FISHING for STARS

BOOKS BY BRYCE COURTENAY

The Power of One

Tandia

April Fool’s Day

A Recipe for Dreaming

The Family Frying Pan

The Night Country

Jessica

Smoky Joe’s Cafe

Four Fires

Matthew Flinders’ Cat

Brother Fish

Whitethorn

Sylvia

The Persimmon Tree

Fishing for Stars

THE AUSTRALIAN TRILOGY

The Potato Factory

Tommo & Hawk

Solomon’s Song

Also available in one volume,
as The Australian Trilogy

BRYCE COURTENAY

FISHING for STARS

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

SOME THINGS FROM THE past stay fresh in the mind of an old man: the curve of a young woman’s breast, the sheen of suntan on her legs. A look, a sidelong glance, so beautiful your mind takes a snapshot to retain it forever, images in which the colours never fade. Out to sea on a pristine morning on the gaff-rigged cutter Madam Butterfly with the ocean spray hitting your face, when you were young and strong and anything was possible. Friends, partners, business deals, government bribes, drink, fortunes to be made and lost, islands, women, children, hope. Anna and Marg, especially Anna and Marg, the yin and yang of womankind. They’re all there trapped in the brilliant blink of a flashlight, then stored as a lasting image. Mine as long as the lens in my mind remains clear.

I am sitting on the verandah of my home in Vanuatu looking over Beautiful Bay. It is near the end of the wet season and the morning air carries a vague hint of crispness. As I seem to be doing more and more these days, I’m recollecting the past. When almost everything that is going to happen to you has already happened, memories occupy more of your time.

Sitting in this large comfortable old cane chair, mentally meandering, flicking through mindscapes, I am attempting to banish what I have called ‘The killing-of-Anna dream’. I woke at dawn again this morning clutching the pillow and bawling like a little kid, choking back my grief, thinking the pillow was Anna. If I don’t exorcise this dream, cast out these demons, the dark shadows of the night will linger throughout this sparkling day in paradise.

Welcome to Paradise; another time, a different pace. I’d read that recently on a large poster as I left the airport after picking up Saffron, my goddaughter, who was visiting me from Port Moresby. Beautiful Bay is about as much paradise as anyone can take; add a little phoney Hawaiian music, frame up, roll camera and let Tales of the South Pacific begin.

Mine has been a fortunate life in so many ways, but in the end we live more in our head than we do in a place and lately there’s some alarming stuff happening in my head. More and more I seem to be recalling the blood, sweat and tears of my life in the islands. Nick Duncan. Billionaire? Sailor? Lover? Soldier? Killer? Dreamer? Pioneer? Nice guy? Bastard? Adulterer? What?

Saffron disturbs my thoughts in a lap-lap sarong and bikini top, looking every inch a beautiful young woman. ‘Uncle Nick, the phone. It’s Great Auntie Marg.’ She giggles. ‘And she’s talking green.’

‘What else,’ I sigh, then laugh, rising from my chair. ‘It’s morning, and her morning calls are always a dark shade of green.’

Saffron, brought up in the islands where the pace of life is relaxed, asks, ‘But why is she always in such a hurry?’

I shrug. ‘It’s her way. Yesterday is a lost opportunity, a list of tasks not completed, so today all must be recovered. Marg is always running to catch up with herself.’

‘She’s seventy-seven! When I’m her age I won’t be jumping around like Jiminy Cricket.’

‘You mean jumping around saving Jiminy Cricket,’ I retort. ‘May we be spared from all zealots, religious or green, God-botherers or self-appointed custodians of all creatures great and small.’

‘What about frogs, Uncle Nick … and butterflies?’ Saffron asks mischievously.

‘Ah, that’s different,’ I grin. ‘If you kiss a frog he may turn into a prince, and butterflies are born to become princesses.’

‘You’re not really a cynic about the environment, are you, Uncle Nick?’ Saffron asks.

‘No, but there’s a big difference between being concerned and being a zealot. Frogs are one of our early-warning systems; when they start to be endangered it’s time to take notice. Old man trees must be respected not turned into chopsticks and cardboard cartons. Moderation in all things, my dear.’ This last remark I recall coming from my Anglican missionary father when, as a child, I’d excitedly captured half a dozen of the same species of butterfly.

‘Better hurry, you know how cranky she gets when she has to wait,’ Saffron cautions, seemingly satisfied with my reply. Some of the kids today really seem to care and don’t think nature is confined to the strip of grass beside the pavement where the dog takes a poo.

Marg Hamilton’s morning calls from Sydney are always a machinegun barrage of words, and usually I’m hit with a request. This time it’s ‘Nick, I need your help! Have the Japanese secured the fishing rights to your Marine Exclusive Economic Zone? Has that corrupt government of yours already signed away their rights? We’ve got to do something, darling! Did you know the Pacific tuna fishery is the last fishing resource not to be decimated by factory fishing!’

