeling quite the clever Nick I’d thought myself to be on the verandah overlooking Beautiful Bay when I’d suggested the reunion.

  Anna arrived wearing knee-length high-heeled boots, jeans and a white cashmere polo-necked sweater, her hair catching the light as she entered the bar. The barman, mixing a martini for another guest, stopped mid-shake and came over to us.

  ‘Sake tokutei reishu [sake served specially cold],’ Anna requested, smiling, unaware of our newfound notoriety. Pointing to the cocktail shaker resting on his mixing bar she added, ‘Please, serve your honourable customer, I am in no hurry and do not deserve prior attention.’

  ‘Sleep well?’ I asked as she leaned over to kiss me on the cheek.

  ‘Like a baby.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Ten hours. I needed it. A long night,’ she said in a staccato manner.

  ‘So, tell me.’

  She glanced around quickly. ‘Not here, Nicholas . . . later.’

  ‘We can speak in English,’ I laughed. ‘We are speaking in English!’

  ‘I have to go back tonight,’ she said quickly in a low voice.
<
br />   ‘Back? Where?’

  ‘Topaz.’

  ‘The bondage joint in Roppongi?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I left my silver cigarette case behind.’

  ‘What, forgot it? Phone, tell them to put it in a taxi.’

  ‘No.’

  I was losing patience. ‘Why not?’

  ‘It was deliberate, a calling card.’

  ‘Shit no! Anna, don’t tell me . . .’

  ‘I have to go alone.’

  ‘Bullshit! That’s not what we agreed.’

  ‘I know, but he won’t come otherwise. I told you, they don’t allow gaijin and I am allowed only because I have a special introduction and am a fellow professional in the art of kinbaku.’

  ‘Okay, then we’ll give it a miss. Go home.’

  Anna’s violet-blue eyes looked at me, unblinking. ‘No, Nicholas, I can’t do that.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘You have killed before, Nick-san. We both know only the first time is difficult.Come, we must prepare.’

  Oyabun Fuchida, Tokyo

  I HAVE WRITTEN EARLIER about the futility of pursuing an argument when the outcome won’t change anything, but I was furious. I saw myself as Anna’s protector, but now she wanted to face Konoe Akira alone. I hadn’t any idea what the outcome might be, but I convinced myself that it wouldn’t be good, that he could even harm her. If she’d mentioned me on her previous visit to Topaz, the house of bondage – and I realised it was a big if – why was her former mentor insisting she come alone?

  When I imagined the confrontation, Anna always saw Konoe Akira in a different light, not as the immaculately clad and all-powerful commander of the Japanese forces in Tjilatjap that she had known but as a civilian in his sixties with a severe limp. In my mind I had rehearsed her reaction to him after twenty years. First would come the slow realisation that the greying man in her presence was no longer in control of her mind, then the understanding that she was free from the horror of the past and of his power over her. I imagined standing at her side with a foolish grin on my face, trying not to show too much emotion in front of the bitter, disillusioned old man leaning heavily on his walking stick.