The Butcherbird (4 page)

The phone rang. Jack gestured for Sarah to answer it. ‘Why do I always have to get it?’

‘Because it’s usually for you.’

Louise held his gaze. ‘You won’t get away with this bluff, you know.’

Sarah called. ‘It’s for Dad. A Mr Biddulph.’

Jack was startled. Louise watched him. ‘Big Mac strikes again. You are popular. Remember, we can’t afford another weekend away or we’ll go broke—and besides, Shane has rugby.’

Jack took the call in the atrium and they could only hear him mumbling and the occasional word. He returned after a few minutes, running his fingers through his thick hair absentmindedly.

‘You haven’t sold the house and left the family homeless or something, have you? You look somewhat addled.’

‘I am. More than somewhat.’

‘Well, what did he say? We’re all agog. And keen to get back to Tanzania and the leader of that great nation.’

Jack gazed around the room, around the knot of his family, apparently not seeing. ‘He said all roads lead to me. He said he’d been thinking about me ever since the weekend. He said he wants me to come and discuss running his company. That’s about it.’

They were all quiet. The kitchen clock ticked. ‘Why would he do that?’ Jack shot her a look. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. We all know you’re a genius and an MBA and all, not to mention your ravishing good looks. But he’s in the insurance business, isn’t he? You don’t know anything about that.’

‘Or who the President of Tanzania is.’ Sarah tried to emulate her mother’s arched brows.

‘Yeah, it’s strange. I assume he’s talking about the insurance company. He’s in all sorts of things privately, but that’s the big public face. I was too stunned to ask. He cut off any questions and said, come and talk. I was the only one, all roads led to me. He repeated that. Don’t think about it, just come and talk. That was the line.’ Again the fingers ran through the hair.

‘Why would you? You run your own company. Quite well we feel, don’t we, group? Although we may razz you from time to time, you’re a good little earner. Why would you bother to talk to him?’

Jack didn’t answer. He looked up. Shifting clouds and a full moon were visible through the glass roof. ‘Well, are you going to talk?’

He nodded slowly. ‘I’m going to have a chat. Why not? It’s intriguing. I’m a bit bored, to tell you the truth, doing the same thing. I don’t mean I’m going to do this, whatever it is, but there’s no harm in talking.’

‘You’re late, Jack. Just off the nest, I’ll bet. And missing a great story. Start again, Maroubra, this one’s a cracker.’

Jack slid into the only vacant chair at the long table and looked around the room. He loved the old beach house and the ritual of the monthly lunch with this disparate group of prominent citizens, knockabouts and larrikins. The creaking timber floorboards, the roar of the Bondi surf, the smell of fish grilling, of chilli and garlic melting in the pan, jugs of beer on the refectory table, Armando in the kitchen yelling his way into any discussion he chose to join, yarns and stories, myths and fables spinning around the table, sometimes raging arguments about politics or sport—never religion. Tales of women they’d known or wished they’d known, good humour and mateship in the old ironic manner. Armando closed the restaurant for them now, even though there were only a dozen or so in the group and the room seated more than double that number. They’d been coming for years and he was proud to have them—judges and heads of companies, people you saw sometimes on television, other characters you thought you should know but couldn’t place, a few you felt it mightn’t be a good idea to recognise. He just cooked whatever he felt like and served it with his favourite wines; no bill, always the same charge.

‘Wake up, Jack, Maroubra’s in full flight. What are you dreaming about?’

The voice came from the depths of the great lump of a man sitting beside him. It was a voice said to engender fear in the hearts of witnesses who had something to hide as the withering cross-examination of Thomas Wetherington Smiley QC lashed them from six feet five inches. Tom was slouched beside him, schooner in hand, drifts of froth finding their way onto the signature Zegna suit he always managed to make look like a charity cast-off within a month of purchase.

‘Get on with it, Maroubra, or we’ll rule you out of order and tell Armando to ration your grog.’

Another towering figure rose from the end of the table and raised its hand slowly in a gesture of silence. ‘Gentlemen. As I was saying before Jack-the-lad graced us with his exquisite presence, reeking no doubt of bodily fluids, the nature of which most of us only dimly recall, an appalling and frightening apparition appeared at the door of number four Cross Street, Maroubra, the family home, at one in the morning last Friday.’ Maroubra paused for effect, glaring around the table, capturing each eye. ‘My son. Yes, gentlemen, the fruit of my loins, my only son, Gordy—rugby player, drinker, rooter—all fifteen stone of muscle and meat, beaten, bleeding. Shirt torn. The shirt his mother gave him for Christmas, five years ago admittedly, but ripped, covered in blood. Gordy, my son. I ask you, gentlemen—’ another pause, ‘who would dare lay a finger on my son and expect a happy life?’