That’s our Marg, straight to the point, no opening niceties, strictly business. Some item or other needs to be ticked off her inexhaustible list of crucial green issues, something that invariably involves my time or money or both.

I’m in inter-island shipping, though she’s aware that I would, of course, know about the tuna resources in this part of the Pacific. She also knows damn well that nothing whatsoever happens swiftly in an island government department.

‘Good morning, Marg. And how are you? Lovely day here on the island.’ I glance through the large picture window overlooking Beautiful Bay and then further out to the harbour. ‘Not a cloud in the sky, the bay is sparkling, God’s thrown a handful of diamonds into the water, the harbour beyond is like a millpond. Unusual weather, even for this late in the wet season.’

The irony in my voice is lost on her. She’s probably got the phone tucked between her shoulder and chin the way women seem able to do, freeing both hands to make notes, fish in her handbag for the car keys, check her make-up in the mirror. How do they do that?

‘Nick, is there any way you can find out quickly? I thought Anna might have been mixed up in it. These things usually take a year or two to resolve,’ she says, silently acknowledging that her agitation was merely for effect.

I feel an involuntary pang of guilt at the mention of Anna’s name. Had she still been alive, she would almost certainly have been part of negotiations with the Japanese. And a small but significant percentage of the licensing fees would have been skimmed off the top as ‘Ongoing Consulting Fees’ or some such euphemism for appropriating the island people’s money. As well, you could bet your army boots there would be a significant backhander from the Japanese for facilitating negotiations; ‘smoothing’ is the common word.

Marg Hamilton and Anna Til are the two women who have been equal halves of the whole of my loving, the greater part of my frustrations, probably the bulk of my infuriation and certainly most of the happiness and abundant love I’ve been blessed to receive. No man on earth, least of all myself, is sufficiently strong to manage two such beautiful, intelligent, articulate, stubborn and determined women who are opposed to each other in every conceivable way. Philosophically, in their aesthetic and gastronomic tastes (Marg eats pretty bland vegetarian; Anna, a contradiction as always, Japanese and French), in the movies, entertainment and music they love, I cannot imagine two people more at variance.

Anna, in her day a superb example of the work of the Big Craftsman in the Sky, passed away four months ago at the age of sixty-six, so I would have welcomed a soupçon of tact from Marg, also once a finely chiselled edition of the Maker’s art. But even so soon after Anna’s death, Marg’s forthright opinions of the other woman in my life are unlikely to be tempered by mealy-mouthed niceties. She is too well bred to say so, but not only has she endured the ambiguities of her relationship with me, she has also outlasted her opponent and must feel that she therefore deserves certain rights. Women are by nature predatory creatures and I have long since understood that any influence I might have had on either Anna or Marg was based entirely on the constant threat that the other might gain the upper hand. Marg has waited a long time to have me all to herself again and she will make the most of it.

‘No, I don’t believe Anna was involved,’ I say, deliberately keeping my voice matter-of-fact, abiding by the old rules even though there is no longer any need.

‘Nick, it’s important we know the very moment they sign. The media will give it a big run. Bob Brown may be able to get some sort of brouhaha started in the senate and that’s very good for us.’

‘Sweetheart, isn’t it about time you threw in the towel, put your feet up?’ I tease, mixing my metaphors. ‘Let the youngsters save the planet. Come to Beautiful Bay and live with me all the days of your life. God knows, collectively we haven’t got that many left. An insurance bloke told me recently that at my age they could estimate on average the number of minutes I could expect to live!’ I chuckle. ‘Minutes, mind you!’

Marg laughs politely, ignoring my deliberately insensitive invitation. I already know she’d find it unacceptable, not only because of the too recent death of Anna, but also because it’s difficult to save the planet from Port Vila. ‘All the more reason to use one’s time productively,’ she replies primly.

‘Please, Marg, not the schoolmistress,’ I tease. ‘It’s the least attractive aspect of your personality.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Nick. I’m an old head and old heads are hard to find in the movement. There are plenty of marvellous young people prepared to throw themselves in front of a whaling ship, and while these confrontations are very important for the movement, of equal or even greater importance is the silent force, the behind-the-scenes work. The kids don’t know who to badger, threaten or compromise in Canberra.’ Then she cleverly gets back on track, ‘As I know you do in the islands.’

‘I don’t know about this fishing business,’ I reply. ‘I don’t have the pull, the influence I used to have.’

‘Nonsense!’ Marg cuts in. ‘You’re the grand patriarch and, unlike us, the islands still respect the wisdom that comes with age.’

‘It’s changing fast, new generation, cocaine, piercings, youth culture.’ Despite myself I’m flattered that she has referred to me as the grand patriarch, even if it is a bit of an exaggeration. However, I am aware that it isn’t like the old days. Many of the new breed of politicians in the Pacific possess law degrees and almost all are university trained, a bequest to the youth of the various Pacific Islands from Australia, New Zealand, Britain or France. It doesn’t make them less open to corruption, only smarter at it.

