The Cait Lennox Box Set

by Roderick Donald

  Cait’s right, he really should be resting in bed.

  Jools made a mental note to keep him on her radar for the rest of the day.

  Paul walked out of the living area with a newly opened bottle of red in hand, and glancing over at G beavering away at his BBQ playing chef extraordinaire, noticed G’s empty glass, so he gave the chatting throng a wide berth and drifted over to his friend.

  “Need a hand?”

  “Not the type of one you can give me. You burn water, remember? But I’d kill for a glass of shiraz.”

  Paul responded immediately and poured G an overfull glass of Penfolds Bin 389. One of G’s favorites.

  “I was rummaging around in the cellar before I came here and found this delightful little drop. Knew you liked it so I brought it along. Get your laughing gear around this before it goes to waste on the drunks.”

  “Thanks, mate. What are friends for, eh?”

  Putting his BBQ utensils down, G turned and faced Paul. G had a good nose for wine, especially red, so he picked up his glass and began swirling the contents, holding it up in front of his eyes to admire the deep ruby color and the glycerine-like lady’s legs running down the inside of the glass before thrusting his nose deep into the top to savor the bouquet: dark red berries, chocolate, spice.

  Although it was a bit of a wank, G still liked playing the taste game so he took a generous swig, swishing the silky-smooth wine around his mouth, swallowed, then smiled as if he had won the lottery.

  “Do you want the taste notes or the real report?”

  “Good drop?”

  “Okay, the real report. It’s not good.” G paused and Paul took a large gulp of his glass, fearing that the wine may be corked.

  G continued. “It’s better than good. It’s mother’s milk.”

  “Jesus mate, you had me worried for a moment there.”

  On the strength of G’s assessment of his wine, being ever the pragmatic one, Paul decided it might be best if the wine stayed between them for the time being, so he placed it on the edge of the BBQ away from the prying eyes of the vultures behind him.

  “So what’s new in the world of high finance? As if I need to ask,” inquired G, simply pre-empting the conversation he knew would no doubt follow.

  “Same old, same old. Deals being done, money being made. Looks like we’re about to take the student accom to the next level.”

  “Yeah? Sounds good,” said G, turning back to his sizzling BBQ to tend his butterflied lamb. The smell of crispy burnt edges was drifting across to his guests, with more than a few hungry looks and salivating mouths being drawn to check out the BBQ.

  G was in seventh heaven. The meat was going to have charcoal edges and be moist and medium rare inside. Time to turn it off and let it rest.

  “So you reckon you’ll pull it off? That’ll require big bucks.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve got to spend big to make big. We’re working on securing new funding that’ll see the project to fruition.”

  G took Paul’s comments on board, thinking to himself that he was glad he wasn’t in Paul’s shoes.

  I’m totally happy earning a decent screw as a business analyst. A couple of hundred grand a year is fine by me. All that happened when I went into business was that I lost a shitload of money and ended up turning my previously comfortable feather bed into a bed of nails.

  “Well, I wish you all the best, but I’m glad it’s you and not me. I presume that Kaz is up to speed on this?”

  “Yeah, yeah. She knows the gist of what’s going on but not the finer details. Just keep it between you and me for the next few weeks until hopefully it all comes to fruition, will you mate?”

  “Hopefully? Thought you said that it was a done deal.”

  “Well, it’s close.”

  “You’re smarter than me when it comes to finance, but from the sounds of it it’s not a totally done deal yet, Paul.”

  “Yeah, almost, but when the deal is finalized, it’ll all be good. Just got to sign the paperwork. After all, why use your own money when you can use someone else’s?” A few reds had loosened Paul’s tongue and he was off and running.

