Geoffrey Cousins - The Butcherbird

She liked him immediately. The room seemed full of people with angles, with Janus faces and cubist poses like the shapes projected on the walls. This man stood straight and square, looked her in the eyes when he talked, not away to see what he was missing somewhere else, and his smile was distributed evenly across the mouth, unlike the lopsided smile of sarcasm or contempt. Jack was called away by a beefy, red-faced business type, leaving Louise and the Pope together.

‘I understand you’ve been a great help to my husband.’

‘Not yet, I’m afraid, but we’re hoping to be.’

‘Who’s we, Mr Normile?’

‘Just some friends. We’re trying to keep it all low key and anonymous.’

She looked at him with her direct, uncompromising stare. ‘You need to understand we work as a team when the chips are down. Sometimes I step forward if he steps back, you understand?’

He held her gaze and, without realising it, reached out one hand to also hold her arm, as if to steady her. ‘I do.’

‘Then there might come a time when you or someone else will need to call me. And I’ll need to know everything. Play your Boys’ Own games in the meanwhile, but not when the time comes.’

They could see Jack returning to them and the Pope released her arm gently and moved away. She watched his tall spare figure weave its way through the crowd with a nod here, a wave there, as Jack reached her side. ‘He’s a good man to have on your side.’

Louise smiled. ‘Yes. When this is all over, I’d love to have dinner with him and his wife. Does he have a wife?’

‘I think so. At least he had one. He’s always been a bit of a mystery. And in the group we don’t really talk about our personal lives.’

They moved from their corner into the melee, arm in arm. As they reached the centre of the throbbing mass, the unusually excited voice of Archie Speyne could just be heard over the hubbub. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Friends. Ladies and gentlemen.’

It was to no avail. Silencing this crowd, fuelled with adrenalin cocktails, would require more than Archie’s entrails. A cell phone rang in someone’s pocket. Then another, and another, and within a few seconds scores of tones and tinny music grabs and feeble fake bells were bleating all over the room. People began to laugh and fumble to switch off the offending gadgets, but the number added to the cacophony outgrew the few that were stilled, and as conversation ceased and at last subsided the buzz of the electronic locusts grew louder. A spotlight now framed Archie and the small round podium he was standing on rose a couple of metres higher. Suddenly, a massive amplified bell tolled and, as it did so, all the cell phones stopped their buzzing simultaneously. There was silence for a moment, and then scattered applause.

‘Who said you can’t silence an art crowd?’ Archie waited for more applause and laughter and, unusually, it came. ‘Are we going to ruin this night with speeches and auctions and other boring function features? We are not. This is not a function. This is a happening. This is the Biddulph Gallery.’

As the last words rang out in Archie’s most dramatic tones, he disappeared into blackness. The spotlight and every other light in the space was extinguished. There was complete darkness for a few seconds and only the weird music swirled louder and louder around the bodies packed together in their designer gowns and La Perla underwear. Lasered shapes reappeared on the walls, merging and drifting apart and then, unexpectedly, coalescing into the image vaguely recalled from the invitation. The crowd could feel rather than see the wisps of smoke thickening around them as the music morphed into more natural sounds, birds perhaps, or the wild calls of some unknown beast, or running water, or was that a roar or the snarl of a predator close by, in the room almost, disturbing, almost frightening, and yet amusing, because this was a party.

A shaft of light strobed into a section of the gallery where, strangely, there appeared to be no people. A shape moved into the flickering light, a human shape, a female shape surely, almost feline in its careful stepping, but difficult to decipher in the gloom. There was something in its hand, a rope, a lead of some kind, yes it was leading something, an animal perhaps was slinking in behind. My God what was it-now, you could see it, see the great black stripes, see the eyes, almost the whiskers, some said later they saw the whiskers, but it was there, the tiger, there was no doubt. There were gasps, squeals, nervous laughter, no screams, yet, but they were coming, they were building-and then a second of complete blackness followed by a blinding light. The dresses and dinner jackets almost stumbled into one another for a moment as dazzled eyes tried to refocus. There was no woman, there was no tiger. Just dresses and dinner jackets. But there had been, hadn’t there? They’d all seen it-or had they? Applause and laughter and chatter broke out around the room and slowly they began to focus on the small but brilliantly illuminated painting in the middle of the main wall. It was only about a metre square but it was unmistakably The Tiger by Franz Marc.

Mac was as stunned by it all as anyone, maybe more so.

People were wandering by almost shyly, as if he were holding court, saying ‘How amazing,’ ‘Congratulations, great party,’ ‘No one else could do it,’ and he was nodding modestly, not speaking, just letting the parade of supplicants pass by. He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find the Prime Minister of Australia standing beside his knight of the oblong table, Sir Laurence Treadmore.

‘Great night, Mac. Wonderful gesture of yours. We need more of this sort of thing. Philanthropy, I mean, not parties-although a few more like this wouldn’t go astray. Beats rubber chicken at the bowling club, which is what I usually get.’

The scent of power and success, of perfumed women, of the perfect white gardenia on Sir Laurence’s black silk lapel, the musk of rising sap-it was a heady potion Mac knew well, usually used to his advantage, but tonight he was reeling from its effect just a degree or two. He was about to click into gear with a witty response to the Prime Minister who, although he’d never had a real job, had risen effortlessly through the political arm of the labour movement and then into local government, state parliament, and on to his present comfortable seat, who was a crass idiot in Mac’s view, a hostage of the unions, committed to taking from hardworking successful people and giving to layabouts who’d never worked a day in their lives, but was nevertheless the Prime Minister. Before Mac could fashion his witticism, the crass idiot spoke again.

‘Was that really a tiger? Might get me in terrible trouble with the animal liberationists or women against fur coats or something if it was.’

The Prime Minister peered down at Mac, smiling, but not so much. He was a tall, handsome man, especially in his own opinion, with a dense shot of crinkled black hair that gleamed unnaturally in the harsh lights.

Mac stammered a response. ‘I’m honestly not sure. It’s not really my party. I mean it is, but I didn’t organise it. Well not all of it-not that bit.’ How to take credit for the great night without accepting responsibility for any difficulties had Mac’s stick cleft very deeply. ‘Laurence did some of it. He might know.’

Sir Laurence dodged this pass as neatly as if it had never been thrown. ‘Mysteries of the night. I’m sure no one will ever know the answers. Everyone here will be much more interested in your new foreign investment policy, Prime Minister.’

There was, in fact, no one in the gallery who was even vaguely interested in such a policy at this moment, other than the Prime Minister, who was always fascinated by his own pronouncements and assumed a similar reaction from other citizens, and Sir Laurence, who never raised any issue without a clear purpose. It was, he believed, discourteous to do so. Mac knew he should be interested, but was still struggling to remember why as the Prime Minister spoke again.