Stark (12 page)

65: A TRICKY PROBLEM

S
ly headed towards the Yalurah community, peering over the top of the enormous cage-like steel ‘roo bars that jutted out in front of his car. The land was owned by the Aboriginals that lived there. It had been granted back to them during the great land rights debate of the early eighties. Sly would have to play this negotiation very carefully. He could not be sure whether there were spiritual connotations to the place. He could not just say that there was an equally unattractive bit of useless scrub, just like the one the government had kindly granted them, fifty miles up the road and he’d give them a crate of scotch to piss off. The point was that the bit of scrub up the road might not have the same Dreamtime connections that the one they were on did. Besides this, for all the fact that Sly claimed they were, Aboriginals were not stupid. If he wanted to get them out they were certain to ask themselves why he wanted them out. The conclusion that they were bound to come to was that the land was worth something. Now a few years ago that might have made them up-the-price but, no more than that. These days however, they were getting a touch more sophisticated. It was not unknown for Aboriginals to actually take an interest in mining themselves. Sly smiled as he remembered the awful crisis of principles that had beset the do-gooders and bleeding-hearts during the great uranium debate. For years these people had bleated on and on about Aboriginal self- determination; about giving them back control of their lives etc., etc. As if they wanted to do anything but drink anyway, thought Sly. Then along came the possibility of uranium on Aboriginal land and of course the same do-gooders were totally against more uranium mining but, unfortunately, some of their darling Abs weren’t. The Aboriginals saw that finally they had a chance of grabbing some white man’s money. It had been a delicious irony really. The do-gooders suddenly found themselves in the role of trying to tell the Abs what was good for them. The very thing they had been screaming about for donkeys years.

Anyway, Sly knew that if he gave the impression that he was desperate to acquire their land, the present occupants were bound to presume that he knew something that they didn’t and hang on in until they found out what it was. It was a tricky little balancing act. He had to get the land off them while making them think that he didn’t particularly want it.

Still, as Sly reflected, they were only Abs and he had ridden rough-shod through half the boardrooms in W A. He reckoned he could handle it.

66: MAKING AN OFFER

T
he negotiations were not going well. ‘Drink?’ he said to the representatives of the community that he sat facing — he had brought a splendid supply of the very best beers and spirits. ‘We’re dry here, mate,’ said the old guy with a tone that directly translated as ‘so fuck you.’

This was a big setback for Sly. If the place was dry it was going to be a damn sight tougher to manipulate them. Sly took a swig himself, not because he wanted any at all but because it was obvious that he was dealing with some fairly together people and he did not want them to think he had just been hoping to get them pissed.

‘So it’s no good hoping to get us pissed, mate,’ the old bloke continued and Sly realized that although he did not particularly hate Abs in general, he sure as hell was starting to hate this wily old bastard.

‘It’s like this, Mr Culboon,’ he said, forcing a smile. Sly explained that he was looking at a number of locations in Western Australia, of which this was only one, in an effort to find a suitable location for a business venture that he had in mind.

‘Business venture, here? What are you going to do, sell white art to us Aboriginals?’

This was all Sly needed — a fucking comedian. He waited while the old boy got his laugh and then paused a little longer, eyeing the bare formica table, the rickety walls, the fat bellied children. Poverty hung about the place like they’d framed it and nailed it to the walls. These people did not have much to lose, it was time to assert himself.

‘Listen, mate, you can sit and take the piss if you like, but while you’re sodding me off, some other guy’s walking off with a fat bank roll the size you wouldn’t dream of.’

‘I don’t dream about bank rolls, big or small, mate. You do, I don’t. Which I suppose is why you’ve got a brand new Toyoki and I’ve got a 1967 Holden, but, you’re in my house so you’ll watch your manners or you’ll fuck off, OK?’ The man was clearly a philosopher as well.

