Bruny

by Heather Rose

  Henry presented me with a large wrapped gift.

  ‘For the new year,’ he said.

  I opened it to find a framed watercolour of the view from my home. It was strikingly beautiful.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ I asked.

  ‘I painted it,’ he said. ‘I like that hill above your house.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. So he knew about my house. It was Hobart. Word got around. Word got around even faster on Bruny, even if Henry’s place was at Cloudy Bay and I was on Dennes Point fifty kilometres away. Still, was this picture a warning? We are watching you.

  ‘You didn’t include the bridge,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a very precise moment in time,’ he said. ‘I did this painting several years ago before the bridge was announced. I had it framed for you when I realised where you lived on Bruny.’

  ‘You are a wonderful artist, Henry,’ I said.

  ‘He is,’ said May. ‘It’s what he really loves about Tasmania. He has time to paint.’

  ‘I want to be like Winston Churchill and spend eternity mastering watercolour,’ said Henry. ‘Because a lifetime isn’t long enough.’

  ‘How do you feel about the bridge, Henry?’ I asked.

  Henry paused.

  ‘He feels the same way I feel about it,’ said May.

  ‘But I have the luxury of being able to voice my opinions,’ said Henry.

  ‘Perhaps a better question,’ said May, ‘is how we both feel about Tasmania.’

  ‘So how do you both feel about Tasmania?’

  Henry said, ‘When I first arrived, I kept wondering when it would all go wrong, and I would wake up to find it crowded and polluted with no blue sky. But it hasn’t gone wrong. It’s so quiet at night I feel I can hear creation. When I first left China it was to go to the University of Chicago. My apartment was tiny, at the back of a building, but even in Chicago, and in my own tiny place where no-one else lived, it was the first time in my life I really heard silence. And it was Chicago! So here—here—it’s as if this is where they invented sound.’ He smiled and I nodded.

  ‘There is a Chinese saying,’ he continued, ‘“When you drink the water, remember the spring.” I think Tasmanians are lovely people. Generous. Kind. But they do not keep enough of an eye on the spring. When I left home, I didn’t know there were places that were uncrowded. If the thing that makes you unique can be protected, then that is what Tasmanians must do.’

  May said, ‘We both came here with very different ideas. I am here—like you, Astrid—to ensure the bridge project proceeds with maximum ease and community support. But my loyalty …’ She hesitated. ‘Our government is not known for its benevolence. If it sends workers, if it offers special prices on steel, if it aligns with the Australian government, the Tasmanian government, then there is a very substantial reason. The Bruny Bridge is very important.’

  ‘What does this bridge have to do with the Belt and Road Initiative?’ I asked. ‘This is not a key location in the world’s shipping or transport. There are no resources, at least not that we know about.’

  ‘Of course, water will be much more valuable than coal or zinc soon enough,’ said May.

  ‘The bridge is something to do with water? Is there a plan to ship Tasmanian water?’

  ‘We will see,’ Henry said enigmatically.

  There was a long silence. Nothing else was forthcoming.

  ‘Tell me, May,’ I said, ‘I am intrigued by Mr Gao. We have not seen him again. Will he be returning from China soon?’

  She smiled. ‘Forgive me, Astrid. I brought him to the meeting only because we know that in Tasmania, in a room full of men, a young woman would never be taken seriously—let alone an attractive Asian woman. Regardless of who I represent or my credentials. So I posed as his assistant and interpreter.’

  May Chen was Shoughan’s lead here. Of course she was. All these weeks she had been posing as his representative after Mr Gao had been called back to China.

  ‘May is thinking of staying here in Tasmania, beyond the bridge,’ said Henry.

  ‘You’re going to move to Tasmania?’

  ‘I think you should tell Astrid about your father,’ said Henry.

