Fishing for Stars (58 page)

‘What?’

‘Ends with a bang?’

‘Oh, I see, that sort of bang. No, it’s T.S. Eliot misquoted. What was it you wanted to say, darling?’

Anna took a sip of champagne – more than a sip, half the glass. ‘Nicholas, can you remember the terrible row we had at Beautiful Bay fifteen or sixteen years ago?’

‘Guilty as usual. I started it.’ I pointed to the bottle. ‘We were drinking.’

‘It was the worst two months of my life, worse than the Japanese, worse than anything,’ Anna confessed.

‘Can’t say I enjoyed it myself. I was drunk most of the time, slept around with any moll I could pick up. “Hello, who are you?” I’d ask in the morning.’

‘Then Joe came to the rescue.’

‘Thank Christ for Joe,’ I said, trying to keep the conversation light. Anna’s confession that it was the worst time of her life, especially given the events of her life, was a fairly startling admission, even if perhaps not entirely true.

‘After we got together were you faithful to me?’ Anna asked.

‘No, not until just before this trip.’

‘Good. That is the correct answer.’

‘What, you’ve been checking on me?’

‘I asked Joe.’

I laughed. ‘How do you know you can trust him?’

‘Joe never lies.’

It was true.

‘So what does all this mean?’

‘You have permission.’

‘Permission for what?’

‘To sleep with Marg.’ Anna burst into tears.

I was too shocked to respond except to take a deep breath and exhale, then to exclaim, ‘Oh.’

Anna wiped her tears away and was quickly back in control. ‘Since her husband’s death she has called you every week. I know you loved her very much, Nicholas. It was her or me and if she hadn’t chosen someone else I think I would have lost.’

‘Oh, Anna, Anna, what am I expected to say?’

‘Expected? You’re
expected
to say, “Thanks, but no thanks,” but no, I don’t really want you to say that. Nicholas, we have tried everything now, and provided we can continue our relationship, because I can’t bear to think I will lose you, then I want you to make up your mind. Whatever you decide I will honour it.’

‘Phew! It should be easy, but somehow it isn’t,’ I said, knowing that Anna had read me like an open book. I knew that I still cared deeply for Marg. Knew I wanted her. If ever anything should happen to Anna, I would go knocking on her door. But now, of course, there was that awkward conversation we’d had, just before I left for Japan, where I’d turned down Marg’s generous offer. She might well see herself as a woman scorned, and when I came grovelling back be unlikely to welcome me into her forgiving arms. ‘How much time have I got?’ I asked.

Anna glanced down at her watch. ‘One minute, starting now.’

‘Hang on, what if Marg says go to buggery?’

‘Fifty seconds! She won’t.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘Forty-three seconds! Because I’m a woman.’

‘How can it be made to work?’

‘Thirty-four seconds.’

‘What if I can’t make up my mind?’

‘Twenty-four seconds! You already have.’

‘Anna, I don’t want to lose you!’

‘Fifteen seconds! You won’t.’

‘Help!’

‘Five seconds!’

‘Yes!’

Anna turned and signalled to the waiter. ‘Another bottle of Cristal, please,
garçon
,’ she said. She turned back to me. ‘Now we work out the rules.’

Okay, now somewhere around this time I should have been acting like the stronger sex, being a little assertive, maybe making a few conditions of my own. But, what would they be? I would have felt noble, strong, in control, if I’d said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks, Anna. It’s lovely of you, darling. Makes me love you even more,’ but I would also have been a hypocrite.

I was forty-six years old, and my sexual drive was still strong. Anna was wonderful in bed but men always hanker for what they can’t have. I confess to feeling sorry for myself on more than one occasion, even telling myself I had the best excuse in the world to play up behind Anna’s back. And I’d tried it, and found that it was just bonking – nice bonking, because the regular women in my life were nice people and I’d be a hypocrite if I said anything else. But sex is sex and love is love, and sex with love is quite a different matter. If what I had with Anna was unconsummated it was still a relationship filled with love and I feel sure, if I’d been forced to choose, it would have been Anna every time.