Sly was having to quickly revise all expectations of Mr Culboon, the head man who sat before him. He had looked such a clown to Sly but clearly he wasn’t a clown at all. ‘What do you want our land for, mate?’ Mr Culboon asked.

‘I don’t want your land particularly? Sly replied.

‘Well, what are you doing here, then,’ said Mr Culboon leaping on the point like a prosecution counsel, ‘has my house suddenly become an in place for Perth money men?’

This wasn’t getting Sly anywhere. He was in severe danger of wanting to strangle this Culboon fellah — which would certainly have soured future negotiations.

‘I need some land, and as I say, this is one of the sites we’re considering.’

‘So, it’s nothing to do with mining then?’

‘Of course it’s nothing to do with mining, Mr Culboon. Your scrappy little hills are a pile of shit and you know it. There’s more minerals in a bottle of Perrier. You could dig for ever and you wouldn’t come up with enough gold to fill your front teeth in. They’re worthless, of course they are, or else why do you think the state government let you have them. You can be damn sure they weren’t going to give you an oil- well.’

‘So why do you want them then?’

Sly had to admit it was a fair question.

‘Well, Mr Culboon, I’ll tell you. Myself and my associates have formed a consortium called ‘Oasis’ and we are investigating the possibility of setting up a desert vacation retreat.’

There was an incredulous pause. Mr Culboon looked at the others in the room, they looked at him. Then they all looked out of the open doorway. They looked at the flies, the ‘roo shit, the flat, shimmering boredom of a featureless bit of desert ringed by piss-poor, reddish little hills too steep to walk, too boring to climb. They looked at the one road — the road that ran from them to Bullens Creek and back again — a road that ran from nowhere to nowhere. Then they all looked at Sly.

‘Vacation!!’ spluttered Mr Culboon, and nearly wet himself. Sly had to undergo the distinctly uncomfortable sensation of a group of people from an alien culture — a culture towards which he had always felt massively superior — pissing themselves laughing at him. The noise of the laughter attracted some women from outside. They put their heads around the door and asked what the gag was.

‘This fellah says he wants to turn our shithole into a vacation oasis!’ said one of the men with tears in his eyes. The women howled.

‘Ha, ha, so the beautiful people are coming are they?’ a woman grinned. ‘I can just see them getting off the plane saying, ‘mmm nice smell of dingo piss’.’

They all howled some more, and more, and more. Sly felt that he was losing control of the conversation.

‘Look!’ he said, ‘I’m perfectly serious and so’s my money, so if you want to hear me out, fair enough, otherwise I’ll fuck off now.’

‘Fuck off now if you like,’ said Mr Culboon, still laughing. Sly ignored him and continued.

‘All we need is sunshine and you will agree that you’ve got plenty of that. We can’t get planning permission on the coast anymore so we’re looking inland. I’m talking a totally man- made environment here, pools, tennis courts, a theatre, discos, and, get this, a gambling licence. We are talking Las Vegas! Have you ever been to Ayers Rock? That’s a totally self- contained holiday complex built out of the desert, what’s the difference?’

‘Ayers Rock,’ said Mr Culboon who, one hopes, had resigned himself to the fact that he and Sly would never be friends.

‘Well, exactly, the last thing your dedicated pleasure-seeker wants is a bloody great area of natural beauty that he’s going to feel obliged to traipse all over. He wants to have fun!…‘ said Sly, getting down to business, ‘we have various options of which, I repeat, this is only one. Now we have a one million dollar relocation budget for whoever happens to be living where we decide to build. There are ninety-seven of you, which works out at ten thousand dollars each to piss off. What do you say?’ People were taking him more seriously but Mr Culboon was very doubtful.

‘A million bucks for a bunch of Abs? You must like this place mate.’

‘We’d have to pay someone off wherever we went. And, besides,’ Sly added piously, ‘the consortium I represent are not unaware of the spiritual value of the land and wish you to be aware that this will be thematically integrated into the overall design of the complex.’

