by Judy Nunn
Refusing to obey his superiors’ instructions, Rob neither denied the friendship nor maintained his silence. He issued a furious statement to the press instead. ‘Max Brown and I went to Bondi Beach Public School together,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘We were childhood friends, we were friends throughout our youth, we are friends today, and we will remain friends, God willing, through our old age until our respective deaths, and anyone who wishes to make something of that can go to hell!’
He and the law firm parted company. He was unrealistic, they told him. He was willing neither to make concessions nor to turn a blind eye, nor, as was evident from his statement to the press, to practise diplomacy when necessary. In fact, it appeared he lacked all the skills of compromise required by a proficient lawyer.
Rob started to wonder whether perhaps law, like politics, had been an incorrect career choice on his part. He’d honestly wished to do some good.
‘I don’t expect to change the world, Dad,’ he’d said to Artie at the time, ‘but I’d like to serve a useful purpose.’ He could only suppose now that that made him naive.
The problem with Rob Farinelli was his parents. There was too much of Artie and Kitty in him. The lethal mixture of his father’s idealism and his mother’s attack and tenacity was confronting to most people.
He was just the idealist Wodin and Wodin had been looking for. ‘It won’t be big money,’ he was warned, ‘you’ll be handling minority cases.’
‘Minority cases’, he soon discovered, were ‘underdog’ cases, which at that time appeared to refer in the main to the Vietnamese boat people. The legal quandary raised by the boatloads of tragic and desperate refugees who were landing in droves on the north and north-western shores of the continent was receiving a lot of attention in the press. Such cases were worth little money to Wodin and Wodin, but as a public relations exercise they were invaluable.
The government had accepted the firm’s caring offer of assistance, but the partners were having trouble finding someone who was willing to go. They discovered just the man in Rob Farinelli.
Rob was sent to Darwin where he was on his own. ‘Do what you can to assist the government’s legal aid,’ he was instructed, ‘but make sure the company’s name appears regularly in the press.’
At the refugee camp Rob befriended a young Vietnamese-born Chinese girl. She was a student, just turned twenty, and she’d been at the camp for a month, having arrived on a boat with thirty-seven others, including three babies, seven children under ten, and four men and women over sixty.
‘There was a four’ baby,’ she told Rob, ‘but she die, we bury her at sea.’
Mai Wang Lee was a godsend, she spoke excellent English.
‘It is my English that save me,’ she said. ‘They don’ kill me because of my English.’
At one point in the voyage, she said, when their engine had broken down and they had drifted for over three weeks, having run out of food and being short of water, the people had become very frightened. She heard them talking about eating the first one of them who died. Then, at the end of the fourth week, she heard them discussing who they might kill. A woman it should be, the men were needed to do the hard work.
Mai was the only person aboard who was travelling without any family and, with no-one to defend her, she knew she would be the first choice. Then she heard them say they could not kill Mai Wang Lee because she was useful, she spoke English.
‘But they kill no-one,’ she said, ‘because the nex’ day the winds come. They make a big sail from women’s clo’s. My blouse,’ she hugged her arms around her thin chest, ‘is terrible, I am so shy.’ She shrugged off her shame and got on with her story. ‘The nex’ day the rains come, and we catch the water in a raincoat. And then, two days, we find land. You see?’ she smiled. Mai Wang Lee had the most charming smile. ‘The gods are kind.’
Rob and Mai became allies. Not only was she an invaluable interpreter, but he watched with admiration as she calmed, advised and counselled her fellow refugees. She was a strong, intelligent young woman. She would be an asset to this country, he maintained, using her as a prime example when presenting the emotional aspects of his argument.
With Mai’s help, Rob achieved much success and Mai was the first amongst a number of the refugees granted residency in Australia. Although his own name featured minimally in the press, ‘legal representation by Wodin and Wodin’ appeared so regularly that his superiors congratulated themselves upon their choice.
