The Following (27 page)

‘Rubbish.’

Regarding Eunice Shepherd, Marcus Friendly’s late love, only one person ever mentioned her name in any context whatsoever as the years went on, and that was Max. But only to Ross Devlin, and only once, over a glass of hooch. The hangman’s daughter and the hangman father. Max’s progenitors. The wrangle of good and evil in the genes. It all came spilling out. Max raising good to the level of a backbencher and wrestling evil back to the level of a backbencher’s propensity for low-key misdemeanour. All in the name of constitutional government. That was enough, that balance, except . . . why couldn’t he have a ministry? Because if he had one, what might he not do?

Whatever Max knew, he’d never told Wendy, nor Nick, nor the girls, nor anyone – nor ever would.

Ross Devlin held the conversation tightly to him, honourably to him, like something learned on a party line, and afterwards you’d put the phone down as softly as you could on its cradle, and you never spoke to anyone about it ever again.

The electorate had been marginal until Max won it, holding Parslow against national trends. Last year in a flirtation with division Max’s supporters panicked and tried to unseat him, and the local branch split in three until an official came down from Trades Hall and put matters right at a table-thump. Max had hardly expected to win yet again. But in the big swing he’d won, and Wendy was furious. To Margaret Wignall, ‘Wigs’, the columnist, she said she’d almost voted for the other lot. When Wigs asked her if she’d like it repeated in print she said, ‘No . . . Not yet.’

M
AX APPEARED AT LUNCHTIME DRIVING
a battered ute from the oyster farm. There was a lurid mark on his forehead and an almost blissed, sheepish, dazed look about him, the expression of a man who had gone too far and discovered a secret – something he hardly knew how to name for the luck it brought him. Tiger craved such epiphanies, call them tragic luck, but always fell back into a sort of unsettled, undeserved happiness, his main state of being, unaware as he was of its blessing.

Max rang Nick to find out how long he’d be with Harry’s parcels and told him what had happened.

‘Was that a good idea?’ Tiger asked when Max finished. ‘Won’t Nick tell Wigs?’

Wigs gave Nick a wild importance. His cranky look won her when he was a kid in a stroller, and now as a young man more so. They talked to each other daily, emailed, met for coffee or a drink. Nick was the only reason, you might guess, why Wigs held back from searing Max with the sort of article she’d written about everyone on both sides of politics who’d ever roused her ire. If Wigs, they said, had been in the French Revolution they’d have statues of her on traffic islands with ribbons in her hair, a bare tit showing and brandishing a fist.

‘Nick won’t talk. He doesn’t,’ said Max. ‘He’s on the road already, in Whistling Corner eating a pie at the Shell servo. He’ll be here by dark.’

‘But Nick will tell Wendy,’ said Sylvia. ‘He’ll want her to know.’

‘She would care, wouldn’t she,’ said Max.

‘I’d count on it.’

‘Goodness, you know her,’ said Max with a wistful jab.

Wendy might be interviewed pouring scorn on the whole new cabinet if Max won a place, that was the fear, and Wigs would be writing it down. Imagine word of the drunken pile-up – but at least there was no-one else in the car. Except would he be believed, etc. Then comes the PM’s phone call – ‘Fall on your sword,’ but before any sword could ever be granted him (in the shape of a ministry).

Max stared at, or into, his hands, then held them in front of his face as if they were nothing to do with him, mere five-fingered strokes of fortune. Marcus Friendly used to do that in the House. There was no-one alive who remembered it. But on television there was Max at question time in a paralysing freeze-frame of a mental process, the PM seeming to say ‘what the farrrk’ in a vignette replayed on
Sunday Morning
, hardly to be missed. No wonder the ministry he craved was denied him.

It was lunchtime again. ‘Isn’t this fabulous?’ said Tiger, urging on all his breadcrumbed snapper fillets, presented on a sheet of baking paper on a large white plate with lemon wedges.

‘Fried fish says cold beer,’ said Harry, grabbing a VB from the fridge. Max was wordless in a continuation of his blissed-out confusion. He did no drinking.

The phone rang. The men looked at Max. Let it keep ringing. Sylvia collected the handpiece and left the room.

‘Wendy,’ said Max without a question mark.

Sylvia could be heard murmuring at the end of the verandah. She came back into the room, replaced the phone on its charger and met Max’s eye.