‘Good boy,’ she replies. I imagine her crossing the item off her list. Good ol’ Nick, always comes through. But I know from experience Marg usually has two requests. I have come to think of this tactic as the ‘double tap’. Moreover, she always makes the less important request first. A right jab followed by a vicious left hook. Suddenly she announces, ‘Nick, I hear you’ve been giving away money … a lot.’ A slight pause. ‘Is it Anna’s?’

Another pause. ‘Well not now, I suppose,’ she says, drawing out the last word.

Marg knows how to get my attention. ‘Ah, Pseudophryne corroboree, unique to Australia, habitat – Snowy Mountains. What, the amphibian chytrid fungus?’

‘Yes, amongst other threats. Guy Cooper, one of the directors with me at Taronga Park, estimates there are less than two hundred left in the wild. We want to begin a recovery program.’

‘Nick, you know there is! At least forty-seven Australian species face extinction, hundreds more worldwide.’

‘No I’m not. Some authorities suggest the fungus has spread across the planet from Africa in the last twenty years.’

‘Well yes, Nick, thank you. The point is, frogs are dying. May I say you’re good for a hundred thousand dollars?’

‘She? Watch your step, sweetheart. You and Anna – it’s time to stop. Anna is no longer here.’

Marg doesn’t know how to watch her step, or how to take a backward one. ‘Darling, let’s face it. Anna only liked frogs for their legs, lightly sautéed with fresh garlic and a sprinkling of truffles.’

I don’t take the bait. The antipathy between the two women was always going to continue beyond the grave. If the situation had been reversed and Anna had outlived Marg, she would probably have been even more vituperative. Nevertheless, Marg can’t have it both ways. I allow the silence to grow, then say, ‘Pity you disapprove so strongly of Anna. After all, it was her money, and as far as I’m concerned still is. I rather like frogs – frogs and butterflies; both so wonderfully diverse. But you’re right, frogs are having a terrible time. I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll send the money to the Bronx Zoo; they have an excellent frog conservation program underway.’

‘You bastard, Nick! You’re being a deliberate shit! It’s different now!’

‘Anna!’ Marg comes down hard on the name so that it seems to crack into two equal pieces, both parts whacking into my ear. ‘The only thing Princess Plunder ever did was rob the environment! You name it – fish, old-growth forests, animal habitat – she contributed in no small way to their degradation!’ Marg’s voice is filled with righteous anger. ‘It’s time to make restitution, and charity begins at home!’

It’s one of the things I love about Marg; she’s not just tough and stubborn, she’s got a good mind and the courage of her convictions, not to mention a whiplash tongue when she’s riled. I know I’m defeated; she’ll get her money. But nevertheless I attempt to regain the upper hand. ‘Like you, Marg, Anna had a mind of her own. As a matter of fact, she made a number of significant bequests.’

I laugh despite myself, so she knows she’s won. In the past I survived the invective of either of them by staying neutral, perhaps reflecting an ambivalence that has been the key to my relationship with both of them. ‘Enough,’ I say quietly.

I wait. Usually there’s a fair bit of growling before the purring resumes, but Marg’s dulcet tone catches me off guard. ‘Nick Duncan, I’ve loved you for most of my life. I continued to love you even after I married the admiral. But at eighteen you were too young and at twenty-six I was too old for you. We started out as lovers and here we are, still the dearest friends.’

I’m not fooled for a moment. She’s got what she wants and she’s much too intelligent to have another crack at Anna, for now. But I’m not fool enough to think the donation of the money will lead to a modicum of respect for Anna’s memory. Marg simply wants to keep a foot in the door in case she needs access in future. Yet, despite everything, I know she loves me and always has.

I’ve often mused about how I could have loved and continue to love two such completely dissimilar women, both utterly convinced they were right in all matters. Absolute conviction must be a nice thing to possess, but it’s hell on everyone else.

‘Nick, I have to go. I have a meeting this afternoon with Macquarie Bank. They’re still young – unlike the others who are all ruled by old men with paunches – and they’re considering throwing their support behind renewable energy. It looks very promising.’

I glance at my paunch. ‘I see, and their money isn’t tainted?’ My voice is still a semitone too sharp.

‘Yeah, righto, I’ll look forward to that. Morning business or evening pleasure?’ I ask, a touch acerbic. While Marg calls me often enough from Sydney, her ‘Lovely to speak with you, darling!’ calls always come in the evening when she’s through with her daily lists and is feeling mellow after a regulation gin and tonic.

