Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  ‘Someone who speaks his mind. You have the gift of seeing through to the sense of a thing and then talking about it in terms others can understand. I know that you are a writer – I’ve not read your books … I am sorry … I don’t get time to read fiction – but I’ve seen you on television and I know something of your background. I think there are other ways you can use your gifts. I think what we need most of all in our country at the moment are people who can communicate frankly and clearly. Without bullshit.’

  Biting his tongue; determined not to rise to the suggestion that fiction was somehow the lesser art. So much for speaking your mind. Our Country, which was another way of saying Our Party. That would be the Liberal-Nationals.

  I know your background.

  Guy supposed that was part of it. He had a long association with Aldous. They’d bumped into each other at the airport on several occasions and, over drinks in the lounge, he’d found the Federal Member possessed of a droll wit rarely evident in his public appearances. Aldous had been a lawyer before he entered politics and retained his love of literature and the arts. They had more in common than he might ever have imagined. Over the years Aldous had provided him with both material for columns and connection to other sources. It was an arrangement of mutual benefit that Bain would have been unlikely to countenance if there was evidence of some horror lurking in the past. Someone had, without doubt, been rifling through his history. Venice springing to mind; or his more immediate association with a particular establishment in Canberra; not to mention Alan. A certain chill at the idea of one of their minions tooling around in his life. But then he’d never been frightened of who he was, the whole purpose and meaning of his books had been to discuss something as grand as the human condition, our awful common failing mortality, and he was unashamed that his own life had been freely employed in its service. If anyone was to claim he judged people harshly, and they did, he held up his own self-analysis as example.

  Inviting him to stand for the Senate. Number two on the ticket. A foregone conclusion that they would retain at least two of the slots. How might they not? The other lot were hopeless, clamouring to be sent to the wilderness for at least a couple of terms. Scenarios involuntarily swelling in his mind, their richness enhanced, perhaps, by the extraordinary nature of the company and the remarkable building, its tall windows giving way now to flood-lit fountains in the formal garden, a sixteenth-century tapestry glowing on the wall behind them. He wasn’t drunk, even though his glass had been filled many times, this was a different kind of intoxication he was suffering from; besotted by possibility. Trying to ground himself with historical imperatives, sic transit gloria mundi.

  The invitation tapping, of course, into what he hoped were well-disguised dreams of glory; what was it Peter Carey had said, who knows the fantasies that lie dormant in a writer’s mind? Something like that. Carey was deflecting a question about the Nobel at the time, but what about the even more terrible fantasy realised by Václav Havel? The one which every writer – world creators all – must nurture deep in their breasts, that eventually the people will come to find them and raise them up to rule over them; even only for a time.

  The honour of it.

  Except, of course, in this case, Peter Mayska would clearly like to be doing a bit of the ruling.

  ‘Let me make one thing clear,’ Mayska said, ‘I’m not, and I think I speak for Aldous here too, interested in turning you to my purpose. That is not what this dinner is about.’

  An odd idiom even for the correctly spoken Peter.

  ‘Aldous has spoken highly of you, that’s all. There is, how can I put it, a dearth of good minds in parliament. We think you could make a difference.’

  A waiter was hovering with the decanter and Mayska allowed the man to spill a splash into the deep bowl of his glass, indicating he should attend to the others. At home here in this, one of his many houses, tilting back in his chair, the white shirt stretched across his taut belly. He must work out, didn’t mind letting others notice. Perhaps he rode some of the horses. No doubt there was a gym somewhere in the complex, and a lap pool, a media centre, helicopter pad, everything.

  It occurred to Guy to wonder if the invitation was a test. Nothing being simple with these people. Trying to keep on his guard. But it wasn’t so: continuing to stand up in favour of the Winderran dam proposal was. Bain had been unusually quiet throughout the proceedings. Now he stepped in to explain the politics of the project, disassociating himself from it. A quick lesson in politics from the master.

