Chapter Forty-One: Four in the Morning

Canggu. The wet season. Four a.m.

He is fifty-one. Rain on the tin awning below.

The glass table. The pool light making its slow blue shapes on the wall. The phone face-down, which is new; he has started turning it over, which he never used to do.

Gail died in the autumn.

The funeral was in Glen Innes and there were about ninety people and it rained, which everybody said she would have liked, given the number of years she had spent wanting it to.

He did not come.

The reasons given were various and all of them were true and none of them was the reason. There was a travel issue. There was advice about leaving the jurisdiction. There was a question about whether he would be served at the church, and that question was real, because there were at least four people at that funeral who would have done it.

Dennis did not come either, for reasons that did not require explanation, and which the town discussed in the car park afterwards in low voices.

So Neville McIntyre buried his wife of fifty-six years in the presence of neither of his sons, shook ninety hands, and went home to a farm called West Broadview.

In her things they found the card.

Christmas 1993. Told you.

And a cheque for two thousand dollars, uncashed, thirty-three years old, the ink gone brown.

Neville sat at the kitchen table with it — the table where the man from the bank had sat in his short-sleeved shirt, the table where a boy had watched his father go helpless in front of a piece of paper — and turned it over a few times.

He is not a stupid man. He never was.

That was the story his son told from stages, and it was the most profitable lie in the catalogue and the only genuinely unforgivable one, because every other lie only took money.

He put the cheque back in the tin.

And at four in the morning in Canggu it arrives, as it has arrived at this hour for ten years.

But it is not completely financially incompetent tonight.

Tonight it is his mother, hanging washing with a peg in her mouth in 1978, saying:

if you call it that for long enough, love, people start to believe it.

And for the first time in fifty-one years, alone, Jamie Neville McIntyre finishes the sentence.

They start to believe it.

You don't.

That is the whole of it.

That is the entire architecture of the man, laid bare at last on a wet Tuesday in Canggu — and it is not remorse and it will not become remorse, and by nine-thirty that morning he will be on a call about Lombok, and by eleven he will be brilliant and funny and warm and generous and utterly convinced that he is the victim of a smear campaign.

But for about ninety seconds he sits with it.

Nine thousand people in a stadium in Melbourne believed it.

Five hundred and fifty thousand across two decades believed it.

A hundred and fifty-two families believed it.

Thirteen creditors believed it.

Five men on a boat believed it.

A crane operator from Mackay who liked him believed it.

A diesel fitter from Toowoomba with his mother's money believed it.

A school administrator from Frankston who rang every quarter for three years believed it.

A photographer in a rented studio who was told he had an eye believed it.

A nurse from Newcastle who checked believed it.

A project manager in Kerobokan who paid thirty-one men out of his own house believed it.

Every purchaser still holding a contract for a villa that has not been delivered believes it, or did.

Ninety-six thousand followers of a man found to have run a fake charity believed it.

A twenty-one-year-old in Fiji who won four votes of seven never got the chance to.

And the only person on the face of the earth who has never once, for a single second, believed that the man is what the sign says —

is the man.