by Heather Rose
‘There’s police everywhere,’ he continued. ‘The feds are coming in thick and fast.’
‘Was anyone killed?’
‘No, thank God. Happened at dawn. No-one about, thank Christ.’
‘Was it that unpopular?’
‘That bridge is bringing prosperity to this island. It’s going to take more than a few fucking terrorists to knock it down.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I was just asking—’
‘The federal government has called for a special session in parliament tonight to enact the foreign labour laws.’
‘Meaning?’ I asked.
‘We’re going to bring in Chinese workers. Skilled bridge workers to add to the existing crew. Without them, we have no chance of finishing the thing on time. It’s a project of national significance and there just aren’t the workers here.’
‘And the deadline is …’
‘Election day, of course. Watch how the Greens like that.’
‘JC, the Tasmanian people aren’t going to like that. Chinese workers?’
‘They’ll like it when the bridge is finished.’
‘But you have an election to win, yes? Public opinion?’
‘That’s why I need a conflict resolution specialist. A good one. A very good one.’
‘JC … no. You know this isn’t my thing.’
‘Yeah, it is. It’s a fucking war between the people who would have this place stay a little backwater and those of us who want to get with the program and join the world.’
‘And the Bruny Bridge is going to do that?’
‘Ace, trust me. Yes.’
‘It can’t be me. Everyone will cry nepotism.’
‘Ace, this is what you do. It doesn’t have to be under the UN banner. Could you take leave? I’m sure you’ve got buckets of it. It’s your home, Ace. It’s your island. We need you. I need you. Tasmanians trust other Tasmanians.’
There was a long pause. Then he said, ‘Who did you help today, hey? Today you could help me, Ace. Me.’
There it was. The family rule. Every night at dinner, from as young as I could remember, our father Angus Coleman would ask us at the dinner table: ‘Who did you help today?’
Our mother suffered the question in silence for a long time. By the time we were teenagers, she’d started scoffing. She’d begun an affair with the principal of JC’s boys’ school. Her boss at the time. She’d decided to get a job once we were all in high school. ‘Just for pocket money,’ she’d said. The marriage had nearly fallen apart, but somehow she and Dad had survived it. Like they survived everything. Mostly because our father was the kindest person I’d ever known.
Once Max had asked our mother the question. ‘So who did you help today, Mum?’
Our mother had replied, ‘As if your father’s silly ideas apply to me. Goodness!’
Two of us became state politicians and one of us ended up at the UN.
‘Let me call my chief of staff in and we’ll brief you,’ JC had said, thinking he’d won.
But I held out. Said I’d try to come home for Christmas. I wanted to see Dad and everyone else. I’d see if I could help him then. And then I’d received that text. Call your brother. Say yes. Tell him you changed your mind.
And so I was here.
I breathed. I knew there were things I had to do, but I was getting cold. This felt like the first moment of complete silence I’d had in a long time. The sun was moving stage west, towards the Hartz Mountains. Gulls were flying down the channel. Seals were prodding fish farm nets. Flies buzzed against the screen door. I slid in under the doona. The white linen felt crisp under my fingertips. I dreamed then of New York, of trying to catch a cab to JFK. JC was beside me and Max was in the car ahead, but no matter how much I wanted to get to the plane, it never happened. In the end, I was standing on the tarmac in the dark feeling desperately alone.
I woke suddenly, disoriented, surprised to find I’d slept for almost three hours. My body clock trying to adjust. I wandered through the house and out onto the deck. The breeze had dropped and the channel was a millpond. A bright streak of pink was running like a wound across the western sky. From here the bridge was a monolith. Listing to one side, too large to pick up and dust off, too unwieldy to untangle and start again. It looked like an idea that had been derailed. Perhaps even misunderstood. If I did the job JC wanted, the bridge would be opened without protest on March 4th. JC would be the premier for another four years. Max would be relegated to Opposition again, and there would be tourists by the thousands flowing over the bridge day and night, supposedly bringing wealth and prosperity to the people of Tasmania.
