I was drinking coffee and reading the Saturday paper at the Dennes Point cafe when a voice said, ‘I could sit there and drink my coffee and read my paper, or I could sit here.’
I looked up. It was Dan Macmillan. He indicated the empty table next to mine, or the chair opposite me.
‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Please, sit down.’
He sat and gave me a grin. He looked freshly showered and unshaved.
‘I’m not trying to disturb you,’ he said. ‘Just thought it would be weird if you looked up and saw me trying not to be noticed.’
‘Well, enjoy being there and not noticed.’
‘Perfect,’ he said.
The waitress brought his coffee and he opened his paper.
I had The Australian and he had The Mercury. I was reading a December feature on The Year That Was. This was a look back at Cyclone Pauline, which had chewed up the coastline from Byron Bay to Sydney at the end of last summer. A cyclone so far south had been unprecedented. The warming currents were blamed. The federal government’s failure to attend to climate change was blamed. The scientists who predicted it were blamed. The coal industry was blamed. The Greens were blamed. But none of the blame saved the thousands of homes, schools, resorts, businesses, yachts and three runways at Sydney airport.
For the next ten minutes, neither of us said a word. We sipped our coffees, turned pages and navigated the space at the table between us.
At last, I said, ‘Okay, I need more coffee. You?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said.
I got up and ordered. As I was returning to the table, despite the warmth of the morning, rain started splattering on the floor-to-ceiling windows. The cafe was built high above the beach with a view up the Derwent and across the channel. White walls, raw wood, polished timber floors, a wide covered deck filled with patrons, and a kitchen garden below with stairs leading down to the beach. Maggie Lennox was nowhere in sight this morning.
Dan looked out as the weather closed in. ‘The boys will be loving this,’ he said. Meaning the crew on the bridge.
‘Do you think anyone will catch the ferry once the bridge is open?’ I asked.
‘Shouldn’t think so,’ he said. ‘Maybe there are ferry nuts like there are train nuts. Might get a few of those. But no. It’s a shame, but I guess that’s progress.’
‘Why does the ferry matter to you?’ I asked him.
‘It was always something to look forward to,’ he said. ‘I mean, I still look forward to it, and I must have done it thousands of times by now. It’s a new experience for a lot of people too—it’s an adventure. With a bridge, there’s no real feeling of arrival. I mean, what’s happening here now, with the bridge and the sealed roads, fifty years ago a bloke would have given anything to have a highway past his front door. Suddenly he’s sitting on a goldmine. These days, someone’s gone to the arse end of the world to set up a place for people to stay, and some government sees fit to build a bridge and it devalues her place. I know there’ll be people who will be going, “We’re sealing the road right by her house. We’re giving her a slip road and a sign. What’s her fucking problem?”’
‘She’s very popular, Maggie Lennox.’
‘She’s a great woman. It’s shitty what they’ve done to her. She’s given a lot to the state. And now they’re throwing her under a bus. Have you seen her place?’
‘I have. It’s incredible.’ Maggie had given me the promised tour. It was exquisite. ‘And you built it,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you did projects like that.’
‘It’s Tassie. We pitch for lots of things, big and small. Got a lot of blokes on the books. Have to keep them busy. In the past, I did the smaller stuff and Jimmy did the big commercial.’
I nodded. ‘Maggie said. It must be rewarding, seeing something you’ve made in the landscape.’
He stretched out his legs to the side of the table and partly turned towards the window. In quixotic Tasmanian style, the shower had passed and sunshine was breaking through the cloud cover. The sea looked like crushed linen. ‘It’s dominated my thought process, building,’ said Dan. ‘And it’s dominated my philosophy. Design is one thing but execution is everything. The central driver is how a structure will perform over a long period of time. How is it going to weather? You want it to stand the test of time. You want it doing exactly what it’s doing today in fifty years, in one hundred years. It can look good, but the test is three hundred years’ time. Maggie understands that. She’s tight—but she’s got her eye on the right result.’
‘Did you build this too?’ I asked, meaning the cafe.
‘No, not this. This was the first thing she built on Bruny. Didn’t know her then.’
Our coffees arrived.
‘Not long ago,’ Dan said, ‘I was on my way home on the ferry and this bloke appeared out of nowhere on the lower deck. He had this white jacket on, like a lab coat. Tall and skinny, wild white hair—looks like the doc from Back to the Future. And I asked one of the crew that I was talking to, “Who’s that old bloke? How long’s he been here?” And the bloke says, “He’s been here twenty-six years. He’s our mechanic.” Apparently he stays downstairs. Gets on at seven, gets off at four. I’ve been on that ferry all my life, and I’d never once seen him. Sits down there in his lab coat all day, every day, when he’s on, monitoring the pressure gauges and increasing the water flow, turn that up here and that down there. And he watches DVDs all day. Got a whole set-up down there. TV, headphones. That’s his life. What are they going to do with him when the ferry stops?’
