Fishing for Stars (27 page)

‘Look up, up . . . up there, at the midnight sky

At the game of chance within the firmament

Saturn’s rings, mooned Jupiter, planet Mars

All yours if you hoist ambition’s sails and set

A galactic course, then cast a wide-flung net

To fish for the brightest stars in all creation.’

‘Anna, that is beautiful!’ I exclaimed.

She laughed. ‘Too much champagne. I have never recited it aloud to anyone before, although I do so in my head every morning the moment I wake and every night before I go to sleep.’

‘Does it have a name, the poem, and what does it mean to you?’ Like a lot of poetry, you don’t always get the meaning first off, but I was curious about it because it was obviously very important to her.

‘It is called “Fishing for Stars”. It urges me to dare to seek my fortune everywhere and not to be afraid to take the risks involved in the truly big ventures,’ she replied.

‘It’s lovely. Where did you learn it? Is it Japanese?’

Anna hesitated. Had I been sober I would have stopped as soon as I noticed her hesitation, knowing she could only have learned it in one place at one time. I daresay, had she too been less inebriated she would have reminded me of her request and in turn my promise never to ask questions about her experience under the Japanese unless she volunteered the information herself. ‘Just something I learned long ago, Nicholas,’ she replied.

‘Him?’ I asked stupidly, knowing.

‘Yes.’

A voice in my head yelled,
‘Stop! You’ve had too much to drink.’
But I couldn’t. The champagne, added to what I’d drunk earlier, had tipped me over the edge and a blinding resentment fuelled my tongue. ‘And you repeat it twice daily? Must be pretty important to you.’

‘Yes,’ Anna replied, not backing off.

‘Why is that?’

‘Nick, stop it! I don’t want you to know. It has something to do with the silver cigarette case you found here in my bedroom.’

It was the wrong thing to say, another unspoken resentment that gnawed at my pathetic heart. A year or so back I had gone to fetch Anna’s suitcase and had seen a silver cigarette case on the table beside her bed which she had obviously forgotten to pack. As Anna didn’t smoke I thought it curious and before returning it to her I had briefly glanced at it, then inexcusably opened it to discover it contained just a dusting of a dirty white powder that I realised must be heroin. She had chased the dragon and no doubt intended to clean the cigarette case before she went through customs in Brisbane. On the lid of the case was inscribed in Japanese script a line that made no sense in that language. It read:
Nyuwun pamit ratu.
I returned the case to her without commenting on the contents, but asked casually what the inscription meant, as it was clearly not Japanese.

‘It is Javanese,’ Anna replied, accepting the case and putting it into her handbag, ‘a small joke.’

‘A joke in Javanese written in Japanese? That’s funny in itself,’ I remarked at the time. ‘Does it translate?’

‘No’ she replied. ‘Some other time I will tell you, Nicholas,’ she said, smiling and attempting to sound casual.

I have a half decent memory and it was only three words. To satisfy my curiosity I’d had it translated and found it meant
Goodbye, Princess.
It didn’t take a lot of imagination to realise it had been presented to her by Konoe Akira. Anna had never mentioned the cigarette case again, nor had I, nor that I knew the meaning of the inscription on the lid; that is, until this starlit night when I had too much French booze in my belly.

‘Ah, the famous silver cigarette case
Konoe-san
presented to you. The one in which you keep your smack; inscribed, no less, with the words,’ I laughed, ‘Goodbye, Princess’.

‘Nick!’ Anna said, her voice sharp yet tinged with dismay.

But it was too late. Five years of sexual frustration, childish resentment and jealousy of her Japanese mentor turned into verbal vomit, which I was unable to prevent spewing out of me. ‘And it came with a lovely little poem about the stars?’ I chuckled. ‘Go on, darling, recite it for me again, will you?’

A moment’s silence followed, then Anna rose and placed her glass on the bamboo table between us and reached for the melancholy bottle. She lifted it from the ice bucket in a clatter of melting ice cubes and upended it over my head. I could hear the gurgle of champagne and felt it fizz as it poured over my head, neck, chest and shoulders. ‘Get fucked, Nick,’ she said, then she dropped the empty champagne bottle, retrieved her own glass and jerked my waistband away from my waist and poured the contents down my trousers. ‘That’s the only French love you’re going to get from me tonight, you bastard!’ Without another word she walked calmly from the verandah into the house.