  G and Jools in the privacy of their own conversations had often talked about Paul and Kaz and their consensus was that, for a banker, Paul was unusual. In fact, they may well have broken the mold when he was forged at conception, because he was also a risk-taker. A calculated risk, yes, but a risk-taker nonetheless. Some of his deals he had invested in and that they were aware of were certainly at the extreme end of the scale and involved blue-sky start-up ventures that promised high returns but also total loss; others were in property investment and bricks and mortar, but as far as G and Jools knew everything was mortgaged.

  And very few projects ever really seemed to come off.

  “Well I’m sure you guys have your investment philosophy sussed,” replied G, almost speaking from the point of view of a sagacious outside observer.

  “It’s all about the deal and the quality of the investments,” Paul continued. “If truth be known, we’re refinancing all our investments. Remember that on-again, off-again China deal I talked to you about a few months ago? Well, looks like it’s finally coming off.”

  “Ah . . . I don’t want to tell you how to suck eggs, but just watch yourself, Paul. There’s a lot of bad stories going around lately about getting into bed with Chinese investors. Especially in the light of the trade war that seems to be manifesting by the day between the US and China.”

  “Mate, for twenty mil I’d sleep with Chairman Xi Jinping.”

  “Holy Christ, Paul, I hope you know what you’re doing! That’s a shitload of money down the drain for you if you crash out.” Paul and G had been close friends for so long that Paul tended to open up with him, more so than with anyone else.

  “Nah, she’ll be fine, G. Steve’s got it all in hand. And it’ll mean we can finally start building interstate as well as here.” Paul was sounding confident.

  Or was it the red wine speaking? thought G. Paul may have had a knife-edge investment portfolio, but it never seemed to concern him in the slightest.

  G was suddenly reminded of the old Merle Travis song “Sixteen Tons,” talking about getting deeper in debt and eventually owing your soul to the company store.

  Except this time the company store would be in China if the deal came off, and that was a totally different ball game.

  No wonder Jools said Kaz was shitting herself, thought G.

  “She’s so ugly, if she was a dog you’d have to shave its arse and make it walk backward.”

  Steve, his wife Jo, Kaz, and her son Jason all burst out laughing. Sean was getting primed and in his element, talking shit and keeping everyone amused with his politically incorrect one-liners and hyperbole. He had a captive audience and was telling them about a new subcontract carpenter he’d just put on to their building site in Carlton and unfortunately, as far as Sean was concerned, he was a she and females didn’t belong on building sites.

  “As God is my witness, she was so butch that before I put her on I had to ask her to drop her pants to see if she could count to twenty or twenty-one.”

  “Sean, you’re such a sexist pig,” said Jo in a lighthearted way. She may have been a lady of leisure who seemed more interested in doing lunch than her husband’s business dealings, but regardless, Jo appreciated the breath of fresh air that Sean brought to a conversation. Sometimes he really did live up to the nickname that G coined for him: Boofhead.

  In many ways Steve loved his business partner to death, but they argued like crazy and he couldn’t help thinking that Sean’s crassness mirrored his upbringing in Cork. Sean’s clipped vowels, lack of vocabulary, and oftentimes disrespect for others to him indicated an unmistakable talent for gracelessness that was best left on the building site.

  Whenever Steve raised his embarrassment with his wife Jo about how Sean carried on, she would call him a pompous, stuck-up prick and would take Sean’s side. It was well known amongst the girl
s that Jo preferred the beauty salon to the board room, but still, as far as she was concerned they were all lucky to have Sean as a business partner because he was a”salt-of-the-earth Irishman” who stopped them from getting too carried away with their own self-importance and ending up with their heads so far up their own fundamental orifices that they lost sight of reality.

  “As Maxwell Smart would say, ‘and loving it, Ninety-Nine.’”

  Sean was on a roll and there was no holding him back. He shone when he was at the center of attention and he was totally aware that he was rubbing Steve the wrong way with his irreverent attitude.

  It was all part of the game. Sean respected Steve’s business acumen—after all, it had made him a wealthy man—but he couldn’t stand pretension, and besides, Steve’s constant secretiveness annoyed him intensely, so he made a point of niggling him when he felt so disposed.