Now she was offering me her love as well as the opportunity to have sex with the other woman I loved. It was generous almost beyond comprehension. I suppose I should have been quietly joyous at the thought that I could have the two women I loved for myself, that is, of course, if Anna was right and Marg accepted, but suddenly I felt very scared. ‘Rules? Maybe Marg won’t accept your rules, Anna,’ I said, attempting to assert myself, if only a little.

‘She will. It’s called “The Calendar of Nick’s Joy”. The first week of the month is mine, the second is yours, the third is Marg’s and the last is yours again. For two weeks a month you’re celibate.’

‘Rule accepted!’ I replied, thinking that with two such strong women in my life, a week in between each visit was probably a sound idea.

‘The second rule. While
we
may talk about each other,
you
may not talk about us to each other. When we’re with you it’s one on one. Always.’

‘Hey, that’s a bit unfair. What if Marg says something nasty about you? Am I not supposed to defend you? Or the other way around?’

‘Don’t worry, she will and I will, but if you start taking sides we’re all in trouble.’

‘Any more rules?’

‘No, but Marg’s bound to have a few of her own.’ Anna lifted her glass. ‘Shall we drink to “The Calendar of Nick’s Joy”?’

‘Wait on, you only call me Nick when you’re mad at me.’

‘I
am
mad at you, Nicholas, but I’ll learn to live with it. The Calendar!’ Anna said, touching my glass.

And so ended our last evening in Japan, one of the more surprising and unexpected, I admit, of my life.

The following morning we found ourselves on the way to Haneda Airport in a cavalcade of six cars, two Toyotas in front filled with
yakuza
troops, the big black Mercedes containing Miss Sparkle,
Fuchida-san
and
Gojo-san
, then two more Toyotas behind. Then came the chrome monster, the powder-blue Cadillac driven by Staff Sergeant Goto, where, in the immaculate white leather back seat, thick as thieves, sat Konoe Akira, our new business partner in the South Pacific, Anna and myself.

All the trouble and strife and the one delight (Gojo Mura) of our visit to Japan had come to farewell us. We had arrived weeks previously knowing little and eager to experience everything and we were leaving Japan having experienced too much and eager to depart quickly and quietly.

But I must say, it was a strange and unique experience to watch as the head of the Tokyo
yakuza
, weeping copious tears, clung to Anna, reluctant to let her go, despite final calls for passengers. Miss Sparkle may have been as tough as old boot leather, but it was obvious she loved that girl to bits.

I couldn’t help but feel, not without a certain sense of foreboding, that with Miss Sparkle and Konoe Akira once again her bedfellows, Anna was entering a different world, one that, for better or worse, would launch her into the real big time, but which could also possibly return her to the dark shadows she’d experienced in their company so very long ago on a different island. But I also knew that this was a different Anna, stronger than the one who had arrived nearly a month earlier when her ghosts had not yet been laid to rest.

We’d come to Japan ostensibly to buy a freighter, and thanks to Anna’s skill and diplomacy I’d ended up with two. But, more importantly, our secret shared purpose – to attempt to assuage the pain of her past by confronting her nemesis, Konoe Akira – had strangely been achieved despite my bull-in-the-china-shop clumsiness over her kidnapping, which had added God knows how much to the sum of her distress.

Anna had obtained her pound of flesh by scaring the living daylights out of her dark angel and, as a consequence, she had gained both his immense admiration and respect and perhaps even deepened his undoubted love for her. She’d also set herself up to profit hugely from a business association with him in the future.

In addition to all this, Kevin, Joe and I stood to become rich men as a result of her brains, guts, effort and, yes, additional suffering. We were all about to get a free ride on Anna’s golden goose with me clinging, so to speak, to its tail feathers.

Not a bad outcome when all was said and done, not forgetting that if you hang on to a set of tail feathers too long they’re likely to come away in your hands.

But of all of these outcomes, one mattered more to me than all the rest. By the time I’d strapped myself into the seat of the Qantas jet, there was no doubt in my mind that Anna was free of Konoe Akira’s influence. If she hadn’t been cured of her vaginismus and if its source lay elsewhere in her damaged past, perhaps never to be discovered, most of the other ghosts of the past had been put to rest. Her vaginismus was not due to his influence and had no bearing on the disciplines he had taught her all those years ago. It was this knowledge that allowed her to make the ultimate loving gesture, to share the man she loved with someone else.