‘Bye, darling, love you!’ The phone clicks in my ear. Corroboree frog will be duly ticked off as business completed. It is something I had wanted to do anyway. When you mention that frogs are endangered, people are at best only vaguely concerned. Frogs are not a priority on the endangered species list, yet they are often the canary in the coal mine, one of the warnings that our environment is changing, usually for the worse.

Despite the humidity outside, I walk back onto the front verandah and flop into the cane chair; the view over Beautiful Bay never fails to calm me. It’s too early for a drink, although I’m almost tempted. That’s yet another thing that has changed: the level in the Scotch bottle seems to be dropping more quickly since Anna died.

I am becoming dismayed at my despondency, a mood that in truth has little or nothing to do with Marg’s call, but obviously has something to do with my recurring dream about killing Anna.

I’ve always been a loner, content with my own thoughts, but never moody or churlish. I’ve observed such weakness and self-indulgence in other men and thought less of them for it.

Now I know that if I should allow the small dark cloud of despair hovering above my head to envelope me, at the very least I will destroy this gorgeous day and be tempted to open the Scotch bottle far too early.

In an attempt to dispel my gloom I try to dismiss the Marg Hamilton of Japanese fishing licences and recall the stunning twenty-six-year-old WRAN in Naval Intelligence who stole my virginity in March 1942, a month after I’d turned eighteen.

By sailing Madam Butterfly, a twenty-nine-foot gaff-rigged cutter, across the Pacific from Java to Fremantle, I’d escaped the Japanese invasion with only hours to spare. It had been in Java that I’d first met Anna, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Dutch businessman and a Javanese woman who had died in childbirth.

Anna was my first love, a young girl so beautiful that my heart still pounds at the thought of her at sixteen.

Upon my arrival in Fremantle after a difficult and eventful month at sea, I was questioned by a Naval Intelligence team, which included Marg Hamilton. She took me home and joyously bedded me less than a month after Anna and I had said a tearful farewell, promising to be mutually faithful and to ‘wait’ for each other until we could consummate our love, however long that might take.

Alas, at eighteen, the one-eyed snake is king. Marg snapped her fingers and I was halfway through undoing my fly buttons before the snap had echoed round the room. She taught me everything a boy should know in the limited time we enjoyed before I left for Melbourne to join the navy. Whereas Anna made my heart pound each time she appeared, the WRAN with the beautiful breasts and long legs gave me a hard-on every time I looked at her. Duplicity had come early in my long life of loving these two women.

Later that year, on the 12th of December 1942 to be precise, while I was at Guadalcanal with the Americans fighting the Japs, Marg wrote to say she’d become engaged to a naval officer. In fact, to Commander Rob Rich who had been my commander at HMAS Cerberus, the naval training centre in Victoria I had attended as a recruit. While I’d been in the islands, Marg had been promoted and transferred from Fremantle to Melbourne, where she’d met him and fallen in love.

I recall feeling cheated, deeply hurt and sorry for myself. In fact Marg had always been very careful to point out while I’d been with her in Fremantle that the privilege of sharing her bed was subject to her approval and should always be regarded as temporary. She was eight years older than I was and she announced in her practical way that this was an emotional chasm too large for either of us to leap.

Nonetheless, battle-weary and suffering from malaria, I was shattered by the news of her impending marriage. I felt unloved and entirely on my own. My mother had died when I was five years old; my father, a missionary in New Britain, had declined to leave his flock and had almost certainly been captured by the Japanese and was probably dead. Anna had failed to arrive in Australia, so I told myself I had every right to assume she too was captured or dead. Now the only other person in the world I loved had jilted me.

The fact that Marg was perfectly at liberty to share her affections with whomsoever she wished and that, in turn, I had barely given a thought to my absolute vow of chastity to Anna on the first occasion I had been seduced by Marg never occurred to me at the time. I recall that months later, when eventually it did, I explained my infidelity and settled my conscience by a process of retrospective reasoning.

I’d seen Anna off at the quay in Batavia when she had escaped with her family on a merchant ship. But upon arriving in Fremantle I was to learn that the Japanese were sinking ships on the high seas whether they carried troops, civilians or refugees. So, I’d conveniently made myself believe that Anna had been a victim of such bombing, leaving me free to jump into bed with Marg. My logic, both belated and dodgy, was neat as a three-button suit.

In fact, when I met Anna in Melbourne five years after the war ended and once again fell head over heels in love with a very changed and emotionally damaged woman, I was to learn that her ship had broken down on the south coast of Java, where she’d become a prisoner of the Japanese, forced to spend the war as the consort of the Japanese commander of the region, or to put it more bluntly, as a comfort woman.

After leaving Marg in Fremantle, I had not been entirely faithful to her either. Shortly after I’d arrived in Melbourne to attend the officer training course at HMAS Cerberus, I had met a lovely little Irish Catholic redhead named Mary Kelly who, while assiduously preserving her virginity for her marriage bed, had been sweet enough to relieve me in other pleasant ways.

