Bruny

by Heather Rose

  Dan sighed and rubbed his face. He looked haggard.

  ‘I’m a soldier,’ he said. ‘You know that. Once a soldier, always a soldier. I didn’t think that was true until now. But I could feel myself pulling back my shoulders and standing to attention. I handed the phone back to her. The woman says to me, “There is no missing worker, Mr Macmillan. Everything is as it should be.” Someone else gives me my phone. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. I got back in the boat. I’ve been driving around out there ever since. It’s all I knew to do. God knows what security are making of it. Me fanging around out there.’

  ‘There are sharks, yeah?’ I said.

  ‘The fall would have knocked him out. Let’s hope he didn’t feel anything. Might have drowned, of course.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You’re very big on manners, aren’t you,’ Dan said. ‘Thank you, please, sorry. I don’t like whatever it is you’re doing here. I don’t like whatever it is your brother and his government are doing here. This is fucked. A bloke is dead. Less than five per cent! If we’d had the police launch out, if we’d done a search, we might have found him. But his life wasn’t worth shit, was it? Because of a bridge. A bridge at the end of the world. He came all this way to fix a mess so your brother can get re-elected. You do know that, don’t you? The whole thing’s so …’

  ‘Dan,’ I said.

  ‘You feeling good about yourself right now?’ he asked. ‘Playing politics with people’s lives?’

  ‘I tried,’ I said.

  ‘Tried what?’

  ‘I wanted the police called,’ I said. ‘When I heard in Hobart. I wanted the police called.’

  I was saying too much. But nothing about this was normal.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘It’s crazy. I didn’t sign up for this either …’

  I looked at the sun cresting the horizon. The sky was amber and mauve, the sea was luminous. A sea eagle was circling above us. It was a beautiful, terrible morning.

  ‘A couple of months ago, I had to leave the body of a young American soldier behind in northern Iraq. He’d been burned to death. I couldn’t get him home to his family. I had to choose between the living and the dead. I dream sometimes that I’m laying his body on the steps of a church in Damascus. It’s a very old church. I don’t even know if he was Catholic.’

  He sat down then, on the rock beside me. We sat there and watched the eagle sweep away across the channel to Bruny, heading south down the coastline. He’s going to quit, I thought. He’s going to get up right now and walk away. And he’d be right to do that. Maybe I’m going to quit too. Maybe none of this is worth the toll. What was I doing here? Everywhere I went, it was chaos. I was so sick of it.

  ‘I’ve got to get back up there,’ he said, standing up. ‘It’ll be handover soon. Business as usual, eh?’

  ‘Can you do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Can you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. I felt sick. Sick and numb.

  ‘Me either,’ he said. ‘You and your family. You sure you want to belong to them?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I figure God has had plenty of opportunities to show his love. Take William Tyndale, who transcribed the Bible into English so that people everywhere could understand it. Surely that deserved a little act of love before they strangled him to death then burned him at the stake in 1536 for heresy.

  And what about that little girl Max told me about? Twelve years old, and pimped by her mother and stepfather. Why is it always the stepfathers? Where were the Brothers Grimm on warning us about stepfathers? That was something every woman really needed to fear. Bringing a new man into a woman’s life was just about the most dangerous thing she could do for herself or her children. Especially for that twelve-year-old. More than one hundred men of Hobart had used her as a prostitute. At least one politician. There was a notebook, apparently, with phone numbers and names and amounts paid, kept by the girl’s mother for accounting purposes. Only the politician was exposed. He blamed his Parkinson’s drugs. No-one was ever brought to court or prosecuted. God did not intervene.

  Or that little boy who had washed up on the shore in Turkey a few years back. Just three years old and, when the boat from Syria sprang a leak, all the passengers found themselves in the Mediterranean, despite the money paid for safe passage. Only the boy’s father survived. Where had God been that night?

  I was in a deckchair on my balcony at the end of this long day. I’d texted JC this morning, after I’d seen the Chinese workers get back on their buses at the end of the shift and Dan Macmillan get in the Zodiac and go back across the channel to Bruny. My message to JC was: Nothing you did this morning was right. Nothing. Going to Bruny. Turning off my phone.

  I went into Hobart and bought a wetsuit. Then I hired a car and I took the ferry and drove all the way down to Cloudy Bay at the far end of Bruny. I was the only person there. I walked a long way along the beach, then I stripped off, put the wetsuit on, and threw myself in the surf. This was my medicine. I bodysurfed wave after wave, and if I sat on the beach afterwards, entirely spent, and let the tears come, then nobody saw. Maybe a seagull, that’s all.

  Then I came home to the house at Dennes Point and took a nap. I woke up feeling shattered. Now I was a bottle of red wine and a joint down. Somewhere in the channel, the remains of a worker was being nibbled into oblivion by small or large creatures. I wanted an argument with God.

  The China I knew had enormous cities with air so polluted people wore oxygen masks with supply tanks just to get through the day. There were cities so polluted, no child born in the last twenty-five years had ever seen a star.

