Tremble (17 page)

“The young woman in question was Mrs. Tetherhook’s Pilates teacher not a close associate.”

Frustrated, Gavin leaned forward and slammed his Schaeffer pen onto the walnut veneer. “Look! This is not a fucking dick-pulling competition, let’s cut to the chase.”

He swung around to Cathy, who remained icily impervious.

“What is it that you want? And no fucking bullshit—I’m footing the bills of both these morons.” He paused, fighting the desire to rip his wife’s sunglasses from her face.

They all waited: Gavin, his lawyer, his wife’s lawyer. Barricaded behind her shades, which glinted like the sectioned eyes of a huge blowfly, Cathy remained silent. Then, her half-inch-long pale pink nails barely
touching the paper, she pushed a folder across to her lawyer, who flicked it open with a frightening efficiency.

“My client wants half your assets, full custody of all three children, a guarantee that you will cover all school and college fees as needed, plus full expenses of any holidays. You will be allowed weekend access to the children—that is, Sundays. Finally, she wants her name exclusively on the Bridgeport development.”

“But I only used her name for tax purposes!”

“As I understand she is currently part owner. Now she wishes to be complete owner.”

“Never!”

“In that case we have no choice but to proceed to court. However, my client wishes to point out that it could be detrimental to both your finances to undergo an independent government assessment of your assets.”

“You fucking bitch!” Gavin lunged forward only to be pushed back by his lawyer, an otherwise jovial man in his late fifties.

Cathy removed her sunglasses for the first time. She stared at Gavin, her eyes devoid of emotion. “I don’t think you understand. I am genuinely inspired by the development of Bridgeport; I have been from the very beginning. It means as much to me as I know it means to you.”

She smiled slightly and Gavin found himself wondering whether there wasn’t a sadistic streak buried deep within the woman he’d thought he knew. He got up heavily and walked over to the window. Bridgeport. The rounded wall of the tall building glittered in the afternoon sun. It had been a vanity project, the one investment Gavin knew wasn’t going to make him money. Instead it was a bid to immortalize him in the history of Queensland landmarks.

It was a piece of architecture that appeared to defy the laws of physics. A triangular wedge with an adjoining curved wall; a lyrical sculpture that soared up into the humid Brisbane sky, gloriously contemptuous of the predictable rectangular buildings surrounding it.

It was the curved wall, a magnificent wave of reflective glass, that really gave the building its distinctive edge. The initial stages had begun before September 2001 and Gavin had managed to hold on to the project despite the deluge of global disasters that had followed the World Trade Center attack, from the stock market crash through to SARS. There was
no way he was going to hand it over to his ex-wife now. Bridgeport was his passport to legitimacy, his homage to Brisvegas.

Standing there Gavin became aware of a faint vibration beneath his feet. For a second he wondered whether there was actually a train going under the building but then the tremor grew to a palpable quiver. The others appeared indifferent: Cathy and her lawyer were in the middle of a whispered conference, while his own solicitor was hunched over a file, his bulbous nose and weathered face puckered in disapproval. They hadn’t noticed anything; could it just be him?

Panicked, Gavin looked back outside. Everything appeared normal, the glittering facade of Bridgeport reflecting back nothing but the calm blue of the sky.

Still the feeling grew that something was terribly wrong. It seemed to Gavin as if the light itself was glaring back at him in defiance. Simultaneously he became aware of a loud rustling, as if an invisible wind had entered the room. Gavin steadied himself against the window ledge, praying that the others would not notice the colossal wave of internal panic that had him pinned.

The rustling, like rats scratching at a thin wall, got louder, assaulting one side of his brain then lunging to the other. Gavin’s knuckles whitened as he clutched at the window ledge. The sound accelerated to the amplified cacophony of a thousand leaves rattling in a hurricane. Suddenly a massive gush knocked him to the carpet.

“Nothing but an excess of ear wax.”

His doctor folded up the auriscope and leaned back in his swivel chair giving Gavin a quizzical look. “Everything else seems normal—blood pressure, heart rate, lungs.”

Gavin stared mournfully at the whitened band of flesh where his wedding ring used to sit. This was what he had been fearing: a verdict of physical normality.

“Given the traumatic nature of recent events in your life…” the doctor ventured.

“Give me a break, Doc. I’ve been through way worse than divorce in my time.”

Ignoring him, the doctor doggedly continued. “I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a panic attack.”