‘Where are you going?’ I called, suddenly sober, soaked, and feeling desperately ashamed of myself.

‘To chase the dragon, arsehole!’ Anna called back.

I wakened the next morning lambasting myself, using every unsavoury epithet I could think of, wincing at the thought of my behaviour the previous evening. I spent the first half of the morning preparing
Madam Butterfly
to sail and instructing cook to roast a chicken, bake a canary cake, Anna’s favourite, and pack a picnic hamper. Sailing to Coffee Scald on the morning after her arrival was another of our traditions, although, like the melancholy bottle, I wasn’t at all sure we would now be following it.

Anna appeared on the dock at about eleven and I was somewhat relieved to see that she wore white shorts and a sky-blue shirt, another tradition; it was the outfit she’d worn when I’d disastrously attempted to kidnap her and she had tossed scalding coffee over me. It suggested that she might agree to come along.

‘Morning,’ I called. No answer. I waited until she came closer and said with a shrug, ‘What can I say? I was drunk and out of order. I apologise.’

‘Accepted,’ she replied crisply, though without even the hint of a smile.

‘Anna, I
really
am sorry. It was a beautiful poem and it obviously means a great deal to you; to belittle it was unconscionable. We have an agreement that I don’t pry into your past and I broke it. What can I do to make it up to you?’

‘You can stop this longwinded and pathetic apology, Nicholas!’ she said sharply, then added, ‘And you can start looking for another girlfriend, one with a less unfortunate past.’

‘You’re back on the smack then? You never intended to give up, did you?’

‘What do you think?’

My father had once counselled me as a teenager, when he’d caught me arguing vehemently with a friend over a matter of no consequence: ‘Nick, most emotional arguments have one of two obvious conclusions: you either win or lose. So, before you open your big mouth, ask yourself: if I win this argument will it change anything, and what are the likely consequences? You will discover that, except in very rare circumstances, nothing positive will come from it either way and you may have lost a friend and changed very little else. Emotional altercations rarely have great potential for turning out well. Argue emotionally only when there is a deeply held belief at stake that you would only forsake if God required you to do so.’

Sometimes having a bishop as your dad becomes a bit tedious. ‘But then I would appear to be weak in the eyes of my opponent,’ I recall protesting.

‘Ah yes, peace and goodwill always demand compromises. War occurs when we are no longer able to accommodate an adversary. True strength is knowing when that moment of principle arrives and our sense of truth has been betrayed.’

I was sober and contrite and I wasn’t going to pick a fight, even if Anna used every foul imprecation known. ‘Are we sailing to Coffee Scald?’ I asked quietly, not looking directly at her and pretending to thread a length of rope through a brass eyehole in a sail.

‘Yes.’

‘Fifteen minutes?’

‘Okay.’

‘Good, I’ll fetch the picnic hamper. Cook’s baked your favourite canary cake.’

A tiny smile. ‘You’re pathetic, Nicholas!’

The wind had been fairly strong and changeable so that I was kept busy with the sails while Anna manned the tiller. There hadn’t been much conversation between us on the way to Coffee Scald; in fact, apart from calling out the odd instruction, we had exchanged not a word.

Anna splashed ashore lugging the picnic hamper and proceeded to prepare lunch in the shade of a large coral outcrop while I tied sails and set the shallow-water anchor. She was waiting for me, seated on the beach and holding out a glass of white wine. I dropped to my haunches beside her to accept it. ‘Fair wind. I think that was just about a record run,’ I said, as a throwaway opening gambit, then, extending my glass, ‘Cheers.’

‘No, Nicholas, it was an ill wind and it brings no good,’ she said, her glass un-clinked.

‘Anna, please . . .’