‘How touching, a Dreamtime Cocktail bar, I reckon — and this folks is the very place where the dumb Abs drew their stupid pictures — that’ll be your thematic integration, mate.’

‘Look, mate, I’m not here to fight a race war. I’m here to do some business, and if you don’t like it I’ll take it elsewhere, all right?’ Sly could see that a few of the faces did not look so anxious to laugh at him anymore.

‘We’ll think about it,’ said Mr Culboon, ‘give us a number where I can contact you.’

This was all Sly had hoped for and it was good enough. He reckoned that once he had gone they’d come round in the end. He was prepared to up the money, if necessary, but that Culboon was a clever bastard and he didn’t want to appear over anxious.

67: JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER

A
ppearances are so deceptive especially when they cross a cultural divide. To Sly’s white eyes, Mr Culboon had looked like a semi-savage. He had the traditional scars across his chest, deep and fearful. Plenty of ash got rubbed in them Sly had thought looking at the great welts that bubbled out of the old man’s brown skin like surf in a sea of gravy. Also he had had his two front teeth removed, a practice which was utterly beyond Sly, it made the man look idiotic.

But really it’s all a question of what you’re used to. For instance, Mr Culboon and his wife both had big old floppy pot bellies. They were not a young couple and his especially hung like an enormous tea-bag across his belt. Neither he nor his wife were remotely self-conscious about this. Now the wife of one of Sly’s principal business rivals in Perth, a woman called Dixie Tyron, had also been developing a gut like that, plus thighs with saddle-bags on them that flapped around like soft, quilted fins. She, unlike the Culboons, was not happy with them and had undergone a form of surgery recently developed in America, which involved injecting the fatty regions with some chemical which actually dissolves the fat, making it possible to suck it out. In comparison with this phenomenal self-mutilation, knocking out a tooth or two seemed merely eccentric.

When the whites first encountered the blacks in Australia, they were horrified to observe that they didn’t seem to wash. This led them to conclude that they were uncouth, filthy creatures who barely knew how to look after themselves. In fact the exact opposite was the case. Their not washing, or rather not washing in the conventional Western manner, was a very sensible thing indeed. To a desert Aboriginal, water is used for one thing and one thing only, drinking. It is simply too scarce to get into the habit of using it for any other reason. They knew where it was, they protected it, they conserved it. Sometimes they worshipped it. What they did not do was put a rubber duck in it and splash it all over the place. Aborigines did wash, of course. They washed in smoke and heat, rubbing themselves down in their own sweat. All peoples adapt themselves to their environment. In the days before easily available heating fuel, the ancestors of those first Australian settlers had sewn themselves into their clothes for the winter.

68: A CALL FROM OCKER TYRON

T
he morning Sly returned from Bullens Creek he was awakened by the phone ringing. Actually, ‘ringing’ is too dignified a word for the wet, simpering trill that was oozing listlessly round the room. It sounded like a small marsupial sitting in the bath and farting through a descant recorder. Sly hated the new phone tones. He could remember when a phone had sounded like a phone. ‘Ring, ring,’ that was something a man could answer with vigour and purpose. These days he felt like saying, ‘I’m not picking you up until you ring properly.’

On this occasion he could not even find the phone — he did not actually know what it looked like. The apartment, as with all of Sly’s properties, had been done out for him by an interior design team. Sly had told them he wanted a one-off shag den and so they had set out to create a relaxing atmosphere, free of tension, comfortingly co-ordinated throughout, with everything blending in. The result had achieved just that and hence Sly could never find the phone. He stared about himself wildly for a moment and then, not for the first time in this situation, ran out to his car.

The interior of the car had not been designed by someone who wanted to be subtle and relaxing with everything blending perfectly. No, it had been designed by someone who wanted to suggest a rich, powerful man with no time to waste. ‘Your quartz quadrophonic personal communication and data processing unit is located in your fully computerized, digitally automized, central console unit,’ the salesman had said.

