Fishing for Stars

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘Involved in the Timor Sea oilfields?’

  Anna handed me her glass. ‘Nicholas, always what amazes me, it is your memory, it is so goed.’

  Anna was suddenly very upset, unaware of the slip in her syntax, or her reversion to the Dutch of her youth. I’d hit the jackpot, but the last thing I needed was a quarrel. I needed her to come clean, not to burst into tears and to protest and obfuscate. Anna was pure titanium in business, but there was a secret Anna I’d met in Batavia in 1942 who was still vulnerable, who could still be reached under all the hammered-down protective layers with which she had surrounded herself. I filled her glass and handed it to her, the surface bubbles still popping. Her hand shook slightly as she accepted it. ‘Darling, you know it goes no further. Just occasionally it helps to talk about things,’ I said as gently as I could.

  Anna turned away from me, leaning on the verandah railing and looking over Beautiful Bay. She remained silent for some time, then sighed, turned and, with her back against the railing, asked with a determined toss of her head, ‘Nick, what is it you want to know?’

  The use of Nick rather than Nicholas warned me that she had not yet quite regained her composure. ‘Anna, you’re angry. We can leave it right here if you wish.’

  There was a moment’s hesitation, then she said, ‘No, Nicholas, what is it you want to know?’

  ‘Was Budi involved in the mur . . . assassination of the five journalists?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus! How?’

  Anna downed half a glass of champagne in one gulp. ‘The Suharto government isn’t stupid, Nicholas. There had to be a risk assessment, a legal opinion, that’s why Budi was in East Timor. There was much too much at stake for the world to see what was going on. The journalists had seen too much; they had to be silenced.’

  ‘Sure, legal opinion, risk assessment, that makes sense, but he wasn’t the general actually in command, was he?’ I was desperately clutching at straws.

  ‘You should know by now that it doesn’t work like that, Nicholas. We, Budi and I, weren’t the only ones who wanted a share of the oil revenue.’ Anna shrugged. ‘This was a way to make sure we were first in line after the Suharto family.’

  ‘He gave the order to kill them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The direct order?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much is involved?’ I was deeply shocked.

  Anna drained her glass. ‘It could be worth six billion dollars to us, Nicholas.’

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Then there’s the natural gas,’ she added calmly.

  ‘Not just oil?’

  ‘No, you could add half as much again for the natural gas. There’s also the supply and support contracts.’

  I was silent, shaking my head. Anna handed me her glass, the champagne bottle half empty. ‘If you add in Roger East, the Australian journalist murdered by them in Dili, that’s a billion dollars for each life,’ I said. My hand was shaking as I poured the champagne.

  ‘Nicholas, wouldn’t you kill someone for a billion dollars?’ Anna asked.

  ‘No! I can’t spend what I’ve got. No! No! No!’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Anna said softly, as if speaking to herself.

  I handed her the champagne. ‘Anna, if what’s-his-name, Peter Yeldham, gets hold of this, you’re history! The implications are too terrible to contemplate.’

  ‘Nicholas, you’re getting too far ahead of yourself. How could he? He won’t get any stuff on Budi from me or from the Indonesians. The oil thing is still years away, twenty at least. We won’t earn a cent until then. Right now there’s only red and green areas marked on a map of the ocean floor and none of them has my name on it or his.’

  ‘Anna, in twenty years you’ll be seventy-eight! You’ve got to live with this! What on earth’s the point?’

  ‘The endgame,’ Anna replied calmly.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Nick, no woman in modern business history has ever become a multibillionaire through her own efforts, starting from scratch.’

  ‘That’s important?’

  ‘You’re damn right it is. It’s revenge!’

  ‘Uh – against who?’

  ‘Men!’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘No, of course not! I love you, Nicholas, but there is always an exception and it doesn’t prove the rule. I have to avenge my mother, who was raped by my father and lost her life for lack of medical attention when I was born. He, the bastard, murdered her!