  So Sean continued playing the buffoon, stabbing the air with his stubby right index finger for effect.

  “I put this She-Man on and bugger me if she didn’t turn out to be one of the best carpenters on the site. Her name’s Margaret but I call her Bob. You know, Bob the Builder. Pisses her off big-time, but she’ll get over it.”

  Steve started shifting his feet uncomfortably; left, right, and back again.

  “The other carpenters reckon Bob’s appointment is as funny as a hat full of arseholes.”

  Sean’s audience were in tears as he continued with his greased-lightning repartee. Except for Steve. He just couldn’t quite come to grips with Sean’s loose toilet humor.

  “She swears like a trooper, and when she gets really wound up she sounds like a jockey with his nuts cut off.”

  Uncouth prick, thought Steve.

  Jo picked up on her husband’s train of thought. “Steve,” she said, whispering for his ears only. “Loosen up. It’s Sunday afternoon and we’re among friends. Chill, okay?”

  But Steve couldn’t wind down. Business was his life—his all-consuming passion—and the fact it was Sunday had no real bearing on anything. Nothing much else mattered other than the lure of the dollar. It was Steve’s faith, his driving force, his conviction. To Steve, there was no real religion, no God. Instead the Divine Being manifested as power, and those wielding it ended up being elevated to the status of deity. For proof, he would say if pressed, look at history: Napoleon, Charlemagne, Attila the Hun, even Hitler. They had money and they had power. And the most powerful people in society today were all megawealthy. Steve looked up to the likes of Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Twiggy Forrest–they had all amassed a fortune and were beholden to no one.

  And since he wasn’t a warrior in a society that could be conquered by physical force, he realized the only way for him to achieve ultimate power was through extreme wealth. Then, and only then, could the cycle end, because he would finally be in control of his own destiny and all those around him.

  So Steve stood back, letting out a false laugh at Sean’s jokes, but his mind was elsewhere.

  But if push came to shove, Boofhead was on the mark actually. Steve did have a side to him that even his wife Jo couldn’t fathom. The difference was that while Sean attributed it to Steve being aloof and pretentious, there was a deeper mystery to the man that was tucked away behind his outward persona. Even Jools, with her uncanny perceptive gift of looking through people and seeing their inner soul, was flummoxed when it came to Steve. All she could say was that there was something dark and mysterious about him she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Every now and then Steve would reveal a crack in his armor and Jools would quickly peer inside, but then the chink would close over as quickly as it appeared and Steve’s impenetrable force field would snap back and the window to his true self would disappear.

  Over the years, piece by piece Jools was slowly building up a mosaic of Steve. He certainly was one of the most complex people she knew, as he had a multilayered persona that was as entwined as hair in a tightly woven plait. The three of them—Jools, G, and Steve—had a history that went back to prehistoric times, way back to when they were footloose and fancy-free: to their throw-caution-to-the-wind and bring-on-the-next-adventure backpacking days in some remote corner of the Third World where life was cheap and survival was a seat-of-the-pants journey that was both a rush and a worry.

  They first met in 1976 during the last days that it was still possible to travel through Afghanistan. G and Jools were journeying overland on their way back to Australia from London, following the path of the ancient Silk Road from Turkey to India and beyond. They had just eaten red dust for eight hours, traveling from Iran to Herat in Afghanistan on a patched-up local bus that in the West would have been consigned to the scrap heap years ago and they were feeling like absolute crap: Jools had been groped, G had been pickpocketed and lost his small-change spending money, and their bus driver had obviously, in a past life, been a failed suicide bomber with a death wish.

  Not a good introduction to a new country.