This meant the phone was between the seats and Sly was grateful for this simple arrangement. He jumped in, barking his shin on the car door. Somehow it is even more galling to knacker your leg on an Aston Martin that cost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This was a car that could withstand the impact of a two joint articulated road train, fully loaded with cans of lager. It had a roll cage a fat elephant could have used as a trampoline. It was so safe you could have used it as a nuclear fall-out shelter for Christ’s sake and yet you could still bark your shin on it like the car was a Ford fucking Escort.

He picked up the quartz quadrophonic personal communication and data processing unit.

‘Yeah.’

Sly was looking at his leg. For a moment there was nothing then, suddenly, as if by magic, a great glistening puddle of blood materialized. Quickly he hung the offending leg out of the window. Even multimillionaires don’t like getting blood all over their soft, beige leather bucket seats. So, there he was, draped across the passenger seat, dripping leg hanging out of the window, gear stick trying to force its way through his back, about to have a phone call that was relevant to all life on the planet. If there is indeed a God, and if he really did make man in his own image, he must look a right dildo.

‘Who’s that?’ said a rather unpleasant, gruff voice. Mind you, in fairness, the way Sly was feeling he would have found the voice unpleasant if Kiri Te Kanawa had rung him up.

‘What do you mean, ‘who’s that’ arsehole? You rang me,’ Sly replied, suddenly feeling nervous. He didn’t like enigmatic calls. Sly hit the various telephonic security switches that had started flashing on the dashboard. He wanted the call taped, just in case it was blackmail. After all, he had had a creative and athletic evening with the Malaysian hostess on his last stop-over from the UK. Mind you, there was no law against peanut butter, or where you put it for that matter — it certainly tasted better than on Satay.

Sly also activated a signal distorter so no one could locate him from the position of his phone, a signal search so that later on, if desired, Sly could discover the location of the caller, a scrambler, in case a third party was listening in and finally, a frequency blocker on the off chance that someone had put a bomb under the car and the phone was the trigger. Sly had no reason whatsoever to presume that he needed any of these things but they advertised them in the magazines you get on airlines and Sly, as always, had been bored.

Of course, some people got off on this sort of thing because it made them feel like men. Sly was not this big an idiot. Ocker Tyron was though, and it was him on the other end of the line. He too had activated all his blocking, mixing, tracing and scrambling gear — consequently what was left of the line was pretty poor. Fifty grand each so that they could say ‘pardon’ at each other.

Without the ‘pardons’ the conversation went like this:

‘Don’t call me an arsehole, it’s Ocker Tyron.’

‘Oh no,’ said Sly.

‘Don’t say, oh no, like that. What’s the problem.’

‘What do you mean, what’s the problem? You’re the problem, Ocker. We hate each other. You know it and I know it.’

Tyron was genuinely taken aback.

‘Well, just because we hate each other doesn’t mean we can’t be friendly,’ he said. ‘What do you want, Ocker?’

‘How did you get on with the Abs and the rednecks?’ Ocker asked, knowing full well that Sly had got on crap and enjoying the knowledge.

Sly nearly fell off his seat, except that it’s almost impossible to fall off a bucket seat in a car when you are leaning across it with one leg out of the window. He convulsively jerked though. Sadly he convulsively jerked with sufficient violence to release the handbrake — always put your car in gear on a slope. Sly spun round, or tried to, he had little room to manoeuvre. As it happens, he had little time either, in seconds the car had rolled into the gate post at the foot of the drive. All he succeeded in doing was agonizingly adding to the mess on his leg as the injured part dragged across the lock button on the door. One knackered leg, one knackered wing — the leg was worth slightly less. ‘Shit!!’

‘Yes, I rather thought that would surprise you,’ Ocker Tyron sneered down the phone.