There were other ‘minority cases’ to be addressed. Following the collapse of Pol Pot’s regime in 1979, Cambodian refugees sought settlement in Australia and other Western countries, and who better qualified to represent them than Rob Farinelli of Wodin and Wodin?
But a case much closer to homeraised its head in the late eighties. It had started in 1982 when Eddie Mabo, a Torres Strait Islander, made legal claim to eight hectares of government land on his native home of Mer Island off the northernmost tip of Queensland. It was the first challenge to the legal basis of white settlement, and the outcome, should Eddie Mabo prove successful, was bound to create a precedent for other such claims to follow.
Wodin and Wodin had found a prime PR issue with which to become associated. And now they had just the man to represent their caring commitment to the cause. Even his name was perfect. Farinelli. And he looked so Italian too. Son of a European immigrant fighting for the rights of the indigenous people. Couldn’t be better. Finally they gave Rob Farinelli his own plush office and his own personal secretary.
Rob was fully aware he was being used, but he didn’t give a damn. He believed wholeheartedly in Aboriginal land rights, so he took up the banner and used Wodin and Wodin right back.
Having thoroughly toasted Son of a Migrant, and having demolished the seafood platter, Rob ordered a second bottle and the conversation turned to Bruce Hamilton.
‘Caroline told me you visited him last week,’ Kitty said. ‘I’m glad. He needs a friend.’ Of course it was Caroline she was really worried about. With Emma in England and Jim an empty shell of a man, Bruce was the only family Caroline had, and his imprisonment had left her distraught. Although she had accepted the fact of his guilt, she would not hear a word against her son’s character.
‘He made a mistake, certainly, but he stayed and faced the music like a man,’ she said defiantly, daring anyone else to differ. ‘Not like those other two cowardly bastards.’
Kitty readily agreed, which was a comfort to Caroline who so valued her opinion. But now Kitty was worried—she was leaving, and who would visit Caroline and fill in the lonely void of her days?
‘You will visit Caroline regularly, won’t you?’ she said to Rob as the waiter opened the second bottle of wine.
‘Yes, I promised you I would.’ He’d promised about ten times.
‘And you’ll take her to see Bruce once a week?’
‘I promised you I’d do that too.’
‘I’ve arranged Meals on Wheels …’
‘Yes, so you told me.’
‘… more for the company than anything, at least she’ll have someone popping in daily …’
‘Shall we order dessert?’ Artie suggested, changing the subject. Kitty’s worries about Caroline had become an obsession. When they’d discussed the possibility of extending their overseas trip, she’d carried on to such a degree that Artie had suggested it would be simpler if he went on his own. ‘My place is by my husband’s side,’ Kitty had insisted. Artie had raised an eyebrow, normally Kitty resisted such platitudes, but she’d continued oblivious, ‘… and you need a holiday. We’re going to Italy for six months as we planned and I’ll hear no more on the subject.’ But it didn’t stop her going on about Caroline.
Not that Artie minded really, he could forgive Kitty anything. She had saved his life. Quite literally, he often thought.
At the lowest depths of his illness, Artie had been prepared to give up. He’d accepted the fact that his cancer would kill him, but he’d been unable to accep
t the fact that his life had been meaningless. When his second book, two years in the writing, had been rejected by all the leading publishers, he’d become demoralised and, in his weakened physical condition, deeply depressed.
He had retreated further and further into himself, despondent, refusing to burden his wife with his unhappiness. But she hadn’t given up, she’d nagged at him untilfinally he had told her the truth.
‘What have I lived for?’ he said, hating the fact that it sounded like self-pity. ‘I wanted to do so much with my life, Kitty, but I leave behind nothing. I have served no purpose.’
‘You call Roberto “nothing”?’ Kitty said. That got his attention. ‘You call the fact that he’s lived his life by your example “no purpose”?’ Kitty could have held him to her and comforted him, but it was not her way. Kitty was a fighter. ‘I wanted to change the world too, Arturo, but I didn’t know how until I met you. Both Rob and I have lived by your example. And the next generation will live by his. If that isn’t changing the world then I don’t know what is.’
