Coda (9 page)

She took the wind out of his sails! What a dame! ‘I miss them too.' Sentimentally rolling her lovely eyes. ‘And I especially miss our own slack, mendacious brand of government. Easy come, easy take.'

The train run north had been more of a
via crucis
than a sentimental journey. They were pestered by another tourist who, recognising their accents, claimed kinship. The skinny lad announced that more than anything at all he wanted a lamb bloody chop. It seemed to sum up everything. Although Brain informed him that there were plenty where he was at present, the horrible traveller kept saying, ‘Not like ours, mate. Not like ours.' Nina had whispered disloyally, ‘Me too. I understand. I'm on his side. The short-loin side.' The youth, suspecting mockery, looked hard at them for the first time in an hour and translated their smiles. ‘And sod you, too,' he said, moving away.

‘Does that,' Brain asked, nodding after the denim back, ‘still make you eager to return? Does it?'

‘Of course,' she said.

The ferry crossing was delayed because of fog so thick nothing of the outer world was visible, a world choked with the cries of ships' bells and the mournful breves of sirens. During that rolling trip Nina suddenly clasped his
hand saying, ‘I have no wish to be difficult, my dear, but I feel I have reached the end. Terminus. I must get away, get back, as quickly as possible.' Then she closed her eyes and slept.

It was late when they had reached Copenhagen. Icy winds blew them momentarily apart as they came out of the station and headed across the square to the hotel. Mrs Waterman chose it because it was rumoured James Joyce had once stayed there. In the foyer a bellhop, determined on a tip, pressed so closely behind her as they waited to register she could hardly move. Baby fingers tangled with hers on the bag handle. She looked down and was surprised by the cold, pert determination of the fuzzless face. Carefully, meticulously, she raised each of the clutching fingers one after another, pressing them away, but as one finger was removed another would return with the persistence of an anemone. ‘Go away, little boy!' she hissed. ‘Away.'

The desk clerk raised his eyebrows.

Once in their room Brain offered the mildest of rebukes. ‘That wasn't wise, dear.'

It was a ghastly room stinking of decay—old bodies, old clothing, damp towels. He began listing the mouldering objects.

‘Humid prose.' Nina added.

‘Whose what? What
humid prose?'

‘Joyce's for God's sake! Perhaps this was the very room.'

‘What very room?'

‘The room where Joyce … oh God, Brain, you're determined to madden. Nora Barnacle. Perhaps even … Oh never mind. I get the feeling they haven't touched a thing in here for years. National treasure at second-hand.'

He could not honestly tell her that she was his. He pulled off his shoes and socks and inspected his bare toes. The central heating was excessive. The window latches were stuck on decades of paint. There was a detumescent protestant stuffiness about the entire Scandinavian peninsula, despite affirmations of liberal sexual manners. Those too were overlaid with Lutheran censure.

Was he failing with her already?

There had been no discussion of future strategy. Former partners had been obliterated in unemotional whiteout, the word ‘never' typed in. He had to force the next question, the salient word.

‘Together? Us? You want to go back together?'

She wasn't stupid. She could assess. She crossed to the window and looked down at the sleet-filled landscape and the misty buildings.
Below on the sidewalk a group of walkers illuminated by the hotel entrance were skidding as they hurried against increasing snowfall. One of them fell flat on his back. She could interpret the ‘O' of pain through the double glazing.

‘For the moment, I suppose.' She turned and looked at him dubiously. ‘There are other ways of partnering besides the bed.'

‘What?'

‘A business, perhaps. There must be something. Gallery? Craft shop? Cafe? A small but exquisite restaurant?'

The inner howling at memory of past failed business ventures surged up, escaped in a lewd moan in that dank room. He would have to do something, he supposed, but had not thought beyond the moment of freedom. If it were that.

She had moved away from the window and was busy brushing her hair, dragging the bristles through shining lengths as slowly as summer. Stroke after stroke.

Was she serious?

Sleepless on that
lumpy bed in Copenhagen, Brain remembering through the sleet-filled night.