‘Look, fuck off, Tyron. I’ll phone you back.’ Sly put the phone back in the fully computerized, digitally automized, central console unit. Jesus! What had happened? Five minutes earlier he had been asleep. Now he had a bleeding leg, a dented Aston, and worst of all he seemed to have breached the confidence and trust of the Stark consortium.

He went inside and had a cup of coffee. There was no point trying to avoid it, Ocker Tyron was on to him in some way and he had better find out what he knew and what he wanted.

Ocker Tyron was an old rival of Sly’s. Sly had worked for Tyron years back, before he had pulled off his great pie scam. Ocker was a cliche-style Ozzie multimillionaire. A tough, boorish maverick. He and his exuberant wife, Dixie, styled themselves virtually as Australian royalty. He as the tough, powerful, elder statesman of national commerce and politics; she as a charity dispensing ambassador of goodwill.

Dixie had a peculiar talent for making many thousands of dollars worth of clothes look like she had bought them at Woolworths. This was her famous common touch (famous because it was often mentioned in her husband’s newspapers) which she firmly believed endeared her to the honest folk of W A. In fact, of course, they would have liked to see her fry.

Sly hated them both.

‘Tyron, it’s Moorcock.’

Sly was struggling to keep his temper. Tyron had taken his revenge for the previous conversation by having his secretary leave Sly on hold for five minutes.

‘Ah, Silvester, ready to have a civilized conversation now are we? Because I really don’t have time for personal abuse.’

‘Well, shut up then you stupid dickhead and get on with whatever it was you phoned me for.’

‘The land project. You screwed it didn’t you?’

‘What do you know about the land project?’ Sly turned on the lie detector and watched the blips on the screen. They weren’t foolproof but it made Sly feel slightly better to flip it on. It was a bit like making an obscene gesture at the bastard behind his back.

‘Oh, come off it, Sly, I know everything about Stark. You don’t think I’m not involved do you? I’m worth twice as much as you.’

‘They never mentioned it to me.’

Sly didn’t know what to make of this. Had Tyron found out about the project and was he trying to muscle his way in on Sly’s back? Perhaps he really was a member. Tyron was certainly richer than he — if differentials still meant anything at their exalted level.

‘Of course they didn’t mention it, we talk about this as little as possible. Slampacker called me to say that you were on board and that they’d asked you to find the land, and of course bung in your bucks…’

‘Yeah, well, I’m finding the land aren’t I? So why don’t you stay out of it?’ Sly was most disconcerted to learn that Ocker Tyron was a colleague in the project.

‘I can’t stay out of it, can I, old son? I’m assembling a great deal of the equipment, that’s my job. Pretty soon I’m going to need somewhere to put it.’ Ocker Tyron switched to scramble and dropped his voice. ‘All this paraphernalia is rather difficult to pass off as harmless mining gear, you know. People notice things.’

Just talking about it made Sly’s head swim.

‘Are you sitting on the stuff now?’

‘No, but it won’t be long, fuel, power, control systems, the hardwear itself. I am going to need somewhere to put it. The stuff is scattered all over the world, but it’s coming. Soon you and I are going to be nominal proprietors of a rather sophisticated installation. And so…we need the real estate.’

‘Look, I’m getting on with it, OK? It isn’t easy. What we’re planning here is a disgustingly and immoral —’

‘So what’s new, love?’ said Tyron. ‘You just got Oz Businessman of the Year for being disgusting and immoral morning, noon and night…’

‘Come off it, you know damn well that this is different. There’s not a politician in the world we could buy off if they got a whiff of it. That’s why I have to tread carefully. People own the land, I don’t want to cause a stir.’

‘Yes, well, if you can’t do it, tell me and I’ll do it, OK? Stay in touch,’ and with that Ocker Tyron put down the phone.

Sly was left feeling absolutely livid. Tyron knew it and leant back in his huge chair happily. The voice of his secretary piped up.

‘I have Mr Nagasyu on a secure line for you, sir…’