I figure God has had plenty of opportunities to show his love. Take William Tyndale, who transcribed the Bible into English so that people everywhere could understand it. Surely that deserved a little act of love before they strangled him to death then burned him at the stake in 1536 for heresy.
And what about that little girl Max told me about? Twelve years old, and pimped by her mother and stepfather. Why is it always the stepfathers? Where were the Brothers Grimm on warning us about stepfathers? That was something every woman really needed to fear. Bringing a new man into a woman’s life was just about the most dangerous thing she could do for herself or her children. Especially for that twelve-year-old. More than one hundred men of Hobart had used her as a prostitute. At least one politician. There was a notebook, apparently, with phone numbers and names and amounts paid, kept by the girl’s mother for accounting purposes. Only the politician was exposed. He blamed his Parkinson’s drugs. No-one was ever brought to court or prosecuted. God did not intervene.
Or that little boy who had washed up on the shore in Turkey a few years back. Just three years old and, when the boat from Syria sprang a leak, all the passengers found themselves in the Mediterranean, despite the money paid for safe passage. Only the boy’s father survived. Where had God been that night?
I was in a deckchair on my balcony at the end of this long day. I’d texted JC this morning, after I’d seen the Chinese workers get back on their buses at the end of the shift and Dan Macmillan get in the Zodiac and go back across the channel to Bruny. My message to JC was: Nothing you did this morning was right. Nothing. Going to Bruny. Turning off my phone.
I went into Hobart and bought a wetsuit. Then I hired a car and I took the ferry and drove all the way down to Cloudy Bay at the far end of Bruny. I was the only person there. I walked a long way along the beach, then I stripped off, put the wetsuit on, and threw myself in the surf. This was my medicine. I bodysurfed wave after wave, and if I sat on the beach afterwards, entirely spent, and let the tears come, then nobody saw. Maybe a seagull, that’s all.
Then I came home to the house at Dennes Point and took a nap. I woke up feeling shattered. Now I was a bottle of red wine and a joint down. Somewhere in the channel, the remains of a worker was being nibbled into oblivion by small or large creatures. I wanted an argument with God.
The China I knew had enormous cities with air so polluted people wore oxygen masks with supply tanks just to get through the day. There were cities so polluted, no child born in the last twenty-five years had ever seen a star.
The North Koreans were underfed and traumatised, the Taiwanese were always under threat, as were the South Koreans, but the Chinese were plain overcrowded. There was no personal space other than their one tiny room, their one tiny apartment.
A Bruny resident had told me that she’d stopped her car because some Chinese tourists on the side of the road looked like they were in trouble. She said they were almost catatonic. When she roused them, they kept saying, ‘So empty. So empty.’ Which she took for an existential crisis, not just the view as they looked at the ocean beach with not a single footprint in the sand.
There were more tourists arriving every minute, getting off planes and descending from cruise ships. Is this how the Aborigines had felt? I wondered. All these foreigners arriving. Arriving and not leaving again. Taking up residence. Making homes in all the best places. Establishing their own rules. Making you beholden to them. Until you were worth nothing. Just domestic labour or hired help at best. What was the tipping point before Tasmanians said, ‘Enough. We’re slowing this thing down. We’re upping the prices. We’re limiting numbers. We’re protecting our special places. Book in next year, or the year after.’ JC would never do that. It was all short-term thinking for short-term gain.
Dan Macmillan’s words came racing back from this morning. ‘You and your family. You sure you want to belong to them?’
I loved my family.
But you live in New York, that other voice inside my head said. Can’t love them that much. Let’s face it, your mother kind of screwed you up.
I’m not blaming her. I just can’t do proximity, I replied to the voice. Look what happens. I’m back to smoking dope and drinking too much.
You do that in New York too.
But for different reasons, I argued.
You sure about that? the voice asked.
Max had laughed when I’d asked if she could score for me. ‘I know a supplier,’ she’d said. ‘Provides medical cannabis for people with epilepsy, chronic pain. She’s a saint. Never charges anything. I’d like to give some to Mother for her nausea, but I don’t dare to raise it. I can just see her telling her friends, “Maxine gave me marijuana!” And it’d be on the front page of the paper. So past time it was legalised.’
I want to love my family. I do love my family. And, yes, I belong to them. If I didn’t love them, what sort of person would I be?
The voice said nothing.
This is why I left Tasmania, I thought. Because you get really small out here on the perimeter of life, and life gets way too big-picture.
