Guy
After the young man left he stayed exactly where he was. Unable to move. Eventually he roused himself enough to turn on the television, flicking through the channels, failing to be caught by either the late news or an old Al Pacino film, one of the ones from before the actor began to see himself as a serious contender for Shakespeare, although, perhaps that was unfair, maybe he had always been one, what did Guy know, he who’d had the temerity to believe he might prove most royal were he put on, but now found himself sitting in a hotel room, naked from the waist down, a man in his mid-sixties, grey hair on his chest and belly, around his scrotum, useless balls hanging ever lower with age, another whisky in his hand, his eyes glazing at the very existence of film or television, too numb to turn it off.
This anomie, he tried to tell himself, was no more than the result of thwarted sexuality turned upon itself. He had reason to be optimistic; the dinner with members of the Party had, after all, been more successful. He’d forgotten, until he arrived at the restaurant, that Bain had told him the owner was once married to Nick Lasker, Helen’s doctor, and that, in one of those peculiar coincidences life seems to delight in throwing up for no special purpose, Bain had even bumped into him there several weeks earlier. No apparent meaning to it, but it must be said that Lasker seemed to surface with unnerving regularity, as if determined to communicate something.
A table set for ten, to celebrate his imminent acceptance on the Senate ticket, and to introduce him to several other Senators and power players. Nine men and one woman, the latter being head of communications to the Leader of the Opposition himself and, by all accounts, a terrifying individual, rumoured to possess an unerring capacity to wound, surprisingly young and, on this occasion, very pleasant, introducing herself as an admirer; but then he had, as yet, lacked the opportunity to do anything to attract her ire. The room just large enough for the table and a small area at one end where they mingled, fine wine flowing generously before the food arrived so that even the hardest of heads must have begun to swim. The place lined, floor to ceiling, with black shelves containing bottles of olive oil gathered from around the world.
He spoke for a time to Alexis Corwen, Shadow Minister for the Environment, with whom he’d corresponded but never met, a short neat man also surprisingly, even unnecessarily, young, with the reserved manner of one trained to the sciences who, by the way he held himself, also spent time in the gym, or perhaps jogging around Lake Burley Griffin. Dressed, like all of them, in an exquisite suit, begging the question of tailors; there must be whole workshops of them kept in business by senior members of the government alone.
Guy took the opportunity to put Corwen right about certain anomalies in the final report on the dam, the sorts of things he believed should never have seen the light of day – he’d done little else than research the subject for the previous month, getting on top of it, if only to forestall more disasters. Corwen, though, interrupted him before he could get far, steering him away from the others as much as possible within the confined space.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I have good news on that front. I had lunch with my opposite number just today. We seem, remarkably, to all be on the same page on this one. A rare moment of bipartisanship, largely due, I think it’s fair to say, to your efforts.’
Guy washed by a hot glow of satisfaction that had little to do with the wine, struggling to retain his composure, shaking Corwen’s small hard hand as a way of expressing his pleasure.
‘The report will come out next week, or the one after, depending on the cycle,’ Corwen said.
This last referring of course to the news, a reminder that all decisions in this place were contingent, that the choice of which projects got up was tied to grubby back-room deals and clever salesmanship rather than merit, and all of these people, even this taut, erudite young man, were engaged in a constant battle to get their little enterprises up, ahead of anyone else. The trappings, the lovely suits and fine wines, were, in fact, quite possibly designed to conceal this, to give the impression that everything was running smoothly, in the hope everyone might forget both the ugliness of the process and that they were all subject to the whim of the electorate. Politics was, Guy thought, something he’d been born to, not so far from what a writer did anyway, sacrificing one or another character in the service of the larger story. The mystery was why he’d waited so long.
When the food arrived it came as small portions delicately placed on large white plates, hard to fathom how so many of these men carried so much weight if this was all they consumed; perhaps they kept buckets of Ben & Jerry’s in their offices to binge on against the anxiety. The meat, however, was delicious, perfectly prepared and accompanied by exquisite sauces of varied provenance. Guy made a note to mention it to Nick next time they met.
‘When I was born,’ he said, indicating the bottles of oil arrayed on the shelves, and addressing as many as could hear him (the room falling pleasingly quiet when they heard his raised voice), ‘there wasn’t a single espresso machine in the country. Nobody but a refugee would have known what to do with olive oil, never mind an olive, well, except of course, to put it in a martini.’ Quickly recovering from the lack of tact in bringing up the subject of immigrants in this company by launching into an old anecdote about martinis and their construction – raising a generous amount of laughter in response. Basking in the pleasure these people took in his stories, in the possibilities the role presented him, in the defeat of his enemies; the enervating pall which had settled on him during these last years sloughing off; forgetting for a moment or two even to observe those present with a writerly eye.
