Black Tide (4 page)

Linda opened with a fast inswinger.

Mr Levesque, people say that you have far too much influence over both the Prime Minister and the Premier of Victoria. Why is that?

Levesque smiled, put his head to one side in a puzzled way. His straight fair hair was naughtily unwilling to stay in place and he disciplined it with long fingers.

Why is what?

Why is this impression current?

Is it? I can’t imagine why. The Prime Minister probably wouldn’t recognise me, the Premier of Victoria I’ve known for a long time but I don’t see much of. It’s usually on public occasions. We commiserate about golf for a minute or so. Also, he once asked me about a horse I had an interest in.

Whether it would win?

No. He liked its name. Momus. He wanted to know what it meant.

The camera went to Linda.

And could you tell him?

Levesque: Could you have?

Linda: Odd to name a horse for the god of ridicule, isn’t it?

Tough point won. She smiled, showing her nice teeth. My lips knew those nice butted-up teeth. You could see why she was a big hit, why the Sydney Morning Herald TV

guide called her the best interviewer on television, why the Sun-Herald said she was a thirty-something spunk who paralysed the channel-surfing finger. Belatedly, Linda was having the career success she deserved.

I understood that the only place she could have that success was in Sydney. Melbourne hated success. It didn’t match the weather. Melbourne’s weather suited introspective mediocrity and suicidal failure. The only acceptable success had to involve pain, sacrifice and humility. Sydney liked the idea of success, achieved at no cost and accompanied by arrogance.

24

In this room, I had said those things. And I’d said, ‘For Christ’s sake, take the job. It’s only a couple of hours away. If you don’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life thinking: What if…?’

Steven Levesque was saying: I’m an ordinary member of the party and from time to time, people in the party ask my opinion on something and I give it. I imagine they seek opinions from dozens of people. And so they should.

Last July, the Premier of Victoria took a ten-day holiday in the Caribbean. He stayed at a property on Guadeloupe called the Domaine de Thierry. My information is that you own the property, Linda countered.

Steven Levesque laughed, a real-sounding laugh.

I don’t. A company I’m involved with does. It owns three properties in the Caribbean.

They’re for hire. Anyone can stay there. You can stay there, Ms Hillier. My understanding is that the Premier was the guest of someone who hired the Domaine.

May we know who?

Another laugh. Even if I knew, Ms Hillier, and I don’t, I certainly wouldn’t tell you or anyone else.

I drained my glass. Now I could spend the rest of my life thinking: What if I hadn’t encouraged Linda Hillier to take the offer from Channel 6 in Sydney? Would it have been happiness ever after? What kind of idiot encourages a woman he loves to move away in pursuit of media stardom?

It doesn’t pay to ponder a question like that. I switched the TV off and went to my cold and lonely bed.

The bed warmed up after a while, the soul stayed cold. Deep in the night, I saw images of people loved. I saw their smiles, heard the sound of voices now stilled, heard our uncontrollable laughter, and felt the touches, the kisses, the hugs, the hand run lovingly over my hair. All gone. Utterly, irretrievably gone.

I awoke before dawn, unrested, got up, made tea, went back to bed and read the last chapter of an English novel in which people were, generally, pretty despondent about the way their lives had turned out. Looking around, noting the terminally unhealthy colour of the sheets that draped me, the soiled socks dotted around the room like the droppings of an exotic animal, the white shirt sleeve hanging from the laundry basket like an inadequate surrender flag, I could sympathise with that view.

I got up, showered, thought about how to pass the day. The days. While I was thinking, they passed. Saturday, shopping, cleaning. Sunday, lunch with my sister.

25

One sister is a difficult thing. Two would be easy. Three, you’d start confusing their names. Four, you’d be the team mascot. But one sister is your mother, writ smaller and without the uncontested authority, but nevertheless equipped with the means to make you feel guilty.

My sister has a special look. It says many things: you aren’t making the most of yourself, you’re letting us down, that tie doesn’t go with that shirt. The only way to counter the look is through a combination of evasion and attack.

Sunday night, I cooked for the freezer, the first time in a month or more. Beef and bacon in red wine and consommé, chicken pies with olives, onion and sherry.

5

Early Monday morning, startled awake by something in an unrecoverable dream, I got up. Uneasy, vaguely sick at the stomach, I scoured myself and drove to Taub’s in the dark, nothing on the streets but a cab full of drunks.

