I felt the world stop then.
‘What?’
‘Yes,’ said Becky. ‘That’s what the bridge is for.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘Tasmanians are going to leave their homes and move to an island with a current permanent population of six hundred people? How is that going to happen?’
She shrugged. ‘How would you do it? You’re the conflict resolution specialist. Imagine you’re the Chinese.’
‘Build facilities?’ I said. ‘Offer everyone a lot of money?’
She nodded. ‘First a bridge to take them easily back and forth. And every Tasmanian will be offered three times the valuation of their home. Given the way housing prices have shot up over the last few years, a lot of Tasmanians are going to get rich. Plus anyone below the minimum wage will receive a universal basic income for the rest of their lives. It gets rid of the whole welfare burden, the pension burden. People here will be more comfortable, have more economic certainty, than any other people in Australia. It will be an excellent research model.’
She paused.
In the distance, growing clearer as the day brightened, was the huge arc of the Bruny Bridge beyond Tinderbox.
‘The accommodation on Bruny will be varied,’ she said. ‘Some low level, some high-rise. Almost thirty per cent of Tasmania’s population is over fifty now, so retirement enclaves will be the norm. With the bridge built, it’s close to Hobart. Around an hour’s drive for those who will still be required, or will choose, to work. Roads, hospitals, schools … it’s all planned out.’
‘Will money do it?’ I frowned. ‘I mean, these are Tasmanians. They’re not going to go quietly.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t rely on a few protestors to spark Tasmania to rebel,’ she said. ‘This is going to be way more complicated.’
‘But surely,’ I said, ‘the rest of Australia won’t stand by and see a part of Australia excised and handed over to a foreign power?’
‘Ace, your altruism is showing. Why do we do nothing substantial about climate change? Why do we do virtually nothing to improve the lives of the poor? Or bother about those refugees on Nauru and Manus? We like our comfortable lives. We don’t want to give anything up. We fear the loss of comfort. This Chinese deal means the rest of Australia is safe for the meantime. Think twenty-six million mainlanders against half a million Tasmanians. Most Australians have never even been here. Those that have think it’s beautiful—nice art, good food. But they’re not going to give up their Saturdays to protest. And with the new protest laws, who’s going to want a five-thousand-dollar sting? I don’t think we’re going to see any great demonstrations in Federation Square or Martin Place. Probably a few on the lawns of Parliament House here, but people get poor fast with five-thousand-dollar fines.
We’d found this cave when we were seventeen, the one place within half an hour of Hobart where we could hide from all the world. We’d smoked drugs, lit fires and brought boys here. Pretended everything beyond here didn’t exist. Now it was almost forty years later, and we couldn’t hide from the world anymore.
‘You knew when you took this job,’ she said, ‘that there wasn’t time to really do anything other than bury the bridge protesters under layers of better public relations than the protesters can manage. I don’t mean to devalue what you’ve done. You’ve done it well. Their voices have been drowned out. And after the bombing, the Chinese look like our saviours. Bruny Island is half the size of Singapore with a tenth of its population. Singapore has almost eight thousand people per square kilometre. Hong Kong has nearly seven thousand. Tasmania has approximately seven people per square kilometre. Seven. If you put half a million Tasmanians on Bruny, you’ve still only got around fourteen hundred people per square kilometre. That’s only a little higher density than Sydney. It looks like luxury to a lot of people in the world.’
‘I’m going to need proof,’ I said.
‘It was delivered to me. The Tasmania/China Project. Top Secret.’
‘Deliberately?’ I asked.
‘It looked just like Amazon had sent it. Before Christmas. I’ve been sitting on it all this time.’
‘You haven’t noticed anything else. Anyone following you? New people wanting to get close?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I have it with me. I haven’t let it out of my sight. It’s in the lining of my suitcase.’
‘Okay,’ I said. Not liking that at all.
‘So I have a question for you,’ she said. ‘Can you do something, Ace? Can you find someone who will break it?’
‘I thought you said it would make no difference.’
‘We have to let people know. Give them a chance. Before the bridge is finished. Once it’s done and the deal comes into play …’
‘Break the rules,’ I said.
‘Break the rules,’ Becky repeated. ‘I don’t want to have to perjure myself at some point in the future. But I’m a Tasmanian. And so are you. If this comes out, I want it to have been for something.’
‘Maybe whoever sent it to you was a Tasmanian,’ I said.
‘I thought that too,’ she said.
She looked at her watch. ‘I have to go. And today we’re in a meeting where we have to revert to being two people who, to all intents and purposes, know almost nothing about one another.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So how do you want to do this?’
‘I could just give it to you today, at the end of our meeting. It’s in a manila envelope now. Looks just like any large file.’
‘No, not direct. Someone might put it together later. You could leave it somewhere for me to collect.’
‘I’m having a drink with Edward this afternoon before I jump back on the plane,’ she said.
Tasmania. Where everyone knows everyone.
‘I could ask him to pass it on to you.’
‘Can you trust him?’ I asked.
‘Of course. I’ve known him almost as long as I’ve known you.’ I’d have preferred a dead drop, but in light of the limited time, maybe this was a good solution. ‘Okay,’ I said.
We clambered up through the bush out onto the path. Back at the turn-off to the car park, she said, ‘What comes next, after this, is up to you, Ace.’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said. ‘And, Beck, you need to end it with JC. I mean really let him go. It’s time.’
‘That’s the choice I just made, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to wreck his life. If it came out, it would kill me. I’d rather share a state secret than that.’
I felt as if we’d both aged in that cave. Any vestige of still feeling seventeen had gone.
‘He must know, Ace,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how much, but he must know some of it. I tried to get a sense of that last night, but everyone on this is so tight. I can only imagine he’s justified it as his way of saving the Tasmanian people. His legacy. You know how he feels about that. It’s just that now it will be on Bruny.’
This almost winded me. The idea that JC knew. I wanted to scream. The duplicity. The underhanded, conniving, manipulative, deceitful …
Suddenly I was remembering all those little moments.
‘Ace, you know I’d never build a bridge to nowhere.’
That meeting with the Chinese in JC’s boardroom.
The lunch with the two Henrys and the laughter at the reference to Bruny.
Max saying, ‘It was a COAG meeting.’
Max saying, ‘Something about this bridge doesn’t add up.’
Dad saying, ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’
JC saying, ‘We’re part of the future. We promised we’d be that, and here we are. Changing the world, twin.’
JC saying, ‘Don’t let all this conspiracy shit get to you.’
Viper saying, ‘Your brother may need you to stay on after the election.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m going.’ It was barely a whisper.
I handed her phone back to her. She looked inexpressibly sad as she turned away. We both did.
There are better men. There are much better men, I wanted to tell her. But I wasn’t so sure. She lived in Canberra.
Who knows what love is? Who knows what marriages are? Who knows what loyalty is? It was as if we’d both already been convicted.
I sat in my car and felt ancient.