As the company broke up Aldous took him aside.
‘Well that went well, don’t you think?’ he said, sipping the smallest of short blacks. ‘Now, I’m afraid I’ve still some business to attend to this evening, but before I go I wanted to get you acquainted with Michael, over there,’ pointing to his chief-of-staff at the far end of the table. ‘He has your schedule worked out for the next couple of days. He can run you through it on the way back to the hotel. We’re going to put you through the ringer, just a little. Get you up to speed. So that you don’t even have to think when you get the difficult questions. I am sorry we have to subject someone like you to this sort of thing, but it’s important to stay on message.’ Clearing his throat. ‘In that regard I did want to have a word. Unpleasant to have to get serious after such a fine meal …’
‘That’s what I’m here for,’ Guy said, so basted with bonhomie that he could bear to hear almost anything.
‘Yes, but these dinners! You mustn’t get the idea we do this every day.’ Leaning forward. ‘What I need to say is that between now and when we announce the ticket you need to watch yourself. And beyond, of course.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m referring in particular to who you associate with.’
‘Does this mean we’ll have to stop meeting Aldous?’
Bain doing him the service of the smallest of smiles.
‘Not so much me,’ he said. ‘You had a couple of nights with our mutual friend a week or so ago, I believe?’
‘Peter?’ Lamprey said.
‘It’s come to Peter, has it?’ Bain enquired.
‘I thought,’ Guy said, ‘Mayska was a friend of the Party’s.’
‘Oh he is, he is, very much so. A good and influential friend. But I’m sure you understand it doesn’t play out so well with the electorate to be seen communing with the zero-point-zero-zero-one per cent. Voters have this ridiculous notion that propinquity to extraordinary wealth will turn your head.’
‘So you’ve been keeping tabs on me?’
‘Not so much,’ Bain said, laughing. ‘But we make that sort of thing our business to know. You can still see him, as much as you like, but not so others notice.’
Guy had spent a weekend in the Whitsundays. Flown there in a private jet, the only passenger, helicoptered on to a neighbouring island then ferried by a man in a thing like a golf buggy to a sun-drenched villa perched on a cliff above the sea. One of several, it transpired, connected to a central building that, in many ways, resembled the one at Winderran, as if they’d been designed by the same architect or at least had the same brief: ultra-modern, lots of glass, polished concrete, re-purposed Australian hardwood. Security systems everywhere, which you wouldn’t think so necessary on a small island. This time there were other guests; captains of industry, an artist or two, a minor film star, a sporting personality and several young men and women who didn’t seem to fit any category other than to be attractive. At times it felt as if he was acting a part in a house party from a nineteenth-century novel.
It was possible that over the weekend each and every guest had individual time with Peter, but if so he didn’t notice it. They had played tennis early one morning, on a court whose outer edge, like an infinity pool, gave way to a view of untrammelled ocean, albeit with a high fence to catch balls. Lamprey had once been an okay player, and found he did not need to be embarrassed, indeed, towards the end of the first set he was up five games to two, all but wiping the court with his opponent. At set point he pushed Mayska outside the back lines with a series of long shots. His host just managing to lob his return over the net. Guy ran forward, scooping up the ball, preparing to drop it on the other side. At the last instant he decided to knock it back to the man. No need to defeat him so forcefully. It was the turning point in the match. Mayska took immediate advantage. He went on to win that set and the next one. No matter what Guy did he couldn’t regain the lead, and the more he tried the less successful he became, furious with himself when shot after shot hit the net or went outside the line.
Afterwards, sitting on the little patio of the tennis house, they drank cold sparkling water from bottles and talked, although, Guy couldn’t help but notice, Mayska once again tended to dominate the conversation.
‘I don’t doubt that you think men like me are limited in our interests, that money’s everything,’ he said, glancing at Guy. ‘It’s not so. Money has for me only ever been a means to an end. It allows me to hold a house party like this: artists, writers, CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies. Courtesans and catamites to entertain. What money does is buy me a better class of associate.’
Guy, still deeply pissed at both losing two sets to zero and at the delight his host clearly took in winning, mused to himself that in reality what it bought Mayska was a better class of audience. Remarking, however, what he’d begun to suspect about the presence of the beautiful young people.
‘You don’t mind if I philosophise for a moment?’