As always, some peace descended upon me as I stood inside the door of the workshop and looked around. It was the feeling I’d experienced years before when, feeling my way out of the black tunnel of despair and binge drinking I entered after my wife’s death, I’d come upon Charlie’s business.

Timber, most of it from a time carefree of any concern for the future and unobtainable now, more timber than Charlie could use if he had another lifetime, was stickered side-on against the walls. The most precious was in the rafters under the huge skylight.

Charlie called the timber up there The Bank. The workshop had three workbenches, unlike any other benches, built by Charlie: 120-year-old redgum, Emmert 18-inch vices at each end, dog holes lined in 12 mm brass, dogs of lignum vitae. Behind them, the planes on their sides in their pigeonholes: thumb planes, block planes, bench planes of every size, planes for curves, planes for angles, moulding planes, multi-planes. Hanging up were the spokeshaves and drawknives. Next to them, the saws stood upright in their slots beneath two cabinets of chisels and carving tools and a cabinet of measuring and marking tools.

Against the righthand wall were the clamp racks: at the bottom, the monster sash clamps; above them, the lesser sizes; in the next rack, the bar clamps, the infantry of joinery, dozens of them in every size; then the frame clamps, the spring clamps, the G-clamps, the ancient wooden screw clamps that Charlie loved best, and flexible wooden go-bars arranged by length. Finally, an assortment of weird clamps, many of them invented by Charlie to solve particular clamping problems.

At the back of the shop were the machines: a Swiss sliding table saw, an old German table saw, a 24-inch thickness planer, a long-bed jointer, a 28-inch-throat bandsaw, a 26

drill press, and a fifty-year-old English lathe. All Charlie’s machines were cast-iron, solid, true, no rock, no play, tinkered with, tuned, kept clean as museum exhibits.

I packed the stove with paper and shavings and little offcuts and a kitchen match set it humming. By 8 a.m., I’d glued up the four small tables made of thirty-year-old American cherry, clamping them with a version of a framing clamp devised by Charlie to ensure squareness. The tables were made to Charlie’s design, utterly simple, their elegance lying in the wood, the taper of the long slim legs, and the thin line of black persimmon inlay below the tabletops.

I made tea. Then, without any confidence, I started planing the tabletop edges with the wooden moulding plane Charlie had chosen from his vast collection. Most workshops used routers for this work. Charlie had an irrational hatred of routers. ‘Router,’ he said once. ‘Rubbish. Spinning rubbish. And what can it do a plane can’t do?’

‘Whatever it does,’ I’d said, ‘it does it quickly.’

‘Mr Hurry,’ Charlie had replied. ‘Mr Little Phone In My Pocket. You use a machine because the hand way is too hard. Or too slow. Or the machine does it better.’

I’d finished the edges, proud of myself, and was scraping the last tabletop with a freshly burnished scraper when Charlie arrived. He ran a hand over the perfect surfaces of the other three. ‘That’s a start,’ he said. ‘You give up the sleep too now? Don’t eat, don’t sleep. Next you give up the other thing too maybe.’

He went over to study the tables, giant hands reaching out to test the clamps.

‘You don’t give up the other thing, it gives you up,’ I said. ‘Who are these tables for anyway?’

‘Politician, some politician.’

‘What’s the name?’

‘I forget. David, some David.’

‘David Fitzgerald?’

‘Fitz, that’s right.’

‘He’s the Deputy Premier.’

‘So?’

‘Doesn’t the Deputy Premier expect the master himself to make the furniture?’

27

Pure scorn in the look. ‘Buy a Chippendale, you think Mr Chippendale made it with his own hands? Artist’s studio this? You notice not? Customer wants four little tables the same, asks nicely, lets me do it my way, he gets them. Now that I think, you tell Rembrandt, that “Night Watch’’, I’ll take four of them, you got them too probably.’

‘Seeing myself as being like one of Mr Chippendale’s or Mr Rembrandt’s helpers, that cheers me up,’ I said. ‘Do you think they got paid award wages?’

‘Only if employed by the business,’ said Charlie. ‘People walk in off the street, waste Mr Chippendale’s time, won’t go away like a cat, cost Mr Chippendale money, come and go as they please, those they don’t get any award wages. Those they should be grateful for anything they get. Air to breathe.’

‘I can see the force of that view,’ I said, making a final delicate pass with the scraper. ‘I think this one’s done.’

‘Think?’ Charlie said. ‘You have to know.’

He took the scraper out of my hand and went over to where the burnisher was lying on a workbench.