While, of course, I had initial pangs of guilt, I also felt enormously honoured that I was still a loving part of this convoluted, mixed-up, damaged, undoubtedly brilliant, unreadable, enigmatic, stubborn, drug-addicted, strong-willed, frustrating, loyal, loving, generous, exciting and beautiful woman. She was also, if you’ll excuse the pun, the world’s greatest expert at tying a man up in all sorts of knots. Anna, Anna, Anna, how deeply I miss you!

‘I was simply casting my net for future stars. They won’t all make it. When you’re fishing for stars even some very bright ones fall through the net.’

Anna, Solomon Islands

THE FIFTEEN YEARS FROM
the seventies to the mid-eighties brought a great deal more wealth for Anna. Everything she touched seemed to turn to gold and it was during this time that the real trouble started between her and Marg, and where the epithets Green Bitch and Princess Plunder evolved as the two women’s worlds drew steadily further apart.

After we returned from Japan, Anna turned her business attention to Indonesia, although, unbeknownst to me, the land of her birth had been receiving her quiet attention for several years, more as a result of her time as a prisoner of war under the Japanese than from any fond memories of her childhood in Batavia.

Every year since I can remember Anna would visit Indonesia, but from around 1965 she began visiting at least three times a year, ostensibly to see her Javanese family, as she referred to Mother Ratih and her son Budi and
Kleine
Kiki (Little Kiki).

If asked she would say, ‘We have lots of fun, I practise the language and I help them with their restaurant businesses, which are doing very well; they now have two more.’ In truth, while she was enormously fond of the two women and, of course, Budi, whom she regarded as her little brother, I would eventually discover the visits were to conduct regular reviews of a rapidly expanding property empire initially based on the money Anna had left behind during the war.

Perhaps a little background is warranted. Anna, her father, stepmother and personal maid,
Kleine
Kiki, had been stranded when their refugee ship the
Witvogel
broke down and limped into Tjilatjap, a river port on the east coast of Java, where it remained for the duration of the war. Her paraplegic stepmother had subsequently committed suicide by rolling her wheelchair over the edge of a wooden dockside; her father died of diabetes brought on by advanced alcoholism; and
Kleine
Kiki, an indigenous Javanese, was apprenticed by Anna to Mother Ratih, the cook and manager of a small kampong restaurant, a widow with a young son, Budi, whom she couldn’t afford to keep at school and who worked for a local Chinese merchant named Lo Wok.

Anna’s father left her a steel box he’d brought away with him that contained his will, personal papers, several valuable diamonds and a considerable amount of money in Dutch guilders. It was cash that Anna knew would be taken from her as soon as it was discovered, and, furthermore, as a Japanese prisoner of war she had no way of concealing it. She consequently used it to buy the kampong restaurant for Mother Ratih as well as a native house each for her and
Kleine
Kiki, which left sufficient funds to put Budi through high school and then university after the war and independence. Anna had also paid the passage money that allowed Lo Wok to escape to Malaya when the Japanese were systematically murdering the local Chinese merchants in Tjilatjap. Sadly, he may well have been killed in the massacre of Chinese that took place in that country in the sixties.

In return for her generosity, and perhaps remarkably in those hard times, Mother Ratih and Budi kept the remainder of the money, still a considerable amount, in safekeeping. The diamonds Anna managed to hide in the brass casing of a military revolver shell that she then sealed with candle wax and inserted, whenever necessary, in a very private women’s place. She used the precious stones to fund her share of the bondage house, Madam Butterfly, when she got to Australia, and to buy her first three workers’ houses in a slum area of the city. I had met Budi and his mother and stepfather – a lieutenant in the police force, now deceased – when, after the war, I went to Java in an attempt to find Anna.

All this seems a rather long way of saying that by the mid-sixties Mother Ratih and
Kleine
Kiki had prospered and Budi had graduated from the new University of Indonesia as a lawyer. When Anna made her big move into Indonesia he was a captain in the army.

