Chapter Thirty-Six: Livin II

The pitch

He bought her because he had understood something about this audience that he had never needed to understand about the property buyers:

They wanted to see him win.

The property people wanted a spreadsheet. The new audience wanted a life. They did not resent the yacht — the yacht was the proof. If ASIC and the banks and the media had come for him and he still had a superyacht, then the resistance was working, and if they could get aboard once a year at a members' weekend then a piece of the resistance belonged to them.

So he did what he had always done, which was to sell it in pieces.

Five investors. Between three hundred and five hundred thousand dollars each. Fifty per cent, collectively.

Fifty per cent of what, exactly, was the question nobody pressed hard enough.

Fifty per cent of a vessel? Of a company that held a vessel? Of a charter revenue stream net of costs — and if net of costs, whose costs, determined by whom?

The documentation ran to eleven pages including the cover.

Dave Prentice

One of the five — Dave Prentice, a crane operator from Mackay who had sold an investment property to get in — asked for a survey report.

He was told there was one.

He asked to see it.

He was told it was with the broker.

He asked which broker.

And Jamie, who could have invented a broker in a quarter of a second and had done so many times, instead did the thing that made him genuinely dangerous.

He put an arm across Dave Prentice's shoulders on the aft deck with a beer in his hand and said:

"Mate. I'll tell you the truth. She's an old girl. She needs work. I'm not going to stand here and tell you she's a new boat — you've got eyes. What she is, is a platform. Nobody in this country is doing what we're going to do with her."

And Dave Prentice, who had braced himself for a sales job and got a confession instead, transferred three hundred thousand dollars the following Tuesday.

That was the move.

Concede the small true thing to buy the large false thing.

He did it his whole life and nobody ever saw it coming, because we are all trained to believe that a man admitting a flaw is being honest — when in fact a man admitting a chosen flaw is doing the most expensive kind of lying there is.

The certificate

Richie Cunningham had skippered for him years earlier and left, and what Richie said about those years, in substance, was that the standard operating procedure was party mode.

Thirty. Forty people on a fifty-eight-foot vessel. Music. Eskies. A tender making runs.

There is a category of maritime offence that involves no collision, no sinking and no injury, and which therefore never makes a newspaper, and it is the most common category there is:

Operating a vessel for hire without a certificate of survey.

A certificate of survey is not paperwork. That is what people who have never been in a life raft think.

A certificate of survey is a statement, by a person qualified to make it, about how many human beings can be on a particular hull in a particular sea state and still get off it.

He took money to put people on a boat that did not have one.

He was fined for it — a Magistrates Court matter, a five-figure sum, the kind of penalty that functions for a man of his temperament not as a deterrent but as an invoice. A cost of doing business. A thing to complain about on a livestream as further evidence of state overreach.

The marina had enough eventually. An unregistered vessel, an unpaid account, and a manager who had run out of both patience and fear. She went out to a swing mooring in the bay.

A swing mooring is fine. Boats live on swing moorings for decades — moorings that are rated, and inspected, attached to hulls that are attended.

The transfer

Two days before she sank, registered ownership moved to Nadine Roberts.

No scene is required. The scene is a form and a signature and it took four minutes.

The novel's only obligation is to refuse the easy reading.

The easy reading is that he knew a storm was coming and got the liability off his name with forty-eight hours to spare, which would make him a prophet as well as a fraud.

The truer and more damning reading is that he did not need to know a storm was coming.

He had been moving assets away from his own name reflexively for twenty years. It was not a decision. It was a posture.

Entities, spouses, parents, trusts, surrogate directors, offshore shells — his whole life was an arrangement in which the thing was never quite where he was, so that when the weather arrived, from any direction, on any subject, the sentence was always available:

That's not mine.

The storm was coincidence.

The transfer was character.

The night

There is nobody aboard. Hold onto that.

A seaway gets up on the Wednesday. Not a cyclone — a hard onshore blow with fetch behind it, the kind of thing that happens on the Capricorn Coast several times a season and which every working skipper in Yeppoon prepared for that week by doing precisely what working skippers do.

She swings. She is heavy and high-sided with a great deal of windage on that flybridge, and the loads on the mooring gear go up not linearly but as a square.

Somewhere between two and four in the morning, the connection fails.

She goes.

Twenty-seven metres of unattended vessel — no ground tackle, no engines, no lights, no one aboard — moving downwind at four or five knots into a shoreline.

Somewhere in there she opens up.

At dawn a man walking a dog on Lammermoor Beach stops and takes out his phone, because there is a superyacht lying on her side in the shorebreak with the surf going over her and a rainbow sheen spreading out from under her on the wet sand.

The morning after

This is the quiet centre of the chapter and it is not about Jamie at all.

The tide goes out and leaves her.

She is enormous. That is what everybody says — that from the beach, with nothing around her for scale, she looked impossibly big. Like a building that had been dropped.

The diesel is the thing that gets people. It gets into the back of your throat and it stays there.

By ten there are sixty people on the dune line. By noon, two hundred. A woman with two kids in school uniform detours on the way past and stands there for five minutes without saying anything.

And the debris begins — not dramatically, but the way real environmental damage always arrives, which is as litter.

Foam. Insulation batts. Plastic trim. Cushions. A fender. A section of headliner. A fibreglass panel the size of a door.

All of it working down the beach with the tide, and into the creek mouth, and out along four kilometres of coast where people walk dogs and kids look for pipis.

Somebody will pay for this.

That thought moves through the crowd on Lammermoor Beach like a current. And through the council offices. And through Maritime Safety.

And the answer that comes back over the following fortnight is the answer that has echoed through this entire book since a room above a travel agency in Camberwell in 2001:

Nobody can find the owner.

There was an overseas syndicate, it was said. She'd been sold.

No syndicate ever came forward. No syndicate sent a representative, a lawyer, an insurer, or an email. No syndicate paid for the removal of one kilogram of anything from a Queensland beach.

Richie Cunningham stood on that sand with the hull behind him in frame and filmed himself and said, to his followers:

"This couldn't happen to a nicer person."

It went everywhere.

Five phone calls

Dave Prentice, crane operator, Mackay, three hundred thousand dollars, learned about it from a Facebook video posted by a man he had never met.

He rang the others.

There were five of them and they had never once, in three years, all been on the same phone call.

By the end of that week they had worked out between them what the eleven pages actually said and did not say, and the conversation ended the way these conversations always end, which is with a long silence and then somebody saying, in a completely flat voice:

"So there's nothing."

"There's nothing."

"Three hundred grand."

"Yeah."

"On a boat. That's on a beach."

And Dave Prentice — this is documented; he said it to a reporter and he has never taken it back — said:

"The worst part is I liked him. That's what I can't get past. I liked him."