The group nodded, mumbled assent, took long drafts of beer or wine. There was expectation in the air. Maroubra’s stories were always rich with courageous deeds or extreme violence or remote and dangerous locations. Weird characters of dubious origin, often involved in his salvage business, threaded their way in and out of the fabric of the stories. But the pride of the family, beaten by unknown persons in the middle of the night—the wrath of Maroubra (kayak medallist, surf belt champion, mountaineer, stroke of the Olympic Eight), the wrath of this man was terrible to witness.

‘I extracted the details soon enough, gentlemen, as you can imagine. A professional job. Bouncers from New Zealand, Gordy in a club, a few beers more than he should, perhaps, but nothing we all haven’t done. They could’ve asked him politely to leave, but no, they smack him around the head. Bad call.’ Maroubra swung his gaze slowly around the table again and then lifted his eyes to the roof. ‘What was I to do to restore the honour of my family? Sometimes, gentlemen, you receive a sign. I looked up and there on the wall was my most treasured possession. The oar I used to stroke the Olympic Eight. With the crew’s names in gold. What could I do?’

Maroubra lowered his head, sighed. ‘I took down that oar and sawed it in half.’ There was an intake of breath from the table and a shuffling of chairs. ‘I took the butt end, comrades, put it inside my overcoat and walked down to that club. Straight in the door. Past those two ugly thugs before they could stop me and yelled as I went past, “If you had a mother she wouldn’t recognise you after I say hello.” I was in the toilet before they could wake up to themselves, put the overcoat over the stall door, the butt of the oar inside and started to wash my hands. It didn’t take long. They came in quietly, cautiously, not sure what was going on. And I let them come, just smiling. I was drying my hands until they were in range. Then I grabbed that oar and belted the shit out of them.’

Maroubra nodded almost sorrowfully at his own story. ‘It’s a heavy thing, a racing oar. Even half an oar. It did a lot of damage very quickly, so I grabbed the coat and ran and kept running. Straight to Coogee Oval. I always feel at home there, safe.

Straight to the middle of the oval, dark at two in the morning.

Down on the ground, comrades, spreadeagled, nose in the dirt, not moving a muscle. You could hear the sirens pretty quickly. I suppose they were both police and ambulance—they would’ve needed one. They went on for a long time, lights flashing around for a while, but they’d never see me out there. I didn’t move for two hours, and when it was all quiet I got up and went home.’ There was nodding around the table. ‘I put the oar back on the wall one piece above the other. I like it that way.

You’ve got to look after your own, hey?’

When the thumping of tables and clanging of glasses had subsided and the great steaming bowls of Sicilian fish stew and rice were set down, quiet fell on the group. Jack had felt it an honour when he was casually invited to come to his first lunch. He knew no visitors were ever invited to this informal club. If you were asked once, you were in. And he’d wanted to be in, to be included in this tangle of flotsam and jetsam that washed up on the shores of Bondi once a month.

When Maroubra had rung him three years ago and suggested lunch, he’d assumed it was merely one of their occasional boozy get-togethers. They’d known one another for nearly twenty years, since the day Jack had first signed on at the surf club for his bronze medallion training. There was the massive frame at the end of the line of newcomers, even then a head taller than the rest. And when they came to the surf rescue training with the old belt and reel, Maroubra had picked him as a partner—although even today he swore it was only because Jack was lighter than the rest and easier to tow as a victim. When the roles were reversed and Jack was required to rescue Maroubra, when little or no headway was being made through the rip, he’d felt the hand on his shoulder and heard the deep voice. ‘Don’t worry, mate, I’ll kick underwater. No one’ll ever know.’

And no one ever had. Just as they’d never seen the same hand take Jack’s pack when they were portaging in the Franklin River and it was all he could do to scale the cliff, let alone manoeuvre a twenty-five kilo pack. But Maroubra came to him for advice, for support, once for money when he was starting his business.

They were joined, if not at the hip, somewhere near.

The group had been formed this way, all from different backgrounds, not a collection of school friends or sporting mates, just one link binding to the next, but a chain forged from a series of found pieces, each as strong as the next. Over the years they’d helped one another with tragedies and traumas, jobs and joyous occasions, funds and faith.

The only other member Jack had known before he joined that unexpected day was the Pope, who’d been at university with him, but even then was an exotic, distant figure. He seemed to have money when no one had money. It was said he made it by selling fur jackets fashioned from rabbit skins, but this seemed so unlikely it was dismissed by most. When Jack had jokingly asked at his first group lunch if it was true, the Pope had simply nodded and said, ‘So what?’