In my mind this meant that I had technically remained faithful to Marg Hamilton. So I was filled with righteous anger that the woman I loved was going to marry a naval officer with a desk job, while I, weak with malaria, was risking my life almost daily in bloody hand-to-hand combat with the enemy to keep her safe so that she could fornicate with anyone she fancied.

I had written to her every week while I’d been in the islands with the marines, and while her own letters never promised fidelity or suggested a shared future, I nevertheless had taken it for granted that she would be waiting for me, that I had matured sufficiently to jump the emotional chasm.

The dreaded letter telling me the bad news had crossed one of my own telling her I was being repatriated from Guadalcanal; that the umpteenth dose of malaria had finally done me in; that I was to be sent to a military hospital in Victoria.

I had lain naked in my tent under a mosquito net, drowning in my own sweat, teeth chattering, shivering from the fever raging through my body, imagining my homecoming. Boy soldier, broken by malaria, returns home a hero to claim his faithful love. She sits tearfully at his bedside holding his hand in the military hospital. When he finally recovers they walk together into the sunset. In my fevered imagination I could practically hear the violins in the background.

Commander Robert Rich, Marg’s husband, was and always had been a great bloke. He subsequently welcomed me as a friend, and in the twenty years that followed he rose to the rank of admiral. Pretty bright in his own right, with the added advantage of Marg – a charge of dynamite in his life – there was no stopping his climb up the ladder. Together they raised two intelligent and thoroughly delightful children, John and Samantha, and appeared to be very happy. Alas, he was killed in a freak accident in 1965. While on a routine inspection at the Cockatoo Island Dockyards in Sydney, he was hit by a steel beam that fell from a crane.

In the five years that followed, Marg grew weary of tea and sympathy, garden parties and official dinners, which she attended alone wearing her husband’s medals. While she’d enjoyed being the admiral’s wife and raising a family, she’d been a captive of her husband’s career. Now she found herself trapped in her new role as the admiral’s widow, expected by the naval establishment to do good works within the navy family.

Marg is a woman with the energy of a buzz-saw and she was slowly rusting away in a corner of the work shed. At fifty-four she was a highly articulate and still extremely attractive woman who craved a new start, longing to walk out of the shadows cast by her former life. Finally, fed up to the teeth with fetes and charity functions, she resumed her maiden name and went to live in Tasmania.

She joined the Australian Conservation Foundation and she became actively involved in the rolling battles to save the Tasmanian wilderness. She was among the first members of the United Tasmania Group, the world’s first green political party, which was formed in 1972. This led eventually to membership of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, where the Tasmanian Greens were born as a political party and ultimately to her election as a member of the Tasmanian Legislative Council.

Marg knew how to get things done, and quickly became a bloody nuisance in Hobart and as a lobbyist in Canberra where both Labor and the Coalition thought her political party at best temporary and at worst a bad joke.

Always the closest of friends, she and I returned to a somewhat peripatetic though more intimate association after she went to Tasmania. I’d visit her in Hobart or Canberra when I was in Australia or she’d visit me at Beautiful Bay. It seemed I had finally managed to jump the emotional chasm.

When she retired from the Tasmanian Legislative Council in 1985 she returned to live in Sydney. By that time she’d earned the sobriquet ‘Madam Termite’, for her ability to undermine the halls of conservatism and complacency that seemed particularly common in Tasmania, especially the Tasmania Club, which she regarded as the greatest single assembly of silly old farts in the land.

Now, at the age of seventy-seven with all her marbles very much intact, she’s the Martin Luther King of climate change, preaching the hot gospel of global warming and the cold logic of melting icecaps. She’s the old woman and the sea, relentless defender and spokesperson for all creatures great and small, those that swim, fly, run, crawl, slither, hop, burrow or simply exist.

When Marg began her crusade she lived in a lonely world where most politicians thought of her kind as tree-hugging ratbags. She and they have come a long way, but not without suffering the slings and arrows of the environment sceptics. Last year she was invited as a non-representative speaker to the Earth Summit, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and the very first conference to be held on the subject of environment and sustainable development. Her talk followed that of British explorer Robert Swan, the first man to walk to both Poles, who warned the world that the Arctic and Antarctic were showing alarming signs of change and drew attention to the size of the hole in the ozone layer over the Arctic. Her podium-thumping talk caused several representatives from the larger nations to walk out and the remainder to give her a standing ovation.

Marg completed her speech by saying: ‘As the twentieth century totters to a close, one despotic oil-producing Arab nation has attacked another equally deficient in human rights. The organisation sponsoring this conference went to the defence of one of them in order to protect the flow of oil from the Middle East.

‘Despite the pious rhetoric, this was the cynical protection of a cheap source of the material appropriately named “crude” that is destroying our planet. The road to Basra is not only littered with Iraqi dead but also with the hastily forsaken principles of nations whose politicians claim to care. This self-serving rescue mission is a clear indication of what the so-called forces for good will do to protect their right to continue to pollute the world in the name of progress.