  ‘My father is at Cloudy Bay,’ said May. ‘At Henry’s home. He is my only family. My father’s brother, my uncle, was the mayor of a small town in China. He disagreed with a plan to build a large shopping centre. Six men grabbed him off the street and held him down while a cement truck ran over him. There were witnesses but his death was ruled accidental. The official finding was that he had stepped in front of the truck. Stories circulated that he had taken advantage of state funds. His wife had to make a public apology. My father, his older brother, is an academic. He is an expert in late Ming Chinese literature. Because of his brother’s alleged corruption his social score was going to be lowered to the point where he would have no longer been employed at the university and he would have been unable to travel. You know about this?’

  The Chinese government had mapped every citizen and scored them. The score was drawn from everyone they associated with, all the suppliers they used and all their online interactions. If you were considered a good consumer and citizen, aligned with Communist Party ideals, your score was high. If you stepped out of line, or you were associated with the wrong people or groups, your score dropped. If you had a low score, you were unable to enrol at certain schools, be employed by certain institutions or companies, and you weren’t allowed to travel, either within China or overseas.

  ‘He did not travel here under his own name,’ May said.

  May Chen had just told me she had helped her father flee China.

  ‘But he is safe now,’ said Henry.

  ‘My father is Gao Enzhu,’ said May. She smiled at Henry and he smiled back.

  It was only then that I realised May Chen and Henry Liu were in love. So maybe Beijing didn’t come first. Love did.

  I looked again at Henry’s painting. ‘What don’t I know about the bridge?’ I asked.

  ‘The long term,’ said May Chen. ‘None of us do. But I am sure you have your doubts, as do I. What I do not know is how far those doubts will take you. You too have a loyalty to your family. But perhaps, this time, Astrid, it is misplaced.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  JC and Stephanie were back from their time at Spring Beach and JC was rarely home before eight. With the girls still on summer holidays, the evenings were slow and simple. The weather was still hot, but it was also damp and balmy. It was an unusual combination for Hobart. More suited to the tropics. Stephanie made an excellent pre-dinner margarita. It seemed like the right summer for tequila.

  ‘Everyone said climate change would be good for Tassie,’ said Stephanie. ‘I do love warm weather, but not this damp sticky heat. I just want blue skies again! If I wanted this, I’d live in Queensland.’

  ‘God, I had to battle my way through Salamanca this morning,’ I said. ‘I feel like we need resident car parks beside the disabled spots so people can simply live their lives. Where are all these tourists staying?’

  ‘One in seventeen Tasmanian homes are now registered on Airbnb,’ said Stephanie. ‘I know so many people who have rented out their home and gone interstate, or camping. Did you hear how today eight thousand passengers came ashore off the cruise boats?’

  We could see the new ships in the distance, moored at the dock in the city.

  ‘Apparently both ships rang ahead to advise that, between them, they had more than three hundred passengers restricted to their cabins. So the hospital chief rang the health department begging for the ships to be quarantined.’

  ‘What was the problem?’ I asked.

  ‘One ship had gastro,’ said Stephanie. ‘On the other they’d all come down with a severe flu. The hospital only has four isolation beds. But the health department refused to quarantine the passengers.’

  ‘They came ashore?’

  ‘Yes. Totally blocked up the emergency department. It was a nightmare, I’m told.
I mean we are this close’—and here she held her fingers about a centimetre apart—‘to a major epidemic sailing into Hobart and we simply don’t have the medical facilities to cope.’

  ‘Because the tourism department …’ I began.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Stephanie. ‘Because quarantining a ship would be bad publicity. I’m fed up with it. I actually rang Max. I thought, if JC is too busy to turn his mind to this, then Max needed to know.’

  I observed Stephanie for a moment. ‘Will you tell JC? That you rang Max?’

  ‘He’s got enough on his plate, don’t you think?’ she said.

  ‘You’re a brave woman, Stephanie.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, smiling. ‘There have to be benefits to my sister-in-law being the ex-head of the Nursing Federation.’

  ‘And the Opposition leader?’

  ‘Well, yes …’

  ‘I’m rather touched you trust me enough to tell me.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I trust you?’

