CHAPTER 79
Life was good. We celebrated Ish’s seventh birthday by withdrawing some of our accumulated bonus money and flying out to Esperance for some seriously wet fun, including a stop on Woody Island for penguin watching. Trying to explain the why and wherefore of polar bear and iceberg absence reminded me yet again of our son’s real age, despite his literary tastes, but there were places to swim, burgers to eat and granite outcrops to play on.

Neither Maz nor I had any truck with the sexist convention that women were meant to be mothers, but we were parents, and it was wonderful, most of the time.

Every now and again, we would find ourselves hindered from doing some adult activity or other, but for my part I saw it as ‘postponed’ rather than ‘prevented’. Whatever the thoughts, Ish would grin or laugh out loud, and any delay lost all importance.

Our holidays were far more often local affairs, such as a trip to that site at Gracetown, or Falcon Bay for swimming and handmade pizzas.

His climbing was improving as well, and when Maz found some kid-sized rock shoes on line, we were off and scrambling. I raised the height of his little wall, setting it at a stepper angle at the end of our garden and digging a sand pit below it as a landing cushion, and the next thing we knew, Vern’s place had our boy in an extended version of That Video, before he was even in double figures for age.

He just seemed to lack all fear, which worried me. Australia has a large number of objective hazards, mostly biological, of all sizes, and it is important to follow a set of basic rules when outdoors, such as not putting any part of your body somewhere you can’s see into. I know they aren’t all fatal, though a lot are, but that which doesn’t kill you usually hurts like hell. His school, though, was excellent in steering its charges onto paths not of righteousness but of a lack of snakes, redback spiders or excessive UV exposure.

He was still a little boy, though, and although his exuberance was filtered in the Australian way, he would still explode into hilarity when encountering such things as the rather large endowments on the roo statues on St George’s Terrace.

Life was indeed good, and getting better. My only issue was that he was still too small to ride pillion, and there was absolutely no way I was going to put a chair on either of the bikes. Instead, a very nice man up in Kalamunda sold us a refurbished compact camper van, the accommodation consisting of one internal double bed and an attached tent.

We were now officially Proper Aussies. We worked, we swam, we had barbie sessions, and our boy steadily emerged from his infancy.

Major change was on its way, though, and as so often it started in Soapy Joe’s, over pie floaters with Bobby and Colleen.

“How’s the boy doing?”

I looked to Maz for the answer, and she just grinned at me before answering.

“Mike would just give some waffle about playtime and hobbies. Anyway, he’s doing really well. Reading age is well above par, and he’s not been eaten by any of the other kids yet”

Colleen laughed out loud, dropping a bit of pie down the front of her blouse.

“Crap! New on today. Give me a sec…”

She wiped quickly with a paper napkin, then grinned again.

“What I was going to say is that he takes after his Dad in size, so I’d be more worried about Ish eating his classmates than the other way around. What are you feeding him?”

“Usual. Barbies, Vegemite and Tim Tams”

I said something about never having that paste in the house, and Maz waved a hand in dismissal.

“School lunches, love. Anyway, we’re supposed to be pretending to be Real Aussies in front of these Official Government People, remember? Can’t have them suspecting, you know, that we’re not fully, um, bonzer, ripper, she’ll be right cobber?”

Bobby was almost crying with laughter, as Colleen giggled about something she couldn’t quite get out until the rest of us simply sat and waited until her hiccups had eased. Bobby raised an eyebrow.

“Well?”

She took some long, slow breaths before speaking.

“What Maz said”

Breathe.

“Been listening to Kul… and…”

Breathe once more.

“You’re all getting like him and it’s…”

She just managed to get her next words out before corpsing again.

“Global Kuling!”

It was like Ish and the kangaroo scrotums all over again. Adulthood was clearly only an occasional visitor to our world. Eventually, however, it prevailed, and Bobby was able to get back to the point of our meeting.

“Got a possible heads-up for you and yours, Mike, Maz, but it’s coming from over our heads. Well over, to be honest”

Maz looked intrigued.

“How far over, Bobby?”

He shrugged.

“About as far as it could be, Maz. Sort of over Commonwealth level”

“Sorry?”

He reached down for his briefcase, bringing out a typical cardboard file.

“Environmental stuff again, this is. We’ve steered you into other states already”

“All of us are grateful, Booby. Right, love?”

I just nodded, as Bobby opened the folder.

“Well, there’s been an RCEP proposal at ASEAN that might well bring some real opportunities your way”

Maz and I looked at each other, and as one said, “What?”

“Association of South East Asian Nations. Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. International bodies, and not just about trade. There’s a load of discussions running about global warming, and some of us take that bloody seriously. Here, it’s drought. Other places, it’s actually keeping some of their country above sea level. Loads of seriously high level diplomatic stuff, but there’s also what they call networking, which is usually a load of seeing what can be screwed out of it. Our delegation was using Aussie States’ public fuel recycling schemes as our best card”

I found myself a little irked, my suspicions about government integrity never far enough away to trust the greasy bastards.