‘Go ahead,’ Guy said, smiling through gritted teeth.
‘There are two streams of thought about how we’ve got to be where we are,’ Mayska said. ‘The first is that the problems humanity faces are both intractable and interminable; when one is solved another takes its place.’
Guy had thought Mayska was being metaphorical when he referred to philosophy, but here they were, before breakfast, discussing humanity.
‘The second,’ he continued, ‘is that the problems are solvable; if you could only legislate with enough sophistication, then the great issues of poverty and greed, health and welfare, would be resolved. The utopian ideal, if you like. What we saw during the last hundred years was this divergence, a separation on a global scale, into these points of view. On the one hand you had totalitarian regimes who believed that if you could only set up society correctly everything would be all right. I don’t need to remind a man like you where that got us. On the other you have what I like to think of as the Western ideal, which if you’ll permit, I’ll sum up as the problems will always be with us. We’ll conquer one and be faced with another and we’ll always be failing, always nearly tipping over the edge of the abyss. The belief that if we have faith in ourselves and our ingenuity, never mind our moral failings, we’ll get through.’
Stretching his long thin legs out. Socks around the ankles, barely worn white trainers. Not a gram of extra flesh on him, which, incidentally, made his face somewhat gaunt, or driven, even when he was, as now, pleased with himself. Giving history lessons. Guy waiting for him to come to the point. Expecting that somewhere along the line an explanation would be given for his invitation to the island. What the cost was going to be.
‘This belief is central to my business,’ Mayska said. ‘The larger it becomes, the more problems I encounter, but at the same time it also means I can engage better minds to provide solutions.’
Why was it, though, that these self-made men were always so determined to tell people about their business models?
‘So why,’ Guy said, ‘the interest in security services?’
‘You have been doing your research.’
‘I’m a writer. I follow things through. I don’t mind spending a bit of time doing it. I made it my business to read about you, that’s all. Except there’s not so much that’s, how can you say, freely available.’
‘But you heard about our acquisition of CoSecOr?’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘Well it made me curious. I can see the advantage of it financially, if you have to pay for security you may as well own the company, and, in the present climate, I can see the business growing, even exponentially, but I can’t see how it fits with what you’ve just said.’
‘But it’s entirely consistent,’ Mayska said. ‘Remember your Hobbes? The Leviathan? The State shall have the monopoly on violence and thus eradicate it from the population?’
‘Words to that effect.’
‘The curious thing is that it’s a lesson our government seems to have forgotten. It could be an effect of the long peace, of course, but they’ve become so enamoured of this idea of “small government” that they’ve taken to subcontracting out the instruments of law enforcement – domestic and international – to the private sector. Not just here in Australia, all over the West, in the US particularly. What they’ve failed to recognise is that if you give the monopoly of violence to someone else, even under contract, you no longer have it yourself. Now, that might be okay, as long as the interests of the private sector are concurrent with that of the body politic. But what if they’re not? Personally I don’t want the Leviathan in the hands of people I have no control over. I’d rather be the one holding the gun.’
‘Now you’re sounding like the NRA,’ Guy said, and laughed, as much to defuse what might be seen as an insult as anything else.
Mayska laughed, too. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s true. But I’m not some piece of trailer trash living in Oklahoma, am I? What concerns me directly are security corporations who, given the chance, will put their own interests ahead of my own.’
‘Fair enough,’ Guy said. ‘But what governs your interest?’
‘Ah, yes,’ Peter said, ‘There’s the question, isn’t it?’
Lamprey waited. Mayska made no attempt to answer. Instead he bent down to adjust first one elegant tennis shoe and then the other, taking his time to get them just right.
It was Guy’s experience that if you wait long enough the other person will despair of silence. You wait, and people speak. Peter, though, seemed immune to this anxiety. The silence prevailed, went on too long, even for him.
‘So why invite me here?’ he said, eventually.
‘Ha!’ Mayska said, sitting up, slapping his thigh in delight. ‘Twice in one morning! I win! You are too soft!’
‘What are you talking about?’ Guy said, although he knew, just hadn’t quite been prepared to believe the man was still playing.
Mayska swung around and punched Guy on the arm, hard enough to hurt. ‘Don’t take offence,’ he said.
Way too late for that.
‘Stop,’ Mayska said. ‘Stop it. I mean it. I order you not to.’ Laughing again. ‘It was a joke. I like you. That’s why I invited you here. No. More than that. I admire you. But when we were playing tennis before I saw you. You let me have a point. In the eighth game, you were 40–15, set point, and you gave it to me. Didn’t you?’
