Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Main Street of Yeppoon

He should not have gone.

Everybody around him said so. Warren said so twice on the phone, in the careful voice he used when he was telling Jamie something Jamie needed to be able to hear as his own idea. The lawyer said so in an email of four lines. Nadine said so.

He went because of the same thing that made him lodge a party registration with nine members.

Nobody checks. And if they do, front up and smile, and they'll fold.

It had worked for thirty years. It had worked in a hundred rooms. He had walked into venues full of people who had lost money and walked out an hour later with more of their money, and he had done it not by trickery but by the oldest and best method there is, which is to be physically present and unafraid.

Human beings are extraordinarily reluctant to maintain hostility toward a man who is standing in front of them being nice.

That is true in a function room.

It is not true in a coastal town of twenty thousand people on the eleventh day of a story about a beach.

Friday

He came up on the Friday, and the reason was legitimate: meetings about the salvage, people who wanted to be told something by somebody, a marina account, an insurance question, a council officer with a file.

He stayed at Rosslyn Bay.

He had a drink on the Friday night with a bloke he knew, and the bloke was fine with him — friendly, even, asked after his brother — and that was the mistake.

Because Jamie McIntyre calibrated the temperature of an entire town off one man in a bar.

Saturday

He needed a coffee and a hardware item and decided to walk in.

Cold and bright. Winter on the Capricorn Coast: nine degrees at dawn, twenty-three by eleven, the light coming off the water so hard you squint.

He wore a linen shirt. Pale blue. Sleeves rolled twice. Boat shoes, no socks. A good watch.

Every single person who describes that morning describes the shirt.

Normanby Street on a Saturday has a market at one end and the shops along it and the cars parked nose-in at forty-five degrees, and it is full of people between nine and eleven and then it empties.

He got about forty metres.

The first forty metres

The first thing was not an egg.

The first thing was a woman outside the bakery who simply stopped walking and looked at him.

That is all she did. Stood with a paper bag in her hand and turned her head and tracked him, and did not smile and did not speak.

And he registered it and gave her the nod — the Jamie nod, chin up, half a grin, g'day —

and she did not return it.

Twenty metres on, two blokes outside the newsagent. One said something to the other and the other one laughed, and it was not a nice laugh.

Thirty metres on, a man in a fishing shirt said, conversationally, at ordinary volume, the way you remark on weather:

"Oi. You cleaning up my beach?"

And Jamie did the thing. The reflex. Thirty years of function rooms.

He turned toward it, opened his hands, and smiled.

"Mate, we're working through it, insurance is—"

"There's no insurance."

"There's a process—"

"There's no insurance, mate. Everybody knows there's no insurance. It was uninsured, it was unregistered, and me nephew's been down there four days picking foam out of the rocks for the council for nothin'."

And here the thing happened that had never in his adult life happened to him, and which no seminar and no Senate committee and no Federal Court had ever prepared him for.

Other people stopped.

Not one. Not two.

Eight, ten, fifteen — the whole soft mass of a Saturday street, drifting in the way people drift toward a dog fight — and the temperature changed inside about four seconds, and Jamie felt it change.

And for the first time in the entire arc of this book he was frightened by a room he was standing in.

The wrong instrument

He kept smiling.

It was the wrong instrument.

In a function room the smile is disarming. On Normanby Street, eleven days after the beach, with diesel still in the dunes, the smile read as exactly what a crowd cannot forgive, which is amusement.

"Look," he said, louder, hands up, doing the room, doing the only thing he knew, "I understand people are upset—"

Somebody at the back said: "You don't understand anything."

And somebody else — a woman, further off, and this is the line half the town still quotes — said:

"Go and look at it. Have you even looked at it?"

And that was the sentence that broke it.

Because he hadn't.

Eleven days. He had been in Yeppoon since Friday afternoon. He had been at Rosslyn Bay. He had been in two meetings and to the bottle shop.

And he had not driven the four minutes to Lammermoor Beach and walked down onto the sand and stood in front of the thing with his own eyes.

And every person in that street somehow knew it.

And it was true.

And it was the truest thing anybody said about him in twenty-five years.

The eggs

They came from the market end.

Nobody planned it, and the novel insists on this: there was no organisation, no group chat, no protest.

There was a market stall that sold eggs, and there were people who had been buying eggs, and there was a man in a pale blue linen shirt standing in the middle of Normanby Street being smiled at by a crowd that had stopped finding anything funny.

The first one missed. It went past his shoulder and broke on the panel of a parked Hilux, and the owner of the Hilux said "oi!" — and then, a second later, said nothing at all.

The second hit him in the chest.

It is a strange, small, undignified impact. Not painful. A wet thud and then the spreading cold. He looked down at himself. Pale blue linen with yolk on it, running, the white of it going down toward his belt.

The third hit his upper arm.

The fourth missed.

The fifth hit him in the side of the head, above the ear, and that was the one that changed his face.

And the crowd made a sound.

Everybody who was on Normanby Street that morning describes the sound, and none of them describe it the same way. Some say a cheer. Some say a roar. One woman, who was ashamed of herself afterwards and said so publicly, said it was:

"a kind of laugh, but not a laugh — like when a footy team scores and you're not even watching."

It was the sound a crowd makes when it has decided.

Fifteen seconds

It lasted perhaps fifteen seconds.

Fifteen seconds of a man in a linen shirt in the middle of a country main street with egg in his hair, turning a slow half-circle, hands still half up, still —

and this is the thing the novel has been building toward since a boy stood at a rail at Glen Innes and watched men lean in —

still trying to work the room.

Because he did. With yolk running off his jaw he opened his hands wider and he said, loudly, into it:

"Alright! Alright! I hear you! I hear you!"

And it did not work.

For the first time in Jamie Neville McIntyre's life, standing in the middle of Normanby Street, Yeppoon, on a bright cold Saturday in June, the thing that had always worked did not work —

and there is no evidence that he ever recovered from those fifteen seconds, and everything he did afterwards, Fiji and Bali and Lombok and the impersonation domains and the whole vast machinery of retaliation, reads from this distance as an attempt to be somewhere in the world where that could not happen to him again.

The shop

A shopkeeper pulled him inside.

That should be recorded. A man who had no reason to help him opened a door and said "in here, mate," because he had decided that whatever this bloke had done, this wasn't right.

And that man took a certain amount of grief for it afterwards.

Jamie stood in the back of a shop that sold surf gear and beach towels, dripping. The shopkeeper gave him a roll of paper towel. Neither of them spoke for a while.

Then Jamie said, and his voice was completely normal, which the shopkeeper found more disturbing than anything else:

"Bit rough."

"Yeah. Well."

"They don't know the full story."

And the shopkeeper — fifty-odd, a local, kids who surfed at Lammermoor — looked at him for a long moment and said the line that ends the chapter:

"Mate. There's a boat on the beach."

He flew out on the Sunday.

He never went back to Yeppoon.

And of the twenty-odd catastrophes catalogued in the public record of his life, he has responded at length to nineteen — with releases, with livestreams, with lawsuits announced and never filed, with impersonation websites and a thousand posts.

The eggs, never.

Not once.