  As G and Jools stepped off the bus, cranky, dirty, stiff, and stinking of travel smells, their senses were immediately assaulted by what they would soon discover was Afghanistan: a burning, dry breeze carrying windblown sand that was doing its best to shred their exposed skin; raw effluent from open sewers wafting through the air; decaying mudbrick buildings with traders displaying their wares out front, accommodation behind. It was definitely not picture-postcard territory; Herat looked more like it belonged in the Middle Ages than the twentieth century.

  They were shell-shocked.

  “What have we got ourselves into here, Jools,” said G, more to himself than to her. He was starting to get a bit concerned that maybe this time they had bitten off more than they could chew. The warning voice in his head was sending out alarm signals big-time.

  And there was Steve, sitting cross-legged at a low table in the front of a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, smoking a shisha pipe and sipping sickly sweet mint tea, looking for all the world like he owned the place, laughing at the two dust-covered, disheveled westerners who had just got off the bus and who were heading his way.

  “Hey, looks like we’re the only white-eyes around here. Want to join me?” inquired Steve, automatically presuming that G and Jools spoke English.

  “Yeah, after that trip . . . my God, what an ordeal . . . we’d love to. I’m Jools, this is Jamie.”

  “Aussies, huh? Now that’s real weird. I’m Steve. From Sydney. And you guys?”

  Steve turned around and caught the young boy’s eye who was looking after the tables, held up three fingers to indicate that they needed more mint tea and then, as happens when travelers meet in distant places far from home, the conversation flowed.

  “Hey, will you check out the dude in the middle of the intersection over there directing the traffic,” said G, turning and nodding in the direction of an Afghan version of a traffic cop. He was standing inside a small white booth with open sides in the middle of what must have been the only”busy” intersection in the whole of Herat, dressed in what looked like the cast-offs from a 1950’s B-grade movie. Instead of looking like all the other males walking around in dirty baggy pants, long knee-length shirt, scarf wrapped around their mouths to keep out the dust and twisted multicolored turbans, he was dressed to impress in an over-the-top military style uniform that could only have come from the props department of a movie set, complete with golden epaulets, heavy braiding, medals on his chest, and a white peaked cap.

  And Traffic Cop was currently in a real quandary, furiously waving his hands around like a windmill, constantly blowing his whistle. This must have been a nightmare for him, because not only did he have a camel train entering the intersection from one direction, but an overloaded cart being dragged along by an emaciated donkey had lost its wheel, and the driver was beating the poor beast with a stick as if it was the donkey’s fault. And then to add to the mayhem, an army truck was thundering through, horn blaring, not slowing down for anyone or anything.

  G,
Jools, and Steve just cracked up laughing. It really was like watching a movie unfold in front of their eyes. And Traffic Cop was appropriately dressed for his leading role.

  “Hey, will you check that out! That’s as funny as a two-headed dog,” said Steve.

  “This place is crazy, man. It’s in a time warp. And notice, there’re no women anywhere. All males,” said G, glancing around.

  “Know how many people live in this shithole? At last count—not a very accurate census I presume—there were reported to be two hundred fifty-eight thousand inhabitants. Just a piece of useless information to digest.”

  “And the paved road running through the middle of town and on to Kabul was built by the Russians. But get past Kandahar and apparently there’s a distinct join in the road where the Americans took over and continued the surface. And that’s it. Everywhere else it’s all dust, potholes, and dirt tracks.”

  “No shit, eh?” Steve was impressed. He’s one smart dude.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” replied G sagaciously.

  “Trust him, Steve. Jamie’s never wrong. He’s got a photographic memory and a mind like an elephant. Trivia’s his middle name,” quipped Jools.

  And that was it. Herat is where G was christened with his”new” name. For his first twenty-three years he was known as Jamie. Then enter Steve. As Steve came to know Jamie, both in Herat and then later on as the three of them joined forces and traveled on to Pakistan together, Steve became so impressed with Jamie’s general knowledge, his intellect, and his understanding of life skills that he started calling Jamie”The Guru.” Which somehow stuck, except the nickname was eventually shortened to G, and the rest is history.