‘I’m off for breakfast,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll finish up. Cam’s picking me up at ten.’

Charlie didn’t look at me. ‘Gambling,’ he said. ‘I blame myself.’

‘You can do that,’ I said, ‘or I can blame you.’

6

‘Winter’s comin,’ said Harry Strang. ‘Need a bit of fat to see you over the winter. Fat’s bin scarce.’

We were in Harry’s study, Harry behind the desk designed and made by Charlie Taub, a piece of furniture that elevated the joining of wood to a breathless height. Behind me, the mahogany bookshelves rose five metres, the walkway for the upper shelves reached by four sliding teak and brass ladders. Behind Harry, I could look through French windows across a brick terrace to a deep garden. A stand of four mature maples was scarlet against a high, dark hedge.

Lyn, the robustly sexy Mrs Strang, came in, escorted by Mrs Aldridge, Harry’s housekeeper through thirty years and three marriages. Cameron Delray, Harry’s lean and taciturn offsider, and I followed Harry’s example and stood up. Lyn had the silver teapot and the bone-china tea-set. Mrs Aldridge had the accompaniments: small, perfect chocolate eclairs, warm shortbread the colour of melted butter.

28

‘One of each for you, Mr Strang,’ Mrs Aldridge said. ‘And no more than one.’

Lyn made a fist, a fair-sized fist, and touched Harry’s cheek with the knuckles. ‘Listen to the lady,’ she said.

When they had gone, Harry poured tea. He took four eclairs and three shortbreads.

‘They mean well,’ he said. ‘Used to dream about stuff like this when I was ridin.’

I took milk. Harry took lemon. Cam added hot water. We ate and sipped in silence.

Then Harry said, ‘Now. Business. Jack, had a talk yesterday. Fellow called McCurdie.

Grows somethin or other, dabbles in the cattle out Echuca way. Come via Tony Ericson.’

He bit off half an eclair, looked at the plump layered remains, put them in his mouth.

His eyes closed. ‘Hmm, lovely. Why does the Lord put bad in with the good? Anyway, this McCurdie. Bit slow but then a lotta the Woops only got one gear forward. Cam’s run the ruler over him. Cam?’

Cam was looking out of the French window. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘before this year he had nothing for years and he wasn’t ever Bart Cummings. But the strike rate’s not bad. Five years ago, run three horses, sixteen starts for three, two, three. Year before, bit better.

Four horses, nineteen starts, four, three, four. Much the same the year before.’ He drank some black tea. ‘A Bob Jane.’

‘A what?’ Bob Jane was the name of a chain of tyre dealers. Racing always held another mystery.

‘Retreads old tyres. Won a race in Albury in ’91, nineteen hundred metres, horse called Live Marine.’

‘Like that name,’ said Harry. He was a connoisseur of horse names, knew thousands, approved of few.

‘Nice name,’ said Cam. ‘Nice age, too. Fourteen. Retired at nine this Marine. Won six out of seventy-five, placed fourteen. Never closer than eighth in the last twelve.

Pensioned off, never heard of for five years, presumed dead or carryin kids in some paddock. Come 1991 and aged fourteen, it was like Fred Stolle coming back to win Wimbledon.’

I said, ‘I see. Bob Jane.’

‘This year McCurdie’s got two new little payslips, both won at nineteen hundred.’

‘Had other comeback nags before Live Marine,’ Harry said. ‘But then the luck run out.

Now McCurdie’s feelin a twitch in the underwear again.’

29

I drank some tea. Mrs Aldridge’s tea both soothed the stomach and cheered and stimulated the brain cells. What did Mrs Aldridge know about the chemistry of immersing small leaves in boiling water that was unknown to all other tea-makers? Yet another mystery.

Harry held up a video cassette. ‘Brought this to show me. Looks like a man with the DTs took it. Bring the cups over.’

On the way across the passage to Harry’s elegant twelve-seater cinema, I admired his outfit of the day: Irish houndstooth tweed suit, soft white shirt, silk tie, Lobb’s plain toecap shoes the colour of caramelised onion.

Cam pressed the buttons. We watched a three-horse race run on what looked like an abandoned racecourse. The camera operator suffered from both St Vitus’s Dance and an uncontrollable urge to play with the zoom. In spite of this, it was clear that a large grey won by about five lengths.

‘I see what they mean about country racing being in bad shape,’ I said. ‘Collapsed grandstand, field of three, crowd of one, jockeys riding in shorts.’