  The North Koreans were underfed and traumatised, the Taiwanese were always under threat, as were the South Koreans, but the Chinese were plain overcrowded. There was no personal space other than their one tiny room, their one tiny apartment.

  A Bruny resident had told me that she’d stopped her car because some Chinese tourists on the side of the road looked like they were in trouble. She said they were almost catatonic. When she roused them, they kept saying, ‘So empty. So empty.’ Which she took for an existential crisis, not just the view as they looked at the ocean beach with not a single footprint in the sand.

  There were more tourists arriving every minute, getting off planes and descending from cruise ships. Is this how the Aborigines had felt? I wondered. All these foreigners arriving. Arriving and not leaving again. Taking up residence. Making homes in all the best places. Establishing their own rules. Making you beholden to them. Until you were worth nothing. Just domestic labour or hired help at best. What was the tipping point before Tasmanians said, ‘Enough. We’re slowing this thing down. We’re upping the prices. We’re limiting numbers. We’re protecting our special places. Book in next year, or the year after.’ JC would never do that. It was all short-term thinking for short-term gain.

  Dan Macmillan’s words came racing back from this morning. ‘You and your family. You sure you want to belong to them?’

  I loved my family.

  But you live in New York, that other voice inside my head said. Can’t love them that much. Let’s face it, your mother kind of screwed you up.

  I’m not blaming her. I just can’t do proximity, I replied to the voice. Look what happens. I’m back to smoking dope and drinking too much.

  You do that in New York too.

  But for different reasons, I argued.

  You sure about that? the voice asked.

  Max had laughed when I’d asked if she could score for me. ‘I know a supplier,’ she’d said. ‘Provides medical cannabis for people with epilepsy, chronic pain. She’s a saint. Never charges anything. I’d like to give some to Mother for her nausea, but I don’t dare to raise it. I can just see her telling her friends, “Maxine gave me marijuana!” And it’d be on the front page of the paper. So past time it was legalised.’

  I want to love my family. I do love my family. And, yes, I be
long to them. If I didn’t love them, what sort of person would I be?

  The voice said nothing.

  This is why I left Tasmania, I thought. Because you get really small out here on the perimeter of life, and life gets way too big-picture.

  The voice laughed. The sky was a zillion fairy lights. A rim of green light was rising up behind me as an aurora began to dance in the sky.

  In my next life, I’m going to be a note of music or a sparrow or a strange blue jellyfish. I’m tired of worrying about people. Who really cares if we have world peace? And even if we got it, how long would it last? A day, a week? Humans are disaster-making machines. We love drama. We’re wired that way. Radical Muslims are way more worrying than the Chinese. I’ve seen what Daesh do. I’ve been to Mosul. You can’t grow a hand back once it’s been lopped off. Mind you, those stories of organ harvesting in Chinese prisons … hard to find another kidney.

  The radical Muslims are out-of-control men armed to the teeth. The far-right Christians are out-of-control men armed to the teeth. How can Christians be pro-life, pro-guns, but anti-refugees? How did that work? Most people were anti-refugees, it seemed. Yet in a single moment of disaster, it could be any of us with no home and nowhere to go.

  I poured another wine.

  At least the Chinese are consistent. No human rights, no refugees, yes to abortions and no to guns. Yes to world domination. Why did it have to be about that? The world was just a giant James Bond movie. There was always a bad guy trying to take over.

  I looked up into the lurid green and purple sky waving its fronds of light as if someone was hailing me from another galaxy. Definitely a movie. But if so, where was the dashing hero? Maybe I was the dashing hero come to save Tasmania from something. Or someone. My brother, perhaps.

  Something was happening here with this bridge and I couldn’t get my head around it. There was no fair go in Australia anymore. It was everybody for themselves. But here in Tasmania people were hanging on. For a moment longer, people were still saying hello to one another while walking the beach, trading a glut of their zucchinis for their neighbour’s tomatoes, being kind to people in the traffic, and taking out the bin of the lady down the road who taught you in grade two.

  I’ll never get a straight answer from JC, I thought. He’s about as useful as eyebrows on a dolphin in this situation. He doesn’t seem to grasp that he’s a pawn. But if JC is a pawn, who’s the queen on this chessboard? It sure isn’t America. Make America great again! And the US had fizzled into factions. After two hundred and fifty years, the government had finally let the Constitution undo them. Why hadn’t Lincoln risen from the dead? His GOP had gone MIA when the country needed it most.

  Was it China then? One in every five people in the world was Chinese. That was a lot of breakfast, lunch and dinner to provide. And if they did one thing very well, the Chinese provided. In a hundred years, one in three people might be Chinese. It was the economics of exponential growth. Which brought me back to the bridge. Why were the Chinese involved in building a bridge to drive people to Bruny? There was too much money involved. Something was wrong.

  I thought about all those Chinese workers down there on the bridge right now, and who might fall tonight. How many before it became a thing that couldn’t be covered up? Three? Five? Twenty?

