The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  That’s my real grief, Clarebelle, that I can’t be there to help you through this awful time in your life. I’m sorry. While I can’t anticipate everything that might happen, I can say with some certainty that fighting the likes of Nicholas never brings satisfaction. You’ll never get the revenge or the apology or inflict the shame or pain on him that you deserve. Don’t waste more money and time trying: you’re financially independent as of this moment. Until you let him go, you won’t be able to get on with your life. That’s my final bob’s worth, darling.

  Easily said, even if it was written, probably laboriously. At times, she could contemplate letting it go, letting him go. But the detail of Nicholas’s betrayal kept coming back. She should have seen the signs. The way he convinced her after their successful fledgling year that he would be better as the front man for the agency, the lone scout out there on the streets of the inner-city fringe while she ran the office, did the contracts, managed the deposits and commissions, banked the profits. He’d sold the idea — and she’d bought it, more fool her — that it was a better use of their complementary skills: hers sedentary, static, supervisory, composing and placing the advertising, keeping the website up to date, working the banks and the solicitors on the landline and by e-mail, doing the books; his verbal, mobile, working from the hands-free in his black BMW 5 series which she thought would alienate the clients but he knew would impress them and besides they needed the tax deductions.

  That should have alerted her. Though he was always out doing appraisals, talking to valuers, particularly one, the month-on-month figures on agency exclusives didn’t really improve in their second year, or third, despite the overall market volumes increasing by twenty or thirty per cent. The rising values and their commissions on the back of them disguised the reality that Nicholas wasn’t bringing in any more contracts than he had the year before. The volumes for the agency were flat-lining, while the profits were going up on the back of the values of a hot market. She should have seen it, but dismissed it as an indicator of increased competition: a lot of agents who’d found something else to do after the meltdown in 2008 were back in the game.

  She was sipping a prosecco under the vaulted arches of the huge loggia that projected out into the piazza from the Palazzo del Trecento, partly rebuilt after the war. There was a photo of it on the other side of the square, looking absolutely wrecked after the bombardamento in 1944, and if you stood there and compared the photo with the reality you could see — this was where the Italians were so cool — the deliberate zigzags of new bricks that perfectly delineated for future generations exactly where they’d had to start again. At home they’d have bulldozed it and put up something new, pretended that things didn’t get broken, that people and buildings didn’t have to find a way to endure in their imperfection.

  To begin with, the fraud that Nicholas perpetrated on her was like a knot in the entrails of their business that she couldn’t even find the ends of. But gradually, with her father’s help, she’d got her head around the mechanics of what Nicholas did: classic contract flipping.

  He would hear of a prospective sale, from the ether, from his myriad contacts, from his ceaseless quartering of their patch, but would tell no one at the agency. Instead, he would visit the prospective vendor to do an appraisal. Happened all the time, that was his job. But the real motive was to suss out whether the vendor was a potential mark, based on criteria like eagerness or desperation to sell, old age, isolation, naïveté, or, at the other end of the scale, openness to the idea of a back-hander.

  As soon as he had the verbal nod, Nicholas would bring the vendor an unconditional agreement for sale and purchase, a standard Law Society template bought from Whitcoulls with no mention of any agency on it, signed either by a purchaser ‘or nominee’, and with a long settlement date. But that purchaser would not be the person Nicholas knew was interested in buying a property of this type. The first purchaser was a stooge, who was in on the deal.

  Clare tried to scoot over the next stage, but it never worked: the stooge purchaser could be anyone, of course she knew that. But the fact that in almost every case it was her best friend Sarah didn’t help. It was like Tourette’s, leaping out at inopportune times — Bitch! — and she couldn’t get past it. It was a mathematical equation that kept getting worse: trying to work out on how many levels she’d been fucked over by Sarah.

  Somehow, the first glass of prosecco had gone, along with the cute little complimentary squares of egg sandwich. She felt she was on the edge of some important revelation and obliged to order a second glass. When she looked out across the piazza, the autumn sun had left it, and the ambling couples, old and young, were putting their hands in jacket pockets or taking their partner’s hands in theirs. What a place this would be to share with someone.