She knew she was making sense. Strange, she thought, Arturo had always been the one with the sound advice, she the headstrong and irresponsible one. It was true, she had learned from him, and now it was his turn to listen to her.
‘You always said that perhaps the next generation would have the answers. Well, how do they get their answers without learning through us? Don’t you see, Arturo, Rob wouldn’t be the man he is, he wouldn’t be doing the work he does, if it weren’t for you.’
It was then that the idea had hit her, the perfect solution. ‘So why don’t you write about the next generation,’ she’d said, ‘why don’t you write about your son?’
‘Yes, I’ll go dessert, Dad.’ Rob was thankful for the change of topic, his mother’s preoccupation with Caroline’s welfare could be maddening at times. ‘The cheesecake here’s terrific.’
Both men shared a smile, and then the three of them talked about Italy, and Tuscany in the spring, and they all felt a little giddy with the wine and the sun and their love for each other.
On the trip back to Circular Quay Artie dozed off in the stern of the water taxi. Kitty had asked the skipper to go slowly so that she could enjoy the view from the water. Her chin resting on her hands, her elbows on the gunwales, Kitty looked out at the plush harbourside homes as they glided past. Many beautiful, some ugly and pretentious, and of course the most monstrous of them all, Wallace Kendall’s twin mansions. Well, they weren’t Wallace’s any more, they were in the hands of the receivers now. But there they stood, rivalling each other in their ostentation, the larger of the two with a helicopter pad sitting atop it like an unsightly bonnet.
How everything had changed, Kitty thought. She didn’t need to close her eyes to see Wally’s old house lounging peacefully there on the point, surrounded by cool verandahs, shaded by the huge Moreton Bay fig. She could see them all now, in their tennis whites; she could hear the shrieks of their laughter. But Wally and her parents had gone, and now she and her generation were the next on the way out. Sobering thought.
It had been shock enough turning sixty. Sixty was old. And yet here it was, 1991, in just two years she’d be seventy, and people spoke with such glibness of the year 2000. It sent shivers down her spine. 2000 had always been light years away. She had never contemplated being alive at the turn of the millennium, and yet in a way it was only tomorrow.
Other water taxis sped past them, dodging busily like worker bees amongst the ferries and the yachts. Fort Denison glided past their starboard bow, to the left was Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, and dead ahead, sitting in all its magnificence upon Bennelong Point, was the Opera House and beyond that the giant coathanger of steel. Dear God, Kitty thought, how she loved this city.
‘Hello, Mrs Hamilton. How are you today?’
‘I’m fine, dear, I’m fine.’
Caroline Hamilton wasn’t fine, far from it. She was so desperately lonely that each evening when she went to bed she hoped she might not wake up. It wasn’t a prayer, Caroline was not a religiouswoman, she simply wished that she could sleep forever. In sleep she could give herself up to her dreams. She could dance with Gene at the Trocadero and watch him running up from the water’s edge at Bondi Beach. They could dine at the Roosevelt on oysters and champagne and always, in her dreams, they were young and beautiful.
During her waking hours, Caroline allowed herself to think of Gene only briefly, refusing to wander too long in the past, for that way lay madness, and she intended to keep her wits about her to the very end. But, when she dreamed she was happy, and in sleep she was free of the painwhich plagued her waking hours and of the emptiness of her interminable days. Days which stretched forever, broken only by the visit of the cheery young woman from Meals on Wheels.
Sally was fond of old Mrs Hamilton, she never complained like so many of the others, and she was always good for a laugh. Sally always tried to schedule Mrs Hamilton last on her list of deliveries so that they could have the odd game of Scrabble now and then.
‘You get the board and I’ll clear the table,’ Caroline said.
‘Aren’t you going to have your lunch first?’
‘No, I’m not hungry today, the food can wait. Besides,’ she called as Sally disappeared into the front room, ‘I’m hardly malnourished.’
‘It’s lack of exercise,’ Sally said, returning with the Scrabble set to see Caroline easing her bulky body into the chair at the head of the table.
