by Fiona Capp
Ned glared at him. What did that mean? What were futures anyway? Fraser had explained it to him once. High risk, he said, but worth it. Ned had told him he wasn’t interested. Had Fraser put their money, their future, into these futures anyway? Did he think he’d make a quick killing, buy back their shares and they’d never know? Ned couldn’t believe Fraser would deliberately rip them off. There must be some explanation. An image came to him of Fraser doing a headstand at the end of the jetty while casually smoking a joint. The absurd nonchalance with which he did everything. Maybe he was just doing what he’d always done – taking risks and getting away with it. Assuming he always would.
Ned’s mouth had gone dry. ‘How come none of you saw it coming?’
The broker’s eyes glazed over. ‘Who could, mate? Market’s like the mind of God. Unknowable. We’re just pawns, mate. Pawns.’ He gave another vacant smile.
Ned tracked from face to shell-shocked face. They stared back at him like the walking wounded who had no idea what they’d stumbled into. As if they’d never signed up in the first place. As if they’d never fired a shot themselves. And here they were, surrounded by carnage.
He couldn’t remember taking the lift down. Suddenly he was out in the street on rubbery legs. The sun had come out, there were patches of blue. Above him, fast-moving clouds made the glass towers veer and tilt. He punched Fraser’s personal number into his phone, only for it to ring out. As his bike wobbled away through the peak-hour traffic, he glanced back over his shoulder at the office block he’d just left and was amazed to find it still standing. Amazed that it hadn’t crashed to the ground, that it wasn’t a pile of concrete, metal and glass. He was sure it was happening all over the city, the implosions. Even when he reached the suburbs, he sensed the tremors radiating from those Victorian terraces. Detonations, silent and deadly, destroying the insides of things and leaving the façades intact. And with fall-out no one could see.
He had a tail wind but it didn’t feel like it. Around him, the air had turned treacly, impossible to breathe. Ned swung off his bike and slumped into the gutter, head between his knees. People riding past shot glances of concern. He tried to slow his breath, tried not to think about Angela and what it would mean for her. He couldn’t believe he had done it, that he had brought this incendiary device into their lives, knowing full well the damage it could do. Just when Angela was feeling there might be some point to life, that it wasn’t just a matter of gritting her teeth to get through each day. She had started working again and her smiles were a little less weary, her laughter a little less forced.
Ned lifted his head and yelled, not caring who heard. ‘You fucking moron! You stupid fucking fool!’ Without thinking, he swung his pack off his back and smashed it down on the bitumen. There was a sickening crunch. For a moment he couldn’t work out what it was. Then he groaned. The honey. He’d forgotten about the fucking honey! Dark patches were seeping through the newspaper. Sticky liquid oozed over his hands like a golden glove. He fished around in his pockets for a handkerchief but couldn’t find one. There was only one way to get rid of the stuff. He sucked on his thumb, vaguely comforted by the thought of those backyard hives, the bees siphoning nectar from flowers in people’s gardens or in local parks and storing it in little cells in the honeycomb, the alchemy that turned it into liquid gold.
His mind slid back to the brokers with their bloodshot eyes fixed on their screens, on the imaginary edifice of the market, this thing which didn’t exist except in people’s heads. All of them convinced they could conjure something out of nothing, out of less than nothing, out of debt. How fantastical and absurd it was. And how laughable that he, who prided himself on not caring about money, had signed up to this mass delusion which was supposed to make the world go round. What a seriously bad joke.
After breakfast, Ned wanders to the end of the jetty where, in the water below, a school of silver minnows glides in formation, never breaking from their invisible envelope that bulges this way and that. Sometimes he’d swear they were remotely controlled. Instinctively, he glances back at the cliff top. It has become a habit, a kind of twitch. Although the house might stay empty for weeks, even months, he can’t be sure. Weekends, in particular, are dicey. For all he knows, the new owners might have a boat in need of a shed. But does it really matter? He can only be told to make himself scarce. There are plenty of other boatsheds around if it comes to that.
