Geoffrey Cousins - The Butcherbird

When they were finally seated after a seemingly endless inquisition on number of eggs, whether crisp bacon should be served on the side, whether guava juice should be added to the fresh orange, whether sourdough toast was better than jam and black bread, Mac gazed appreciatively at Jack’s full plate.

‘It’s great to see someone enjoy their tucker. Know what I mean? Enjoy life, really. People who don’t eat don’t really enjoy anything much I reckon. But you seem to have a bit of fun.’

Jack looked up quickly to see whether this was an oblique reference to his indiscretion of the previous evening, but Mac was concentrating with great intensity on the slicing of a kangaroo sausage, ‘killed on the old place’. He felt the need to respond to his host’s enthusiasm for breakfast, sport, life, toast, kangaroos, all that lived and breathed and was cooked.

‘Well, I’ve always loved sport and activity and a good feed afterwards, although I don’t often eat a breakfast like this.’

‘Nor do I. You wouldn’t believe the stuff Bonny gets into me. Fruits you’ve never heard of all blended up with wheat germ and soya beans and curdled goat’s milk or whatever. It feels like she pours it down me with a spout. No enemas needed in this household, I can tell you.’

Jack laughed uncertainly. ‘Yes, we go the healthy organic route most of the time.’ He paused for another mouthful of his four-egg omelette with three types of mushrooms and chorizo sausage on the side. ‘Incidentally, you mentioned I had a low golf handicap, how do you know that?’

Mac looked up with a half-smile. ‘I like to know about my guests, know what they like, what to avoid. Just common courtesy, hey?’

There was silence and serious eating. Finally, Mac pushed away his plate and it was instantly whisked from the table. ‘So, you’ve had a great run in property, I hear?’

‘Yes, the last few years have been remarkable. We’ve sold just about everything off the plan, which is unheard of.’

Mac poured coffee from the plunger. ‘Do you have a formula? The one-sheet-of-paper idea?’

‘Pretty much. Always a harbour view or waterfront, always big rooms, huge bathroom somewhere, usually a fireplace, a home cinema, a concierge in the building, forget the gym and the swimming pool since no one ever uses them, always an enormous price. And we never bargain. It seems to work.’

Mac laughed. ‘They made you chairman of the Property Council and you were on the shortlist for Businessman of the Year. It seems to work all right. And you love it, do you? It still gets the adrenalin running? You’ve got to have that, haven’t you?’

Jack eased back and looked out across the rail to the river of his youth. He played with his sugar spoon, tapped it on the cup, placed it carefully in the saucer. ‘Well, to tell you the truth, it has lost an edge for me lately.’ He paused. He barely knew this man and he hadn’t spoken of his feelings to anyone, not even Louise. But no one else had asked, and Mac was leaning forward, genuinely interested in him and his life, and he was sated with the warmth of coddled cholesterol and New Guinea Highlands coffee and the memory of… what was her name? He would have to find out discreetly before she came up for breakfast. Mac said nothing. He knew the art of a good listener.

‘I like what I do and I guess I’m good at it, judging by the results. I suppose this sounds incredibly arrogant, but it’s just become too easy. We design those things, I dream up some absurd price, jack it up another twenty per cent and they generally snap them up before they’re even built. In a way, I enjoyed it more when we had to struggle.’

‘Who’s we? You have partners?’ Mac’s voice was quiet now.

The staff had slid away, they needed no signal.

‘No, I’m a lone wolf, I guess. Louise, my wife, used to be my partner. She’s still my partner, but not in the business. We have two kids so that’s pretty full time.’

‘You like it that way?’ Jack looked up. ‘Being your own boss?’ Mac poured more coffee into both cups. The pelican flew quietly away as the boat eased up on the anchor chain. The tide was turning and the Pacific Ocean was running in to meet the fresh waters of the Nepean and the Colo and the Hawkesbury, running down from the Blue Mountains and the Southern Highlands. With the salt water came the schools of red bream and taylor, flathead, sometimes black fish, and the predators that followed-the Port Jackson sharks, the hammerheads, the ferocious bull sharks. The sharks were all saltwater creatures and yet they’d been found more than thirty miles upstream, way into fresh water, and once, when Jack was only about eighteen, a waterskier had been taken at Sackville, which was thought to be impossible. He had hoped all the waterskiers would be frightened off this river. He’d hated their destruction of the tranquillity even when he was a boy.

He chewed at the question. Did he like it that way? Being his own boss, working with the same circle, half-circle, of colleagues and contractors, lunching regularly with the group, using the same ideas he’d lived on for twenty years, dining out on the same stories he’d told for too long. He hated it when Louise said, ‘I think we might have heard that one, Jack’, but it was always true.

But something made him hold back from opening his cloak to this man. ‘I do. I like running my own race.’

Mac gave him the knowing smile of an old python. ‘So do I.’ He rose from the table. ‘Come on, I’ll show you a few of the other little toys we have on offer. God knows when the rest of these lazy bastards’ll climb out of their pits.’

The two men walked slowly away together, both satisfied with their conversation. Not too much was to be given; understanding would come from what was unsaid. As far as Mac could see, which was further than most, Jack wanted nothing from him except a bit of fun. If so, he was the only person on this boat with such modest desires. And Mac wanted very little from Jack. Sure, he would touch him up for a discount on that penthouse for Bonny and get it, but that was just pigeon shooting. He liked the bloke.

From behind, as they strolled the length of the boat, the contrast in the silhouettes was comic. The one short, square, bandy. The other tall, lean, lithe. The sun was high now above the bridge. The Honey Bear was ready for another day.

The door to number thirty-two Alice Street, Woollahra was a solid block of stainless steel without blemish or keyhole. Set into the facade of a late 1890s terrace in a conservative, manicured street of immaculate ‘restoration’, it seemed to be either thumbing its nose at history or promising relief, depending on your point of view. The minuscule front garden was a sea of river stones rather than the ferns and mondo grass or camellias and azaleas of neighbouring terraces. Apart from these two aberrations, number thirty-two faced the world with wrought-iron and Victorian modesty, just like all the other widows in the row.

Jack climbed somewhat more stiffly than usual from the leather seat of his Aston Martin, stretched, looked up and down the street as if checking for observers, and clicked the remote. A dull thump emanated from the stainless steel and he made his way into the house. He still experienced a frisson of pleasure every time he entered. It was his finest work as an architect, from the days when he really practised his design skills. That was the part of property that lifted his soul. And Louise had used all her skills as a negotiator to convince the local council to allow a conversion they’d never seen before and of which they were deeply suspicious. Two terraces joined together, not side by side but from front to back, with a glass atrium between, opening to a sculpture court in the centre-it might comply with the building codes, but was it ‘right’?