“Off with the boys tonight,” said the Doll, whose view of the hole was obscured by Wilder’s body. “Eh, Max?”
There was no answer. The Doll looked up and Wilder twisted around. But Max was no longer in his hole, and was nowhere to be seen. Wilder jumped up, scanned the crowds and then the sea.
“Oh my God,” said the Doll. “He’s caught in the rip.”
And she pointed to a dark snake tongue of water whipping back through the breakers, on which a small boy on a boogie board was being swiftly carried to the ocean beyond.
They could see Max mouthing screams, helpless and terrified. But with the noise of the waves breaking, people yelling and squealing in the excitement and pleasure of catching waves and having waves crash on them, no one could hear him, and no one, not even the lifesavers, had noticed the small boy’s plight. Both women leapt up and began running to the sea.
But before they reached the water or found a lifesaver, they saw a young man strike out into the rip and swim after the now crying boy. The man was a confident swimmer, riding the rip with ease until he reached Max. The two women watched mesmerised, Wilder silently sobbing, as the man took hold of the board and slowly, almost casually, swam it sideways out of the rip. Then he swam Max and the board back to shore, timing their journey inward between the breaking waves. When at last able to stand, he picked Max up and, trailing the board behind them on its wrist leash, walked to where the two women were now making their way through the shore slop toward him, waving and shouting.
He was dark and slender, with short curly hair, and his dark skin was accentuated by the long white Billabong board shorts he wore. Without a word, Max climbed out of his arms into those of his mother.
Wilder stood knee deep in the sea, the larger waves crashing into her waist, crying and smiling, holding her son to her chest, angrily berating him, halting every so often to thank the man before returning to tick Max off, all the while kissing and hugging and burying herself in him, as Max attempted in a half-hearted fashion to shy away from such an embarrassing outburst of maternal affection in front of a stranger.
The young man said little, making light of his rescue, trying not to stare at Wilder’s breasts. Then he smiled, said goodbye, shook Max’s hand as if they were men who had shared an adventure together, and headed back out into the surf.
“He’s a bit of a looker,” Wilder said, as he disappeared into a wave.
“Very woggy,” said the Doll.
Later, the Doll went for a bodysurf. This feeling she loved above all: diving beneath that wall of white water, feeling its power tumble over her, and popping back up in the confused aftermath of boiling water, the brilliant light slashing her eyes.
The Doll blinked twice because of the brightness and the stinging salt, and then only a few metres away she saw him, similarly blinking and tossing his head, the young man who had so bravely rescued Max.
He smiled. She smiled. He raised an arm out of the water and waved. On impulse, she swam over to where he was treading water, put her arm around his neck and kissed him on the lips. It was a gentle, affectionate kiss, and though neither of their lips opened, her legs washed around his for a moment, and the Doll felt her body tingle.
“Thank you,” she said.
And then the water began pulling them apart, a wall of water bearing down and pulling them backwards. They began rising with the wave like sea creatures, and she just had time to give a small smile before she made the split-second decision to catch the wave. She jackknifed and threw herself into the wave’s wall the moment before it broke. She felt it lift and hurtle her in its wild aerated force back towards the beach. She seemed to be in the wave for the longest time.
When the wave’s power was almost spent and she could feel it bottoming out, agitated sand swirling around her skin, she stood up, gulped a few times, and with smarting eyes searched the glaring sea around and behind her. The slender young man was nowhere to be seen. She half-expected him to surface out of the water and grab her unawares. But he had disappeared. Though the Doll would not admit she was disappointed, she spent some time scanning the waves and wash for his lean body before giving up and going in. She went back up the beach and lay with Wilder and a now subdued Max. The sun beat down on them, she slumbered a little, and when she woke, it was time to leave and get to the Chairman’s Lounge to start her early shift.
7
How the Chairman’s Lounge held on to its reputation as one of the most upmarket pole dancing clubs in Sydney was an achievement not easily explained. Though it had twice won Eros Foundation awards for “Hottest Naughty Nite Spot (NSW)” and once been awarded an impressive five breast rating in Hustlaz.com Adult Almanac, such gongs meant nothing to anybody other than on the award evening, and, as the Doll herself pointed out, who didn’t win prizes these days?