In the time that Ned has been here, there has been no sign of the new owners. Nothing seems to have changed. The key to the boatshed was still hanging under the eaves where the Wainwrights always left it. The shed and all its contents are as he remembers. The camp stove, the enamel basin, the set of bunks, the card table, the wooden cupboard with crockery, cutlery and glasses, the bar fridge. Suspended across the exposed wooden beams of the roof are the beach paraphernalia: Fraser’s kayak, some deckchairs, a pair of wooden oars, lifesaving vests, a clutch of fishing rods and boxes of tackle.
The shadow of a large ocean gull darkens the water and the minnows scatter, disappearing under the jetty. He watches as the water swirls about the pylons, hypnotised by the swaying skirts of seaweed fanning out from the wooden posts. Then his phone starts up again, a nagging thought that won’t go away. Mai’s name flashes on the screen. This is one call he can’t put off. If he doesn’t speak with her, he will make everything worse.
‘Hey, Mai!’
‘Ned, hey. How’s it going?’
‘Getting there.’
‘Your sister’s worried about you. I told her I’d drop by.’
Ned jumps to his feet and starts pacing down the jetty. ‘No need, really, Mai. Not that I don’t want to see you but—’
‘—you’re at home then?’
There is a pause. ‘Resting up.’
‘That’s strange.’
‘Oh?’
‘Because I’m at your flat. I’ve just spoken to the new tenants. They said you moved out two weeks ago.’
Ned sits down and stares at his pale feet dangling over the jetty, at his big ugly toes. The second toe is longer than the others and looks positively mutant, like a thick, hairy worm. This little piggy ate too many hormones. He once wrote a skit about his feet and it got him more laughs than almost any other he’d ever done. Angela used to tell him he had the feet of a chimpanzee.
‘Ned?’
He drags his eyes away from his feet. Whenever something happens that he doesn’t want to know about his mind scatters like those minnows.
When he doesn’t answer, Mai says, ‘Where are you?’
‘Please don’t tell Angela anything. I need to speak to her myself. Tell her I’m feeling better and that I’ll be there for dinner on Wednesday. We can go out afterwards. I’ll explain everything. I promise.’
‘Are you in trouble?’
Ned laughs bleakly. ‘Just trust me.’
‘Why should I?’ she demands, finally losing her cool. ‘You haven’t been straight with me – or your sister. We went out together and everything seemed fine and then you just disappeared. Why should I trust you?’
‘You shouldn’t. But I’m asking for Angela’s sake.’
There was silence. ‘You better have a good story.’
‘I wish it was a story. Then I could give it a happy ending.’ Ned slips his phone back into the pocket of his jeans and stares out over the water. Still no wind and the surface is seamless. For weeks he’s been telling himself that if he sifts through the messy facts long enough, a solution will emerge. He will figure out a course of action, find a way to that happy ending. He ought to have twigged by now, but he’s always been obstinate when it comes to facing up to reality. Up to the facts. In this case, the fact that there are no facts left to sift through. The solid fact of their money is no longer. It was transformed into something slipperier, something hypothetical and speculative, no more real than the sulphuric light from a computer screen. And then, pouf! The money was gone. That is the only fact left now.
He laughs bl
eakly. ‘I played my luck,’ he says in his best hard-boiled detective voice. ‘Sometimes a hunch pays off, sometimes it doesn’t.’ He and Angela had loved those corny Stan Freberg spoofs when they were kids. Their father came home one day from a garage sale with an old portable gramophone and a bundle of 78s and one of them was ‘Little Blue Riding Hood’. All Ned had to do was sidle up to Angela and say, Pardon me, ma’am, could I talk to you for just a minute, ma’am? and she would put on a simpering parody of a tough gal voice and say What about? and they’d be off. On the B-side was ‘St George and the Dragonet’. The legend you are about to hear is true, only the needle should be changed to protect the record.
After they tired of the spoofs, they moved on to the real thing. Chandler, Hammett, Cain. Ned read Chandler so many times he could pluck paragraphs out of the air as if swatting a fly. It had always been a cinch to entertain Angela when they were kids, to make her laugh. All those years later, when he arrived at the hospital straight from the airport, he found a woman he barely recognised who gave every impression that she would never laugh again. As if her facial muscles had been paralysed along with the rest of her. Her hair was a greasy helmet. Her once-flawless olive skin was sallow and bruised. Her high cheekbones – the envy of her friends – seemed to be the only thing holding her face up.
