by Heather Rose
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Max and I were out on JC’s deck sitting side by side, shelling peas and broad beans, and drinking a very lovely Tasmanian sparkling wine. It was almost cloudless, twenty-eight degrees and still. A hot Christmas Day. There had been Christmases with snow in Hobart. Plenty of grey, blustery Christmas Days too. Plenty of memories of running about with new surfboards, or new bathers, in rain and hail. But this long, hot spell was not budging. Bushfires were still burning. Houses had been lost, and the water levels were down in the dams across the state.
JC’s balcony had an uninterrupted one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view from Mount Wellington all the way down the river. You’re hard-pressed in Hobart, squeezed as it is into the narrow band of land between the foothills of the mountain and the Derwent River, not to have a view of either the mountain or the water. But to have both was especially good.
Today, despite the heat, we were in floral dresses and shirts and ties, looking like some kind of throwback to the fifties. Stephanie was setting the table inside with the girls and keeping our mother occupied folding napkins into some elaborate design. Frank Sinatra was singing Christmas songs.
I’d just asked Max how her love life was going.
‘You know what it’s like,’ she said. ‘There’s no time. Even if there was someone the least bit suitable in Hobart, which there isn’t, can you imagine what they would have to go through?’
‘I’m sure your wish list and mine are pretty similar,’ I said. ‘And that makes our chances of meeting the right person here about 0.002 per cent.’
‘I think your odds might be a little optimistic, Ace. And in both our cases, The Mercury would want to feature them in the Sunday magazine. No. It’s not going to happen.’
‘Do you miss having sex?’ I asked.
‘Goodness, it’s Christmas Day. Are we supposed to talk about sex?’ Max elbowed me.
‘That was the plan,’ I said. ‘We were going to find great sex. Fantastic sex, actually. Remember?’
‘Is that what we said?’
I nodded. ‘We made a pact. We were up the liquidambar and you said you thought your boyfriend—what was his name? Rick?’
She nodded. ‘Rick with a silent P.’
I laughed. ‘That’s right! You said you thought he was a dud. And I said that I had the same problem. Two seconds and the whole thing was over. So we agreed we were going to find fantastic sex.’
Max pulled a face. ‘I’ve found sex to be pretty overrated, personally. As I get older, I wonder if I’ll ever be bothered again. Men are … well, messy. Demanding. Smelly. You?’
‘I’ve discovered the wonder of vibrators. No premature ejaculation, no snoring. Bliss.’
‘No being unfaithful either.’
I sighed. ‘True. And no nastiness.’
‘I’m still angry with Ben, I want you to know that,’ she said.
‘Maybe the fact I have better sex living without him indicates that things weren’t exactly right between us.’
Max laughed.
‘He said I wasn’t very much fun anymore,’ I said.
‘Oh.’
‘I loved him.’
‘He was handsome …’
‘We looked good. We had that going for us. He could magnetise a room, people hanging on his every word. And then he’d come home. Very different man behind closed doors.’
‘You know none of that was about you, really, don’t you?’ said Max, pulling a face.
‘The house was never tidy enough. The kids never quiet enough. He didn’t like my work schedule. Or that I earned more. Travelled more. He resented my friends.’ I sighed. ‘No wonder I stopped being fun.’
Max squeezed my hand. ‘I’m not going to give you sympathy, Ace,’ she said, ‘because I think what you do is awesome, and you don’t need sympathy. Ben’s an arsehole. He had a meanness with the kids. Like they were actually a nuisance. Took up his time. Got in the way. I never understood that. I didn’t like it when I saw it. In fact, I hated it. But when it’s someone’s marriage, even your sister’s, it’s hard to say anything. He could be a bully, frankly. I watched how you ran around doing all this stuff to keep him happy,’ she said.
‘I thought that was how you were meant to do it,’ I said. ‘All those years watching Dad keep the peace.’
‘Yes,’ said Max.
‘It’s still bewildering that Ben found a new family. Ignored his own children. Particularly Tavvy. But she’s stronger for it. I’m not so sure about Paul. I think he’s worried he’ll become like Ben.’
‘We all have a parent we don’t want to become,’ said Max.
‘One day I’d like to get softer,’ I said.
‘Have you at least had a fling?’
‘Haven’t even had a date. I look at men and I think, no, no, no. Tavvy says I have PTDS. Post-traumatic divorce stress. I think it’s actually post-traumatic divorce shame. I feel ashamed that I couldn’t see who he really was. It’s possible I was really stupid.’
‘Okay, Ace,’ said Max, ‘you have nothing, nothing, to be ashamed about. You’ll know yourself better next time. And I’m interviewing any man you think is future relationship material! You know I love you, don’t you? We all love you. It’s over. You’re here now.’
I cried then. And she held me. Anybody who might have considered coming out on the deck just left us to it.
‘Do you have to be based in New York?’ she asked at last. ‘Could you work from here?’
‘Oh no, I’m not coming back,’ I said, wiping the tears away and laughing. ‘That’s not happening.’
‘Why not?’
‘The kids are there. And I made a promise a long time ago.’ I sighed.