  ‘It’s a State government thing,’ he said. ‘Of very limited significance and nothing to do with Canberra except for the purposes of signing off. If it comes before us after the election we’ll approve it in a millisecond, of course, if only to support the premier, but the decision to build was made in the heat of the moment. We’re happy to sit this one out. Nobody wins with issues like this. It’s best to avoid them.’

  It was somewhere in there that the comment about having a dog in the fight had surfaced.

  ‘So why do you suggest I stick my neck out?’

  ‘Because you’ve shown yourself as a rational voice in a difficult place. It doesn’t hurt to be recognised for that. These environmentalists are fanatics. Zealots. It’s taken a while but people are starting to realise it. They’ll never be satisfied. It doesn’t matter how much they win they want more. Nothing will ever be enough. Taking them on is a simple way of showing the Party where you stand.’

  Helen was more than simply disparaging, not just at the idea of attending the community meeting as a speaker, but of having anything to do with Aldous.

  ‘I never liked him,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust him. He looks like a walking corpse.’

  ‘You can’t hold what he looks like against him.’

  ‘Yes I can. He’s a politician. What’s he doing cosying up to Mayska Coal & Gas? That can’t be good from anyone’s perspective. And what do they want from you? I thought you wanted more time to write. You never stop complaining about having to produce your columns, the committee work, the television program. Is this just more procrastination? Or have you decided to throw it away completely?’

  Helen, who had not been invited to the dinner and wouldn’t have attended if she had, was still recovering from the surgery, suffering now under the strain of radiation. Taking tiny sips from a glass of water in the kitchen when he returned late in the evening. Impatient with him.

  On the subject of Mayska, though, she was wrong. The man had a powerful intellect founded on hard learning. He’d spent years in remote north-western Queensland and New Guinea, fossicking, living in caravans and tents with only himself and books for company, taking out mining leases nobody else wanted when he thought there were possibilities. It had given him an unusual perspective on what was important. When China woke from her sleep there he was, in possession of the rights. This, apparently, being how immense wealth is accumulated, not just the original obsession with rocks and the ownership of the leases, but the ability to grasp opportunity when it presented itself, time and again, on each occasion being prepared to risk it all, at least until the construct became so large nobody was prepared to let it fail. Mayska the one amongst a million who could do it.

  ‘What do I want from government?’ he said, in answer to Guy’s question. ‘That’s simple: an administration that’s open to business. Listen.’ Bringing the chair back onto four legs with a crack, leaning forward, ‘In our lifetimes we have seen the greatest eradication of poverty in human history. Millions, billions, lifted out of abject misery, whole countries, not just China and India – where there is much still to do – but Brazil, African countries like Botswana, the smaller Asians, Vietnam, Thailand, all of them transformed through free trade, nothing else, through being allowed to act in the market.

  ‘There is a great campaign to stop this, the elites in the developed world don’t want the unwashed billions to have the kinds of things they have. The planet can’t afford it, they say, but wha
t they mean is that other cultures aren’t sophisticated enough to manage their own economies … It’s a kind of colonial thinking. A throwback to another time.’

  ‘That’s not quite the case,’ Guy said. ‘It’s not that they think them incapable of managing their economies. There are legitimate fears about global warming. I’m sorry to bring it up.’

  Mayska waved this apology away. ‘Don’t be afraid to speak. It’s why you’re here. But listen, MCG is diverse. We can see change coming just like everyone else. Unlike some others we’re not trying to stop it. We’ve invested in liquefied gas, in electronics research. Whoever comes up with an efficient battery will command the world. Such a battery will be the end of coal. Overnight. You don’t think I know that? Technologies change. I want to be the man at the forefront.’

  Which was another way of saying he wanted to be the richest man in the world, and to do so he wanted a pliable government in Australia.

  Mayska laughed. ‘Is that such an unlikely ambition? I am now in a position to make changes to the way the world runs.’

  ‘Peter doesn’t like to advertise it,’ Bain said, ‘but he is Australia’s largest philanthropist.’