Guy shrugged.
‘But, you see. I was just watching. I was still trying to figure you out. On a good day I think you could beat me, but not if you’re prepared to give away games. Is it maybe a writer’s thing? Empathy? You feel for the other man, you don’t want him to lose? Is that it? I doubt it’s because I’m rich!’
Very few people, certainly not those close to him, had ever accused Lamprey of too much empathy.
‘And then you did it again … You asked a good question, you waited for the answer, but then you let me go.’
‘I did,’ Lamprey conceded, but reluctantly. Unused to being lectured on his failings.
‘Listen my friend. I tell you this because it’s important. You ask me who watches me? People whose judgement I trust, who I hire because I believe in their smarts and that they have the balls to call me on what it is I’m doing. There is no-one else. But right now I need to give you some advice, even though I can see you don’t want to hear it, least of all from me. But listen, please. It is important. Don’t for a minute think that Bain has invited you into the Party because he likes you. There is a man with more killer instinct than the great Khan himself. A vast pile of skulls in his basement. He’s been doing this all his life. He will lift you up just exactly as high as he wants to and then he will squash you just as quickly, if it serves his purpose. For him you are nothing more than a tool.’
‘I thought you two were friends?’
‘Ha!’
‘Why then do you have anything to do with him?’
‘Because he has power and influence in arenas I do not. And I have the means to influence him in some small way.’ Not saying what this was. ‘Listen, I just say this to you. You have come to this late and from a different perspective. You make a mistake if you think these people want you for your wit or intelligence. I mean, they do, of course, why else? But only in so much as these things are useful to them.’
Warned about Bain by two people in the space of a week. Mayska stood up.
‘It’s who Aldous associates with that worries me,’ he said.
‘Lonergan?’ Guy said.
Mayska gave him a sardonic look. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The far Right. The religious ones. He thinks he has them under control, he thinks he has me under control, channelling my funds to their projects, but they’re a horse that’s hard to turn in a tight place.’ Stretching. ‘Come, we need to get some breakfast. And there is a very beautiful actress staying with us on the island. Right now she will feel as if she is being ignored. Which would defeat the purpose of inviting her.’
Lamprey stayed where he was. ‘So, what do you want from me?’ he said.
Mayska had picked up his racquet. He tapped it against his hairy calf.
‘History goes on all over the place all the time,’ he said. ‘The bits that get remembered have good observers, good chroniclers. That’s the only thing that makes them significant. I’m hoping that if you find it interesting you will write about this. How am I doing so far?’
In his armchair in the hotel Guy wondered if Bain knew about the young man who had come to his room. His favourite, Jaydon, had not been available at short notice and the notice had been short because before flying to Canberra he’d thought it inappropriate to indulge himself when Helen was so ill. But the success of the evening had led him to decide to reward himself, vestigial loyalties notwithstanding. Failing to consider how too much wine, too much rich food, and the strangeness of the new boy might affect him.
His inability to perform made him think his original intention had been correct, that the humiliation of his flaccid penis in the face of the beautiful young man was a kind of punishment for yielding to temptation. He felt wrong, dirty, corrupt, useless. Old. He’d declined to take advantage of Mayska’s proffered delights in the Whitsundays, if that was what they were, because he’d not been sure there wouldn’t be a price to pay and he wasn’t yet prepared to sell himself to the billionaire for so little. Was this what he had come to as a writer? The amanuensis of a small man made big by money? A pawn in Aldous Bain’s machinations? Was he deluded, becoming paranoid? Is that what was happening now, in the hotel room? Unable to get it up because Bain’s foot soldiers (or Mayska’s – who knows how large his reach was) might be watching? Nothing like the idea of a camera to dull the spirit. Which did not make it any less demeaning. The boy/man, an exquisite creature, for all his sartorial elegance and slim hairless body, as dumb as a fridge, had ended up kneeling between his legs. Using all his arts. Guy, by no means, an objective participant. He’d had to ask him to stop. The boy had offered to try other techniques. Did he want to be bound? The forfeit of his outrageous fee a small price to pay to be rid of him.
Eventually he flicked off the unwatched television, prepared to slope off to bed and tempt the gods of sleep. Reflexively switching on his mobile. Almost immediately it pinged into life. Three missed calls from Lasker. A voice message told him that Helen had had a relapse and been admitted to hospital. Asking him to call, it didn’t matter at what time of night.
Already well past midnight. When he rang the number there was no reply. The phone went straight to machine.