  ‘Well, you’re trusting I won’t mention it to JC.’

  ‘Oh, Astrid, if I didn’t know that, I don’t think you’d be here at all.’

  I decided not to enquire further.

  ‘Do you think that headline was right today?’ she asked. ‘You know, “Coleman Inc.”?’

  The front cover and a double-page spread of The Mercury had featured the three Coleman children and their roles in present-day Tasmania. Gilbert Farris had basically accused JC and Max of colluding to run the state as a Coleman family business, stitching up government policy between them. Amy O’Dwyer questioned their united front on the bridge when there were still so many questions around why the project was greenlighted. There was a bit about Max’s support of me and the alleged quarter of a million dollars I was being paid for my role. There was even a picture of the three of us on the balcony on Christmas Day, taken by someone with a long lens.

  JC and Max had issued statements confirming their commitment to the bridge as a project of state significance that required exceptional circumstances following the bomb. That included the appointment of a specialist in conflict resolution, someone the Tasmanian people could trust. But I knew the money I was being paid would not go down well. The fact it wasn’t true was immaterial now. I could hardly say that it was under by fifty thousand dollars, including my success bonus when it was all done. I’m expensive. Peace is. I’d be sure to get a few cold, hard stares onsite. And maybe a new respect. Men liked money and I was always dealing with men. I suspected Frank Pringle of leaking the information about my contract, but I hadn’t anything but my gut to prove it.

  ‘I think Viper will be annoyed that he wasn’t featured in some way,’ I said.

  ‘Sidelined by Coleman Inc.,’ said Stephanie, using her finger to dab at the salt around the edge of her glass. ‘Mind you, he’s always got something up his sleeve. You watch him reassert his significance in the coming weeks. He has a way of coming out of left field.’

  ‘What does JC make of him?’ I asked, observing with interest this shrewd Stephanie who was rarely on show when JC and the children were about.

  ‘JC knows Viper’s a snake in the grass. But he also knows that he can’t run the jungle without him. I’m actually in a book club with his wife. She’s very smart. Don’t know how she puts up with him. But, then, I’m sure there’re people who think the same about me.’

  We sat in silence for a little while. The thunk of balls and the screeches of the girls could be heard from the tennis court.

  ‘I’m going to have to get a screen put up, aren’t I?’ said Stephanie. ‘Whoever took that picture on Christmas Day, they can do it again. It’s endless sometimes. But on we go.’

  I nodded.

  I was thinking about how I had crossed the channel with Dan at 7 am. Then I had watched Dan have a heated exchange in the morning meeting with Mick Feltham over pushing the teams to work faster. Dan was coming off night shift and he was in no mood for a fight. I could see he was right at the edge of saying, ‘So you want another fatality?’

  Feltham must have known about the Chinese worker. But we had never discussed it. Event. Incident. Fatality. There was no official name. There had been no event. We were all meant to have amnesia. But both Dan and I had found a bottle of very limited edition whisky on our Bruny doorsteps a few days after the event. I had yet to open it.

  The works across the Channel at North-West Bay had been hit by lightning in another storm a few days back, and it had caused problems with some of the machinery. There were delays on bridge sections. Dan was explaining to Feltham that speeding things up, once the delivery schedule was back to normal, wasn’t the answer. I could see that the public glory of a statue had begun to colour Feltham’s thinking. The wellbeing of a few workers—their hands, eyes, backs, lives even—was becoming less of a concern to him. After all, someone had died and no-one had made a fuss. Collateral damage.

  At times like this, watching Dan and Feltham struggle to communicate with each other, I thought how there were eight billion people on the planet with very little idea how to communicate effectively. I was meant to feel okay about this because at the grocery store there was an excess of lettuce varieties, sheep’s yoghurt and coconut ice cream, artisanal tomatoes and paleo muesli varieties. But if I had a poor social media score, or wanted to cancel an automatic debit, it was bad luck because there wasn’t anyone to call. There were just Frequently Asked Questions and chat rooms and layer upon layer of opacity and bureaucracy. In my darker moments, I felt as if twenty-first-century existence had been assessed by a quantity surveyor who had determined we were all just parts, not people.