  ‘Every two minutes a woman is raped in the world! Every two minutes!’ she cried. ‘That’s 263 000 reported cases, and it’s estimated only sixteen per cent of rapes are reported. When you extrapolate from that, every twenty seconds a woman or a child is being raped somewhere in the world! Men mostly get away with it, not just young louts, thugs and brutes, but fathers, uncles, lawyers, doctors; respected men escape justice because most judges are men. Who knows how many of the men sitting in judgment are guilty, or for that matter the defence lawyers! Throughout the world ninety-five per cent of rapists get off scot free! Even in Australia it’s seventy-five per cent! One in every three women in our own country is sexually abused as a child. In Saudi Arabia if a woman has been raped she is accused of being a temptress and beheaded!’

  ‘Whoa! Wait a cotton-pickin’ minute, darling. What has being a female billionaire got to do with revenge?’

  ‘Hear me out,’ Anna said. I don’t believe I’d seen her this worked up since my attempt to kidnap her on Madam Butterfly all those years ago. ‘First Konoe Akira attempted to steal my mind, but in fact he gave me something invaluable; he gave me strength. He taught me that I had the power to protect myself. That I didn’t have to be another male conquest. He is the one man beside yourself, Nicholas, who gave me anything. And you? You gave me love.’

  ‘But wait a minute, when you were sixteen, a virgin, you didn’t have these thoughts. At the time you said I was the first man in your life, that we’d wait for each other. I remember we discussed our fidelity.’

  ‘Yes, but it was only in Tjilatjap that I discovered the circumstances of my birth from my drunken and dying father. He told me the story not out of deep regret for what he’d done – he’d effectively killed my mother – but because my mother’s people had destroyed his life by castrating him. For once a rapist had been punished.’ Anna paused, attempting to calm down, then said, ‘Then I read in his will he had left nothing for me, not a brass razoo. I had bad blood! That, but more especially the knowledge that I was the child of a rape victim, shocked me deeply and, as it’s turned out, permanently. That was at exactly the same time as I came under Konoe Akira’s influence. He had Korin-san teach me the techniques of female domination and through male bondage he gave me power, the power never to let a man simply take my body, plunder me, treat me as if I was a worthless piece of shit.’

  ‘But, Anna, what about a man who loves you? Me, for instance?’ I thought guiltily of how quickly and happily I had betrayed her when I’d first met Marg. The eternal curse of the one-eyed snake.

  ‘Please, Nicholas, let me finish,’ Anna demanded. ‘I’m never going to say this again . . . to anyone. When Colonel Takahashi, that repulsive kempeitai pig, tried to force me to have sex with him in the Nest of the Swallows, I was going through the motions, the sexual foreplay Korin-san had so diligently taught me, when my mind went haywire and flipped inwards. I saw my father in the nude, not as a young man, but as a huge, bestial bloated man, the broken veins on his bulbous whisky nose, the snorting, the snot covering his upper lip, his huge repulsive body heaving as it had been just before he died from the effects of alcohol and diabetes. But he wasn’t dying, he was raping my tiny mother, and then just as suddenly I was in the process of being born, forcing my way out, rupturing her cervix, too big to pass through, with blood everywhere as she screamed and screamed, dying in agony.’ Anna was shaking as she looked at me. ‘The blood belonged to that Jap
anese scum I’d stabbed to death.’

  I rose from my chair and took her in my arms. ‘Darling, you don’t have to do this. Enough! It’s enough!’

  She pushed me away. ‘No, I do! I have to.’

  I moved to stand at her side, leaning with my back against the railing.

  ‘No, Nicholas, sit. I need to see you. I need to explain,’ she commanded.

  ‘Anna, you’re upset,’ I said, moving away toward my chair.

  ‘Of course I’m fucking upset!’ she yelled furiously, losing control. ‘Jesus-Christus, sit down, Nick!’

  ‘Your vaginismus!’ I said, too loudly.

  It was as if the word took all the wind out of her. ‘Yes. Every time you tried to penetrate, the scene came back, exactly the same, the rape, me being born, my mother dying in a scream of agony! I thought it might be you, my daring to love you, that was my punishment.’

