‘No brief from HOA? Are we to understand from the phrasing of this response that you are briefing lawyers regarding company matters on your own account?’
‘I prefer not to answer that question.’ The silence in the room was filled with the hum of machines.
The air-conditioning could be heard grinding away, there was a faint buzz from the speakers in the roof, the electronic gear that ran the sliding screen and the computer graphics was humming softly in its cage. Jack resumed his seat.
‘I need a day or two, Chairman, before I can report properly.’ Sir Laurence closed the white file. ‘If I may summarise for the board. A series of relevant, specific questions has been put to the CEO regarding significant matters, some of which may relate to an ASIC inquiry. The CEO has either been evasive or refused outright to respond to the board. You agree?’ He paused, but not for agreement. ‘I suggest the board needs a few days to consider the critical question of whether it can continue to place its trust in the CEO. Do you agree?’
There were murmurs of assent from around the table.
‘The board will meet again at ten o’clock on Monday. The presence of the CEO will not be required. Thank you.’
Jack wandered about the car park in a daze. Where had he left the car? He couldn’t remember. He’d abolished the old system of allocated places with names and titles as part of his egalitarian push. He’d been good at all of that, hadn’t he? He knew the staff loved it, loved Jack appearing in their workspace without warning just to chat, eating with them in the canteen, even pissing with them. No more executive toilets. They even seemed to love the snide articles in the press about him. But where was the car? He clicked the key remote and was relieved to see a distant flash of tail-lights. It was too early to drive to the old lawyer’s house. His wife had told him to wait till this evening. He didn’t want to go home to Louise, but he needed to talk to someone. He rang the Pope.
As he sat with a brown paper bag on the bench by the canna lilies, the terse nature of the response came back to him. Perhaps it was unreasonable to expect a meeting at short notice, but surely the headlines would excuse it. The lean figure was beside him on the seat before he was aware of its arrival.
‘Pass the sandwiches. I don’t have much time.’ It was an uneasy conversation, or monologue, that ensued.
Jack sketched out the lines of the board meeting in broad strokes but, even to his own eye, the portrait was of a guilty suspect stuttering under the harsh light of interrogation. He described his confrontation with the press outside his house and again he could see himself as a weak reed. Why was he the victim when he should have been the aggressor? He put the question to the Pope in a variety of ways, but elicited only a series of grunts.
Finally the Pope screwed the brown paper bag into a tight ball and threw it in one clean arc into a rubbish bin.
‘This is difficult. Very difficult. But I may not be able to help you anymore.’
Jack was stunned. The day was a series of sharp blows to the stomach. ‘Christ. Why? Have I done something? Or not done something?’
The Pope shook his head. ‘It’s nothing to do with you, Jack, I give you my word. It might be okay, I’m not sure. But the group did say from the start that if any of us had conflicts, we might have to walk away. I’m just warning you.’
Jack held the rough wood on the weathered bench with both hands and felt a splinter pierce his thumb. What was happening? The world was closing in on him without remorse. ‘I need you around. If you can. I really need you now.’
The Pope stood. ‘I know. I’ll do what I can, but I may have to go.’
He walked away a few paces and then turned back and held out his hand. ‘Good luck.’ chapter fifteen
When he drove past the house, the workshop was a brooding shadow in the birch groves. He was too early. They never met before eight, but he had nowhere else to go. He parked outside the gate. What did it matter who saw him now?
The street was alive tonight. Executive cars were ferrying executive persons back to the safety of their leafy driveways and the welcome of their patient wives. Buses were disgorging schoolboys weighed down with backpacks full of football gear and Catcher in the Rye. Young women in tailored skirts and blazers were returning from law firms and accountants’ offices insisting to their mothers that they wouldn’t be waiting by panelled doors with peep holes for the return of the master. Dogs were leaping for joy at the gathering of the pack and the smell of lamb roasting in the oven. All was safe, placid, pleasant in the realm of suburbia.
Jack waited for an hour, watching. It reminded him of the life he’d grown up with and the relaxed easiness of it all came back to him in a drift of nostalgia. He remembered riding his bike down streets like this, arms in the air, just balancing with the sway of his body, not a care in the world. His cell phone rang and rang out. He switched it off. The street was quiet now. Dinner was being served. Homework books were being discovered under unwashed tracksuits next to half-eaten apples.
Television was siphoning off minds into unreality. The lights went on in the workshop.
Still he lingered. He was reluctant to go in. He placed both hands on the steering wheel, expecting them to be shaking with the irregular rhythm of his breathing, but they rested calmly on the yellowy leather. It was time.
He eased open the door then closed it gently behind him, as if it were important to be quiet. Clandestine meetings that everyone knew about still required respect for the conventions. He trod carefully on the soft covering of leaf litter. There was no wind to rustle the birches tonight, no moon to silver the trunks. A possum hissed and leapt in the branches above. He hesitated on the stone path when he could see the lighted window above the workbench, and listened to the whirring of the lathe. Sometimes it screamed and yowled as it tore at the wood, but tonight it was a steady, mechanical whirr. He knocked on the heavy, ribbed door.
There was no response. The lathe whirred, the birches stood guard. He rapped with a closed fist and the door rattled against the jamb. Nothing. Normally, all sounds would cease at his first knocking and then he would hear only the soft pad of slippers on the wide boards. He reached for the forged hasp, its manufacture previously described to him in loving detail, and the door swung open. He could see the dense bulk of the old lawyer hunched over the workbench, intent on the machine before him. He called out a greeting, but there was no response. And then he knew.
He was frozen. He couldn’t approach the workbench. He had to move, but his systems wouldn’t obey. He gulped great lungfuls of air. And then, in a rush, he was at the bench and his hands were on the shoulders and the body fell forward, face down on the rough wood.
He cried out as the lathe continued its scream, dangerously close to the gnarled face. Why was it still operating? The foot pedal. He sank to his knees and grasped the ankle in the thick wool sock and pushed, hard, but the foot wouldn’t shift off the ugly contraption. It was wedged somehow, the weight of the body twisted onto it. He tried to lift the leg, to free the man from the machine, to stop the appalling noise that was now screaming into his brain. If only he could stop the noise everything would be all right.
He knelt higher, sweating under the bench, frantic, panicked, grasping at the legs and the trunk to shift the weight. He lifted and pushed simultaneously and suddenly the foot was free and the scream was stifled. He fell back in relief and sat, panting like an exhausted hound.
And then, before he could prevent it, the body began to slide, crashing to the floor in a swirl of sawdust and shavings. Now it wasn’t a body anymore, but a man. The face was compressed into a grimace by the neck forcing it onto the floorboards, but it was the face he’d come to trust, to admire, maybe more.
He crawled to the man and held the face in his hands and wiped the shavings away. Should he be forcing the mouth open, breathing his breath into these lungs, pounding this old heart, running, ringing, someone, somewhere? But he knew he was holding only the body, not the life. He gently turned the face away from the floor and straightened the bent legs and flayed arms. The old lawyer was sleeping now, at peace in the detritus of his life’s work, ready for the rituals of the world he’d left behind.
Jack slumped into the chair by the stove. He was shaking, shivering, still gulping air to no purpose and then, without warning or knowledge, he began to howl.
The long, haunting wail rose into the beams and rang off the iron roof and seemed never to stop.
That was how she found him, in her husband’s chair, keening over his body. She’d lost a son, and part of a husband, long ago; she knew the living had more need of her. She knelt before the chair and wrapped his head in her and gradually the howling subsided into sobbing until finally his whole body relaxed into her, and it was over.
It was late, Louise would be worried. He’d rung no one. He felt he’d never switch on the phone again. They