The voice laughed. The sky was a zillion fairy lights. A rim of green light was rising up behind me as an aurora began to dance in the sky.
In my next life, I’m going to be a note of music or a sparrow or a strange blue jellyfish. I’m tired of worrying about people. Who really cares if we have world peace? And even if we got it, how long would it last? A day, a week? Humans are disaster-making machines. We love drama. We’re wired that way. Radical Muslims are way more worrying than the Chinese. I’ve seen what Daesh do. I’ve been to Mosul. You can’t grow a hand back once it’s been lopped off. Mind you, those stories of organ harvesting in Chinese prisons … hard to find another kidney.
The radical Muslims are out-of-control men armed to the teeth. The far-right Christians are out-of-control men armed to the teeth. How can Christians be pro-life, pro-guns, but anti-refugees? How did that work? Most people were anti-refugees, it seemed. Yet in a single moment of disaster, it could be any of us with no home and nowhere to go.
I poured another wine.
At least the Chinese are consistent. No human rights, no refugees, yes to abortions and no to guns. Yes to world domination. Why did it have to be about that? The world was just a giant James Bond movie. There was always a bad guy trying to take over.
I looked up into the lurid green and purple sky waving its fronds of light as if someone was hailing me from another galaxy. Definitely a movie. But if so, where was the dashing hero? Maybe I was the dashing hero come to save Tasmania from something. Or someone. My brother, perhaps.
Something was happening here with this bridge and I couldn’t get my head around it. There was no fair go in Australia anymore. It was everybody for themselves. But here in Tasmania people were hanging on. For a moment longer, people were still saying hello to one another while walking the beach, trading a glut of their zucchinis for their neighbour’s tomatoes, being kind to people in the traffic, and taking out the bin of the lady down the road who taught you in grade two.
I’ll never get a straight answer from JC, I thought. He’s about as useful as eyebrows on a dolphin in this situation. He doesn’t seem to grasp that he’s a pawn. But if JC is a pawn, who’s the queen on this chessboard? It sure isn’t America. Make America great again! And the US had fizzled into factions. After two hundred and fifty years, the government had finally let the Constitution undo them. Why hadn’t Lincoln risen from the dead? His GOP had gone MIA when the country needed it most.
Was it China then? One in every five people in the world was Chinese. That was a lot of breakfast, lunch and dinner to provide. And if they did one thing very well, the Chinese provided. In a hundred years, one in three people might be Chinese. It was the economics of exponential growth. Which brought me back to the bridge. Why were the Chinese involved in building a bridge to drive people to Bruny? There was too much money involved. Something was wrong.
I thought about all those Chinese workers down there on the bridge right now, and who might fall tonight. How many before it became a thing that couldn’t be covered up? Three? Five? Twenty?
‘It’s the yellow peril,’ I could hear my mother saying. She said it a lot when we were kids. This idea that the Chinese were going to invade at any moment. They were invading Vietnam at the time. But it wasn’t so much a fear of invasion here. More a sense that Tasmania—maybe even Australia—was being outwitted on the world stage. I had a bad feeling that, in five years’ time, people would be saying, ‘Why the hell didn’t we see that coming?’
The vast bucolic wonder of Tasmania, with only half a million people and enough rich arable soil to support millions more than that, with an abundance of water and a perimeter of ocean with several deep-water ports, had to be a sitting duck. Unless you had a powerful ally. Maybe JC was right to cosy up with the Chinese.
You really want to belong to your family? I heard Dan Macmillan say again.
Do I care? I wondered. I could just say, ‘To hell with your bridge, I’m going back to New York.’ I’d be sent to another hell-hole because that’s my work. Did I care that, on election eve, JC would stand on the bridge and look like a hero? What happened when the next worker died? When all is said and done, and I’m dust on the breeze, I wanted to leave something good behind. You see, I’m a hypocrite. I like altruism in me but not in anybody else.
Altruism is like vitamin C, that other voice in my head said. It staves off the scurvy but it won’t stop the ship from sinking.
I’m like a vegetarian who still eats red meat, I thought. I pretend I’m committed, but I don’t want to give up my bolognaise.
I had to get some human company, I decided. And because I was buzzed and a little drunk, I had lost my inhibitions. I didn’t want to consider the ramifications of my next move. I got up off my balcony and wandered across the paddock, past the wallabies who hopped away, and went down the hill.