  ‘Darling, how long have you known this was the cause of your vaginismus?’

  ‘A long time.’

  ‘And you did nothing about it, saw no one?’ I was trying to conceal my sudden anger.

  ‘Nicholas, please don’t be angry. I’m sorry, I couldn’t, I mean, I didn’t want to. It became my reason for revenge, that and the money.’

  ‘Forgive me if I’m stupid, but I don’t understand. The money? What the fuck has that got to do with it?’

  ‘Men! Don’t you understand? It’s all about power! Young blokes rape women by using force, it makes them feel powerful. They take them then discard them, sick fathers or uncles or family friends do it to their daughters, nieces or their friends’ children and it gives them a sense of power. And the daughters, nieces or friends’ children are destroyed, often forever. Older men get their power through money. In the male world power is everything and money buys it, buys ego. What they can no longer take with their loins, their threats and their fists, they now take with their money. Nothing is as exhilarating in the male world as money, simply because it’s the thing other males respect the most and will bring a beautiful woman to her knees to perform fellatio. But for those who can’t do it with money, there’s always rape! Do you know why my father raped my mother?’

  ‘Yes, you told me.’

  Anna ignored my reply. ‘Because his cock was too small! He was terrified a Dutch girl would laugh when she saw his pathetic little willy, so he raped my mother, a native girl he could discard, throw on the scrap heap, just so he could feel powerful! His teeny-weeny little prick may have been small, but hooray! It was still capable of murder!’

  I wanted to contradict her, to protest that men were not all like that, that I’d never even contemplated raping a woman, that I’d have given anything to have kids with her. I recalled the time ten years previously when Marg underwent her metamorphosis and got Helen Reddy’d and went from admiral’s widow to roaring ‘I Am Woman!’ I confess I thought at the time she was going somewhat over the top, but I understood her frustration. But, Jesus, that was nothing compared to this, to Anna now.

  ‘I had no idea, darling. But does rape and money have to affect you like this?’

  It was a badly phrased question. ‘Affect me like what? Both have affected my entire adult life, Nicholas. I’m going to put it as crudely as a man would, in male language so you understand. What’s more, I don’t apologise. No male has or ever will enter my cunt! Since those imbeciles in Japan, no male has ever harmed me. No man will ever bully me, or intimidate me, or slap me around, or compromise me, or threaten me, or force me to flatter him or appeal to his ego as millions upon millions of women are forced to do every day. I smile and scowl of my own volition. I don’t care what any male on earth thinks of me except for you, and even then I don’t care all the time. I intend to be the one woman on earth who started with nothing and never became a victim. No male on earth possesses enough money to buy a single compliment formulated by me to please him. It is I who have the power, not only the virgin power, but all the fucking power to bully, to enforce, to bribe, to corrupt, to get my own way! I may not care to use it, but I’ve got it, or most of it, and when I’m worth several billion, I’ll have it all. The first woman to take men on in their own terms and win!’

  ‘Anna! You can’t win! Never! They’ll just think of you as a dyke, a ballbreaker!’ I cried rather lamely.

  ‘What do I care? I know more about their balls than they do, and I know how to break them, too. I’m one of the world’s best dominatrices. I know all about their pathetic little male perversions, and believe you me, no male exists without one, and the richer and more powerful the more pathetic they are. On the outside he’s the big bad wolf, on the inside he wants to wear a nappy, shit in it, then rub it all over himself while I scold him and he ejaculates!’

  Cook came out and called us in to dinner. I rose and took the champagne bucket with me. Anna’s glass was empty again and I estimated there was one glass left in the bottle. We walked silently towards the dining-room table, the only noise our footsteps and the rattle of what remained of the ice cubes in the melted water. We’d come a long way from the subject of Budi and his implication in the murder of the Balibo Five, now confirmed by Anna. In fact, we’d simply come a long way full stop. But I wasn’t sure where the last bit had taken us or how to continue.

