The Adversary by Ronnie Scott

Author:Ronnie Scott [Scott, Ronnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760144784
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

PART 2

INTO THE UNKNOWN BUT CHOSEN

The difficulty of the fray

lies in making

the crooked

straight

and in making

an advantage

of misfortune.

Sun-tzu

There were men in the world, and they were not finished with me. I pictured plots and rituals, complex fibs and schemes. Madwomen in the attic, fake identities – the kinds of fates inflicted on people in all the novels, on women and, sure, maybe some Russians, so why not on me?

This wasn’t how I wanted to go down. But Dan said, ‘No, you drongo.’

It turned out this had been a needlessly alarming way for Dan to tell me he’d formally committed me to a New Year’s adventure at a beach house to which Vivian had ‘access of some kind’; unspoken was the idea that his parents owned it, just as they owned his squalid but valuable apartment in Richmond.

It turned out we weren’t even going for New Year’s Eve, when the house had long ago been booked by internet strangers; instead we had it for the night of December 30, and we’d drive back to Melbourne in the morning.

The next day, Dan showed me the listing on his phone.

‘Ooh, inlays,’ I said, hoping he wouldn’t scan down towards the descriptive passage where I had learned this word eight or nine seconds ago.

‘Those are very interesting,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

It was mid-century modern, full of rectilinear teak and fussy mid-century furnishings. Everything was polished, blond and red. Downstairs, a ‘mess room’ looked crammed with single bunk beds, each of them tucked under low ceilings, exposed beams. I pictured the kinds of parties they must have had there in the fifties: the proud host and hostess sleeping in the room upstairs, the last gin fizz after a long night on a wide deck, and then stowaway persons, descending those stairs, drunk and giggling; and nowadays, dead.

It’s the new year soon, so my Richmond friend had said. Meaning what exactly? If you aren’t careful, you’ll get stuck being the same old you? Sadly, I could only be so lucky.

Soon I was in the back of a car, behind Dan and Lachlan, because whether I liked it or not – and for the record, I didn’t – we were really doing this, the old me, the old them, presumably abandoned in the dark dream of this year – but not yet, not yet. These were significant new vistas! I had to assume this, because they were being blocked by Dan and Lachlan being conspicuously handsy in the front seats, Lachlan driving the car and Dan reaching over to angelically fix his hair. We drove mellow streets, then hectic highways, then mellow streets again, listening to a podcast on the tree of evolution, an image we could leave behind us as we sped on through: humans hadn’t just evolved by passing down our genes, but by passing down the genes of things with which we shared our bodies. The human genome is, for instance, eight per cent virus, and little shreds are carried over when our selves are copied.

To the hatchback’s right, the cold ocean, its uncompliant hands.

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