Michelle drove the white rented stretch limo down to Rushcutters Bay for the celebratory lunch. Carmen was in the back seat in a scarlet satin dress that did not easily contain her magnificent chest. Her almost matching straw hat was so wide it threatened the fellow occupants as she gabbled her disappointment at missing the action.
‘All that front-page of you, girl,’ Carmen said. ‘You’d be leading the Hero Parade, if it wasn’t already over.’
Michelle gave Maria the eye once more in the rear-view mirror, this time it was a wink and a smile.
‘There’s still the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras next week,’ Ali said, avoiding the eye of her mother sitting facing her.
Jas turned to her husband. ‘We can stay on another week if you like?’
‘See how the other half live it up,’ Carmen said.
‘It’s seeing how our Irish other half used to live I’m interested in.’
‘Not until after our wedding, Danny Boy,’ Marty said, turning from the front seat. ‘Then we come too.’
‘Our honeymoon,’ Michelle said, ‘starts in Ireland. We got to find our missing links, right, bro?’
‘Hope so,’ Dan said, taking his wife’s hand. ‘Extended family, I think’s the phrase.’
‘Not quite,’ Ali said.
Maria squeezed her hand. ‘You can do better, sis. He was never going to hang about.’
‘I know. He said he had to move on …’
Brad so vulnerable in the St Brigid’s hospital bed, until she saw him wink at the young nursing nun. The nun had blushed and looked away. Brad knew she saw the exchange but gave her that cheeky, devil-may-care smile. He was unrepentant and she knew he would not change.
She asked him as calmly as she could what he wanted to do when he recovered. He said he was moving on. His father wanted him back in the Navy, and the Navy doctors had said at the time of his accident they wanted him to undergo new drug treatment in conjunction with recompression therapy. They claimed his decompression sickness manifested itself in Munchausen’s Syndrome. His take was that if he remembered the diagnosis, then they could not make a liar of him. And if they couldn’t find him, then he was safe from being their psychiatric guinea pig. He was not going to jump off buildings, or jump in the deep end more like, under the influence of experimental drugs like the CIA’s infamous LSD testing on unsuspecting recruits. Thus, he was going to do the disappearing act again. He said his only regret was they had to split up.
‘Privilege to meet you,’ he called after her as she blundered out of the ward, failing to stop the tears blinding her. It did not blind her to his condition, which she had little doubt the doctors were correct about, he was a world-class liar. It could have been worse. Imagine in her desperation to cut loose in Oz she had gone out with Portillo. At least Brad’s professed protest beliefs squared with hers, and he was an attentive and courteous lover and taught her how to enjoy abandoning virginity. She could have done much worse, and that would have been Portillo. But one thing she was in debt to Portillo for, he had encouraged her writing. And she had a big story to get on with, from inside the protest movement.
Ali realised there was an awkward pause created by her not finishing the sentence. ‘… and so do I. There’s a big story to write.’
‘Bigger than moi?’ Carmen said archly, releasing the tension in the limo as everybody laughed, none more so than Carmen’s gargantuan cackle.
Maria allowed herself a wary smile. Ali meant the French saboteurs. It was quite a story, but it would not see the light of day. The debriefing she received from Ted Downing came with a warning that it might be their last Trans-Tasman exchange if her leader took the NZ out of ANZUS. It was not an unfriendly warning. He was effusive in his praise for the part her family played in unmasking the operation funded and controlled by the SDECE, the French secret service.
She agreed that Brian Portillo was merely a fellow spy traveller, while still smarting at the way he had duped his colonial cousins and specifically herself. Nothing had changed there. The Brits had always treated Kiwis as sheep to the slaughter. It was in any case no secret that the French and the British regarded nuclear testing as vital to the maintenance of their security. The Australians had stopped the British testing in Central Australia and the New Zealand frigate at Mururoa last decade had done much to drive French testing underwater. That was some little pay-back to their former colonial masters.
In hindsight it made sense for the former traditional enemies the Brits and the French to collaborate. Portillo and Prévert were being deported and Bob Hawke had been on the blower to French President Mitterand and received assurances there would be no more hankypanky in Australia’s territorial waters.
Downing suggested she pass that on to Lange, who might want a word with Mitterand by way of a pre-emptive strike. Maria thought that as likely as believing Downing’s profound regret that she had been assaulted by the French agent, which Potz seemed to find amusing.
Ted Downing was probably relieved, she decided, that things had not been worse. They might never know who this saboteur Aldus Bruce was, but likely he was a French agent. That was for the Americans to find out. Neither Prévert nor Portillo was talking, and the local thumbscrew option lapsed with O’Toole. The good news, Downing said, was that the two agents would not be talking to anybody else, at least not for public consumption.
The aspect of the debrief that incensed her was the French intention to direct blame for the attempted sabotage of the Buchanan on to the protest movement, specifically Ali and her American boyfriend. Gallic deviousness at its best, Ted Downing had said with some relish. Australian authorities were no fans of the protest movement and New Zealand threatening to bail out of the ANZUS nuclear accord. They’d been even less so if they knew her sister was involved, albeit peripherally, in the bombing attempt on the nuclear warship.