Anna had already laid the foundation of what was to become a vast property portfolio, but it grew dramatically as she capitalised on several turning points in the young country’s history, the first of which was the demise of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno. Like most resistance leaders who become president, he built a great many monuments in praise of himself and ran the national economy into the ground until the poor were starving and the middle class had become totally disaffected. Many of both classes subsequently joined the PKI, the communist party directly aligned with Peking. With Sukarno ailing and isolated, the PKI attempted a coup in 1965 that was put down by a relatively obscure army officer, Major General Suharto. He then took over the army and the government and subsequently became the next president of Indonesia. It was at this time, in the most disastrous circumstances, that Anna saw an opportunity to truly prosper.

Following the suppression of the coup, in 1966 Suharto went after the communists and the previous president’s immensely rich Chinese cronies. The army presided over the murder of possibly a million Indonesians accused of being communists or fellow travellers. In addition many of those Chinese who had grown rich under the founding president Sukarno and who posed a threat to the new regime were either slaughtered or in some cases exiled, their property seized by the army and appropriated by Suharto’s followers.

The army’s approach to the killing was unsophisticated but very effective: they would enter a town or a village and order the population to round up all the communist party members and sympathisers, while the army detachment set up a cordon around the area. The locals were then ordered to kill all the people who had been rounded up. The wealthy Chinese, traditionally hated by the people, were even easier prey. Victims were hacked, strangled, burned and beaten to death en masse by the frenzied mobs. This complicity in the killings is one of the reasons why most Indonesian citizens were and still are reluctant to revisit the events of 1966, which have been virtually expunged from official records; a truthful version of events at the time has never appeared in the nation’s official history books. Many countries have revised, rewritten or ignored the blacker parts of their own history – witness Australia’s attitude to the history of the invasion of Aboriginal lands, or the gap in the official records about the massacre of the Chinese in Malaysia in the early sixties.

Budi, a lawyer and a captain in the army, was undoubtedly heavily embroiled in organising some of the killing, in this way gaining favour with the new Suharto regime. Years later he inadvertently mentioned to me that in 1966 he’d been stationed in Bali, where over 200 000 communists and fellow travellers were killed in that year. It was inconceivable that Budi would not have been involved, especially given his later influence and power in the Suharto hierarchy. Nevertheless, he was too low in rank to get much direct benefit from this macabre bonanza. Still, he was in the right place at the right time, and under Anna’s instructions, he was able to use her inheritance to buy for a song former Chinese-owned mercantile properties from the suddenly property-rich but often cash-strapped generals. Moreover, he was able to do his own conveyancing, thus ensuring watertight titles.

Anna sensed that Bali, a tourist resort popular with the Dutch since the 1930s, would take off again, so they bought several sites in Denpasar and Kuta Beach. But most of the properties suitable for restaurants were in the better areas of major cities in Java – Jakarta, Surabaya, Solo, Semarang, Jogjakarta – and Cilacap, the large town, now a city, formerly known as Tjilatjap, where Anna had spent the war.

Anna, as usual, had a long-term plan which she had formulated on her first trip to America in the late fifties when she’d attended a clinic in an attempt to withdraw from her heroin addiction. There she’d noted and been impressed by a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. After fish, chicken is the next most commonly consumed protein by the middle class in Indonesia. It also constituted a large part of the cuisines of the four restaurants the two women owned. On her next visit to Indonesia Anna registered the KFC initials and the name Kiki’s Fried Chicken for a nationwide restaurant chain.

Suharto and his cronies, having eliminated the communists and the influence of mainland China, were quick to establish relations with the West, and Indonesia was soon seen as a valuable anti-communist ally of America. Foreign investment poured into the country, the standard of living rose immeasurably and Indonesia became one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia.

As soon as all things American were once more in favour, Anna got
Kleine
Kiki and Mother Ratih to restyle their rapidly growing Kiki’s Fried Chicken restaurant chain to resemble a typical American Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Foreigners who had visited America and Americans themselves thought of Kiki’s Fried Chicken as a quaint imitation of one of America’s cultural icons, a form of Asian sycophancy, and smiled indulgently, at the same time often remarking that Kiki’s spicy chicken was infinitely tastier than the original eleven herbs and spices of the Colonel Sanders American version.

