Geoffrey Cousins - The Butcherbird

As for the contrast between these beautifully wrapped little bonbons and the amorphous lump of old political horseflesh following them, well it was almost enough to turn the stomach. Why didn’t Harold Wilde do something about himself? Although what that might be Mac wasn’t sure. There was no way any of Bonny’s medicine ball throwing or shadow-boxing exercises (Mac loved to punch at her) or squats or anything could wear away the rolls of fat that were flopping around under that tent of a shirt. There must be a couple of kilos in the neck folds alone. Disgusting. The huge behind just sat itself on a soft Senate seat and dozed until it was lunchtime or dinner time or some meal time no one had ever heard of, and now it was waddling its way onto his boat behind his collection of sweetmeats, defiling the soft evening air, a great heaving mass of visual pollution. But useful, potentially useful. So feed him up, let him leer and sip and sup. One day, some day soon, it would pay back in spades. Mac gave him a cheery shout as he lurched his way aboard and the great bloated jellyfish almost slipped over as he looked up.

He would have slipped over if it hadn’t been for the steadying hand from behind that grabbed at some protuberance poking out from the tent. There was Shane O’Connell, where he always was, lurking just behind someone, ready to pick up any crumbs that fell from a corporate table or grease some grateful politician’s way into a sinecure. He was another member of Mac’s board, the company that was the great provider, the tree of plenty, the goose of goodness, the cream jar for all these sticky-fingered players and hangers-on and pigeons; the company he, Mac, Big Mac, had created, sired-yes, sired like a great stallion and then given birth to like a… well anyway, sired like a great stallion. By sheer force of personality and guts he’d wrenched it into the world, and now it was the largest home-insurer in Australia, a name everyone knew, HOA, Homes of Australia-the name he’d given it, just as he’d given it life and form and air.

But you had to watch people like Shane O’Connell. They were not always unquestioning in their allegiance to Mac, to HOA. They failed to understand that the two were indivisible, that HOA was nothing without Mac and that Mac was-he jerked back from that thought as if slapped with a wet fish. Sure, all his vast, complex, interlocking, tangled fishnet of private companies and Swiss bank accounts and hedge fund investments and trust funds and God knew what else (well he hoped God knew because Mac could never understand it all), sure this stuck-spaghetti mix all lived on the sauce of HOA, but there was no reason ever to assume that sauce would cease to flow. Maybe now and again Mac woke in the night, in the room he’d moved to across the hall from Edith, or in the apartment, with Bonny breathing softly, evenly beside him, the magnolia scent of her breath mingling with the musk of her mounds and clefts. Yes, he woke sometimes despite his oft-repeated boast, ‘I always sleep like a baby’. (Babies woke, didn’t they?) But not often. And not for long. If there was a problem, and lately there’d been one or two icebergs in the water, he attacked ferociously and sank them, or whatever you did to icebergs.

But you had to watch the doubters. Shane O’Connell was easy to handle once you knew where he was headed. But he was deceitful and shifty and on the take. At least Sir Laurence’s arrangements were all in the open-well, in the open with Mac. There was no need for others to be concerned with them.

O’Connell was one of those lawyers who didn’t really practise law and was only on his board because he represented the interests of the biggest foreign shareholder in HOA. Just how he’d brown-nosed his way into that job Mac had never discovered. Anyway, it wasn’t O’Connell who had been waking him up in the black hours lately. It was that damn idiot Buckley, a creature of his own making. The man had been a run-of-the-mill accountant before Mac promoted him to chief financial officer and then, only a year and a half ago, to chief executive. And now he’d found religion or something and was scampering around mouthing off about ‘corporate governance’ and ‘transparency’ and ‘triple bottom line’. There was only one bottom line in HOA and that was the line Mac drew in the sand, the auditors audited, the shareholders knelt before. As they all had and did in the regular, steady rhythm of corporate communion. So why this idiot Buckley was digging around in corners among contracts and ‘conflicts’ that didn’t concern him and hadn’t concerned anyone else-because they didn’t know about them, because they didn’t need to know about them-Mac was at a loss to understand. He was well paid, obscenely well paid. He just failed to understand what he was paid for. Why did he need to know the detail of every consultancy fee? What business of his was it when reserves were released to profits? The actuaries were responsible for working that out, not the CEO. Or, more accurately, Mac decided what was needed and the actuaries signed off on it. It had always been that way. For Christ’s sake, he’d hired all these people, and they hadn’t been easy to find; flexibility of thinking was required and not many people had it.

Apparently not Buckley. Well, he’d have to go. But in the quiet transition the market appreciated. Which meant a replacement who looked better. Which was what was keeping him awake at night. Still, as his father used to say, ‘Macquarie, the solution to any problem is usually in front of your eyes-you just look through them.’

Enough of this navel gazing (though he took one last peek down at the Big Mac chest and stomach and thighs before they had to be lightly covered to greet the guests). The last of them was aboard now and it was time to descend and dazzle them with all his force and power and the trappings of this floating castle. The one he’d really blow away was this last figure, coming aboard in a jacket that looked like tweed-tweed, on a twenty-degree evening-probably with patches on the elbows, and carrying a duffel bag that reminded him of something you found in an army disposal store. Archie Speyne might be the director of the Sydney Museum of Modern Art, he might be used to sauntering around halls jammed with masterpieces (half of them jammed with crap from what Mac could see), but he’d be bowled over when he took the art tour on the Honey Bear. Yes, they’d start with that today. He’d been planning to start with the toy tour, all the boats and gadgets and playthings, but this was better. Straight into the art. He couldn’t wait to see the look on that pumped-up little know-it-all’s face when he saw Mac’s Whiteley, better than anything the gallery had, and the Moore sculpture-a small one, admittedly, but on a boat and who the hell expects to see a Henry Moore on a boat in Sydney Harbour? Well, he’d be blown away, and would soon forget about plaguing Mac for whatever it was he’d been manoeuvring for over the past few months. Mac had invited him for sport, so let’s have some sport.

Wisps of early-morning fog were burning off the gunmetal Hawkesbury, flocked here and there with shafts of sun filtering through the impasto of clouds and mist. The river was still, tide turning, windless, birdless, fishless, boatless-except for the sleeping Honey Bear, resting at anchor in an angophora-lined cove. Its gold standard hung limply at the pole. The deep navy of the hull with amber rails and beading curved elegantly into the sheet-glass water. A fish jumped. The ripples spread out gently from the point of entry and reflected in the eight coats of marine varnish. As the haze swept up off the river, the peeling pink bark of the angophoras was lit with klieg lights and the colours danced and dazzled in a blotchy palette. The great river turned blue in unison with the sky and the world was suddenly awake. A pelican flew overhead, peered down at the floating blue log like a bewigged judge assessing a miscreant, lowered its undercarriage and set down in a foamy wash.