But like much else, the puzzle of its prominence was entwined with the mystery of money. By the straightforward expedient of charging twice the admission price of the other clubs and an even more exorbitant mark-up on drinks, the Chairman’s Lounge kept its status bolstered and its punters happy, because they would not throw away such money unless it was one of the best clubs in Sydney and therefore worth every vanishing dollar.
Each day at noon the head bouncer, Billy the Tongan—a large man inevitably clad in an immaculate white tracksuit, gold chains and knock-off Versace sunnies—created the entry to the Chairman’s Lounge by rolling a length of grubby red carpet out of the ground storey of an old hotel into the border country that bestrode Kings Cross and Darlinghurst.
Here seemed to be the perfect position for a business that specialised in pompous cock teasing. The city centre was only a short walk distant, while a block away were the brothels and sex shows and streetwalkers of the Cross—an area chiefly known for a dying retail line in old world sleaze, its major feature being a run-down strip mall that parted the hillock on which it sat like a bad mohawk. Here the junkies and the pros, the pervs and the homeless, looked out over their daily shrinking atoll with as much bewilderment and as little hope as the inhabitants of some South Seas micro-nation, knowing whatever the future might hold, it held nothing for them.
Around them, washing up from the gentrified tenements and newly built designer apartments of Darlinghurst and the ceaselessly refurbished mansions of Elizabeth Bay, rushed the incoming tide of property values and inner-city hypocrisy, rising as inexorably and as pitilessly as the nearby globally warmed Pacific Ocean.
Along either side of the carpet that somehow joined all these disparate worlds, Billy the Tongan would set up the brass poles down which he ran an ornate gold-coloured rope. Inside, the true nature of the club began asserting itself. A strip of bare purple neon tubes ran like tracer fire down the half-dozen steps that led into the entry foyer. Here arose the deafening break-beat of doof music and the insistent scratching of the entrance cash register attended by a semi-naked woman charged with undertaking the first fleecing. Beyond this foyer, along a corridor and around a corner, was the main lounge with its scattering of purple felt-lined dancing tables, each replete with a brass pole.
If in the dusty light of morning the club had all the charm and erotic allure of an Eastern European airline’s executive lounge, this too was for a purpose. For its dirty, dun-coloured tub chairs and its generic bar and its featureless tables, its unremarkable nature and meanness of finish pretended to be no other than what it was, more of the bland sameness that was the world of those who came and watched. In its familiarity it relaxed its customers, as in its meanness it reassured them. Its manager, Ferdy Holstein, knew that any attempt to alter this relentless dullness and ordinariness would be an attempt to raise the tone that could only prove an overwhelming commercial error.
Ferdy claimed to come out of rock’n’roll, and frequently dropped names the Doll had never heard of. Ferdy wore Mambo shirts and thought it was fashion, not knowing it was middle age.
The truth was that Ferdy had left his job at a pearl oyster hatchery in Broome
a decade earlier with a bootload of Kimberley dope. He drove two thousand kilometres south, traded the dope and made enough to refill the boot with ecstasy he got through a contact in the Gypsy Jokers. He crossed the interminable length of the Nullarbor and made his way along the Great Ocean Road.
He liked to say he arrived in Melbourne in a ’73 Charger and left it a month later in a ’96 Beemer, making his way in that same year to Sydney, where he bought a half-share and the job as manager of a run-down bar, and invested what was left of his new wealth on refitting the bar with felt-lined tables and brass poles in the manner of the pole dancing clubs that were then becoming so popular. He would later recall those early years with the tone of feigned humility so many self-made men feel necessary:
“We had our hopes.”
Hopes were unnecessary, for the times, as he frequently told his customers, were his. In the Broome oyster hatchery he had spent the first fifteen years of his working life as a technician breeding vats of microscopic algae to be fed to juvenile oysters. All that mattered in that job had been getting several constants right, and thereafter never varying them. Ferdy applied the same principles to his management of the Chairman’s Lounge.