By the mid-seventies Anna, together with her two partners, had acquired ninety-eight potential restaurant sites and converted forty into Kiki’s Fried Chicken restaurants. In each instance Anna owned half the property,
Kleine
Kiki owned a quarter, and since her death in 1970, Mother Ratih’s quarter had passed to Budi.

In 1975 Kentucky Fried Chicken decided to enter the burgeoning South-East Asian economy, by which time the rules of doing business in Indonesia were truly set in concrete. To operate in the country you needed to have a local partner, almost certainly drawn from among the ruling army clique, who would also require a majority holding.

By this time Budi had risen in rank and status and was now a colonel and a junior member of Suharto’s kleptocracy. It didn’t take Kentucky Fried Chicken long to sniff the wind and examine the lie of the land and soon Kiki’s Fried Chicken was converted to the real thing, with Anna and her two partners owning fifty-one per cent of the profits. Moreover, they owned outright the real estate of forty of the outlets and sold half of the remaining fifty-seven outlets for a vast fortune to their American partners. Anna, with Budi as her gatekeeper, was now in business as a big-time player in Indonesia.

It stands to reason that Anna must have endured several failures in business over the years. Most great self-made business successes are built on failure, which is where the lessons are learned that ultimately lead to success. Apart from her Indonesian successes, she’d taken the considerable fortune she’d made selling the site for Nauru House and built an international conglomerate. Increasingly she would be referred to in the financial sections of the newspapers as Australia’s richest businesswoman, her fortune often compared with that of the wealthiest male tycoons. But Anna seldom talked about business when she was at Beautiful Bay and I knew as little of her successes as I did of her failures. That is, except for the Japanese–Pacific fishing business that had resulted from our trip to Japan.

Today, in the islands of the South-west Pacific, cruise ships deliver tourists eager to pick up bargain bangles, beads, T-shirts and sarongs, as well as a quick dose of island culture, but in the 1970s, which doesn’t seem all that long ago, the islands were backwaters. The shorts, white hose and short-sleeved shirts of the perspiring white men and the cotton dresses and sandals of the exasperated and constantly complaining women usually indicated one of the three Ms – missionaries, misfits or mercenaries, the last two categories usually consisting of Australians or New Zealanders, with the occasional American or even European. Pacific Islanders have always had a pragmatic view of white folk. Providing you don’t break any tribal taboos they accept you as they find you, angel or bastard or, more commonly, a mixture of both.

I had chosen the Solomon Islands carefully for our first foray into the fishing business. The winds of change were beginning to blow in the islands and, like all change, they brought confusion. New Guinea, the largest of the islands, and the second largest in the world, was five years away from independence, but at the start of the seventies, even the most optimistic supporters of independence, as well as the Australian Government, believed that it was far into the future, despite the fact that Indonesia had been enjoying independence for decades.

My own home, the New Hebrides, with its joint British and French administration, was torn between the British desire for a graceful exit and the French determination to hold onto their Pacific territories come what may. If they caved in over the New Hebrides they felt certain that the valuable nickel reserves in New Caledonia would be threatened and, of course, no government in its right mind was going to give up Tahiti.

The British had already signalled that Fiji was to be granted independence on 10 October 1970, with the Solomon Islands to follow in the not too distant future. In preparation for this, Solomon Islanders were increasingly filling the lower levels of the public service, although British expatriates still clung to the top jobs and headed the government departments.

Every week Joe, who got the weekly newspapers from every island state brought in by ship, sent me clippings mapping the progress of ‘his’ islanders, the names of recipients of Uncle Joe Scholarships underlined in red. Joe never lost touch with his kids, many by now adults. People said of Joe that, when independence came, he could choose to stand for president of any of the emerging nations in the South-west Pacific and it would turn into a one-horse race. He had grown an afro – greying at the sides – and at six feet four inches of hard, firm-gutted man, he looked every inch a chief.