Thought Crimes (7 page)

Keen to avoid these ancient disputes, Hizu tells Ray that MacArthur Pleasure Resort is a better name, the General having done so much to bring their nations together.

‘Australia's not worth shit,' Ray says. ‘This resort is the best patch of Australia we have left. Did you hear what the terrorists did to Royal Melbourne? It's not safe to play in Australia these days.'

‘No worries about safety here. And the greens have never looked better.'

Ray's not so easy to distract. He's different from most guests, who usually love to put the bad stuff behind them.

‘Golfers are an easy target, Hizzy. You want to blame someone for Australia going to shit, blame us. Or blame the pioneers who only tried to make something from a useless patch of dirt and scrub. The courses they're tearing up are a symbol of everything we achieved.'

‘It's a beautiful day, Ray. Not so windy as yesterday.'

‘Yeah, one out of the box.'

Seeing the old man cheering up, Hizu gives him a play-punch to the bicep.

‘Days like these, you wouldn't be dead for quids.'

With the shower running cold, Hizu drapes a towel around his waist and knocks on his neighbour's door, hoping Tom knows whether the problem is common to all apartments in the annex. When there is no answer, he phones the superintendent.

‘It'll be back on this arvo. Had to replace the tank,' Jet says.

‘Seen Tom or Miuki about?' Hizu asks, momentarily forgetting his distaste for Jet's gossip.

‘Admin gave them the flick.'

‘Bullshit!'

‘Too many complaints. The boss'd had a gutful.'

‘They're good people,' Hizu says, remembering how Miuki comforted him in the first weeks. It was she who'd said that a young man could have no greater ambition than to become a good Australian.

‘Sure, they're good guys, but they forgot themselves.'

That was the one thing always said of the staff told to leave: they'd forgotten themselves.

‘They were more Australian than anyone here,' Hizu says, which is close as he'd come to issuing a protest.

‘Might've been the problem. You can be too Australian.'

Some things aren't meant to be fathomed. Reiko dies, and that
death sends you into the path of a woman who might have been her
twin. Miuki knew me from somewhere outside time. For her, it was
no accident that fate brought me here. I was like Tom, whose dad
worked with my dad at the old reactor before these fairways were
dredged from the sea, when men and women made the two-hour
commute from Hoshi six days a week. She said we were here in
search of our dreaming.

When Miuki delivered her second dead child, the obstetrician
from Fukuoka told Tom that the resort's water was contaminated.
Neither man dared raise it with the bosses. ‘Time to get bolshie,'
Miuki said. ‘That's what an Australian woman would do. There's
no one more daring than an Australian woman.'

She was certain I'd make it, that fate had been astute when it
sent me here. So why has fate chosen to treat her and Tom like shit?
Despite everything that's happened in Australia, they intended to
live there as soon as they'd saved enough to retire. ‘Guests have
their reasons for escaping to a place like this, but we think we can
give something back.'

Born in Stockholm to Australian parents, Missy looks the part, a statuesque blonde with an accent that could slice raw steak. Her great gift is making all her students think they're her favourite. For this session she's asked Hizu to instigate a role-play.

In an unspoken nod to his friend Miuki, Hizu casts Shingo as the worker who requests three days' leave to visit a dying parent in Perth. As the boss, Kobe will choose this moment to question Shingo's dedication. When Kobe refuses the request, Shingo is nonplussed.

‘That was excellent,' Missy tells them, ‘but you left out the most important part. Should the boss have the last word?'

The class mulls this over for a moment before Hizu suggests that Shingo would give his boss the bird.

‘Absolutely! When the boss turns his back, the worker makes a one-fingered salute … You try that, Shingo.'

Shingo jolts his index finger upwards.

‘It might be more expressive to use the middle finger
.'

‘Wouldn't it be better to do it to the boss's face?' Kobe asks.

‘Possibly.'

Missy then turns to Nobuko, who always has an answer, along with a deep, relaxed laugh that any Australian woman would kill for. ‘Why wouldn't Shingo make his gesture to the boss's face?'

‘That would be unAustralian.'

After class, Nobuko seeks Hizu out to ask why he never attends the Sunday evening staff parties.

‘It's a good turn,' she tells him with a gleam in her eye. ‘Cheap grog. Drink till you chuck … With norgs like yours, you could win the wet T-shirt comp.'

Nobuko is slim and pretty, and Hizu knows that his only hope of meeting a woman and making a family is to pair off with a staff member, as Tom and Miuki had, but grog's the one thing he can't get on top of. All his worst errors have followed a night on the piss.

He tells her that after caddying fifty-four holes he's knack-ered most Sunday nights. Truth is, he'd prefer to study and write.

Nobuko doesn't conceal her disappointment.

‘Maybe you'd like me if my tits were big as Missy's?'

‘Maybe,' Hizu tells her, and feels the wind of her raised finger the moment he turns his back.

For the first three months, his mother wrote twice-weekly; now he's lucky to hear from her once a fortnight. Her attitude has changed. To begin with, she was proud that her son had a job where he earned the same as a top surgeon. After losing Reiko, it was important to make a fresh start. Now, she says he's rejected her and her culture. He's so tainted he can't see how offensive his thinking's become.

She misses her son, as he knew she would. It was too much to expect her to understand the dedication this work would involve when he hadn't fully understood it himself until recently. You only see the point of no return after it's passed.

‘Your father never would have let this happen.'

That might be true. He can't say. He has few memories of his father. The most prominent has his father being summoned to school to approve their chosen punishment after Hizu, a gifted mimic, entered the principal's office and delivered a bogus speech over the public address system, complete with trademark tics and slurs.

‘Do you want to go on the stage, is that it?' his father shrieked, his complexion already hinting at the cancer that would take him the next year. ‘Your friends will be lawyers and you'll have no arse in your pants.'

An Australian dad would have asked him to repeat the routine, and praised the accuracy of his impression. In the final analysis, it wasn't about what his own father thought, but about the kind of dad a decent Australian could choose to be.

While setting himself to blast out of the greenside bunker on Crampton's fifteenth, Craig asks his caddy if it's true that the cancer rate among resort staff is ten times the national average.

‘That's bullshit,' Norichi tells him. ‘Wouldn't be enough money to pay a bloke if that was true.'

Fifteen metres away on the green, Craig's playing partner, Ben, has overheard this exchange and looks Hizu in the eye.

‘Sure, that's the company line. Let me ask you something, man to man. It'll go no further than us four here. There's a story doing the rounds in Melbourne. Two big blokes came up here, one of them a top investment banker. After drinking a skinful, they decided to have a swimming race on the ornamental lake. Two thirds of the way across, the banker's mate had a massive coronary. The banker notices, pulls him to shore, does CPR, and saves his life. Two days later, both men are dead. The doctor signed off on meningitis, though he knew it was radiation poisoning. I've heard that story from three sources. Is it true?'