As a boy, Ned never gave any thought to Angela’s appearance. She was too close for him to see her properly, almost an extension of himself. If he thought about her at all, it was as his conscience. What would Angie do? What would she say about this or that? Her views and opinions mattered far more to him than their parents’, whose idea of child-rearing was one of benign neglect, leaving them to their own devices and letting them raise themselves. The generation gap was supposed to be a thing of the past, but when Ned and Angela were teenagers it felt like a canyon. Maybe that’s why Angela was drawn to fossicking around in people’s childhoods, hoping to shed light on her own. It wasn’t until Ned was in his mid-teens and his friends started ogling his sister that he registered her looks. Somehow he’d failed to notice that his sister was a bit of a stunner. Not that there was much sign of it when he saw her in hospital, a grotesque metal contraption attached to her head.
For months, Angela lay on her back with an extinguished look in her eyes. Nothing Ned said, absolutely nothing, could raise even the flicker of a smile. It was like trying to reach someone exiled to the far reaches of the universe, a solitary astronaut adrift in the never-ending blackness of outer space. After Ned spoke, there would be a delay before she replied, as if they were light years apart and their words had to traverse some vast, interstellar expanse.
When she spoke, it was in urgent gasps. One day, she locked eyes with him. ‘Don’t let them—’ She took a series of short, quick breaths. ‘—Put me. Some hell-hole. I’d rather die.’
He squeezed her hand fiercely and rested his cheek against hers. It was sunken and cold. When he drew away, she whispered something he couldn’t catch.
He asked her to repeat it.
‘Promise me something.’
Ned stopped himself just in time from asking what. There were tubes pumping God knows what cocktail of drugs into her system, playing havoc with her thoughts. Hating himself, he patted her hand and shook his head, as if he didn’t understand what she meant.
Her gaze was unwavering.
Ned waited.
‘Promise me.’ Deep breath. ‘You’ll do it.’ Deep breath. ‘Give me. The thing I want.’
A raw half laugh, half sob burst out of him. He was the only person left in the world who knew the story behind that phrase. When their mother started losing her memory, she would point to something and say, Give me the thing that I want. And he knew what Angela wanted. Just a nod from him, an acknowledgement they had an agreement. If it all got too much. He told himself she didn’t really mean it, that tomorrow she probably wouldn’t remember what she’d said. And so he gave her what she wanted. He nodded and played along. He managed to control himself until he was out of her room. In the corridor, he sank down on the bare linoleum and put his head in his hands.
A week later, he arrived to find her bed had been shifted to face the window and tilted up so that she could enjoy the sunshine and the pale blue sky replete as an egg and the suburban rooftops and the parks and the smoky ranges in the distance. She was hungrily devouring the world outside and didn’t notice his arrival.
He stood in the doorway of her room, watching her with a smile on his face. In his best hard-boiled voice, he said, ‘Pardon me, ma’am, could I talk to you for just a minute, ma’am?’
Very slowly, his sister turned to look at him and the corners of her mouth twitched in a way that made him want to weep. In a croaky, wise-cracking voice that seemed to be travelling to him over the passage of years, she said, ‘What about?’
Canned laughter floated across from the TV over the next bed. Ned was too overwhelmed to speak.
Finally Angela said, ‘I’m no fun any more, Ned, am I?’
Suddenly it all came together – the mood, the timing, the perfect remark. He gave her a tough guy grin and said, ‘You don’t have to amuse me. I amuse myself. I do a brother act that has me rolling in the aisle.’ There was nothing like a quote from Chandler at the right moment. His eyes welled as she cracked a smile.
That’s when it sank in – what had to be done. He didn’t have to sit uselessly by, watching her lose all hope. This was the most important gig of his life and he couldn’t afford to fail.
And so Ned began his halting journey from comedy to tragedy, blind to his destination, longing like a Shakespearean fool to speak the truth and yet terrified where it would lead.
6.