Two years ago another of his more exotic failures, for which he had, without a doubt, a kind of genius. Over the years there had been sharp exchanges with his brother-in-law, the minister for transports. Own up! He couldn't stand Len, couldn't bear his lamp-tanned ego-ridden confidence, the spanking way he hefted his cheapskate schemes through the barriers of local councils to make another financial killing.

Jealousy? Sure. Ferocious unabating envy.

Brain nosed around.

No wonder Sham and her husband were
rolling in the stuff. The Mercedes and the Porsche were hardly products of a backbencher's salary.

He nosed around.

He kept alert at parties.

He kept his ears open. Their antennae sensitively recorded the slightest frisson of shonky dealing. The wealth, he noted, had followed swiftly on electoral success. He was engaged by rumours of land deals up and down the coast and vast profits made from Japanese investors. Between his own misdirected concerns Brain conceived an ironic revenge whose jokiness might yet be turned to profit.

On a shaggy block of land on the highway north of Reeftown, a block he had purchased fifteen years before, he had begun erecting a three-storey … what? Humanoid? Pioneer figure? Tourist goggle-butt? The land was a poor few unserviced acres on the hillside above the sea, picked up cheap before the boom. Except when the bill for rates arrived each year, he had almost forgotten he owned it.

Come down in the world, Brain was working as evening bar manager at one of the glitzier resorts, a grocery-money job that gave him the days free. Bosie spent her mornings at the local golf club trying to achieve a hole in one. Connections who owed him a favour at a
plastic and fibreglass mouldings factory became involved in his project, making mysterious sections without ever being aware of the total concept.

No one twigged.

Over three months of near-furtive activity, he trucked up huge anonymous pieces of bildakit and by the time legs, belly and chest were assembled, the monstrous torso was visible above the uncleared scrub on the fence line. Another week and he would be ready to lug the questing head up on ropes to drop onto its swivel axle so that Len's slack, tanned features could inspect the Coral Sea. North, south, north, south, to the whim of the trades, in the harbour, in the islands, he hummed, remembering his father and the singing in the Ascot evenings. His first political coup! Already busloads of tourists heading for the Port had noticed with excitement this mammoth artifact skulking behind acacia, and visitors in rented cars had been stopping to take photographs.

Wisely he slung a six-foot chain-wire fence across the frontage of his block and extended it partly up each side. He put a padlock on the swing gates. At the end of that week Len's conniving features were lowered into place by ropes and pulleys in early tropic darkness. Brain was so enraptured with the result he sat below his
towering god savouring the proxy ecstasies of a pagan worshipper.

Within two days the council intervened.

‘What the hell do you think you're doing?' the shire engineer asked. ‘Did you apply for a permit? Anyway, what in God's name is it?'

Brain smiled modestly. He was choked with laughter. ‘It's the Big Developer,' he said slyly. ‘Related to the Big Cow, Prawn, Pineapple, Banana. It's a work of art. I don't have to apply for a development permit for a sculpture.'

The two of them stood in the shadow of thirty feet of moulded fibreglass and poured concrete, dodging the slab-like heat and humidity of mid-day. There was Len—hi, Len!—sporting natty tropical safari suit painted in semigloss acrylic, gold chain and white developer shoes. His legs, Brain pointed out to the unliterary shire engineer, bestrode the world like a Colossus. The tanned rubbery features and neurotic eyes moved on their swivel skull to the smallest breeze, gazing appetently up and down the coastline, seeking new empires.

‘Smashing, isn't it!' Brain said. ‘Unfortunately I've run out of money. I had intended a restaurant.'

‘Restaurant?'

‘Sure. Stairs up each leg, lavatories at the
flies—suitable, hey?—dining room at the paunch and a revolving lookout in the skull. Say cocktail bar, huh, where all the brain damage occurs. Nothing like a metaphor. It's a nice idea, isn't it?'

‘I think you're bloody mad,' the shire engineer said. ‘Get it down.'