“A panic attack?! But I wasn’t even panicking. It was the sound, that awful loud rustling; I felt like a moth caught up in a wind tunnel…”

“Look, I haven’t entirely ruled out a physical cause. I’ve written a referral for a CAT scan—just in case—and here’s the number of a good friend of mine, a psychologist who specializes in both divorce counseling and panic attacks. One often heralds the onset of the other.”

The depressed property developer tried to distract himself by counting the number of houses he’d bought and sold as the sleek car purred its way through the streets. Panic attack. It made him sound like a real mental case—Jesus, he’d be the laughingstock of the company if it got out to his employees. He’d managed to convinced Cathy and her battleax lawyer that it was an inner ear infection. Last thing he wanted was them claiming he wasn’t mentally fit to have even weekend access to his children.

The opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth interrupted his train of thought. He picked up his mobile and checked the incoming call. It was Amanda, his twenty-three-year-old mistress. He switched the phone off. That was the third time she had tried to reach him that day. In all truth, Gavin had never felt this unsexual in his entire adult life. It wasn’t just the divorce—although the unexpected sensation of loss had caused part of him to retreat—it was also the fact that open access to Amanda was, to his surprise, a big turnoff. She was far more alluring as a clandestine liaison. As soon as he’d been thrown out of the family house and moved into his own flat she had transformed from the mysterious creature whose perfect youth and flattering receptivity had originally captivated him into a needy harridan whose insecurities seemed to multiply by the day.

Besides, the last time they’d been together he’d failed to get an erection—a fact that had secretly festered inside him ever since. It was natural to feel vulnerable given the circumstances, Gavin reminded himself, trying to remember if he’d ever felt this way before. Maybe once: the day his father sat the family down and announced that he had
lost the farm. The burly farmer had actually broken down in tears. The sight had so shocked his two sons that later they made a pledge with one another never to weep publicly themselves.

The Merc screeched around the corner and up the ramp into Bridgeport. As soon as the car entered the artificial greenish light of the car park Gavin felt better, as if he was sheltered within a great concrete womb of his own making. It was only on the way to the elevator that he remembered the car park had been the scene of his erotic fantasy two days before. Perhaps there was some potency left in him yet. Cheered, he entered the elevator whistling.

He decided to double his dose of sleeping pills. After an accompanying glass of whiskey, he left a message on Amanda’s landline telling her he couldn’t see her for a couple of weeks. Afterward he slept like a baby, floating in perfect drug-enhanced dreamless slumber.

In the morning he woke groggy but invigorated. He leaped out of bed and even managed a few of the yoga stretches Amanda had taught him to ward off backache. He was in the child’s pose in front of the full-length mirror, staring in admiration at his firm buttocks and long muscular thighs, the comforting weight of his testicles resting against his heels, when he noticed the strange dust. The sole of each foot was covered in a greenish powder, as if he’d been standing in a dried-up riverbed. Where had it come from? He’d only just taken off his perfectly clean nylon socks.

Sitting up he examined himself. Trapped under his toenails was more of the mysterious dirt and also under his manicured fingernails. He shuddered, repulsed. It looked like algae. Thinking back he tried to work out where he might have picked up the dust during the day. Nowhere. The itchy feeling of being unclean made his stomach lurch.

He ran to the shower and scrubbed himself until his skin was wrinkly and bright red. Standing under the high-speed shower nozzle he let its luxurious pounding wash all misgivings from his mind. Nothing had meaning, just this, the immediacy of physical pleasure. He was okay. He wasn’t just going to survive; he was determined to flourish.

His pager went off in the other room. Gavin stepped out of the shower and, still wet, walked into the bedroom. A trail of shiny
footprints followed him, each one a clear outline of an alien claw with three toes.

“She’s a beauty but she’s a bugger to drive. It’s all this semi-computerized bullshit, you have to be a fucking genius to operate some of the equipment nowadays.”

Gavin’s main project manager, a Pacific Islander named Murray but nicknamed Shortstuff due to the fact that at five foot four he was the shortest Islander anyone had ever seen, gestured to the mammoth crane. The name
Stella
was painted in scarlet calligraphy on the side of the operating cabin.

They were on Gavin’s third building site—a considerable tract of land that was to be a new housing development west of the Brisbane hills. They’d already cleared the site, despite some local protest over what had been described as an endangered wetland. “The Kellen wetlands? Give me a fucking break—a bloody swamp more like,” Gavin had scoffed before giving the order for several tons of sand to be dropped on the area before they leveled the ground.