  Anyway, Nicholas would then flip the contract: take another agreement to the third party he knew was interested in a property like this and sign him up for an extra twenty or thirty or fifty k. The vendor on the new contract was, of course, the stooge purchaser on the original contract, and the dates for settlement of the two contracts were always contemporaneous.

  On settlement, without putting up a penny, the stooge purchaser and Nicholas would walk away with whatever the difference was between their purchase price and the ultimate sale price — fifteen or twenty k mostly, but on three occasions it was thirty and once fifty, for a widowed pensioner who had no family and was selling a former state house she’d paid for over the course of a lifetime. That money was cash and a hundred per cent profit, apart from Sarah’s cut and the back-hander to the valuer. There were no agency overheads and no commission to pay because the agency, being run by the faithful gormless wife, knew nothing about it.

  It might have gone on for another couple of years, had it not been for New Zealand’s two degrees of separation. One of the third party purchasers was represented by her father, who’d seen a contract come across his desk with Sarah Easton as the vendor. He’d mentioned it to Clare — he wasn’t acting for Sarah and not breaching any confidence — who thought it more than passing strange that her best friend was buying and selling houses and had never mentioned it to her or asked her advice about the market. They’d made it through the terrible twenties together, cried over boyfriends together, got drunk together, shopped for clothes together, planned their lives together, yet Sarah had never said, even in passing, that she’d bought a fucking house and was selling it.

  What Clare knew of Sarah’s financial situation was pretty dire. Her flirtation with the law was short-lived (boring!) and she’d spent the fag-end of her twenties with Shanes and Dwaynes and Kanes, each younger and poorer than the last, doing an endless succession of courses from TM to Bikram yoga to dance therapy to drama to NLP to Zumba, some of which had qualified her to instruct. Sarah was in no position to pony up a deposit on a house, even in the days of ninety per cent mortgages. If she had been, Clare would have been on the case for her best friend, looking.

  She’d met Sarah for a coffee to ask her the question. They’d sat in the wintry morning sun at Blake Street, just down from Jervois Road, Sarah in lycras under a puff jacket — she was currently a Zumba instructor at Les Mills. But something in Sarah’s manner stopped Clare from opening her mouth. She wasn’t sure how long it had been there, a kind of flitting, fleeting eye contact, a rush of words about nothing, skating and slipping across the surface of their intent, old coded signals that used to be shorthand for something meaningful and understood, but now seemed opaque. Something had changed. Clare had gone away, weighed down with worry.

  20

  Dusk had come to the piazza and given it a cosy shroud, an intimacy that seemed to encourage the couples to move closer together as they walked. Their happiness wrenched her heart and flooded her with regret and yearning.

  She ordered a coffee from the tall, dark and not very handsome waiter who was at least looking less truculent than when she’d arrived. He even smile
d when she said she didn’t want any more sandwiches, grazie. She loved it here, she loved the anonymity, that there was almost zero chance that anyone would walk into the Piazza dei Signori and see her occasional tears and know her shame.

  But amid the betrayal, the deceit, the emotional meltdown, she’d missed something. Rewind.

  The original vendors. Most of them had been unknown to the agency but three of the dozen had been on the books. Another had rung her one lunchtime when Lana, the receptionist, was at the gym. Having used up her lunchtime, Lana would then eat her yoghurt and lettuce at the desk, which Clare had been meaning to talk to her about, but the girl was so emotionally fragile she didn’t dare. Anyway, this woman had telephoned while Lana was out and it had come straight through to Clare. It was one of those exploratory calls — the market’s going crazy, should I cash up? — the sort of query she’d refer to Nicholas to go and do an appraisal. She’d duly done this then heard no more about it and assumed the woman had been another tyre kicker. Until she saw her name on one of the flipped contracts a year later.