  Cook placed avocado halves filled with tiny harbour prawns marinated in fresh lime juice and coconut in front of both of us and I topped up Anna’s glass with the last of the champagne. I was aware that she’d had too much to drink, in fact, three glasses was usually her limit. She only drank when she was at Beautiful Bay, knowing it was the one place she could let her hair down, although I don’t believe I’d ever seen her quite this inebriated; her face seemed unusually flushed.

  What she’d just told me I realised wasn’t merely the drink talking, it was something she wanted to say and the champagne had allowed her to say it. I was deeply shocked as well as saddened, even angry, at the reasons behind her vaginismus, and that, by attempting to force myself into her, I had caused the return of such horrific hallucinations. In the act of loving her I had filled her with unspeakable terror.

  I had always known Anna to be a deeply troubled soul – how could she not be? – but I could never have guessed to what extent. I hadn’t understood how she felt about men, rape and the symbolic and actual power of money. Perhaps it wasn’t normal, yet nobody could call her insane. You could say she was mentally unbalanced, but she was no more so than the male power moguls with whom she saw herself competing, and their behaviour was accepted without question.

  I momentarily asked myself how all this affected me, then immediately dismissed the thought for another time. One thing was certain – if Budi was exposed as the general who had ordered the murders in return for a share of the Timor Sea oil revenue, and then her connection with him was brought to light, the effect on Anna would be disastrous. It would mean she had been eliminated from the endgame. In her mind she would have been cheated of the triumph of being the single woman in history who took on men at their own game and on their own terms and beat them. Instead there would be ignominy and abject defeat. She would think she had failed not only herself, but also her gender. The independent and untouchable woman would become a disgraced and corrupt one, the ice maiden who was prepared to condone murder to achieve her objectives. She would have left herself open to the slings and arrows of an outraged world and the laughter of her male competitors as well as the scorn of every woman alive. Even though she would still possess a vast fortune she would see herself as a loser. Anna played by the same rules as men, where the winner takes all, but when men fail, the world allows them to fold their tents and slip silently into the night; her punishment would be different, infinitely harsher, because she was a woman.

  I wanted to say something kind and instead put my foot in it, but at least it served to change the tempo, ameliorate her anger. ‘Anna, I want you to know that I would have regarded it as a great privilege to have had children with you.’

  Anna smiled, but not
happily. ‘Nicholas, what would have happened if we’d had a girl?’

  I was shocked. ‘You can’t mean . . . her and me . . . rape?’

  ‘Nicholas! Of course not! Darling, how awful. What I meant was how would I cope? I would be so protective of her I would totally destroy her life.’

  ‘But you adore Saffron.’

  ‘Yes, but she’s not mine and with Joe as her grandfather she’s a pretty grounded little twelve-year-old. When are the school holidays? I’m high as a kite on champagne – I can’t think straight. Can you have her to stay on the week that I’m here?’

  ‘Of course. Her parents want her to go to boarding school in Sydney in a year or two. She’s pretty bright and can’t get the schooling she needs in New Guinea.’

  ‘Oh good! She can fly down to Melbourne on the weekends. I’d love that. But why can’t she go to school in Melbourne?’

  ‘It’s got something to do with Uncle Joe scholarships. He has several of the really bright island girls at Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Sydney and he thinks it will be good for Saffron to have her own people with her to keep her grounded. He doesn’t want her growing up to be a toffee-nosed little madam. He was going to speak to you about letting her come down to you on some weekends.’

  ‘Every weekend, I hope. I love that child,’ Anna said happily.

  I was grateful that we’d been reduced to small talk but conscious that what had been said, momentous as it was, hadn’t actually advanced my plan to get to the Borneo timber concession and the survival of the great apes.

  Cook brought in the roast and I was preparing to carve when Anna put down her napkin and rose from her chair. ‘Nicholas, I don’t feel well. Too much champagne. Please excuse me from the rest of the dinner, darling. Tell cook the shrimp marinade was delicious.’

  I jumped to my feet. ‘Let me see you to your room . . .’

  She gave a little smile. ‘Sweetie, I’m not that pissed. I think I might be able to find my way, but thank you.’ Slightly unsteady on her feet, she came over and kissed me lightly on the forehead.