They left the room, headed out to the bough shelter.

This was a hooped structure of grassy clods held down with chicken mesh and standing on a knoll overlooking the bay with a view through the heads, one way to the open sea, the other back over the estuary into the empurpled ranges, all stacked one upon the other up to the Dividing Range in smoky light.

After a good half hour of talking Max came ambling back to the house, his cheeks pink. He laughed with genial satisfaction to see everyone expectant. Would he walk straight to the phone now and call the PM to tell him he wouldn’t be available for the post he hadn’t been offered? It seemed likely, such was the melted ambition in Max’s eyes after Sylvia was finished with him.

Sylvia would never betray a confidence – read the chapter on discretion in
Conduct Codes
– and Tiger would never ask what they’d said to each other. But that was the look, unless you knew Max better. All gone, all drained.

Except.

Except somewhere in his head Max lived out life in a universe where all the same people were, the same names and places were, but with relationships and understandings that didn’t exist anywhere else. Max was always trying to bring that world back into this one. It seemed like his whole life’s undertaking. Except he could never say what it was, except . . . it was a following.

Tiger made a pot of tea and took it to Max and Sylvia, sitting cross-legged on a picnic blanket. It was an easy pose for Sylvia, whose workshops were conducted on Afghan-rugged floorboards. Max was a pretender to sitting cross-legged, he told reporters he used the meditation rooms in Parliament House and was the only member who did – and did, too, now and then, but only in order to make himself scarce.

The phone rang again and now it was Wendy for Max. He was ready for her.

Tiger thought it through. To get her to call, much had been done. Max had put his foot down on the causeway and watched dark water douse the headlights as he struggled to unclip his seatbelt. Surely it cannot have been deliberate, as Wendy must have thought, in order to ring. But Tiger knew that track, he knew that section where it came down to the estuary. He would go and ask the tow truck driver how many extensions of winch cable he’d used to stay on dry land and still haul the vehicle out. Then he’d know more about Max than he ever thought he knew. Perhaps even more than Max had been able to confess to Sylvia in their tete-a-tete, knowledge of a man in despair and the quality of his despair that Sylvia would be able to encapsulate in terms of psychology, but that a man would hold to himself, not as the kernel of a hard uncrackable seed, as women liked to think, but as the inviolable soul of himself.

Towards evening Tiger threw open the door of the second fridge. ‘There’s all this wine and beer, not my best stuff, give me a break, but get stuck into it, we’ll be back late.’

Tiger and Sylvia were driving to Eden to meet Judith and Jake Try on board
Workers Comp
. As Tiger collected his torch and keys he heard Harry saying to Max, ‘I’d be happy never to leave here, mate.’

Tiger drove south with a tear in his eye and a heaviness in his heart. Sylvia put a pillow against the passenger window and settled her head there, dozing.

I
N
E
DEN, WITH
J
AKE AND
J
UDITH
, the yacht was berthed between two rusty fishing boats. Access on board was by means of a flexible plank, then a few careful steps along the wooden deck.

‘How is it?’ said Judith. ‘With Sonni.’

Sylvia told how she and Tiger would grant every wish of Sonia’s and ease every torment of Harry’s to the end of their days if they could.

‘Tell us what they need, what we can do,’ said Judith. ‘It must be destroying poor Harry.’

‘There is that break,’ Sylvia said, ‘that awful catch in his voice. The way he’s always close to tears. Angry tears. Fearful tears.’

‘Harry’s the bloke who’s never been beaten by anything,’ said Tiger.

‘You must be exhausted, both of you.’

‘I am done,’ Sylvia admitted.

‘Stay the night,’ said Judith. ‘I’ll make up the double bunk in the saloon.’

‘We do this Buddhist thing each night. I can’t let Sonni down.’

‘I’d be fighting mad,’ said Judith. ‘I would not be praying.’

Judith had a way of emphasising her opinions that made ordinary points of view seem lost.

The two men went up and sat in the cockpit. Tiger loved this battered yacht and envied Jake’s ownership of her – worn, aged, yet maintained as appropriate to a vessel trusted with lives. She’d been famous under the name
Artemis
more than sixty years ago, then wrecked, her kauri timbers splintered on rocks. A book had been written about her original owner’s single-handed voyage from Seattle to Sydney, where, after coming aground at Long Reef, she’d been salvaged, towed, then rotted on a slip at Berrys Bay until a boat-yard worker took her on. It wasn’t bad luck to change a name between owners. That had been proved by good sailing.