For he, a man come out of the red mystery of the Kimberley’s pindan dust into the blue certainty of the Kings Cross night, sensed in Sydney that the possibility of human community was a pointless dream, that cities revealed that men shared with algae the most natural destiny: meaninglessness confused by the inexplicable need to live. There were no words for any of it, but a pole dancing club seemed to him a better place than an algal fermentation vat to watch its cracked unravelling. That was what Ferdy felt. What he said, on the other hand, was banal, but not without its own related truth.
“It’s all in the show,” Ferdy would say.
And indeed it was.
8
Until the moment, a little after 7 pm, that he walked along the red carpet of the Chairman’s Lounge, headed down past the purple neon tubes and pulled from his Armani pants’ pocket a twenty-dollar note to pay a smiling woman the entry fee, Richard Cody’s day had been unhappy. He had slept poorly, woken to yet one more argument with his wife, then been called out by Six’s news producers to anchor the live crosses from a terrorist bomb scare at Homebush Olympic stadium.
There was a new makeup girl who had made his hair look ridiculous, then the OB van kept losing contact with the studio on the live crosses, and the whole story in any case quickly grew repetitive, then pointless: three bombs had been found, each in a kid’s backpack. The crowd was evacuated, the area sealed off. Nothing else would happen now.
He had continued saying the same thing over and over with his stupid hair and the studio dropping in and out, while a string of so-called experts—mostly consultants wanting a job as an expert in security, terror, politics—commented on each other’s remarks, which in turn repeated and elaborated the few brief comments made by the police and government spinners, all pretending that in this vortex of nonsense might be found some sign predicting what might next occur.
Only his Armani summer suit didn’t let him down, enduring the heat without crease or crumple. In middle age he had taken refuge in elegance, even when the temperature had not dropped below thirty-eight for five days and the humidity was stuck at ninety-four per cent. As his body thickened and leathered, as his hair thinned, Richard Cody believed his fine clothes helped assert a persuasive idea of himself as charming, sophisticated, clever: in short that his agreeable clothes helped the world concur with his agreeable idea of himself.
After the 1 pm cross, Richard Cody had had enough, and the best of excuses. He had been invited to a lunch at Katie Moretti’s home by the boss of Six’s news and current affairs division, Jerry Mendes, who had been a not unimportant aspect of Katie Moretti’s divorce. Richard Cody was secretly pleased that Jerry Mendes had invited him. It proved, he felt—not least to those to whom he let drop news of the invitation—who was still the senior journalist at Six.
When he finally arrived, Katie Moretti ushered him inside her home—a Double Bay mansion gained in her divorce and refurbished in the contemporary manner of a corporate foyer—and introduced him to her other guests. They came, he learned during the introductions, from advertising and finance and the law. There were also two McKinsey vice presidents—is there anyone, he wondered while shaking hands and smiling, who works for a modern corporation who isn’t a vice president?—a Labor Party senator and a graphic designer. You could have greased a hundred barbies with their conversations.
Still, the food had been exquisite, much good wine had been drunk, and a very fine Armagnac had gone around the table several times. The new furniture and the new paintings and the new crockery and the new caterers all deserved the compliments they received; the view from the dining room over the harbour had rightly been celebrated in several major magazines; and there had even been two wonderful Romanian musicians, a violinist and an accordionist—my gypsies, as Katie Moretti called them—earlier in the afternoon. Yet somehow it all seemed tedious, overwrought and as much effort to endure as a day at work.
No one really cared overly about anything; but they still felt the need to repeat what they had read in the Sydney Morning Herald which repeated the opinions of people at dinner parties such as the one they were now at, all feeling slightly dizzy with the familiar dullness of everything.
So many ideas to parade, films to have watched, books to have read, exhibitions and plays to have seen, so much to have to have greedily gobbled—and unless you were a glutton and had swallowed the world whole, you were an ignorant fool, unqualified to say anything.