  ‘It’s the yellow peril,’ I could hear my mother saying. She said it a lot when we were kids. This idea that the Chinese were going to invade at any moment. They were invading Vietnam at the time. But it wasn’t so much a fear of invasion here. More a sense that Tasmania—maybe even Australia—was being outwitted on the world stage. I had a bad feeling that, in five years’ time, people would be saying, ‘Why the hell didn’t we see that coming?’

  The vast bucolic wonder of Tasmania, with only half a million people and enough rich arable soil to support millions more than that, with an abundance of water and a perimeter of ocean with several deep-water ports, had to be a sitting duck. Unless you had a powerful ally. Maybe JC was right to cosy up with the Chinese.

  You really want to belong to your family? I heard Dan Macmillan say again.

  Do I care? I wondered. I could just say, ‘To hell with your bridge, I’m going back to New York.’ I’d be sent to another hell-hole because that’s my work. Did I care that, on election eve, JC would stand on the bridge and look like a hero? What happened when the next worker died? When all is said and done, and I’m dust on the breeze, I wanted to leave something good behind. You see, I’m a hypocrite. I like altruism in me but not in anybody else.

  Altruism is like vitamin C, that other voice in my head said. It staves off the scurvy but it won’t stop the ship from sinking.

  I’m like a vegetarian who still eats red meat, I thought. I pretend I’m committed, but I don’t want to give up my bolognaise.

  I had to get some human company, I decided. And because I was buzzed and a little drunk, I had lost my inhibitions. I didn’t want to consider the ramifications of my next move. I got up off my balcony and wandered across the paddock, past the wallabies who hopped away, and went down the hill.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I pushed open his gate and saw the light was on in his house. Out on the deck, I found Dan Macmillan quietly rolling a joint.

  He didn’t seem surprised as I came up the stairs. I took the freshly rolled joint from behind my ear and put it down on the table next to his.

  ‘You want to share?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  I put a new bottle of red wine on the table too.

  ‘You come bearing gifts,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not down there tonight,’ I said.

  ‘I was told to take a night off. I was offered longer, but I said a night would do.’

  He indicated the other deckchair. ‘Have a seat.’

  I sat and gazed away from the bridge and down the channel at the water and the hills and the stars, the moon hurrying away from cavernous clouds.

  Dan went into the house and came back with two glasses.

  ‘It’s good here,’ I said. He offered me the joint but I told him to go ahead.

  He lit up and took a long drag. ‘Paradise,’ he said.

  ‘Why are we letting paradise get invaded?’ I asked.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Because we’re little people,’ he said slowly. ‘And we can’t stop it.’

  ‘Are you sure we’re little people?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Even if some of us do have connections.’

  I thought about that for a while.

  ‘I don’t want to be little,’ I said.

  ‘I never thought I’d be anything else,’ he said.

  ‘That can’t be true. You were a paratrooper.’

  ‘Littlest people of all, in a way. They train us to be legends, but at the end of the day, we’re fodder,’ he said.

  ‘What did you want when you were a kid, Dan?’

  ‘I wanted a motorbike,’ he said. ‘I wanted a horse, actually. Watched a fair few cowboy and injun movies as a kid. And later I wanted a motorbike and leathers and a long road ahead. Had a bike for a while. Sold it eventually. Didn’t come home enough to ride it. What did you want to be?’

  ‘I was going to be an actress. But then there was this girl, Melissa, who was so good in year twelve that I realised I would never have what it took. I wasn’t wild enough somehow. Couldn’t let go the way she did.’

  ‘So you decided to save the world instead.’

  ‘And now I’m breaking the law.’

  ‘You and me both. Bonnie and Clyde up on our hill while some poor bastard is down there feeding the crabs. I wonder what the penalty is? Not reporting a death … to say nothing of covering up a workplace accident. They’d throw the book at me.’

  We were both silent.

  ‘What if it leaks?’ he said. ‘If the media get hold of it? Am I the fall guy? I guess I’m the fall guy. I was right there. That’s my crew. But what proof will they ha
ve? I’m sure they’ll find another somebody to be worker number one hundred and seventy-seven if need be.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Dan, and I know saying sorry doesn’t do anything. I’m numb about this. I’m still in shock, I think.’

  ‘Rock and a hard place, you and me both,’ he said. ‘I feel like I should be raging.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I feel like I should have raged this morning.’

  ‘Just our word against—what? The Communist Party of China? Can’t see that going well.’

  We were both silent again. There were crickets somewhere close by making cricket love with their wings.

  ‘I didn’t mean to take it out on you this morning,’ he said. ‘Well, I did, but you’re not the right target.’

  ‘I deserved it. I didn’t come here to do this. I’m not an apologist.’

  ‘Surely you must have known it was going to go this way.

  How did he do it, your brother? Appeal to your sense of family?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Duty,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, that’s the one. Duty and family. Bolted on, those two.’

  ‘Goes in deep, this place,’ I said.

  ‘That it does.’

  ‘I like to forget, when I’m away, but it’s always a magnet. Luckily my family is the repellent, otherwise I might never leave again.’

  I passed the joint back to him. He took it from me carefully.