A few years into Jake’s ownership Tiger heard that
Workers Comp
was possibly on the market, that Jake had found something that might do better, a sixty-footer set up for work in the Chilean sub-Antarctic. Tiger made his enquiries with a broker with the stealth of a lover arranging a rendezvous. Jake and Judith sailed to Chile with Gerry De Smet in the steel sloop
Greenlander
, doing bird counts and dropping mountaineers into fjords. This became their life from then on. But they came back every six months to
Workers Comp
berthed at Cairns. The yacht had never really been free, the whole sneaky dream was a delusion.

‘I can’t let her go,’ Jake had said when Tiger put the question to him. ‘I couldn’t, ever.’ Tiger swallowed his disappointment, not so much over not getting her, but in failing some sort of higher estimation of himself. To cap the humiliation, Jake never spoke about the incident again.

Jake and Judith were back from three months in New Guinea waters, cruising the most unlikely coasts, charting despoiled forests and taking photographs of bundles of rainforest hardwoods, rusty freighters and their mongrel crews. At intervals they’d reached out past the Solomons and reported long-liners to Sea Shepherd, stopping that game only when Jake went aboard an attack boat for a spell and declared their operations chaotic, bullying, dangerous and cruel. The planet was going under through human folly, but that was no reason to dump human standards. Jake had little money to put into
Workers Comp
and discovered a fellow feeling for the Taiwanese and Filipino rust bucket skippers that Sea Shepherd harassed into bankruptcy.

Jake had a bottle of single malt that he drank with a splash of lemonade because an old Gaelic speaker once told him that lemonade was as good as any other way to sink a dram. Tiger felt himself drinking too much to consider any thought of driving home. He would reel below and tell Sylvia they had to stay. Tomorrow, nausea.

Later, when they were down below and Tiger blurry and blissed, Judith slung a CD into the player and turned up the volume. It was always Leonard Cohen as Sylvia danced, eyes half-shut, weaving her arms in a slow overhead rhythm as Tiger kept time, tapping his fingers on the chart table and smiling. Sylvia had the gift of flicking a switch to merriment or melancholy while stone-cold sober, confounding watchers as to who was the drunk one. She had wrecked Tiger’s trust of Leonard Cohen’s music years ago by fingering him in the ribs and saying he was the only other man who could put his shoes under her bed.

‘What were you and Judith talking about when I came down?’ said Tiger, steering Sylvia upstairs for a breather.

He spread a jacket on the cockpit seat for her.

‘Judith’s always been bulletproof,’ said Sylvia. ‘This illness of Sonia’s has rocked her. What if it was her? she keeps asking.’

‘I know that way of thinking,’ said Tiger, dumping an attack of nervous mortality on Sylvia under the influence of two laid-back friends and a dynamite swig of distilled proof spirit filtered through peat moss.

‘Judith used my name.’

‘Darling, you think everything’s about you. But come to mention it, there is something Judith has never quite liked, that she raised in a sort of way, I admit with you as an example.’

‘That I chucked her over for you?’

‘You really are funny.’

Tiger and Judith went back to before he’d met Sylvia, when Judith was the girlfriend of Mark Herring, who’d served with the Admiral as an exchange officer. ‘There’s something fishy about Herring,’ was a smart-arsed thing to say, and Tiger had said it all those years ago, Judith having been too young, too high-spirited, too fabulously a good sport to be thrown away on a smouldering old fart, forty-seven years old to her twenty.

Herring had asked to marry her, and it seemed she’d said yes when she went off for a long weekend with Jake in Max’s Jag.

Tiger went around grinning. He told his father that Herring was gulled. The Admiral’s response was to tell Herring. Forget Judith’s part in it and Jake’s – or even Max’s part in lending them the car – Tiger was the one left looking bad. The Admiral said this about him: he’d taken longer than his friends to do his growing up; he was known for telling whoppers; only in malice did he seem to crack the truth, and then his truth wasn’t absolute.

‘You are a shoddy little shit,’ said Herring when he cornered Tiger alone, taking him by the necktie and informing him inter alia that in naval terms a necktie knot was a buntline hitch, tighter the harder it was pulled, and a choker.