‘It is time to reclaim a world once beautiful but now slowly dying as we stand by and let these internal combustion bullies have their way with our planet. May they burn in a hellfire fuelled by an everlasting oil well!

‘Green is a silent force; it is not a nation, it is you and it is me. It is every individual who loves and cares about the future of our planet. Our only weapons are our voices, but we will be heard! You cannot destroy, in the name of human progress, what God provided as necessary for all life on earth.

I don’t suppose that anything Marg said was new or hadn’t been said by others. But the passion with which this seventy-six-year-old woman stated her convictions carried the audience. A minister in the federal Labor government brandishing a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald containing her speech called it a disgraceful diatribe by an ageing ex-Greens agitator who in her day was known to be a mischief-maker. To the general mirth of the House, a member of the Queensland National Party brought it up in Question Time, where he referred to Marg’s speech as a direct attack on democratic rule and a threat to the ANZUS Treaty.

If I am beginning to sound like a fellow traveller, then I must confess that my conversion, like that of so many others, is only very recent. Anna’s world had no time for the climate debate and, to be fair, I gave the subject almost no thought until the advent of the Earth Summit.

I guess we were all simply too busy kicking and clawing our way up the ladder to question our ambition or the morality of our actions. We may never have used a phrase such as ‘Greed is good’, but we also never questioned our right to have what we wanted, whatever the cost. While I loved Marg Hamilton, I thought her views a bit far-fetched at times, in fact most of the time, while Anna simply dismissed her as a raving fucking fanatic.

I guess I’d always accepted that humans are by nature greedy and that altruism is rare in our species; enough is never enough and we cannot be too rich. Or, as Anna would say with an impatient sigh, or a naughty giggle, ‘Nicholas, if I don’t, someone else will.’

If Marg saw the Iraq–Kuwait war as a disaster, Anna had very different views. In the early stages of her cancer, when she wasn’t so ill from the chemotherapy, she and I watched the bombing and the carnage on the road to Basra as American aircraft bombed the retreating Iraqi soldiers. I recall her saying with a shrug, ‘Well, at least it is good for my oil shares.’

‘Isn’t it rather a risky time to be investing in oil?’ I suggested. While she never consulted me on money matters, and often dealt in big numbers, I was shocked when she told me the size of this particular transaction – a million dollars US.

‘Nicholas, I was lucky to get them in the scramble to buy on the New York and London stock exchanges.’

‘But surely the greater the price of raw material, of crude, the less profit to the buyer?’

Anna loved explaining the intricacies of a financial system that had made her perhaps the richest woman in the southern hemisphere. ‘They buy the crude from the supplier country and then add a percentage, predicated on all the costs they incur right up to the moment you use the bowsers, and with a good solid profit margin included.’

‘Sure, that’s what we all do. I do in the shipping business. What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing, but you don’t own the docks, the cranes, the passengers or the freight you carry, the terminal at your destination, the transport to the retailers or the retail outlet itself, as the oil companies do.’

‘Yup, the entire distribution system, the six or seven stages it takes to go from a barrel of crude to the petrol pump, and each of these stages is a separate profit centre.’

‘You mean they’ve already made a profit on the first stage, buying the crude and adding their mark-up, then they add an additional profit at each stage? Seven stages, seven additional profits … Wow!’

She grinned. ‘Nicholas, you’re improving. I’ll make a financier out of you yet.’

‘Cheating? If it is, it’s legitimate cheating. It’s capitalism and the joy of profit centres.’ Anna sighed heavily. ‘Nicholas, whatever is going to happen when I’m gone? These days you’re sounding more and more like the Green Bitch.’

‘Steady on, darling. I won’t have you calling Marg that!’ I reproached her.

Anna sniffed, ignoring my reprimand. Faced with a possibly terminal illness, she didn’t give a shit and the gloves were off between the two women. She openly called Marg the ‘Green Bitch’ and Marg in turn referred to her as ‘Princess Plunder’. I knew there wasn’t going to be any reconciliation.

‘Nicholas, if I’m not here when the price of oil drops below twenty dollars a barrel, you must sell immediately,’ Anna instructed me.

I recall laughing and protesting, ‘Darling, I’m in the shipping business. If it doesn’t drop soon the company will probably go broke – diesel fuel is our greatest expense.’

‘Try to understand, the higher the price of a barrel of crude the greater the profit to the oil companies.’

Anna pointed to the screen, where as far as the camera eye could see, thousands of mangled trucks and piles of ordnance lay scattered along the road to Basra. The dead lay sprawled in their thousands in the fierce Arabian desert sun, many roasted and blackened, or grotesquely welded together in the back of still smouldering Iraqi army trucks. ‘This little war is eventually going to make me a lot of money, Nicholas,’ Anna asserted. She’d seen too much death and destruction in her life to take much notice of what was happening on the television screen.