  It came to Clare at the same time as the coffee. Lana had to have been complicit. Nicholas had to make sure all contacts to the office went to him first so he could vet them for potential marks. It suddenly made sense: she’d seen dates and times on Lana’s telephone messages that were hours old, sometimes as much as a day. When Clare had taxed Lana with it she’d rolled her big blue eyes, then blushed so badly that Clare felt sorry for her. She was fucking Nicholas.

  Clare swallowed the coffee, left some euros to cover it — the figures on the notes were blurred and she didn’t want to wipe her eyes, was sure it’d be more than enough — and walked back down the magic carpet, oblivious this time to the warm glow of the shops.

  At first she felt a kind of triumph. Over Sarah. She felt like texting her or even ringing her and telling her that Nicholas had made a fool of her too. But the feeling didn’t last. Lana, hopeless, helpless Lana, whom she’d thought of as a charity case. She’d wanted to fire her but Nicholas always wanted to give her another chance. Damn right he did! Should she ring him? Let him know she had additional information on . . . What exactly? The magnitude of his betrayal? On what a deluded idiot she’d been?

  It was always the detail that killed her. Those lunchtimes when Lana would get back pink-faced from ‘the gym’ and gobble her yoghurt and god-awful health confection or whatever the fuck it was, spilling stuff on her keyboard and answering the phone with her mouth full of couscous and her husband’s cum. Say hello to Pedro!

  She walked past the sallow young man on reception and took the lift up to her room. She tripped over a shoe box in her tan and white Hush Puppies and booted it across the room, sending the gladiator slave sandals cannoning into the boxes under the writing table. The room seemed suddenly stuffy and full. She picked up the empty box, gathered up the tissue paper and opened up the shuttered windows to the night air. Below, the bland expanse of the mostly empty carpark looked yellow under the lights. She saw two of those huge rubbish bins against the wall further along near the back entrance to the hotel kitchen. She dropped the box the three storeys to an empty park, screwed up the tissue and threw it after. Then she began emptying the boxes, throwing the shoes on the bed and the boxes and tissue out the window. It didn’t take that long. When she leaned out the window again she saw that they’d made a messy sort of pile across one park.

  She left the room, went downstairs and outside for a smoke, then remembered her mission and walked through the arch and round the back of the hotel to the carpark. She lit the fag, then tried to gather an armful of boxes and tissue. Some of it fell out of her arms and she looked across to the rubbish bins through the curling smoke, so far away. It was hopeless, useless. She dropped the stuff she was carrying and went around the outside of her midden, booting the boxes and tissues into some sort of pile. The Hush Puppies were exactly right for the job. She had a last drag on the disgusting cigarette that disgusted her almost as much as she disgusted herself and threw it on the pile. She wondered how long it would take the cigarette to ignite the tissue paper or whether she’d have to use her lighter. She felt numb, becalmed, until the smoke grew into flames, quite spectacular for about twenty or thirty seconds. She thought about taking a photo and sharing it with someone — Sarah, probably, or Nicholas. Subject: My life. My dreams. You’re such a drama queen, she admonished herself, even though she felt no emotion at all. She heard a siren, quite close.

  Gemona 1943

  21

  ‘

  Hai fame?’ someone was asking him. Are you hungry?

  Joe remembered a game at PG 57, where men would describe their favourite meals in great detail. When he had seen them salivating and swallowing, he had started to as well. That had made him feel worse, not better, so thereafter he’d stayed well clear. He heard the voice again, asking him if he was hungry.

  When he opened his eyes, the mother, Nina, was there, offering him a bowl of soup, flanked by Donatella. Joe pushed himself upright and took the bowl in hand. He must have looked for a spoon.

  ‘Così,’ said Donatella, and mimed sipping it from the bowl.

  The soup was thin, but tasted of chicken. Bepi came in with a torn chunk of crumbly bread, to soak up the last of the soup. They seemed to approve, as he slurped and swallowed. Nina was watching him intently and when he’d finished and handed her the bowl, she took it with one hand and with the other gently touched him on the temple, where the hair wouldn’t grow, and traced the scar down to the lump on his cheekbone. ‘Quanti anni hai?’ she asked him.