Ned has given up fishing from the jetty. He got lucky that first week, but Fraser was right. It’s empty as Texas in the shallows. His binoculars encircle shadowy reefs, roiling patches of water, a flock of sea birds torpedoing the waves. He zooms in on some black-faced cormorants working over a spot in line with the Chinaman’s Hat, where the seals live, and decides that’s where he’ll go.
It takes him a good half hour to dig out the old fibreglass dinghy hull half buried on the beach. He washes it off, checks for cracks and holes and when he is satisfied it isn’t going to leak, he drags it to the water’s edge and tosses in the wooden oars from the boathouse, Fraser’s rod and tackle and a bag of pipis and sandworms he’s just dug up. He pushes off and quickly jumps in, slipping the oars into the rowlocks.
What is it about rowing? he thinks, as his arms and legs work in concert. The stretching and contracting, the rhythm and the repetition, are strangely soothing. Once he’s beyond the anchored boats he can row without looking over his shoulder. Wouldn’t do to collide with something expensive like the oversized motorboat moored alongside the jetty with the Hawaiian bar. It has three shiny white tiers and looks brand-new.
By the time he reaches the spot where the cormorants were feasting, they have gone. The fish might have too, but it’s still worth a try. He opens the tackle box and admires, as he always does, the little compartments and jewel-like shapes of the sinkers and floats and soft plastic lures. Examining each one in turn, he selects what he needs and skewers a few sandworms. When he and Fraser used to go out in the Wainwright boat, you only had to stick your pinky overboard to catch something – or that’s how he likes to remember it. If he can pull up a few King George whiting or some snapper he’ll be happy and set for the rest of the week.
Even as the day warms up, a thin film of cloud moves across the sky. The sparkle of early morning gives way to the torpor of noon. Ned can feel his chances of catching anything evaporating with the sweat on the back of his neck. He rows aimlessly, peering over the side every so often to see what lies below. He is thinking about heading back when there is a flash on the cliff top. A figure in overalls whose glasses have caught the sun. Ned freezes as the man opens the gate from Fraser’s old house to the walkway down the cliff. It’s the gardener from the house next door. Ned has seen him potter
ing around, doing a bit of mowing and whipper-snippering and raking up leaves. He hasn’t ventured beyond next-door’s garden before.
Ned watches him descend the stairs. Every now and then the man stops and scans the horizon. Ned drops anchor and pretends to be engrossed in his fishing. He tells himself he has every right to be there. The jetties might be private, but no one owns the sea. At the bottom of the steps, the man moves past the boathouse and Ned relaxes his grip on his rod, his bolt-hole safe – for now. When the man reaches the L-shaped landing at the end of the jetty, he undoes a rope strung between the pylon and the wooden pontoon floating a few metres away.
There is a faint, choppy hum coming from above. Ned looks up at the sky to see a plane emerging from the filmy haze. The gardener looks up, too, and they both watch it approach. Like a boy mesmerised by the sight of a bomber before it drops its load, Ned is too intrigued by the plane’s sudden appearance to be alarmed. Now he understands what the pontoon is doing there. He had assumed it was a diving platform, but as the plane’s contours sharpen, it’s obvious. Not a bad way to get around. Sure beats taking the train and the bus.
The plane skims across the water on its great splayed floats and manoeuvres until it nudges the pontoon. A moment later, a door slides open to reveal a man in navy blue slacks and a billowing blue and white striped shirt whose large body almost fills the space. He grips the door frame, bracing himself before lurching onto the floating platform, his stubby legs almost buckling under him.
From behind his binoculars, Ned takes it all in. This is not a man who could ever travel incognito. And would probably never want to. How could he throw his weight around if no one knew who he was? But everyone does and he knows it. Ned can’t help speculating – his thoughts gravitating to slapstick – that if he chose to throw his weight around now, on the wobbly pontoon, it could be quite a laugh.
After him, a lithe, towering figure in a pale linen suit descends with a fluid agility. He puts his hand behind the big man’s elbow to steady him and they stand with their legs apart, like a pair of novice cowboys, as the pontoon rocks gently beneath them. Ned half recognises the second man, too, who is signalling to the gardener to draw the pontoon to the jetty.