I had to agree with the BFG. And with Max. Something about this bridge didn’t add up. No government puts in two billion dollars without a serious payoff. It had to be worth a lot more than two billion dollars to someone. Why had the Chinese brought it in under their Belt and Road Initiative? Tasmania was never going to be able to deliver a payoff like that to the Chinese no matter how many tourists came. The Belt and Road Initiative was in South America, the Pacific, southern Europe and Asia now. Big investments in infrastructure—dams, ports, power stations and roads—and massive loans to foreign governments.
In my experience, the people to worry about most were not the entitled white men. They were easy to peg. It was the people of any gender, colour, race or religion who had implacable ideals. The bridge smacked of something to do with a vision. I just didn’t know what that was yet. But I was going to work it out.
I put on my jacket. Sunset this far south was a long farewell. By mid-summer it would be twilight until after 9 pm. I followed my nose and found the narrow path at the bottom of the street, and in a moment I was down the flight of steps and crossing the road to the beach.
CHAPTER NINE
In regular circumstances, I thought, as I strolled the shoreline, Tasmanians would have found Gilbert Farris a bit of a tosser. But they tolerated him now, I suspected, because he was pushing their barrow. It wasn’t that they couldn’t have pushed it themselves, but he had more than 13.4 million Twitter followers, and more on YouTube for his lectures. He had famous friends and famous enemies. His ideas for improving the human race included the sterilisation of criminals and incurable addicts, a two-child policy worldwide for those deemed fit to parent, compulsory free education until age twenty-one or military service. He was pro-abortion, anti-guns, pro-meditation and an atheist. He was born and educated in Canada. Apparently his favourite book was Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.
Mostly Tasmanians had no interest in being famous. Why else did they live at the end of the world? They didn’t like grand-standing. They didn’t want a bridge that was going to make them famous. They had a very famous art gallery for that, the envy of galleries worldwide, built ten years ago by a maverick art-loving gambler who needed a tax deduction. Despite a couple of high-profile members like Farris and Lennox, most of the Bruny Friends Group were mums and dads whose property, or simply their quiet summer holiday, was threatened by the bridge. So the briefing notes had said. Yet they’d kept fighting for four years. And now the bridge was in pieces. Farris was more than an activist. He’d become something of a saint. It’s dangerous to be a saint. They tend to end up as martyrs.
The horizon was blood red now. The sea breeze had dropped out and the sea was liquid red, edged with pewter. The colours were so remarkable I stopped and simply stared. To add to the wonder, a dolphin leaped twenty metres offshore. Then another. A pod of five or six of them moved away along the shoreline, languidly lifting their glistening bodies in effortless arcs as they went. I took photos, trying to capture all this to send to my children. They were unlikely to care. To them, Tasmania was a bit like Narnia. Somewhere they went on rare occasions and afterwards, looking back, it all seemed a little unreal. I knew the feeling.
Checking the time, I realised it was after 3 am in New York. Paul’s girlfriend might respond in the morning, so I included her. Love you Mum! would be the note back from Tavvy,
my twenty-four-year-old. Accompanied by smiley face emojis. That was fine. Any contact from your twenty-somethings was fine.
I remembered cartwheeling on this beach and making sand-castles, wandering about with a net scooping up tiny sea creatures to examine, doing handstands in the water. I remembered JC getting startled by a huge stingray that used to lie in the shallows on warm days and crying until our mother promised him his own packet of Tim Tams. It was one of the only memories I had of her being here. I remembered discovering when we were teenagers that if I sang ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ it would drive JC absolutely mad. Suddenly I wanted to run along the beach and attempt a cartwheel. I resisted. Most likely I’d put my back out.
The jetty at North Bruny had once been the main landing platform for people and produce arriving on the island. That jetty had disappeared in my childhood, becoming a narrow, planked thing, big enough to cast a line from, small enough to run from one end to the other in five seconds before throwing ourselves in at high tide. But now that, too, had gone and it was a great working platform for the bridge.