There were people around this table whose intellect challenged him. He looked across at Murray Ingham sitting opposite, dipping a chunk of bread into his bowl. The face was a block of pitted granite with two thick, black slashes above the eyes. How did he grow those brows like possums’ tails? Were they groomed and fertilised and cut like hedges? Jack looked away before the hooded eyes could catch him staring. Murray had written two critically acclaimed novels—both of which Jack had tried to read but which were still in the drawer by his bed with bookmarks a few chapters in—as well as a biography of an obscure artist that had won him awards and prizes and a year in some garret in Paris. And then there was Murray’s apparent disdain for Jack’s facile brain and purposeless life as property developer to the semillon set. At least Jack perceived this contempt from the occasional sardonic remark that was thrown his way.

Beside him was the imposing figure of the Hon. Mr Justice Norman Crosby, Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, connoisseur of rugby and rum, Latin scholar, collector of Picasso ceramics, author of an unpublished play of considerable vulgarity. The Judge, as he was always referred to in the group, was examining Jack with great interest, much as a taxidermist stares at a potential subject in order to define its precise attitudes.

‘Mr Beaumont. Always a pleasure when you grace our table.’ For some reason—and it made Jack nervous, as if he’d committed an undetected felony—the Judge always referred to him as ‘Mr Beaumont’, whereas all the others received their nicknames or given names. ‘What news upon the Rialto? What do you bring us from the real world, the world of commerce, of glamour, of intrigue and money and success, of failure and suicide, or indeed of fraud and jail and terrible penalties, of the ruin of families, the dissipation of great fortunes piled brick upon brick over generations and then dashed to the ground in one lifetime of excess, of gambling, of drink, of illicit sex? What of all this, Mr Beaumont? We wait with bated breath.’

Jack tossed off a glib response. He knew he could never strike the right note with people like the Judge. Jack Beaumont, the great salesman, ask anyone, look at his record, look at the money he’d made. Why he could buy anyone around the table, pretty well—except the Pope, perhaps, but then nobody knew exactly what the Pope owned or did, just the way he lived—but all the rest. He could buy or sell them all, but as good as he was at selling, sometimes he felt challenged. There was no reason for it. He’d graduated with honours and been second in the year, tacked on an MBA for good measure. They all liked Jack-the-lad, were always happy to see him, welcoming. But with just a few, like the Judge or Murray Ingham, he sensed another level of activity in their brains that he couldn’t reach.

It hadn’t been like that with Mac Biddulph when they’d met in Mac’s office earlier that morning. There was an immediate rapport. Seated in the vast, gloomy space with two life-sized paintings of brumbies above the desk there should have been an initial feeling of uneasiness. That was the intention of the design, if design was a description that could be applied to a room where the furniture seemed to be built for giants and one unrelenting colour pervaded, a sort of early mineshaft brown that appeared to soak up all the available light.

Mac had immediately asked him to run his company, HOA, the biggest home insurance company in Australia, as chief executive. It was an absurd notion, he’d felt at first, because he knew nothing of the insurance industry except that it was complex and required sophisticated assessments of risk and pricing. But Mac swept these doubts aside.

‘And what do you think I know about risk assessment and pricing a book? What do you think I know about coefficients of variation and central estimates and all the other jargon and palaver the actuaries go on with? That’s why we have actuaries, Jack, so people who create businesses like you and me don’t have to spend our lives crawling around a pile of papers. Did you ever meet an actuary who built a business? And there are the regulatory authorities like APRA and ASIC and the ASX and every other alphabet coven of bureaucratic witches who pore all over the stuff. You wouldn’t believe the truckloads of documents we pack off to these leeches. So you don’t have to worry about everything being kosher—that’s the one benefit of all this crap. But who brings the business in? Who creates the revenue instead of just reporting where it’s kept? Isn’t that what a business is really all about? And that’s where you come in, Jack. You’re a genius at selling. Don’t tell me you’re not. I’ve checked. And the banks love you; you’re the only major property developer who’s never missed an interest payment through all the market’s peaks and troughs over the last fifteen years. They trust you, Jack. Do you know what trust’s worth in this business? Think about it. For ninety per cent of our customers we do nothing every year except send them a bill—only about ten per cent make a claim. They renew because they trust us to pay out if that fire ever comes, or the burglar ever breaks in. Trust. It’s what insurance is all about. You have it from the people who matter, the guys with the money, and you’ll build it with the customers. And you know everyone in the building industry and all the associated services, and particularly in home finance. We insure homes, Jack. More than half of all the homes in this country. But how do we increase that share, get the new business, the first-time young buyers? Jack Beaumont gets it for us, with his contacts and his salesmanship. You can push us forward, instead of treading water while the weight of regulatory bullshit tries to pull us under. You’re a visionary. We need you.’