‘What promise?’
‘That I’d go live another sort of life.’
‘Than what?’
‘Whatever Mother had planned for me. But I do love it here.
That’s the hard part.’
‘It is,’ Max agreed.
‘It kind of seduces me a little bit more every day. I sit up on my balcony at Bruny and it’s so peaceful.’
‘You still get the nightmares?’
I nodded. ‘But at Bruny I’ve been sleeping better than I’ve slept in years.’
Stephanie appeared, bringing a fresh bottle of champagne and removing the bowls of shelled peas and beans.
‘Can we help?’ I asked.
‘Lunch will be half an hour. Keep talking. You two don’t get enough time to catch up,’ she said, then she kissed me on the top of the head.
‘We should come help,’ said Max.
‘If it’s a should, then you must never do it,’ said Stephanie. ‘That’s what I tell the girls.’ She laughed and disappeared back inside.
‘So,’ I said, ‘to completely change the subject, what’s your latest conspiracy theory on the bridge?’
‘I’ve decided it was a CIA job.’
‘Do tell,’ I said.
‘Well, some people in the US government have got to be deeply annoyed at our swing towards China, whatever the official line is. People have been saying current policy will change, no doubt with a new president in two years’ time. Thank God for fixed terms.’
‘No saying it won’t be more of the same,’ I said.
‘It would make the disappearing act understandable, though,’ she said, ‘if it was the Americans. The way that boat just vanished down the channel. They know how to get in and out, those guys.’
‘How did it happen again, the bridge funding?’
Max raised her eyebrows. ‘It came out of a COAG meeting. Council of Australian Governments. All the premiers from every state get together with the prime minister a couple of times a year and they float projects and negotiate deals. I’m sure they were pitched the bridge as a way to save Tasmania from sliding into economic paralysis. There was a lot of talk at the time about rising unemployment and the need to create a young skilled workforce here.
‘Western Australia was looking at seceding be
cause they thought Tassie was benefiting unfairly from its GST contributions,’ she continued. ‘I don’t think it was particularly serious, but in Canberra they started to believe it. They have a habit of believing very silly things up there, depending on who’s spouting the hype. What you have to remember is that Canberra operates in a bubble. No traffic jams or parking problems. Everyone can afford to send their kids to private school. It’s a group of intelligent, affluent, middle-class people totally removed from life in the rest of Australia.
‘I mean, you only have to sit in parliament and listen. All those years of travelling back and forth as head of the Nursing Federation, I watched them make crazy policies. There was actually a hospital in Victoria that had been built and was totally operational, but it didn’t have any patients. There were admin staff, but there wasn’t enough money to have patients. At the time, nobody in Canberra seemed to think that was a problem. It was like an episode of Yes, Minister. So I think someone sold them the idea of the bridge and they bought it.’
‘But who pitched it?’
‘Aiden Abbott, I’m told. And Senator Barney Viper.’
I grimaced.
‘Frank Pringle worked for Viper back then. But once the bridge was announced, Pringle went to work for JC and he’s been there ever since.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘So that’s how he happened.’
‘Viper’s good at getting dirt on people and that’s not restricted to his own party. He’s a real manipulator. I’m still not sure he didn’t undo my predecessor.’
‘Has he got stuff on JC?’ I asked.
‘Probably, but I don’t want to know what.’
‘We’re talking two billion dollars.’
‘Yep.’ Max shrugged. ‘All the research about the bridge was hugely exaggerated, totally unrealistic. But even so, none of it was enough to allocate two billion dollars at a time when we have failing education rates, failing health stats. Tasmanians are getting poorer, fatter and more stupid. Actually, that’s true of the whole country unless you’re in the top one per cent. We’re thirty years or so away from using up our coal reserves, fifty for our iron ore reserves, and then what are we all going to live on?’
‘Maybe that was the gambit,’ I said. ‘I mean, the design and the whole international focus … the world stage. Get the focus off the domestic picture.’
Max shook her head and sighed. ‘It could have been a simple, straightforward four-lane single span. But instead they have to do the six-lane flyover from Kingston and the new highway on the Bruny side. This massive design. It’s as if they’re expecting a million visitors, not another hundred thousand. It could have cost a quarter the price but instead it becomes this huge thing that totally overwhelms the landscape.’
I nodded. ‘Maybe climate change is going to make Tasmania so attractive, six lanes is foresight.’
‘Yes, except it isn’t,’ said Max. ‘Sometimes I don’t know if I can keep caring, Ace. The blokes in my party, the constant bickering and infighting and the power plays, it feels like a current I’m swimming against day after day.’
‘You’re tired, Max. It’s Christmas. You’re allowed to be. And you might be a bit paranoid.’
‘But I’m not.’
‘Should I tell you if I think you are?’
‘I’m relying on you.’
When JC walked out onto the deck, Max turned and said, ‘Nǐ hǎo.’
‘You might regret that,’ he said. He glanced at me, but he knew I’d never tell Max about the fatality on the bridge. That’s the bit where discretion is the better part of valour.
‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,’ said our father, who had followed JC out with Ella.
Max turned and said, ‘I love you, Dad.’
JC said, ‘So, Shakespeare, what other pearls of wisdom would you like to share?’
‘Don’t speak to him like that,’ said Max.
‘Well, he speaks to me like that,’ said JC.
Our father wandered off into the garden, smiling, saying something out of earshot, but Ella was on to it. Tapping away on her phone, she recorded the quote and came back and showed me the screen.
It read: Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power. Brutus in Julius Caesar (2.1.19–20).
‘Et tu, Brutus,’ I said quietly to her. ‘It’s a great play. You’d enjoy it.’
‘I have one hundred and ninety-one!’ she said.
Our grandfather had been a union man for twenty years until the workplace accident that killed him when our father was still in primary school. Dad had hated the area school he went to, so he’d followed in his father’s footsteps and gotten a carpentry apprenticeship. His first job was making sets for the Theatre Royal, Australia’s oldest theatre, in the heart of Hobart. Reading Shakespeare might have bored him in class, but on the stage it mesmerised him. He started being cast in minor roles. In his early twenties, he went to night school and studied to complete his Higher School Certificate. Afterwards he got a job in a union office as a clerk, and not long after that was asked if he’d be interested in running on the Labor ticket. People remembered his father. He campaigned well and he had the Coleman name. He missed out that first time, but he won the next election. He retained his love of acting even after he was in parliament. It created quite an affection for him among voters.
‘I would have liked to play Julius, or Othello,’ he once said to me. ‘But I wasn’t a leading man. Same in politics. I’m good at being stage left, sweeping up the mess, dancing on the table.’ When we were children, he’d always get us tickets for opening night, and we’d see our father decked out in fern fronds or battle gear or sitting about rolling drunk. He’d take us to every Shakespeare play that came through town, amateur and professional alike. In his early seventies, he began forgetting his lines. By then he’d retired from politics.
It was no wonder Shakespeare had stuck in his brain. It’s possible that, this whole last phase of our father’s life, he’s playing the ghost in Hamlet. Trying to communicate with his son. Maybe, if Max is not paranoid but perceptive, something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Not murder, but something fishy.
‘So when are you two beginning campaigning in earnest?’ I asked.
The election date was set for Saturday, March 5th. They were already out there, jostling for media attention every day, but soon the real ruthlessness of an election would begin. Any camaraderie would be put on hold for the ensuing weeks. And I will almost certainly be caught in the election crossfire.
JC will be all about jobs and growth. Max will be all about health and education. JC will counter by promising to lower the payroll tax and invest in tourism. Max will parry with better public housing, upgrading services, new investment in schools. And on it will go. Everything becomes predictable in politics if you live long enough.
JC was standing by the railing. Max and I went to stand either side of him.
‘So my guess,’ Max said, ‘is you’ll bring the PM down about January twenty-sixth. For Australia Day. What do you think, Ace? With the biggest infrastructure project in the country going on here, I’m sure the PM will be wanting some Australia Day bridge shots … might even set off a few fireworks himself.’
JC scoffed.
‘I think we should have the oysters out here—it’s so lovely,’ Stephanie said, coming onto the balcony. ‘JC, could you make sure everyone has a glass?’
Then she looked at the three of us. ‘You’re not talking election, are you? Oh, you are! Stop it. You know it’s forbidden today.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Profound thought upon waking on New Year’s Eve: The thing that frightens me most is the next time I take off my clothes for someone.
I had returned to Bruny. I’m not a crowd kind of person. I don’t want to think about the past year. I don’t make resolutions for the next one. I’m happy to hear the sound of revelry from afar, but I don’t have any desire to be amidst it.
I was sitting on the edge of my d
eck, taking in the sky beginning to do its evening spectacle of red, crimson, orange, vermillion. The channel was darkening and soon night would be seeping through the gum trees. I listened to the birds chaperoning the sun to bed. The bushfires had been contained for the moment, the sky had cleared, but there was still no rain. It had been thirty-one degrees again today, a record-breaking streak of hot weather. Clouds had rolled in from the west, huge and black, but the promised thunderstorm had not arrived. The air was charged with heat and the prickly sense of unreleased energy.
I had been thinking about my kids back in New York, and my friends, and how I was almost halfway through this job, when Dan walked across the paddock, startling the wallabies grazing on any green shoot they could find in the parched grass. He was carrying two beers dewy with cold.
‘Had a feeling you might be hiding out up here,’ he said.
‘Party of one,’ I said.
He eased himself down beside me and, pulling the top off, handed me a beer.
‘Nice night,’ he said.
Dan was in a pair of long, faded navy shorts and a worn white t-shirt, which showed off his tan and a Celtic sleeve tattooed down one arm.
‘You’re my first visitor,’ I said.
‘Cheers to that,’ he said, and we clinked our bottles together. ‘It’s a good view.’
‘It is a good view,’ I said. The mountain was silhouetted to the north. Two yachts—a ketch and a sloop—were sailing down the channel. Birds were carolling in the trees. It all went well with the coolness of the beer.