  When I had complained to my son Paul about how I’d been unable to solve a double-billing problem at a company, he’d said, ‘They’re not focused on in-bound traffic, Mom.’

  Not focused on in-bound traffic. Someone seemed to have forgotten in all this that the in-bound traffic kept the machine running. That great traffic jam every morning on the freeway going into every city was filled with the people who made the machine work. No doubt, soon enough, we would almost all be replaced by robots, and the rise of the billionaires would be complete. The people who owned the robots, who employed the techies ignoring in-bound traffic, those who could afford high-protein, low-carb medical care and organic sex, they were going to be sitting pretty in their driverless cars. They would be the ones the car would save when it had to choose between the wellbeing of the driver and the life of a pedestrian crossing the street. There are people working on those algorithms right now. Whose life is worth more when we are in driverless cars? That’s one of the things facial recognition software will give us. The ability to instantly recognise the rich from the poor. If both you and a billionaire were crossing the road, you didn’t stand a chance. The driverless car would avoid the billionaire and kill you. The GOP had proved that to every sick kid in America.

  This was the problem with growing older, I thought. Even with two politicians in the family, I felt powerless. And that was why a 7 pm margarita had been invented, no doubt. So that when you got old enough to realise what was at stake, you could also anaesthetise yourself against the pain.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ said Stephanie. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Do you think JC has sold Bruny to the Chinese, Steph?’ It had been nagging at me ever since the lunch with May Chen.

  ‘God, I can’t believe people are saying that,’ Stephanie said. She’d obviously heard the rumour. If it was true and she knew it, she was a marvellous actress.

  ‘He would never do that. He loves Bruny,’ she said.

  But does he love it more than his political career, I wanted to ask her. What was the long term May Chen had suggested? What did JC really want for Tasmania? What would it cost?

  ‘Seven weeks,’ Stephanie said. ‘Then you can escape all this, lucky thing.’

  ‘Are we prisoners, the two of us?’

  ‘Political wives are all prisoners, Ace,’ she said. ‘Everywhere I go, people r
emind me where JC is doing badly, what’s going to bring him undone. Tennis parents, coaches, at the supermarket, at the fish shop, at the health food store, when I’m buying school supplies, on the phone, via email. It’s a never-ending one-way dialogue. I don’t mean to complain. I know this is what he does, what he’s passionate about. He’s cut out for it, but I’m not sure I am. It will go on for another four years, unless Max pulls a rabbit out of her hat. And can you imagine how awful he’d be in opposition? I doubt he’d resign, if Max wins.’

  ‘Did you know JC wanted to go into politics, back when you were, well, making plans together?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was rather starstruck by that at the time. I was only twenty-four. He told me he wanted to be premier of Tasmania. Felt it was his calling. He and your dad had talked about it many times. Then he told me he was going to run for the Liberals. He thought your father would never speak to him again. I was sure that wasn’t true.’

  ‘But you offered to step in, keep us all together, no matter what?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So you see I’m caught in my own ideals. The perfect wife.’

  ‘You are the perfect wife,’ I said. ‘At least from over here, that’s what it looks like.’

  ‘Even if I’ve caused my husband some nasty headlines in the paper tomorrow?’

  ‘And possibly saved an epidemic,’ I said.

  She poured us another round from the cocktail shaker and raised her glass to mine.

  ‘To missions accomplished,’ she said.

  And we clinked.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Two days out from Australia Day, JC announced that the prime minister—his friend, Tasmania’s friend—was flying in to Hobart to officially launch JC’s election campaign. And our mother went into hospital. Phillip had settled her into Calvary, the Catholic hospital she preferred, and her oncologist was monitoring her. Max had rung me to let me know and we’d all agreed to meet at JC’s.