‘What do you reckon he does at the end of the day now?’
‘Chops people up, I reckon. Got people dissected in his freezer.’
I laughed.
‘And what about the women who sell curry in Kettering?’ he asked. ‘They’ll be out of a job for sure.’
‘Do tell,’ I said.
‘There’s two of them in a caravan just near the terminal. They’re like Marg Simpson’s sisters. They’ve got these lines on their faces like a couple of Shar Peis, as though they’ve smoked a billion cigarettes. Their curries are fantastic. They make it all onsite, sitting on crates peeling onions. It’s another bit of the channel that we’ll lose when the bridge opens.’
‘Dan,’ I said, ‘why do you think Tasmanians protest so well? Why are they so averse to change?’
‘Well, we already gave up a lot just to be here.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Most of us could have done something else. Gone interstate or overseas. Could have lived bigger lives. Had fancy homes and a fat bank account. And the sea changers, well, they did live bigger lives. But they came here for something else. Quiet. Simplicity. When you settle for Tassie, you’ve settled for less in some ways; less of what matters out there, more of what matters here. If someone wants to change that, take what you love about it away, you get pretty shirty. Because it’s what we have. It’s all we have. You’d have seen a bit of that elsewhere in your line of work, I’m guessing.’
‘I have,’ I said.
‘Pretty messy job at times, yeah?’
I nodded. I didn’t want to think about all that. ‘So, Dan,’ I asked, ‘what matters most to you on this project?’
‘That I don’t lose any of my guys,’ he said. ‘It’s a bloody big structure.’
‘How do you think the foreign workforce is going to go?’
‘Hard to tell. Guess we’ll make it work.’
‘You seem pretty relaxed,’ I said.
‘That’s why they pay me the big bucks.’ As in not. He grinned that infectious grin that had such mischief about it. He had the most intensely blue eyes. Paul Newman blue. They were distracting.
‘So, you were a paratrooper,’ I said.
‘Been checking up on me?’ He grinned again.
‘It’s my job to know who I’m dealing with.’
He gave me a long level gaze. ‘You think I’m the bomber?’
‘Probably not,’ I said.
Yet he must have known a fair bit about explosives. He’d have had friends, too, who might have been able to put a team together. But the cost? Someone must have funded the bombing to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars. If Dan had done it, he would have been employed by someone. But would he build the thing and also blow it up? It seemed unlikely. Unless they offered him big money. I thought of his car, the house. He didn’t seem like a man who would be motivated by money, but it was hard to tell. More likely it been an order from higher up. Maybe a commanding officer from the old days. That might make sense. He was the only person I’d found who had the right background. And he was trained to obey.
‘Way beyond me, a job like that,’ he said, as if he knew he hadn’t convinced me. ‘But the Feds did ask me a fair few questions. I didn’t blow up the bridge, Astrid. Jesus. But look at the place. It’s paradise. I don’t want it to change.’
‘Someone really knew how to do enough,’ I said. ‘Not too little, not too much.’
‘Yep,’ he agreed. ‘Skill.’
‘Was it hard adjusting to civilian life after all that?’
‘It’s why I like working with a crew, I guess.’
‘Why did you leave?’
‘Our unit was reassigned to mechanised infantry in 2011,’ he said. ‘The ultimate insult. Hyper fit, top of the food-chain, airborne soldiers got to be carried around in armoured personnel carriers like backpackers.’ He stretched out his arms and yawned. ‘Still, small-minded decisions are not special to the army. Lots of us moved on. Jimmy offered me a job, made me a partner. Taught me everything I know, really, about business and such. It’s been okay, coming back.
‘I gotta get down to the site,’ he said, looking at his watch as he finished his latte.
‘Nice to see you, Dan,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the chat.’
‘You need a lift over tomorrow, Sherlock Holmes?’
I laughed. ‘Sunday lunch cannot be missed. Is that okay with you?’
‘See you at the pier. Eleven,’ he said.
He looked good as he walked away. Tall, strong, a bit solitary. I’d never seen anyone else come or go from his house, but I supposed he had a partner. Despite my job involving endless conversations, I’m an introvert. I like solitary. I need it. I understood exactly what Maggie Lennox’s clients were looking for. The difference was, they paid twenty thousand a week for the privilege while I could just close the door. Dan too.
I went to pay but Trixie behind the counter told me it was all good; Dan had taken care of it.
When I got back to the house, I looked down on the rooftop of Dan’s house. From the street, it was private and surrounded on three sides by an old macrocarpa pine hedge. A kind of fairy-tale seclusion with an amazing view.
I had once had a beer with an American submariner after an operation. He’d been underwater for fifty-six days on a sensitive mission. I asked him what he’d missed while he was down there.
‘Stars,’ he’d said. ‘I missed the stars.’
I’ve had prisoners tell me the same thing.
I learned a lot of tough things early. It’s taken me all my life to get to the simple ones.