‘Hey, wait a minute,' Brain protested. ‘It's a statue. It's not a dwelling. It's not a restaurant. Not yet. There's nothing in the by-laws about erecting a statue. It's beautification of my land, mate.'

Rage transmuted the shire engineer's face into a clone of the one swivelling above them. Congested fury made him goggle. For a minute Brain thought he was speaking faster than sound.

‘You'll hear more about this. There'll be a council 'dozer up as soon as I can organise one. That's if you don't get busy yourself. The thing's caused traffic snarls, near accidents. Just look down there now. Can't you see what it's doing?' There were indeed five cars parked below on the highway with excited families clambering up the road margin. ‘It's a bloody public hazard.'

He stumped off down the slope to his car, now wedged between a bus and a truck. Japanese cameras clicked crazily as he approached.

Brain smiled. Already reporters had been
up to take shots and run stories in the local press. He liked to think of Shamrock's and Len's outrage when the Brisbane papers took it up. May they choke on their croissants! he hoped. He could hear the cough-splutter of tortured windpipes. It was a good likeness. Len could hardly fail to recognise his horrible self.

Brain grew high on wild sensations of pride. Flair, that's what it was. Flair.

His tragedy was a multiplicity of small talents.

‘Hey!' Chaps said that week, on one of his brief visits home for money. ‘Some kook has built a bloody great statue thing on the Cook Highway.'

‘What of?' Bosie was waggling her finger-nails to dry them. She appeared to be clawing air.

‘Well, it's a guy in a snappy safari suit. Looks like Uncle Len, actually.'

‘Len?'

‘Yeah. Got those bloodshot eyes. Shifty. You know how the Unk looks when you ask him anything. Guess it's a kind of libel. Doesn't look like a tribute.'

Attempting
indifference his father asked carelessly, ‘Did you go right up?'

‘Couldn't get a park. There were two buses and half a dozen cars pulled in. I slowed right down, though. It's a gas!'

‘My!' Brain laid down the paper and reached for the coffee pot, savouring the scent as he refilled his cup, savouring the prospect of a relaxed afternoon by the pool. ‘Causing a stir, is it? Maybe some civic-minded grateful member of Len's electorate decided it was time for public thanks.'

Chaps rubbed his freckles thoughtfully. ‘It's certainly causing a stir. Everyone up in Port was talking about it. Maybe some hippy whacko freaked out.'

Bosie and Brain had been playing happy families: Mother, Bimbo and Chaps, all up for Mother's yearly visit. Bimbo had looked in only for a couple of nights on his way to Darwin. Chaps, who was leaving the next morning, could think only of that long run down the coast in a beat-up Holden that badly needed an overhaul. He judged, nicely gauging his father's pleased smirk about something or other, that it was time to put in the nips.

‘What the hell do you do with your allowance? What about those casual jobs you're always telling us you've got?' Brain asked.

Bimbo and Chaps had only the blazer pockets of their Brisbane boarding school as
mementoes of five years' expensive education. Bimbo had failed university political economy and was thereby assured of administrative work in a political party. ‘Better if you hadn't done any of that crap,' the party secretary told him. ‘Spoils your judgement. Still, we'll give you ago. Temporary.' The wily lad had only recently decided to throw in his genius with the national coalition. Uncle Len had applied some pressure but not, Bimbo thought resentfully, nearly enough. ‘Why them?' his father asked. ‘More perks,' Bimbo explained briefly as he gazed critically around his parents' outdoor living room where, my God, those old sixties carbuncular speakers were still playing forties big band muck! Still, he'd be gone soon. His olds bored him rigid. Bosie was a complete turbo mouth once she got going. He wondered how the old man stood it and for the shortest of moments (to be calculated in microseconds) he patted his father's sad, greying thatch and regarded the poor wrinkled neck with compassion. That vulnerable nape! Instinctively he rubbed his own, dreading. Chaps wasn't nearly as critical—yet. He was still into eating and muscle-building and lapped the pool endlessly, his shoulders darkened by sun, glistening with oil, stroking away in brilliant chlorinated waters.