I saw a dusty white pick-up parked beside the road. Ute, I reminded myself—ute not pick-up. Got to remember my Australian vernacular. The driver was standing to one side, talking on the phone. He had a fishing rod leaning against the rear of the vehicle. He was tall, in dark glasses and a hat that had once, maybe a century ago, been a beige Fedora. He looked up as I approached and gazed at me as he finished the call, pocketing his phone.
‘Quite a view from here,’ he said.
He thinks I’m a tourist, I thought. Here to check out the bridge.
‘It’s certainly big,’ I answered, my accent no doubt confirming his assumption.
‘More than eight hundred thousand tonnes of steel and concrete,’ he said, ‘by the time it’s finished.’
‘So you’re for it?’ I asked. I wondered if Gilbert Farris had his binoculars on us.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘It’s an eyesore. But it will put Bruny on the map. Has already, as you can see. Especially thanks to that mob there.’ He gestured to the BFG camp.
I nodded.
‘The cafe is doing legendary trade with all the visiting journos. Pat at the gallery tells me she could dry a few bits of seaweed and someone would pay a hundred bucks for it.’
‘There were dolphins,’ I said, ‘back there, on my walk.’
‘Yeah, they’re always good for the visitors too.’
I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t a visitor. Tell him that actually I was a Tasmanian and my family had been Tasmanian for generations.
‘They break into the fish farms down at Barnes Bay and free all the salmon for people like me,’ he said. ‘Fish farmers hate them. I’ve heard their guys shoot them with harpoons if they see them near the nets.’
I frowned. Nasty for Tasmania’s image if that went viral—shooting dolphins.
‘How are you finding being back?’ he asked.
So he didn’t think I was a visitor. He knew who I was. I sighed inwardly. There had been a large profile piece in The Mercury yesterday created by JC’s PR team. Pictures of me and JC and Max as children. A picture of me overseas on UN work. It was meant to reassure people but it had the side effect of making them feel as if they knew me. This was it. No privacy.
‘In some ways it’s a surprise to find it so unchanged—other than …’ I indicated the bridge. Then I looked at him more carefully. God, beneath the hat and Ray-Bans, he seemed familiar. I had a dreadful moment wondering if he was someone I’d known years ago. That had already happened to me at the bottle shop last night. A woman who claimed to have gone to school with me had corralled me by the Tassie sparklings and invited me to come out for drinks one night. I’d only the vaguest sense of who she was. She had the benefit of my face on the front of the paper.
‘Do you know who blew up the bridge?’ she’d asked. ‘Are there any leads? God, it’s like a spy thriller right here!’ Then she’d asked, ‘So how do JC and Max really get on?’
I’d escaped, feigning a call I had to take.
He cocked his head to one side and grinned at me. ‘Dan Macmillan,’ he said. ‘I’m the bridge foreman.’ He took off his hat and ran his fingers through cropped brown hair. He nodded towards Tinderbox across the channel. ‘Apparently I’m running you back across tomorrow morning.’
‘Oh, great,’ I said. Of course. The Dan Macmillan who lived on this side. Who had actually spotted the bombers’ boat as they’d taken off down the channel and seen the bridge blow. I’d forgotten how this happened in Tassie, especially when you least expected it. Someone had once declared that there were six degrees of separation between any two humans on earth, but in Tassie there was maybe half a degree. Talk with anyone here for long enough and you always found someone in common.
I reached out to shake hands. We shared a brief, steady exchange, not the crushing grip I often braced myself for.
‘You missed the meeting this morning?’ I asked.
‘They don’t include me in meetings like that.’ He grinned. ‘I’m a lowlife. Just here to keep the lads on track.’
‘You saw it happen,’ I said.
‘Not something to forget, that,’ he said, turning to stare at the bridge. ‘So you’re here to make us all one big happy family.’
‘I guess that’s your line of work as well,’ I said.
‘Yep, too right,’ he agreed.
