She loved the stories he told her about his travels, and how he had made his fortune dealing rare stamps and playing poker, mostly on the internet. He worked a gambling system which seemed so obvious, when he explained it, and so clever.
Internet poker games took place all over the world, 24/7. He’d use the time zones, logging on to games that were being played where it was the small hours of the morning by people who were tired and often a little drunk. He’d watch for a while, then join in. Easy pickings for a man fully awake, sober and alert.
Abby had always been attracted to older men and this guy, who seemed so tough, yet was passionate about tiny, delicate, beautiful stamps and enthused to her about their links with history, fascinated her. For a girl from a staid British background, he was totally different from anyone she had ever met. And although there was that vulnerability about him, at the same time there was something intensely strong and manly that made her feel safe with him.
For the first time in her life, breaking her own rule with total abandon, she slept with him that very night. And she moved in with him just a couple of weeks later. He took her shopping, encouraging her to buy expensive clothes, and often came home with jewellery or a new watch or an insanely lavish bunch of flowers if he’d had a good poker win.
Sue had done her best to dissuade Abby, pointing out that he was a good deal older than her, that he had a somewhat uncertain past and a reputation as something of a ladies’ man – or, put more crudely, was a serial shagger.
But Abby had ignored all of that, dumping her friendship first with Sue and subsequently with the other friends she had made since arriving in Melbourne. Instead, she enjoyed meeting Dave’s older and – to her – much more glamorous and interesting circle. Big money had always had an allure for her and these people were all big spenders.
As a child, in her school holidays she had sometimes gone on jobs with her father, who ran a small floor and bathroom tiling business. She had loved helping him, but a stronger attraction for her was the houses – some of them really incredible – where rich people lived. Her mother worked at the public library in Hove and their little semi in Hollingbury, with its neat garden, which both her parents tended lovingly, was the extent of their horizons.
As she grew up, Abby felt increasingly constricted, and restricted, by her modest upbringing. In her teens she read the works of Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins and Barbara Taylor Bradford avidly, and of every other novelist who wrote about the lives of the rich and glamorous, as well as devouring
When a friend of Dave’s was arrested on three murder charges she was appalled, but she couldn’t help feeling a frisson of excitement. Then another of his circle was shot dead in his car, in front of his twins, while watching a children’s football training session. She began to realize that she was now part of a very different culture from the one she had grown up in and had previously understood. But despite her shock at the man’s death, she found the funeral exciting. To be there as part of all these people, to be accepted by them – it was the biggest turn-on of her life.
At the same time she began to wonder what else Dave was really up to. She noticed him sometimes fawning over the guys he had told her were the biggest players, trying to do some kind of business with them. One morning she overheard him on the phone telling someone that trading in stamps was a great way to launder money, to move it around the globe, as if he was trying to sell the concept to them.
She didn’t like that so much. It was as if she hadn’t minded all the time they were on the fringe, just hanging out in bars and partying with these people. But actually doing business with them – almost begging them to let him do business – lowered Dave in her eyes. And yet, deep in her heart, she felt she might be able to help him, if she could just get through the wall he seemed to have erected around himself. Because, after several months with him, she realized she knew no more about his past than when she had first met him, other than that he’d had two previous wives and both his divorces had been painful.
Then one day he dropped a bombshell.
22
The metallic blue Holden pick-up headed west, away from Melbourne. MJ, a tall young man of twenty-eight with jet-black hair and a surfer’s frame, wearing a yellow T-shirt and Bermudas, drove with one hand on the wheel, his free arm around Lisa’s shoulders.
The ute sat low and squat on its shocks, on wide mags shod with fatties that clung sure-footedly to the contours of the winding road. This vehicle was his pride and joy, and he listened contentedly to the burble of the V8 5.7-litre engine through the drainpipe exhausts as they drove through big, open country. To their right, plains of scorched vegetation stretched out for miles. To their left, beyond a tired-looking barbed-wire fence, softly contoured brown hills rose in the near distance, parched and arid courtesy of six years’ almost unbroken drought. A few thin ridges of trees were scattered over them randomly, like strips of facial hair missed by a razor.
It was Saturday morning and for two whole days MJ could forget about his intensive studies. In a month’s time he was sitting tough stockbroking exams, which he needed to pass to secure a permanent job with his current employers, Macquarie Bank. Spring had been a long time coming this year, despite the drought, and this weekend promised to be the first truly glorious one after the dreary winter months. He was determined to make the most of it.
They were ambling along. With six points on his licence, he was being careful to drive well within the speed limits. Besides, he wasn’t in any hurry. He was happy – intensely happy – just being here with the girl he loved, enjoying the drive, the scenery, the Saturday morning feeling of the whole weekend stretching out ahead of him.
