Mark Abernethy - Second Strike

Mac remembered carrying a big seagrass bag behind Diane, who was dressed in a see-through pink sarong that revealed she was topless. He tried to be sophisticated and not too Rockhampton about the topless thing. He was trying to impress this bird.

They had walked up the Camp Cove beach and continued under the trees and around the point. He wanted to tell her they’d gone too far but they’d kept walking around the point and gone down a cliff path at the next beach. He’d followed her to a position in the middle of the sand where a lot of tanned bodies lay around like seals, and as Diane was fi nishing off a story about a nympho secretary at the British High Commission in Islamabad, she unfurled her mat on the sand and removed her sarong. And then took off her undies.

He could remember it like it was yesterday. He’d turned slowly to see what reaction the crowded beach was going to have to this dramatic nude form and then the penny dropped: it was a nude beach.

Everyone was starkers.

Mac had been running full speed to try to stay with her, to downplay the provincial Queensland thing and make it about his education, his worldliness. But when Diane had said, ‘Come on, get those shorts off – it’s good for you,’ Mac had run headlong into who he really was, which was a Mick footballer from Rockhampton who had never been on a nudist beach in his life and had no intention of removing his shorts now he’d found himself on one.

He’d stood there humiliated and embarrassed as Diane lay down on her mat, pulled her Evian and then her squirty bottle of carotene oil from the seagrass bag. He’d tried to leave that nudist beach quick-smart but Diane wouldn’t go, just lay there laughing at him from behind her Ray-Bans. ‘You silly old thing,’ she’d taunted with her plummy English accent. ‘No one’s looking. You are so funny, Richard.’

He’d broken the deadlock that day by dropping his daks and lying down on the damned towel, clenching his bum like he was trying to crack a walnut, praying to God that no one from HMAS Watson up on the cliff could recognise him. His enduring image of that day was the smell of carotene and the vision of a tanned woman who was waxed all over. An enigma of a woman who had left him for dust.

Now, sitting in the pool bar at the Shangri-La, Mac felt physically relieved not to be standing on the beach at Lady Bay. Clyde put a glass on the bar, dropped in one large rock and poured a double of Bundy rum over it. Jenny said it was a hick’s drink but the Queensland rum was comforting for Mac. He gulped a mouthful and, opening his mouth slightly, felt the fumes evaporate into his mouth and sinuses.

An Anglo male, fortyish, with an IBM salesman haircut, sat down at one of the tables near the pool and, leaning back, read the Economist .

The Economist at nine-thirty in the pm? Spies always carried a prop such as a magazine or newspaper into a public place, but to Mac’s brief glance the bloke didn’t seem like a dire unfriendly. Maybe a Canadian or Kiwi embassy intelligence designate, just merging into a conference and seeing if Mac was up for a chat. It’s how the vast majority of human intelligence was conducted: with a smile, over a beer.

He smelled her before he saw her, and then Diane’s arm was over his shoulder and she was kissing his ear.

‘Hello Mr Grumpy Pants,’ she whispered. ‘Still sulking?’

Before he could reply, she ordered her own drink. ‘I’m having what he’s having, thank you, Mr Clyde.’

She had changed into white tennis shorts, navy tank top, fl at espadrilles and lots of tan. She looked stunning and as she folded her arms and cleared her throat, Mac found her a barstool, dragged it over and Diane sat down as her Tiger arrived. She clinked glass with Mac and drank from the bottle.

Diane had been annoying with the whole bra-and-panties act, but they made up over a few drinks, and attempted to bore Mr Economist into leaving with a louder-than-necessary marital conversation about mortgage rates and mobile phone plans.

At 11.43, Mr Economist left without looking at anyone. He’d been made and was hitting the hay.

Mac had forgotten how funny Diane could be when she drank.

She kept trying to order more Bundys and he made the mistake of asking her if she was trying to get him drunk.

‘I’m trying to loosen you up, Richard,’ she said, prodding him in the chest. ‘Emotionally, you’re like a fucking oyster.’

Clyde kept the drinks fresh and Mac and Diane agreed to take turns having their whinge about events of the past, and then never mention it again. Diane wanted him to start, but Mac said, ‘Ladies fi rst.’ She rolled her eyes so Mac suggested they fl ip a coin to which she said, so the whole poolside area could hear her, ‘You are such a child!’

‘Keep it down,’ mumbled Mac into her ear, and Diane whispered that this was perfect husband-and-wife cover – a drunken dis-agreement about something petty.

‘Rock, paper, scissors?’ asked Mac.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ said Diane and grabbed a coin from Clyde.

She lost the toss and went fi rst, reminding him of a night in Jakarta when they’d got drunk at the old harbour, and they’d slept in Diane’s cottage in the British residential compound.

‘You remember?’ she asked. Mac nodded, looking into his beer and hoping she wasn’t playing him.

‘You said you had been going to ask me to marry you, when we were at that restaurant in Sydney, a few days before,’ she said.

‘Yep,’ said Mac. ‘I remember.’

‘And I said, “ Really? ”, and you said, “ Yes “?’

Mac nodded, a little unsettled by the memory.

‘Do you realise, Richard, that I lay there in the dark, waiting for you to ask me? I thought that was the point of the fucking conversation,’ she said in a low, hissing tone of anger and hurt that only women can do.

Mac stared into his Tiger, thinking, and when he turned to face her she was looking into his eyes.

‘Look, Diane, I was scared. You were very new, very different.’

‘It could have changed our lives, if you’d asked me,’ she whispered.

‘What?’ he laughed. ‘You’d have said yes?’

The hardness came back into her face. ‘You’ll never know that, will you, Richard?’

Mac sat against the far wall of the breakfast restaurant. He’d been taught in craft school always to arrive early when courting an asset, and to sit where there is the greatest vision available to you and the least to the other bastard. Wincing through his headache, he asked for a cooked breakfast and a pot of coffee.

Mac counted three black goldfi sh bowls in the ceiling and he had a quick look at the Asian Wall Street Journal, taking the opportunity to scan for eyes, see if a bit of counter-surveillance was called for. Around him were tables of networking, jabbering business types who were in town for the conference but were really hoping to be introduced to the type of person who could make them a lot of money. Waiters and fl oor staff wafted about and by the time the waitress came back with the coffee Mac had found no reappearance of the surveillance team from the previous evening, and no encore from Mr Economist.

Alex Grant came in with Michael Vitogiannis at 7.04, greeted Mac and they all headed for the bain-maries.

Back at the table, Mac poured coffee all around and let Grant drive the discussion to where he wanted it to go. One of the reasons Mac was a relative natural at what he did was that he was a good listener.

People who talked more than they listened made terrible spies, and there were a lot of them.

‘So, I brought Michael up to speed on our discussion,’ said Grant, wearing offi cial leisure clothes that looked new. ‘You know, from last night?’