  ‘An individual like me,’ Mayska said. ‘I have the capacity to direct funds in ways that are impossible for government, simply because they are top heavy, too slow to turn. I’ve been given, through my wealth, access to some of the levers of change.’

  ‘So you favour the benevolent dictatorship?’ Guy said. Perhaps he was drunk, but the man’s delusions of grandeur were simply too large. He might own a Giacometti and a Cézanne but he hadn’t been looking at them enough. He’d forgotten to notice how frail they were.

  ‘No, you have me wrong. I’ve told you from where I came.’ A careful pause to let that sink in, to be reminded of the flight from Eastern Europe. ‘I have a profound and active hatred of repression, corruption, nepotism. But I see the values that sustained the West, that brought it to the fore, in decline. I want to reverse this process.’

  Something about the way he said this jolting Guy into relative sobriety. Anyone can say such a thing, and many do; many try to effect change, but few are in possession of the means to do so. Mayska speaking directly to him, saying, I have these tools in my hands right now. Here was the point of the dinner next to the tall windows, the ancient brandy in his glass. Mayska was inviting him to be part of the remaking of the world. Mayska was saying I want you to help me.

  In the middle of the night, woken from sleep as from nightmare, startled awake, he lay in his crumpled sheets, washed by waves of humiliation. That he had allowed himself to be talked into participating in such a farce. The way he had been treated. The heat of it burning his skin. The things said about him during the debate indefensible. And at the centre of it, like a crude allegory, this woman, wistfully screwing him before the crowd. His own creation turned back on him, not even respecting him for who he was.

  Helen doing everything but say I told you so. ‘You were conned by the Cézanne,’ is what she managed. ‘Mayska might be talking about technological change but he’s digging up coal as fast as he can while ever the digging’s good. The fact he’s aware of climate change doesn’t mean he’s sympathetic to regulation of carbon when it interferes with building his wealth. Probably doing his best to derail rival technologies for batteries as we speak, if he’s doing anything at all and not simply bullshitting. I’m not the first person to remark how extreme wealth, like beauty, makes people seem smarter than they are.’

  Plotting comebacks in the hours between two and three, that meaningless time when, by common knowledge, it is understood nothing under consideration will survive the dawn and which must, yet, be thought through anyway. No wonder there were alcoholics and drug abusers, depression and despair. And at the heart of it, the kernel of knowledge that he should never have returned to this Godforsaken country, this oubliette at the bottom of the world which had brought him nothing but sorrow. A forgotten man in a forgotten place.

  His beautiful book, Correspondencies, slammed in the New Yorker. To have Sheila bring it up on television, to score points. So much ordure coming his way these last years. No real writing for almost a decade. The last novel, which he had thought would be his masterwork (in which that woman had starred under the name of Greta), the one he had believed would lift him back into the minds of his readers, would, okay, here we are then, move the stars to pity, had been universally ignored. Politely reviewed. A careful study. Prolix. A beautiful confection. As if he had created a pavlova.

  His earlier writing had come out of a sense of trust in his own judgement – a belief he could tell when something was good or bad. Now that capacity, along with any access to originality, appeared to have deserted him. There had been a time when literature had welcomed him, when words had flowed without effort, as if imagination were a well from which it was possible to draw infinite story, all he had to do was describe what he saw in his mind’s eye and the words would arrive with facility, running down his arm, coursing across the page from the tip of his pen. He had even tried going back to writing by hand, as if the tyranny of the screen might have been the problem, but not only was it too exhausting to scratch away at the paper, his handwriting barely legible, even to himself, it was as if his body rejected the process, his fingers had become attuned to the machine; time and again he returned to the computer, talking at it, battering its keyboard, fabricating the bones of worlds in the hope that eventually the tipping point would come and out of it a story would appear, something as simple and appealing as a life. It had been what he’d done for so long that he didn’t know what else to do. The need to be useful. To have his life turned to some purpose. Without it he was nothing.