Something he had once read was going around inside his head: Happiness is not getting what you want. It is wanting what you have.
He said it out aloud to Lisa, and she said they were beautiful words, and she agreed with them. Totally. She kissed him. ‘You say so many beautiful things, MJ.’ He blushed.
She pressed a button and music from the Whitlams thumped out of the madly expensive sound system he’d had installed. And their camping gear and the slab of VB beer thumped under the battened-down tarp behind the cab. And his heart thumped too. It was good to be here, good to feel so alive, to feel the warm air blowing on his face through the open window, to smell Lisa’s perfume, to feel her tangle of blonde curls batting against his wrist.
‘Where are we?’ she said, not that she cared. She was enjoying this too. Enjoying the break from her weekly routine of visiting doctors’ practices as a haemophilia drugs sales rep for the pharmaceutical giant Wyeth. Enjoying wearing just a loose white top and pink shorts, instead of the business suits she had to wear during the week. But most of all, enjoying precious time together with MJ.
‘Nearly there,’ he said.
They passed a yellow hexagonal road sign depicting a black bicycle and stopped at a T-intersection, beside the skeletal trunk of a Radiata pine that was topped by a thick clump of needles, like a badly fitting toupee. Immediately ahead of them rose a steep, bald hill with isolated clusters of bushes looking as if they’d been stuck to it by Velcro.
Lisa, who was English, had only been in Australia for two years. She had moved to Melbourne from Perth a few months ago and the terrain was all new to her. ‘When were you last here?’ she asked.
‘Not for some years – ten maybe. Used to come here camping with my parents, when I was a kid,’ he said. ‘It was our favourite place. You’re going to love it. Yee-hah!’
With a sudden burst of exuberance, he tramped the accelerator. The ute shot forward, making a sharp left on to the highway with a squeal of its tyres and a roar of thunder from its exhausts.
After a few minutes they passed a sign on a pole that read BARWON RIVER, then MJ slowed down and started looking to his right as they passed another saying STONEHAVEN AND POLLOCKS FORD.
After a while he braked sharply and turned right on to a sandy track. ‘I’m pretty sure this is it!’ he said.
They bounced along for five hundred yards or so. Wide open country to their right, bushes to their left and an embankment down to a river they couldn’t see. They passed a steel-girder bridge sitting on old brick buttresses to their left, then thick brush obscured the view. The track suddenly dipped sharply, then rose again on the far side. After a few minutes it widened out for some yards and ended, turning into scrub grass beyond which was dense brush.
MJ brought the ute to a halt and put on the handbrake. A cloud of dust swirled over them. ‘Welcome to paradise,’ he said.
They kissed.
Then, after some moments, they climbed out. Into total warm silence. The engine pinged. There was the scent of dried grasses in the air. A bowerbird made a sound like someone whistling
‘God,’ Lisa said, ‘this is so beautiful.’
A fly buzzed around her face and she batted it away. Another one came and she batted that away too.
‘Good old flies,’ MJ said. ‘This is the right spot!’
‘Obviously they remember you!’ she said, as a third one landed on her forehead.
He gave her a playful punch, before arcing his hand several times in rapid succession in front of his face, giving an Aussie salute to flap away more flies that were pestering him. Then, with his arm around her, MJ steered Lisa to a gap in the brush.
‘This is where we used to launch our canoe,’ he said.
She peered down a steep, sandy slope overgrown with bracken that was a natural slipway into the river, a good thirty yards below. The water, about twenty yards wide, was as still as a millpond. A few damsel flies sat on the surface, feeding off mosquito larvae or laying eggs, and more hovered just above. Reflections of the brush on the far bank appeared in sharp focus.
‘Wow!’ she said. ‘Wowwwwwww! That is amazing.’
Then she noticed the series of white sticks planted all the way down the slipway. Each of them had precise ruled markings in black.
‘When I was a kid,’ MJ said, ‘the water level was up to here.’ He pointed at the top marker.
Lisa counted eight exposed rulers, all the way down to the water. ‘It’s dropped this much?’
‘Good old global warming,’ he replied.
Then she saw the looped hangman’s rope fixed to the overhanging branch of a tree thick as an elephant’s leg.
‘We used to jump off that!’ MJ said. ‘It was just a short drop.’
Now it was a good five yards.
He peeled off his T-shirt. ‘Coming in?’
‘Let’s put the tent up first!’
‘Shit, Lisa, we’ve got the whole day to put the tent up! I’m hot!’ He continued stripping. ‘And the flies hate the water.’
‘Tell me what the water’s like – I’ll think about it!’
‘You’re weak as piss!’
Lisa laughed. MJ stood naked, then disappeared for some moments into the undergrowth. Moments later, she saw him crawling along the overhanging branch. He reached the rope, which looked