It was difficult to imagine someone as old and as fat as Mrs Hamilton ever having been young. Sally wondered if she’d been pretty. Quite possibly. Her hair, though now white, was thick, and her eyes, amidst the folds of her face, were the deepest brown.
‘You really should try and get out for a walk now and then,’ she said.
If only she could, Caroline thought. Every single movement caused her pain. ‘I know, I know, dear. I’m thinking of taking up jogging. In those little tight shorts and a sweatband.’
Sally laughed. Old Mrs Hamilton was always good for a laugh.
Caroline played a similar game with Rob Farinelli when he visited her, and particularly with Kitty during their weekly telephone calls.
Kitty rang at the same time each Saturday, and the conversation always started the same way.
‘Are you well?’
‘Yes, I’m fine. Went for a five-mile hike this morning.’
‘Now don’t be silly. Are you all right? Really?’
‘Really, yes, I’m fighting fit.’
‘Has Rob visited?’
‘Yes, on Thursday, as usual.’
‘Is there anything you need?’
‘Rob asked me that. There’s nothing, Kitty, truly. I’m perfectly happy.’ Then Caroline would change the subject. ‘I got your postcard. San Gimignano looks beautiful.’ She was on safe ground there, Kitty would wax lyrical about the glories of Tuscany, the countryside and the medieval towns for a full ten minutes.
‘And Artie,’ Caroline would ask before they said goodbye, ‘how’s Artie?’
Kitty was always a little guarded in her reply. She didn’t dare raise her hopes too much. ‘He hasn’t gained any weight and he doesn’t seem any stronger, but he’s loving being here. It’s good for him, Caroline, he’s happy, I can tell.’
‘Oh my dear, I’m so glad.’
Then came the phone call three weeks before Kitty and Artie’s planned return.
‘My God, the time’s flown,’ Kitty said, ‘it seems only yesterday we stepped onto the plane …’
Really? Caroline thought. To her the days and the months had dragged by, each day seeming longer than the last, each morning bringing with it the disappointing discovery that she was still alive.
‘… and now we’ll be home in three weeks. I can’t wait to see you.’
Caroline longed to see Kitty too, just once, to say goodbye. She had a feeling it wouldn’t be long now. She’d stopped eating to help speed up the process. She was simply being practical. She knew she
would never survive long enough to see her son out of gaol, so what was the point in hanging around any longer than was necessary. The meals Sally brought her she wrapped in plastic bags and put in the outside rubbish bin. But she was amazed at how efficiently the body could cope without food, it had been a whole two weeks.
‘You don’t look well, Mrs Hamilton,’ Sally had remarked only yesterday. ‘Shall I call the doctor?’
‘No, dear, I’m perfectly fine, and I can call him myself if I feel the need. Leave the food on the bench, there’s a good girl. Do you have time for Scrabble? I feel a winning streak coming on.’
A thought occurred to Caroline as Kitty chatted away. Was she coming home just because of her? If so, how terrible.
‘Kitty,’ she said, broaching the subject with care, ‘if Artie is responding well, then surely you should stay in Italy longer.’
‘Oh good heavens no, it’s time to come home. Besides, I’m missing everyone.’ Then the hoot of Kitty’s laughter down the line as she truthfully admitted, ‘Well, you and Rob anyway, the rest can go to buggery.’
Yes, Caroline thought, Kitty Farinelli was returning to Sydney for the sole purpose of looking after her friend. Her friend who didn’t want to be looked after, who dearly wished to leave this mortal coil. Well, that was it, Caroline decided, she had a little less than three weeks inwhich to do it.
‘There’s someone at the door, Kitty, I have to go. I’ll speak to you next Saturday.’
Caroline brought up the subject of funerals with Rob when he called the following Thursday. He gave her the perfect opening. ‘I’m calling the doctor,’ he said the moment he saw her. ‘You don’t look at all well, Caroline.’
‘He’s already been, dear,’ she replied quite airily, ‘this morning.’