  ‘Diciannove,’ he told her. Nineteen years old.

  ‘Poveretto,’ she said.

  ‘Mamma!’ said Donatella. There was a quick exchange between mother and daughter in dialect, which Joe didn’t understand, but in which Nina seemed to be justifying expressing sympathy for Joe’s disfigurement so young. Nina was either ash blonde or grey, Joe couldn’t tell which, but was probably only in her mid-forties.

  ‘Lei,’ said Nina, turning to Joe and indicating Donatella, ‘diciotto.’

  ‘Eighteen, me,’ translated Donatella.

  ‘You speak English?’

  ‘A little only. I study at convent school. To become a teacher.’

  Nina had crossed the room to the dresser, and returned with a portrait photograph of a young man with fierce eyes glowering under the peak of what looked like the kind of stiff felt hat mountaineers wore, with a long feather pointing straight up from the left temple. ‘Questo mio figlio,’ she said. ‘Luca.’

  ‘My brother has twenty-four years,’ said Donatella.

  Nina explained that Luca was somewhere in Russia, she didn’t know where, and she prayed that wherever he was, some mother knew that he was the son of another mother, like Joe, and would treat him like her own son. Joe nodded and said he hoped so too, though he’d never been treated like this by Molly.

  ‘Where is your mother?’ asked Donatella.

  ‘Dead,’ said Joe, and tried to explain that she died giving birth to him.

  ‘Orfano?’ asked Nina.

  Orphan. He supposed he was. His sisters weren’t his sisters, strictly speaking: they were his aunts. The youngest of the oldest three, by Mal’s first wife, Patricia, had been his mother, Annie. When Annie had died giving birth to Joe, Mal Lamont, Joe’s grandfather, had grabbed both boys and taken them back to the farm at Devil’s Bridge. By that time Mal had had nine daughters trying to get a son, the last six by his second wife, Molly, who’d been his housekeeper after Pat’s death. Mal had formally adopted Dan and Joe and had raised them as his sons. By that time, Mal was in his seventies, and Molly, though twenty years his junior, would have been too old to have more children.

  The youngest of the last six daughters, Ida, who had been more of a mother to him than Molly, had told Dan she remembered a man coming out from town on a horse, and Mal confronting him at the farm gate with hi
s shotgun, telling him if he came again he’d shoot his horse.

  But the man had come once more, according to Ida. He’d waited until Mal and Molly and the sisters had gone off to the basilica, as they did every Sunday morning, rain or shine. Ida had been left alone to look after Dan and Joe and when this man had ridden up to the house and demanded to see the little boys, what could she say? She was terrified, because Mal had told them the boys’ father was a gambler and a drinker and a ne’er do well. ‘Indeed,’ said Ida, ‘he might have been smelling a bit of whisky, but he seemed gentle enough.’

  Ida told Dan that the man had done nothing, just ruffled three-year-old Dan’s hair, then stared at Joe in his basket. Ida said he might have been crying, that at one stage he’d bent over and gripped the basket and she could see his knuckles were white. Then he rode away.

  Ida had been worried that he’d come back the next Sunday, but he never did. She’d sworn Dan to silence and had never told her father about the man’s visit. Malachy would have beaten her for allowing the man into his home and hearth, though Ida didn’t know what she could have done to stop him.

  When Joe was older, Dan told him about the man who’d come to see them. They both taxed Ida about the stranger: What did he look like? All Ida could remember was that he was darker than ‘the rest of us’ and polite and ‘dressed like a townie, dapper’. She said he looked like Dan, though that might have been because she knew that’s what Dan wanted to hear. What was his name? they chorused. But Ida didn’t know, the man never said. Joe thought that, after the war, he and Dan would go to the Magistrates’ Court or the Oamaru Borough Council or wherever the adoption records were kept and find out what their real father’s name was.