But all these subjects existed only to lard the hard truth of the lunch: the gossip that traded knowledge for money and power; the finessed probings of position and status; the sly seeking of alliances and linking of chains of patronage; the constant aggrandisement of self, as necessary as a bull elephant seal’s bark.
Richard Cody would have left even earlier than he did, had it not been for the graphic designer. She was dark, with curly black hair and was wearing a short dark brown dress with a low neckline partly covered with black lace. The lace made the curve and shape of her plump breasts look particularly enticing. Her name was—but what her name was, Richard Cody, for all his interest, was unable to remember.
Still, even without being able to refer to her by name, Richard Cody flirted in a way he believed would not be noticeable, but which he thought would only seem to others like the courtesy someone would show a stranger.
The day dragged on, the graphic designer seemed at first uninterested, and then politely irritated by Richard Cody’s attention, and when Jerry Mendes took him aside, ostensibly to admire the view from Katie Moretti’s new deck, but rather in order to speak to him in confidence, Richard Cody was both relieved and excited. Perhaps a new program? A promotion? Money? It could only be good, he thought, as he laughed wholeheartedly at some of Jerry Mendes’s wretched jokes.
Jerry Mendes was a fat man with a bad complexion. He appeared to have been assembled out of chipped billiard balls. His reputation was as an arse licker, he never seemed to have much to say, and what he said was uttered in an unpleasant voice that was both resonant and high pitched, and always sounded to Richard Cody like one billiard ball hitting another—clack—and rebounding onto yet another—clock. Still, Richard Cody felt rather important being invited outside for a private chat, and he thought how, in spite of what people said, he was really quite fond of Jerry Mendes.
On the deck the heat was like a weight. The sun was so bright that there was no view, only blinding shards of white light ricocheting off the water like shrapnel filling the sky, slashing at the vision of any who looked. They screwed their faces up to narrow their eyes to slits. Like reptiles waiting to strike, they gazed out on Australia, unable to see anything.
9
“Beautiful, eh?” Jerry Mendes said.
“Exquisite,” Richard Cody replied, his head already beginning to ache fr
om the inescapable glare.
“Gotta fag, Richie?”
Richard Cody loathed being called Richie. He wearied of Jerry Mendes always asking this same question and him always giving the same answer: he didn’t smoke. He longed for shade.
Jerry Mendes went inside and returned with a lighted cigarette, took one big drag and, as the smoke meandered out of his mouth, flicked the cigarette over the deck and into the blinding white light of Sydney.
Then he turned to Richard Cody and told him that exciting things were afoot at Six, that the board was keen to spend more on current affairs in the chase for ratings. He waited for Richard Cody to say something, and so Richard Cody said something, but it was like telling Jerry Mendes he didn’t smoke, for Richard Cody knew whatever he said at this point was irrelevant.
Jerry Mendes then told Richard Cody that he was being transferred from his job as anchor for the network’s flagship weekly current affairs program, This Week Tonight, to their nightly current affairs show, Undercurrent, but not as the anchor, which Richard Cody would have found acceptable, but as “senior network correspondent”. He was being replaced at This Week Tonight by the young ABC newsreader Zoe LeMay.
Jerry Mendes used all sorts of empty phrases—reinvention … new demographic … we are all family … synergy—to dress up what they both knew to be a demotion. All Richard Cody could hear was clack-clock-clack and the sound of something sinking. Zoe LeMay! A bimbo even blondes looked down on! It was his face, his age, he knew it. He went to protest, but Jerry Mendes cut him off:
“Well, Richie, if you want it different, you’re going to have to get off your arse. Take some responsibility for yourself. Work your way back.”
Richard Cody completely forgot how only a few moments earlier he had been rather fond of Jerry Mendes, for now he hated him from the bottom of his heart, hated him completely and utterly, and loathed his grasping mistress, Katie Moretti, and all their awful, dull friends. What made it even worse was that Jerry Mendes, finally weary himself of his own nonsense, had abruptly changed the subject and was now, his repulsive hand on Richard Cody’s shoulder, philosophising about journalism as if they were brothers in arms.