“Australia’s claiming dibs on our schemes? ‘Here’s one we prepared earlier’ sort of thing?”

“Not quite, Mike. More of a ‘Here’s one we prepared earlier, and would you like to meet the people behind it?’ sort of thing”

My wife’s mouth was hanging open, and when she hauled it shut, she asked, “You are serious, aren’t you?”

Bobby looked embarrassed, for some reason.

“I am. I’m just a bit, ey? I didn’t know they were going to do this, or I would have insisted they actually bloody talk with you first. Fair’s fair, after all”

“Is there a timescale to this?”

“At least a couple of years, Maz. This file is a report I’m working on, sort of TLDR of how we got set up and then spread East. If… It looks like they might want a repeat of that Sydney trick, where someone goes up to do the groundwork, but I don’t know whether they would look for branch offices like yours, or just a one-off training contract, so I don’t know what the finance side is like”

His mouth twisted.

“Rumour I got was that one of our delegates was going to try and sign a deal, taking all the bloody credit, but our boss had a mate on the trip, who passed the word back and then got his foot in the door first. Stopped the other bastard from stitching you up”

Collen did her own and clearly sarcastic shrug.

“Politicians, ey? Don’t you bloody love ‘em? Anyway, we’ve got a lot of work to do on this report, but we are saying that it doesn’t get written without your lot having a proper input and agreement. A fair go is a fair go in this country. Big boss wants to arrange a formal meeting with you, for the sake of optics, but not until we’ve sorted out the details like mates. Makes the public bit easier as well, if we’re all on the same page before we ‘officially’ negotiate”

I went to say something about a proper tendering process, and Colleen waved that away quickly.

“Bit of history, Mike. Can’t guarantee I’ve got all the details right, so bear with me. Dad was in the R.A.A.F., flying Canberras. He was talking about fiddles, and it was an example he gave about ejection seats. Best in the world are made by a British company, and when some Yank politician found out their Navy, or marines, can’t remember which, were using Brit seats, he demanded they stop and but American. So the commanders, they say, ‘Nope, only the best for our boys’, and he demands an open competition between the Brits and the Yanks”

I couldn’t see where she was going, and said so, which brought a grin.

“Yeah, me neither, till he told me the next bit. His Navy bloke or whatever simply said the Brits would win because their kit was better than the Yanks knew how to make, so this Senator or Congress bloke defined what he meant by fair competition: Martin-Baker, I remember the name now, would give all their production secrets to all the Yank companies, and---”

Bobby was nodding, mouth a thin line.

“That’s the thing, mate. Not what we call a fair go, not at all. Not letting some slimy lizard—not now, Maz---hand over your stuff without your say-so, just so he can get bloody kudos for doing bugger-all”

A grin, and then, “Yes, Maz, I know lizards aren’t slimy, but those ones in the shiny suits bloody are slimy as”

I had some notes down already, just enough to run it past the others in our office, but another thought came to me.

“Bobby?”

“Yup?”

“Who’s in ASEAN?”

“Oh, just about every country from Burma and Thailand, Indo-China and down to Indonesia. Extra little groups where they include us and the Kiwis”

“Right. Where are they looking to set this up, initially?”

“I suspect, given the geography and loads of the politics, it won’t be in my family’s old place. I’m guessing Singapore”

After we got back to our office, we held a quick brainstorm with the others, and to my surprise Kul was a little twitchy.

“Not fancy the opportunities, mate?”

“It’s not that, Mike. It’s just… Look: when we first came out here, the three of us, it was just a City thing, Perth, yeah? Now we’ve gone state wide, and just about bloody country wide, literally transcontinental. Now we’re looking at going INTERcontinental. It’s skillsets, mate. No way I feel confident trying to dance around so many sets of local laws. We need a serious steer from Head Office this time, rather than just doing a ‘what we’ve done on our holibobs’ report. We really do owe Booby and his lot for this one, but we need to make sure we can actually deliver before we say yes to it. I can already see an optional way forward”

Ronnie asked the obvious question, and his grin was a shadow of its normal self.

“We train up their own people to go out there, like we already do on the schools scheme”

Maz looked at me quickly, then turned back to him.

“You don’t want to go up there for a bit?”

The grin returned, this time full strength.

“Oh bloody hell, of course I do! But it wouldn’t be me and mine. Local knowledge, Maz. Cultural norms, as well. My background, I’d probably use the wrong chopstick or something, or drink out of the wrong part of the rambutan”

“You don’t drink rambutans, Kul”

“See? Shows how little I know. Think about it, Maz: who do we have here who knows the local shit and giggles best? You. Here’s my suggestion, as best as I can see it. We speak to Sheffield, once we have more details from your mate Bobby. If they give us a green light, we agree legal minders from the Aussies, get their embassy people primed to helps us to avoid stepping in too many barker’s eggs—Ronnie, that’s a term for dog turds. Then it has to be you and Mike. Oh, and the lad, of course”