She knew the Australian attitude first-hand from a tape Sarnie thought she would be interested in. Ted was telling Potz that Lange could come into the Hilton the service lift way. Nobody had heard of him. They couldn’t work out why Bob even bothered with him. He was a small beer distant little Anzac cuzzie.
She was surprised that Ted was so contemptuous when he thought he was not overheard, claiming it was only American insecurity that kept NZ in ANZUS. ‘The Americans want to be loved,’ he laughed. ‘LBJ even went down to Kiwiland to get a handful of their troops for Vietnam. Useless buggers shelled and killed some of us, not exactly what you expect from an Anzac cobber. So, forget about Lange, it’s our man Hawke we watch – like a hawk.’
‘Nice one, Ted,’ said Potz.
Not nice in the least, as far as she was concerned. Bloody Aussie ratbags, as treacherous as the Poms. You expect that sort of behaviour from the French, but not from so-called allies.
Maria tuned into Marty saying the Irish trip was going to cost an arm and a leg. ‘We might be able to charge it as a marketing exercise for the wine.’
‘Mean Mr Marty,’ Ali laughed.
‘Wow, sis. I didn’t know you could reference the Beatles.’
‘Hey, the money’s in the details,’ Marty protested, his hands waving about. ‘I always count the pennies, pounds look after themselves. We just got a massive order for Vukovich from the French.’
‘Compensation?’ Dan suggested.
‘Looks like the Australian trip was worthwhile in the end, don’t you agree, Daniel?’
‘Yes, dear,’ he said, knowing Jas meant a great deal more than the wine sales. So much had changed in a week. He regretted how adamant he had been that he did not want to read about the wretched past of his family. He had shut his ears to Ali’s pleas. He had shut his mind long ago to his mother’s obsessive religious faith and his father’s naïve faith in socialism to rid society of privilege and the class system that condemned ordinary people such as his ancestors to the atrocities of the penal colonies like Sydney. Now he was shutting his mind to his daughter’s faith in protest.
She was as fierce as his father, slamming Hawke for going off as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford and coming back wanting to be part of the nuclear club. This meant selling uranium to the Yanks so they could build even more weapons of mass destruction. He turned his back on the people who voted him in, she argued. That was why the people were marching against uranium sales. Power to the people! It was the people who broke the colonial shackles, and they would do it again. Otherwise, the suffering of our ancestors was in vain.
Ali had the effect the priests used to have on him when he was a captive altar boy. That is, she made him feel guilty. She said they had to know their past in order not to relive it. That she said was why he had to read the diary.
His wife agreed. His half-sister agreed. His daughters agreed. He wanted to agree. He had to. If he did nothing, his mother would forever remain silent and remote, and he would repeat her behaviour. He did not want to spend the rest of his life retreating from his family. As he had already said, he did find the diary’s history interesting. And now he was in debt to his half-sister for probably saving his daughter’s life. He would never understand the pressures his mother must have been under, but he could not reject her child. Besides, she was intriguing. If his arithmetic was correct, she had to be sixty if not a few years more. She looked in a different, exotic way as attractive as his wife, and that was saying something.
‘Part of the deal with the French,’ Maria was saying. ‘Along with some extras for the Ockers, and of course deporting Prévert and Portillo.’
‘We won’t accept any strings attached,’ Ali added. ‘We still protest their nuclear testing in the Pacific.’
Jas smiled at her husband. He deserved better than her behaviour with the Frenchman. Alain was a handsome devil and like the Devil, a cunning seducer. When she told Alain it was not appropriate for a married Catholic to flirt when her husband was going through a bad patch, he agreed. He told her he respected her for her faithfulness. He too was a Catholic. He understood. But perhaps she needed a shoulder to cry on. They could be friends as well as business partners. He invited her for a coffee. She thought this was harmless, and they were doing business.
Over coffee and croissants he told her he had teenage daughters. Françoise wanted to be the next Jeanne Moreau. Cécile was already apprenticed to a fashion photographer in Paris. But enough of him and his family, what was worrying her? She found herself confiding in him about the distance developing in her family. She blamed herself for much of it because she was only interested in the business. She did not sit down and talk to her daughters. She did not offer her support to her husband when he got this terrible news about his mother having a child with another man in Sydney.
‘Pftt!’ he said, dismissing this. ‘Did her husband take her back? Yes. Well then, what is wrong with his son? He should learn from his father, no?’
By this stage they were back in her hotel suite. She allowed him to put a sympathetic arm around her. Then her husband rang and rescued her from a man who was amusing himself while he waited for his operation to begin.
Jas looked at her daughters sitting opposite on the vulgar white leather seating. They were getting on for the first time since ever. And this was despite Alice being exploited by another handsome devil and Maria fighting off a rat pack of men lusting after her. Most men couldn’t keep it in their pants. Her husband was the exception, bless him. Although, if he wished, he could make an exception for her. Yes, something to work on there.
Behind her Michelle was announcing they had arrived. ‘Time to make whoopee!’ Carmen declared. Men and women and women who were formerly men and men who wanted to be women, all – like that pop song of a few years ago shrieked – just wanna have fun. Where better than this warm and liberal and gorgeous harbour city – if you ignored the grim grey nuclear warships lurking in the stream far too close to the streets where the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras was imminent.