Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [45]
Corker uncapped a whisky bottle and set up a couple of Pyrex glasses on a tree stump. From a reedy gully he extracted a billycan of clear water and asked Tony to say when. After they toasted the purchase Tony wrote a cheque for the deposit, and by the time Corker poured two more snifters of the Famous Grouse they were well away on a friendship riff.
There was more to this, an oddity of congruence. Among auctioneering legends, Careful Bob Corker, Alan Corker’s father, had been the veritable Don Bradman of his profession. Tony remembered Careful Bob ranging north to Haddon Rigg during the 1960s, where Tony, in blue Oxford shirt and Wool Board tie, shaggy hairdo and tight white moleskin trousers, had a season of selling rams. Corker liked the portrait of Careful Bob that Tony presented, a man the rest of the world had pretty much forgotten. Tony recalled gruff humour rising to the melody of a bush singer as the bids came flying in. ‘You’ve got him!’ said Corker. Even the sheep paid attention, said Tony; the crowds on the railings stayed hushed. Careful Bob was a small overweight man the double of Harry Secombe; his upper forehead white as parchment, his face raspberry-red when he lifted his narrow-brimmed hat to a lady.
‘There’s justice in that description,’ said Corker. ‘You have a way with words.’
‘I’m running out of them,’ said Tony.
After their drinks Tony wandered along a bush track, keeping to himself, wondering what he’d done. Corker followed at a discreet distance at the wheel of the Toyota. When Tony climbed back into the car Corker had the radio tuned to Classic FM.
‘So you’re a friend of the ABC,’ said Tony.
‘You could say that,’ said Corker. ‘I do a lot of long drives—five, six, seven-hour stints. Radio keeps me company. It’s been my education, sort of. Then there’s the music. It’s always the music with me.’
This was what people said, digging a hole for themselves, when they weren’t able to come out and say they loathed listening to Tony ‘Give Me Your Ears’ Watson. Tony knew that Corker’s buying group (underpinned by West Australian money) spent big on his show: it was why the Corkers of this world, honest brokers who needed him, couldn’t say they hated him. They didn’t know it was best to let fly, giving Tony the benefit of feeling cornered by desperation and dismal neglect. Didn’t know that his success was forged in silence.
Not that Tony sensed anything like hate from Alan Corker, an unusually warm and confiding sort of bloke. But just for a moment there, in the front seat of the car, Tony turned and projected from his upper chest and larynx into a space only a few inches in front of Corker’s nose something that sounded like ‘Arrgh!’
‘Are you alright?’ said Corker, hitting the brakes.
Tony recovered himself.
‘I’m on the ABC next month,’ he said. ‘“The Media Report”’s doing a tombstone number on my forty years of being me.’
‘I’ll be listening.’
‘You and about three others, that’s the stats.’
‘Come on, the mountain comes to Mohammed, you ought to be pleased.’
‘My sister, Judy Compton-Bell,’ said Tony, ‘must have given them a push. She’s deputy chair of Friends of the ABC, quote unquote. I put up with a tremendous amount of bull-o from her. I’m putty in her hands.’
‘Judy Compton-Bell—she’s your sister?’ said Corker.
‘To wish it were otherwise,’ said Tony, ‘would be very heaven.’
‘Her book’s in our library. There’s always a waiting list. I remember that night in ’98, the Sydney to Hobart . . . It was wild enough up here—wind and weird fog—couldn’t imagine what it was like out there on the water, till I read what she wrote.’
‘Garn, she’s unsinkable,’ said Tony.
‘It was the oddest thing,’ said Tony, when he took Judy out for dinner after she returned from Antarctica a week or so later. ‘I had the feeling all the birds were talking to me, calling out my name.’
‘As the centre of the universe, is this