‘No, Nick, I cannot continue! I must go away from you. I cannot be your woman. I am useless!’ She looked forlorn. ‘I
must
let you go. You must find another woman to love you. But only understand, no one can love you as much as I do. It is not possible.’ Then, heartbroken, she started to cry in earnest. It was the first time I had witnessed her howl. The usually self-contained Anna was now an abjectly miserable creature bawling her heart out, the wine glass abandoned, its contents spilled into her lap.

‘Anna! Anna!’ I threw my glass aside and dropped to my knees, holding her to my chest as she continued to weep, her breast and shoulders shaking against me. ‘Darling, no! Not ever!’ I cried, close to tears myself. ‘Don’t you understand, I love
you
. I don’t
want
anyone else. They, the others, mean nothing!’ I kissed the top of her head, her forehead, her hands covering her face, her ears. ‘Sweetheart! Darling! Please!’

In an adult storybook I would have held her, comforted her and then made love to her on the lonely island beach, waves lapping at our feet, Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in
From Here to Eternity
. But of course no such thing happened. Anna eventually quietened down then pulled away from me, brushing away her tears with the fingertips of both hands, regaining her dignity with this one small gesture. ‘No, Nicholas,’ she said quietly, ‘we cannot continue.’

The next day Anna caught the DC-4 leaving for Sydney via Noumea. No tears and a peck on the cheek at the airport. ‘Nice, Nicholas,’ she said softly, and turning, walked across the tarmac to the waiting aeroplane.

My final view of her, seen through a blur of sudden tears, was of a perfectly contained Anna, the dark sheen of her hair, her trim figure in a beautifully cut grey business suit, the skirt just above the knees, nylon stockings and the click, click, click on the tarmac of the six-inch stiletto heels of her black leather shoes. The little Anna I’d seen on Coffee Scald was safely tucked away deep down where hurt couldn’t reach.

The next month I was in turn angry, remorseful, tearful, drunk and belligerent. I picked fights, screwed around, paced the bedroom floor in the small hours of the morning, stopped myself reaching for the phone to call Melbourne on a thousand occasions, was consumed by self-pity and generally made a bloody idiot of myself. Until one night Joe Popkin, who must have heard about my pathetic carryings on, arrived by boat from Port Moresby and found me pissed as a newt in
Le Club Français.
Lifting me bodily (I weighed round 190 pounds)
he carried me over his shoulder to a waiting taxi. Once home he dumped me under a cold shower then threw me, still wringing wet, into bed.

The following morning, bleary-eyed and hideously hungover, I stumbled onto the verandah where cook was serving Joe breakfast. ‘Nick, mah man!’ he exclaimed cheerfully. ‘Sit you down, Champ. Take yoh’self a chair, boy. We got ourselves good news. Yeah, man . . . real
good
news!’

‘You’ve arranged to have me shot? Put me out of my misery,’ I muttered, plonking myself down heavily in the wicker chair, the smell of eggs and bacon causing my stomach to turn.

‘Juice.’ He handed me a glass of orange juice then turned to the cook. ‘Cookie, bring masta Nick coffee. Head blong hem sore tumas.’

I sat with my chin on my chest, my head thumping like the clappers from hell, orange juice in my hand. ‘What good news, Joe?’ I ventured at last.

Joe cackled. ‘Well you jes about alive ee-nuff for me to tell you, son. Las night I called Mel-bourne.’ Joe laughed and clapped his hands, sending a jolt through my head. ‘Hallelujah! Tomorrow she’s comin’ back. Dat Sandring-ham, it bringing yoh lover back to yoh arms! Now maybe we can do some shippin’ busi-ness and Kevin, he gonna get offa mah back.’ His voice changed and he mimicked Kevin. ‘What’s wrong wid Nick? The whole goddamned Pacific is crawlin’ wid free pussy and he wants dat screwed-up junkie widda black leather corset, widda thigh-high boots!’ Joe laughed, ‘That’s our partner, partner.’

Anna had once told me that she worked in a silk evening kimono and I would later question Kevin about the bondage uniform he imagined. ‘Where you been? You ain’t never seen no porn movies, Nick?’ he asked, clearly astonished. ‘Dem punishment dames, dat da standard uniform. Every Joe Palooka know dat, man!’