He had a Chris Pine been-down-Texas-robbing-a-bank look. At least six three. Stubble with a touch of grey in it. He looked strong. More Chris Hemsworth than Chris Pine in that way. But rugged. Maybe ten years younger than me. He didn’t remove the Ray-Bans so I couldn’t see his eyes and it made me search his face harder. He had a pale half-moon scar to the left of his lip, as if he’d been caught on a fishing line as a kid.
‘How are the workers going?’ I asked.
‘The ones I have now, they get a mixed reception if they mention what they do in the pub. And they’re pretty sick of crossing the channel at the end of the day in a breeze. But they’re on a good wicket. The ones coming, the Chinese? Not sure what they’ll get. Ton of trouble, I’m guessing. S’pose you’ll be sorting that out for us, eh? Nothing to worry about.’
‘If only it were that simple.’
‘Well, us little folk are relying on you big folk to make it work.’
Was he being antagonistic? Condescending? Or was this his manner? It was hard to tell.
He moved to the back of the ute and pulled a bucket out from underneath the cover of the tray.
‘You live this side?’ I said.
‘Yep. My place is just down the road from yours.’
It was all so close. He knew my house, knew my family. I had left for this exact reason.
‘Do you want the bridge, Dan?’ I asked.
‘Not up to people like me,’ he said. ‘We’re just cogs in the wheel.’
‘So you’re impartial?’
‘I wouldn’t say that. I just know what I think doesn’t make a bone of difference. I make sure the thing gets built to specification and on time.’
‘So you took over when …’ It had been in one of the briefing notes. The last bridge foreman had died a year back.
‘Yep,’ said Dan. ‘Damned if I’m going to let it kill me though.’
He had that tradie swagger. The one that seemed to convey that because they could fix most anything, they were God’s gift to the world. And they got paid cash, if they could get away with it. That, no doubt, gave a person swagger. But underneath, in my experience of living through several renovations over the years, they were often quite shy. Dan Macmillan didn’t seem the shy type. The flannel shirt was untucked, the jeans were worn. He looked pretty comfortable with himself. I wondered what would kill Dan Macmillan. Alcohol maybe. Or a long life.
Dan said, ‘They found his car there.’ He pointed across to Tinderbox. ‘They found his clothes out there, where the road ended at the time.’ He indicated the bridge. ‘Folded. Neat and tidy.’ He pa
used and then he said, ‘Maybe it was a very beautiful sunset. Decided he’d had enough. Nice place to die.’
I hadn’t realised it had been a suicide. That hadn’t been in the notes. ‘Did they find him?’ I asked.
‘Nah,’ said Dan. ‘There’re great whites in the channel. Smaller sharks too. They come for the fish farms. Nine degrees in the water that day. The cold probably got him first.’
‘He was a friend,’ I said. I could hear it in his voice.
‘He was my business partner,’ said Dan.
I have learned not to react when people tell me terrible things, but this blindsided me for a moment. I wanted to kill the person who’d prepared those briefing notes.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know.’
We stood there in silence until Dan added, ‘And my brother-in-law. Met my sister when they were sixteen. Two kids. Yeah. Didn’t leave a letter or anything.’
I watched the waves break on the shore beside the jetty. There was human tragedy in the world. It was a fact even here, in faraway Tasmania. A kind of numbness seemed to crawl up from deep inside me, as if it had been waiting there while I took a day or two to acclimatise.
It was Dan who spoke next. ‘Your place has scrubbed up well. Bit surprised your brother’s been so keen on the bridge. Must want you to have some lights to look out on at night.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, but what I thought was how JC would like his initials lit up on the highest point of the bridge. That would make him happy.
‘What was his name, your business partner?’
‘Jimmy,’ he said. ‘Jimmy Talbot.’
I nodded. The conversation was becoming awkward. I wanted to ask him all about Jimmy Talbot, and I also wanted to evaporate.
‘Well, it was good to …’ I began. But what was good? Again that numbness. What was wrong with me?