Chapter Twenty-Five: The Party Houses

i. The house

Eleven bedrooms. A pontoon. A swim-up bar. A media room nobody ever used. A kitchen with two of everything.

From the water at night it looked like a cruise ship that had run aground in a suburb.

The ABC would later describe him, in one dry clause, as a banned businessman previously known for hosting lavish parties in Surfers Paradise.

That clause is doing an enormous amount of work.

ii. The insight

You do not need to own a house to rent it out.

That is the insight, and it is the same insight as the rabbit scalps, and the same insight as the option contract, and the same insight as the eighth judge — which is to say it is the only insight the man ever had, and he monetised it for thirty years.

You take a house on an ordinary residential lease.

You represent yourself to the owner as a tenant. A professional. A family. A long-term prospect. Ideally one who pays six months up front, because an owner with six months in the account asks no questions in month three.

Then you list it nightly, at eight or ten times the pro-rata rate, on a platform.

You take the spread.

One house is a side hustle.

Twelve houses across Queensland and Victoria is a business — and that is what it became. A portfolio of waterfront properties rented from owners under residential tenancy pretences and sublet without the owners' knowledge or consent.

The owners believed they had a tenant.

The tenant was two hundred people a weekend and a marquee.

iii. The inspection

The recruitment of the houses was its own art form, and Jamie was superb at it, because it required precisely his gift: one hour, in a room, with a stranger who needs to believe something.

Mermaid Waters, 2013. A rental inspection. Invented.

A retired couple. They have moved up to Buderim and kept the Gold Coast house because their accountant told them to. They are nervous about tenants. They have heard things.

And a man arrives in a good but not flashy car, in a collared shirt, with his mother's voice in his mouth — because that is the actual trick, that is the whole trick: he does not do Gold Coast for these people.

He does Glen Innes.

He sits at their outdoor setting and he says: "I'll be straight with you. I grew up on a farm at Pinkett. My old man's still there, still going, eighty-odd. He'd have my hide if I ever treated somebody's property like it wasn't theirs."

All true. Every word of it true.

He offers six months in advance. He offers to do the garden himself. He notices the wife's hydrangeas and says something accurate about them — because he actually does know about hydrangeas, because he grew up on eight hundred and forty hectares with a mother who kept a garden against the frost out of sheer defiance, and because in that moment he is not performing at all, he is genuinely and briefly happy to be talking about hydrangeas.

They sign.

He is, for about forty minutes, the best tenant they have ever met.

Fourteen months later they will receive a phone call from a neighbour describing a PA system, and they will not believe it, and they will ring the agent, and the agent will not believe it either.

iv. Ron Hallam's log

The novel's witness for this chapter is Ron Hallam, seventy-one, retired, three doors down.

Ron kept a log.

That's the detail that undoes you. A retired man, in a spiral notebook, in biro, for two and a half years.

Sat 11th. Music from 2pm. Amplified. PA system. Approx 150 persons. Vomit on footpath outside No. 14. Police attended 1:50am, departed 2:05am, music resumed 2:20am.

Sun 12th. Cleaning crew 6am. Two skip bins.

Fri 17th. Boat arrived with additional guests. Counted 43 off the boat.

Tues 21st. Quiet.

Sat 25th. Started 1pm. Marquee erected on the grass. Portable toilets (4). Bass audible inside my house with windows closed and TV on.

Sun 26th. Found a young woman asleep in my carport at 7am. Gave her a glass of water. She was 19. Said she'd lost her friends. I drove her to Broadbeach.

Mon 27th. Rang council. Reference number 4471-B.

Thurs 30th. Council rang back. Advised complaint is a tenancy matter. Advised to contact the owner. Do not know who the owner is.

That entry — do not know who the owner is — is the whole book in six words.

Ron complained eleven times over two years. To council. To the platform. To police, who came, and who could do very little, because the noise stopped when they arrived and resumed when they left, and because the legal question of who is actually operating this house was a maze with a hedgerow at the entrance.

And nobody at any point in two and a half years had the one thing that would have ended it in a fortnight, which was the owner's knowledge.

v. The economy

A weekend at scale is a business with staff.

There are people on the door. People behind a bar. People moving eskies. People cleaning at six in the morning. There are drivers. There is a tender running guests off a boat.

All of it cash. All of it casual. All of it arranged by text message, at rates that a nineteen- or twenty-year-old on the Gold Coast in 2013 could not get anywhere else for a night's work — and the entire arrangement structured so that at no point did any single person on that property hold a document with Jamie McIntyre's name on it.

That is the pattern again.

The absence.

He is a wonderful host and he is not the operator. He is at the party and he does not hold the lease. He is on the boat and he is not the registered owner. He is in the room and the company is in somebody else's name.

The eighth judge, twelve years early.

vi. The host

And here is the part that has to be said, or the book is dishonest.

He was magnificent at those parties.

Everybody says so. Generous, funny, remembered your name, remembered your brother's name, put people at ease, tipped enormously, talked to the nineteen-year-old clearing glasses for ten minutes about her course like she was the most interesting person on the property —

and she was, for those ten minutes, because that was never fake. That was the gift. He genuinely liked people. He has never in his life met a person he could not find something to like.

There is video of him at four in the morning on that pontoon with a bottle in each hand, absolutely luminous with joy, surrounded by people who had known him ninety minutes and would have followed him into the sea.

And that is the same man who is, as the video is being taken, three years into not returning Marion Dalgety's quarterly phone call.

Both things. At once. Always.

That is the entire thesis of this novel and everything after this point is consequence.

vii. Four in the morning

The cocaine came in with the parties, or the parties came in with it; by the time anyone was paying attention the question had stopped meaning anything.

In the novel's telling it is not a vice. It is a tool — and it is the tool that makes the rest of the machine run, because a man cannot do four hours on a stage and then six hours on a pontoon and then be on a call to Melbourne at nine without something, and the something was available in every room he walked into for twenty years.

It also does a specific thing to a specific kind of man, and the specific thing is this:

Cocaine does not make you lie. It makes you certain.

It takes the small voice that says the rezoning is not going to happen and turns the volume down to nothing.

And it takes the voice that says I am the most impressive man in the southern hemisphere and turns that one up until it is the only sound in the building.

By 2014 he could not reliably distinguish between having had an idea and having done the thing. That is not a moral judgment; it is a description of a cognitive state, and it is why five separate schemes were sold on developments that had not been approved, and why, a decade later, two coastal cities would be marketed in Lombok while — on the promoter's own published admission — still in the conceptual stage, pending formal approval from the provincial government and the relevant Indonesian ministries.

And it is why, at four in the morning, when the chemicals thin out, there is a thing that gets in.