I shrugged, deeply saddened by her desire to make a killing in the market, because all the money in the world wouldn’t save my beloved Anna, yet she couldn’t let go.

I guess Marg Hamilton represents the new, emerging, untried and inexperienced good of the new century soon to be upon us while Anna typifies the careless greed of the one coming to its end.

I still think the odds are probably stacked against Marg as the wealthy countries maintain their voracious appetites for profit despite the cost to the plundered planet and the emerging nations become increasingly industrialised and demand their share of the goodies. But try telling Marg this. She, like Anna, is a poor loser, determined, even if single-handedly, to pry our tottering planet from the clutches of greed, capitalism and pollution which are causing the extinction of so many species that have no immediate economic value to humans.

‘The last generation belongs to Princess Plunder, the next generation to our young people and their children,’ Marg claims optimistically. I hope she’s right. I lived through the sixties when flower power was going to change everything. I can only hope green power is more effective.

As I sit ruminating over the Misses Yin and Yang, Princess Plunder and the Green Bitch, each possessed of the same fanatical desire to destroy the values of the other, I am unaware that Saffron has walked onto the verandah until she coughs politely to catch my attention.

I remind myself that while she didn’t mention it earlier she represents yet another female issue I have to contend with. Saffron wants permission to get a tattoo, a butterfly on the point of her shoulder. Joe Popkin, her grandfather and my partner in the shipping company, has refused his permission and she’s working on me to convince him.

Joe Popkin, who runs the Port Moresby shipping office, is a Black American married to a Tahitian woman, the delightful Lela. Their son, Joe Junior, married yet another, the fiery and beautiful Frances. The gorgeous Saffron, who has recently completed a Bachelor of Economics at Sydney University, is the result. ‘Would you kindly fetch me a Scotch and water, please, darling?’ I ask.

She nods. ‘Uncle Nick, have you spoken to Grandfather Joe?’ Her eyes remind me of a starry night at sea.

‘No.’ My bloody memory isn’t what it used to be. But then I suppose nothing is, in particular the area immediately below the belt line. One of the tragedies of growing old is that pretty is still pretty, the roving eye still takes in what it sees and the imagination is just as active, but alas, for most of us the one-eyed snake can no longer raise its head. I guess in theory this makes me a dirty old man.

‘Put one of those studs through your tongue instead,’ I suggest. ‘At least it goes largely unseen and you can remove it when you’re mature enough to realise that you’re a beautiful woman and don’t need any of that trendy crap.’

She looks shocked. ‘Uncle Nick!’ she exclaims, dark eyes as wide as saucers.

‘Oh, gawd!’ I laugh to hide my embarrassment. It seems only yesterday she was a little girl holding my hand as we visited nature’s fairy lanterns, the ripe persimmons hanging from the bare branches of the trees lining my driveway.

Her one-word explanation of the stimulatory use of a tongue stud together with her giggling has completely stolen my resolve. She knows I’m done for, mere putty, an old-man pushover. ‘Very well, I’ll have a word with Joe,’ I say gruffly. ‘But I suggest you think about it carefully; tattoos don’t rub off.’

Saffron pecks me happily on the cheek, turns and wiggles her tight little bum triumphantly as she leaves to make my drink. ‘It’s called a tongue bar and there’s even a version that vibrates,’ she calls back, laughing. ‘I’ll bring your lunch out on a tray.’

I don’t ask her how she knows all this. The kids these days seem to know everything and nothing very useful.

Next evening Marg Hamilton calls. I’m relaxed, two stiff glasses of Scotch under my belt. I tell myself it’s an evening call, so no harm can come.

‘That’s very nice to hear but quite unnecessary,’ I laugh. ‘Saffron and I have been out on Madam Butterfly; it’s been a lovely day, good strong breeze, I feel ten years younger.’ Saffron’s a damn good sailor and does the hard work on board while allowing me to appear to be the skipper.

‘I mean generally,’ Marg replies, not listening. ‘When we last talked you didn’t sound yourself. What’s wrong?’

I’ve been unable to keep anything from her for as long as I can remember. It’s something about her tone of voice and the strength of her character. Even a casual question demands an answer. Maybe it’s because she listens with her eyes, and despite this being the telephone, I can sense her gaze fixed upon me. I clear my throat. ‘Old man’s dreams, nothing more,’ I reply, attempting to make light of the matter. ‘And I’m up and down all night.’

‘Well, have you had a prostate examination lately?’ she asks in her practical way.

‘And the dreams … What kind of dreams? Good ones? No, they couldn’t be, or you wouldn’t be complaining. I read recently that ex-servicemen often start having dreams as they grow older. They may feel guilt—’

‘Well of course not, not directly. But I can sense you’re distracted. Something’s wrong. What is it? The war? Anna?’