  The problem might be his habitual misanthropy. There was a thought to conjure with at three-thirty-seven in the morning, with a demented kookaburra calling the dawn an hour too early, its half-hearted cry dissolving into a heavy-set night of cloud and promised rain, a night in which everything falls back on itself under its own weight and all is failure and shame. Alan rising from his grave to haunt him. Edward there, too, calling from Seattle, to boast of his success in the world of academia. Metaphorically, of course. In reality nobody calls from anywhere and if they did he wouldn’t talk to them, he is an embittered old man who had the temerity to think the world was waiting for him, a fool who had been fooled by flattery into thinking he had another turn at utility. If the fool were to persist in his folly … but not during the dark hours, not when sleep eludes and all is isolation and illusion.

  Helen asleep somewhere in the house, rendered permanently beyond reach by illness and its lessons, as if there were any possibility he might want what she offered anyway. After Alan there had been no more them. After Alan it had just been each of them alone in the sprawling house, the complex weave of emotion too broad for resolution or redemption, too raw for forgiveness, from any quarter. Their daughter, the one who hadn’t died but undoubtedly, irretrievably, irreversibly, believed she should have, navigating the troubled waters until she was old enough to leave, convinced she would never be loved as much as the missing one, which was so unfair, even more unfair than their grief for Alan. But then grief is unfair. So unexpected the intensity. It brooks no interference.

  five

  Nick

  The memorial service for Doctor Miles Prentice was held in a marquee at the showgrounds. Neither the community centre nor any of Winderran’s seven churches would have been large enough to accommodate the crowd and, besides, Miles had never willingly entered a house of religion in his life. Even then many were left standing along the sides of the tent, holding the flimsy Order of Service over their heads to ward off the sun.

  It wasn’t just the marquee, though, that gave rise to the idea of some sort of party. The crowd were turned out in summer clothes, hardly a shred of black in sight, the deceased himself represented by a large flower-bedecked photograph – flowers upon flowers, because in the picture Miles was wearing an Hawaiian shir
t with a lei around his neck, smiling broadly, as if he’d just arrived in Honolulu, the photo in fact snapped at a themed party, the giveaway being the piña colada he was holding up to the camera, replete with tiny paper umbrella.

  Joy had pulled together a committee to organise the event. Even now she was bustling around in a too-tight black satin dress (in this heat!) making sure the right people were sitting where they needed to be. Placing nervous Nick on the row of chairs at the front for the speakers, facing back into the crowd, horribly exposed. He could see few faces he recognised, this being the thing about Winderran, you thought it was small but there were thousands of people in and around the town you never met, living undisclosed lives. An older demographic, generally, here for the service, but one that cut across all barriers: amongst the retirees and tree-changers were also men with craggy farming faces in sharply ironed short-sleeved shirts and moleskins; frocks on the fleshy women, fanning themselves with programs.

  He watched as Guy Lamprey came bobbing his way through the crowd towards him, dressed in an open-necked shirt and washed blue jeans, genuflecting right and left with the air of a politician on holiday. ‘I see they’ve roped you in as well,’ he said to Nick, lowering himself onto the white monobloc chair beside him.

  He welcomed Lamprey’s arrival with mixed emotions, relieved that at least someone he knew had joined him at the front, while at the same time being reminded by his presence of the call-out to Spring Creek a few weeks before. They had not spoken since. The more he’d considered it the more uncomfortable he’d felt about his failure to follow up on what had happened to Cooper, at having accepted Aldous Bain’s compromise.

  Disregarding such thoughts he held up the folded piece of A4 on which he’d typed some notes for his speech, ruefully admitting to Lamprey that he took no joy in public speaking – by way of an understatement – there being, even then, a sharp terror in his bones.

  ‘Few do, God knows,’ Lamprey said, ‘but here’s hoping I get a better reception than I did talking about the fucking dam. Perhaps even this lot can manage to put aside their differences for a funeral.’