‘You’re grieving, Nick. Hardly surprising,’ she adds in a rare albeit offhand acknowledgement of her departed rival. ‘These war dreams … do you feel guilty?’

I sigh. ‘God knows I have reason enough to feel guilty. Though probably least of all over what happened in the war. The Japs had it coming to them and I’ve never felt any remorse. Although I don’t suppose one ever quite gets over the business of killing.’

‘Ah, then it’s Anna,’ Marg announces, as usual coming down hard on the name. ‘Is she in your dreams, these war dreams?’

‘Like what exactly?’ I ask, slightly impatient. ‘I imagine it’s all a part of the process of grief and growing old. The past revisited. Elephants going to a predestined place to die.’

‘From the war. I told you, I’ve recently read about it – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.’

‘No, our war, the Burma Railway, Changi, Sandakan, the Middle East, New Guinea, the Solomons. We didn’t give it a fancy name then.’

‘So I haven’t had a sleepless night thinking about it from the day I was demobbed and exchanged my naval uniform for a cheap government-issue suit. That is, until about four months ago. It’s a bit bloody late for Post-Traumatic Stress whatever, don’t you think?’

‘Nick, that’s when Anna died,’ Marg says patiently. ‘I think you should see someone. And you should definitely get that prostate checked.’

‘Darling, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’ll ask around. I’ll be very discreet.’

‘Marg, leave it alone!’ I protest. ‘It’s only started recently. I daresay it will pass.’ I laugh. ‘It’s probably the after-dinner glass of Scotch catching up with me … the years of after-dinner Scotches.’ I don’t tell her that my nightcap has turned plural three or four times over.

‘Oh, I see, feeling sorry for ourselves are we? The navy doesn’t forget its war heroes, darling.’

‘Ha, ha. All those invitations to mess dinners must have been lost in the mail.’

Marg’s voice grows concerned. ‘Should I come over to the island? I could help with your inquiries about the fishing rights.’

Despite myself I burst into laughter. ‘I couldn’t think of a quicker way to scuttle your plans. As soon as the Department of Fisheries learned you were on the island, darling, they’d close everything tighter than a duck’s bum.’ I hope my mirthful outburst will distract her attention from me and bring it back to matters green, but I should know better. She’s tenacious. ‘You can trust me, Nick.’

‘Nick, I’m only going to make a few inquiries. Bye, darling.’ I hear the click at the other end.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I mumble to myself. Marg Hamilton is on the warpath and somewhere along the line someone closely resembling Dr Strangelove will be tapping the end of his fountain pen on a desk and asking me a bunch of questions intended to reveal my innermost mind. X-rays and brain scans are certain to follow, with a urologist in the wings waiting to probe my arse with a surgical glove.

A week later, with a couple of nightmares thrown in for good measure and five empty bottles of Scotch, I pick up the phone to hear Marg Hamilton on the other end. I groan; it’s a morning call. As usual there’s not so much as a greeting. ‘Nick, very exciting news. I’ve found just the chappie.’

I sigh. ‘Why, of course! It’s confirmed then. Good. Now, may I get on with my life?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! Nick Duncan, you’re damaged … possibly severely damaged. You’re going to need help.’

I’m certain she must feel the weight of my impatient sigh all the way down in Sydney. ‘Forget it, darling. I’m past repairing. Let it go, it will sort itself out.’

‘No it won’t!’ she says emphatically. ‘You’ll simply have to fly over and see the psychiatrist I’ve found. Lovely man. You’ll enjoy him.’

‘Well then, he’s probably got deep psychological scars of his own to attend to.’ Suddenly angry, I find myself shouting. ‘Bloody oath, Marg, will you leave me alone!’ And I slam down the receiver.

But, of course, the phone rings again moments later, finally stops, then five minutes later starts to ring again. Somewhat calmer and ashamed of my childish tantrum I answer it. Her voice is triumphant. ‘See, I knew it! You’re in trouble, Nick. You can hang up all you like, but I’m not giving up on you. You need help. Now get Saffron to pack your bag and drive you to the airport and I’ll meet your plane on arrival. You can stay with me. Ring first and tell me the number of your flight.’

I grin despite myself. ‘I have to be over next month for Saffron’s graduation, we’ll discuss it then. But if you don’t mind we’ll stay in a hotel.’

Marg doesn’t take umbrage. She’s too busy to care for guests anyway. ‘Don’t disappoint me, Nick. It’s hard to get an appointment. I’ll have to pull strings; he’s top-drawer.’

Silence, then her voice suddenly grows tender. ‘Nick, you do know that I love you, don’t you? I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, darling.’ She pauses and then gives a despairing choke. ‘I … I couldn’t stand it!’ I’m surprised to hear that she is crying.

BRYCE COURTENAY

FISHING for STARS

Contents

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE