Coda: Tisha | The Art of the Con

Her name is Tisha, she is twenty-two, and she is from a village outside Singaraja on the north coast — four hours from Canggu by motorbike, and roughly a century from it by every other measure.

Her father grows cloves. Her mother did too, until her hip went. She has a younger brother who is clever and is at school in Singaraja, and whose fees are, in a real and load-bearing sense, the reason Tisha is in the south.

She sends money home every fortnight. Not sometimes. Every fortnight, without exception, for three and a half years — and she has never once mentioned it to anybody as though it were remarkable, because among the young women she works with it is not remarkable.

It is the point.

She works in a café in Seminyak that he has an interest in. She makes coffee. She is good at it and good with customers and she has the specific hard-won cheerfulness of a person who has learned that cheerfulness is a marketable asset in a tourism economy.

She is not naive.

The novel is going to be extremely firm about this, because the alternative — the innocent village girl, the exotic ingénue — is a lie that Western books have been telling about Indonesian women for a hundred and fifty years.

Tisha knows exactly what Jamie McIntyre is. Not the Federal Court judgment, not the Hansard, not the seven million dollars. She knows the type, which is more useful. She has been working the south coast since she was nineteen and she has served ten thousand coffees to Australian men in linen shirts, and she can read one across a room in four seconds, the way a stockman reads a beast.

She went in anyway, with her eyes open, and the reason is the most ordinary reason there is:

he was funny, and he paid attention to her, and he remembered her brother's name.

He did, too. That is the thing. He remembered the brother's name, and asked about the school fees, and once paid them — offhandedly, generously, without being asked — and then never mentioned it again.

That is the man.

Both things. Always. At once.

The clinic

Denpasar. Fluorescent light. Plastic chairs bolted in a row. A wall-mounted television with the sound off showing a cooking programme. A woman with a toddler asleep across her lap. Disinfectant, and under it frangipani from somewhere outside.

She comes out holding a printout.

She sits down in the row of plastic chairs — not because she needs to sit, but because the chairs are there and her legs have made a decision — and she looks at the printout for a long time.

She is not crying.

She does the arithmetic instead.

This is a woman who has been doing arithmetic every fortnight for three and a half years, and she does it now, automatically, on a plastic chair in a Denpasar clinic:

The café wage. Her brother's fees. The rent on the room in Kerobokan she shares with two other girls. Her mother's hip. What a birth costs. What a birth costs here, in the south, versus at home. What her father will say. What her father will say to her mother, which is the harder question. Whether she can work at seven months. Whether she can work at eight.

And then, last — because it is the least reliable number in the entire equation:

Him.

She is twenty-two years old, sitting in a clinic in Denpasar, and she is the only person in the entire public record of Jamie Neville McIntyre's life who has ever run proper due diligence on him.

The printout

She tells him at the villa in Canggu, in the afternoon.

He is on the phone when she arrives — he is always on the phone — and he holds up a finger, one minute, and she waits by the door, and the call goes nine.

Then he hangs up and turns around with the full wattage on, arms out: "There she is."

She gives him the printout.

And this is the moment the entire book has been walking toward since a boy at Glen Innes saleyards watched a man in a coat make grown men lean in.

Because Jamie McIntyre has spent fifty-one years developing, refining and industrialising one single capacity, which is the capacity to take any given object and re-describe it until the description is worth more than the thing.

Eight hundred and forty hectares of frost country is West Broadview.

A pen of weaners with a weeping eye is a line I like.

Halved rabbit scalps with sand in them are forty-two rabbits.

An option over land that will never be rezoned is a wealth strategy.

Sixty lots at a dollar is marketing coordination.

Nine members is a movement.

A sentence in the future tense is Bitcoin 2.0.

A boat on a beach is an overseas syndicate.

A stolen crown is an eighth judge.

A hoarding and some rebar next to a prison is Hotel K, Seminyak.

And a hundred and fifty acres of contested coastline with no permits is Marina Bay City, and then Nesara Bay City, and then Gesara Bay City, and then Harbourside City, and then NESARA EcoMiniCity, and then FuturisCity — and then, on his own published admission, a concept that might be shifted to other islands.

He looks at the printout.

And there is nothing to say about it.

That is the thing. There is nothing to say about it.

It cannot be rebranded. There is no name you can put on it that changes what it is. It will not respond to marketing, or to a rendering, or to a photograph with a film star, or to a press release, or to a rebrand, or to a lawsuit announced and never filed.

It is not a scheme, or an allegation, or a jurisdiction, or a narrative.

It is a fact, arriving in the future tense, and it is the first one he has ever encountered that he cannot get in front of.

He stands in his own villa holding a piece of paper.

And Tisha — twenty-two, a clove farmer's daughter, four hours and a century from Singaraja — watches him do it, and sees exactly what she expected to see.

And to her enormous surprise, also sees something she did not.

He is frightened.

Not of the money. Not of her mother. Not of Nadine, or the lawyers, or the press.

He is frightened the way a man is frightened who has just discovered, at fifty-one years of age, that there is a category of thing in the universe that does not care what you call it.

"Well," he says.

And then, after a long time, in a voice she has not heard him use before — the flat one, the one from a kitchen at West Broadview:

"Right."

The notebook

She has the baby in the wet season, at a clinic in Denpasar, with her mother there. The hip made the journey. It cost, and it was not discussed.

It is a girl.

He is not present. There is an explanation and the explanation is detailed and partly true.

He comes four days later with money and an enormous absurd toy, and he is, for two hours, wonderful.

He holds her properly, which surprises everybody including him — he is a farm boy, and a farm boy knows how to hold a small thing. He is funny with Tisha's mother, who does not speak English and who laughs anyway, because he is that person, because he has always been that person, because if he were not that person then none of the preceding four hundred pages would have been possible.

And then he goes, because there is a call.

And Tisha — twenty-two, sitting up in a clinic bed in Denpasar with her daughter against her chest and her mother asleep in a plastic chair — does the last thing that happens in this book.

She does not scream at him. She does not sell the story. She does not go to the fake newspapers, or the real ones.

She writes down, in a notebook, in Indonesian, in a careful hand — the way Trevor Aylwood wrote PATIENT, the way Ron Hallam kept a log in biro for two and a half years, the way a man in Rockhampton counted thirty-one phone calls, the way every single victim in this entire book documented everything meticulously and uselessly —

the date, and the amount, and the name.

Not for a lawyer.

Not for a court.

For the child, in about twenty years, when she asks.

Because the one thing Tisha has decided, lying in a clinic bed in Denpasar in the wet season, is that her daughter is going to grow up in a house where the name on the sign matches the land —

and where nobody, ever, calls eight hundred and forty hectares of frost country a broad view and expects to be believed.

And the last image of the book is not him, and it is not her.

It is a Saturday morning on Normanby Street, Yeppoon, forever.

A man in a pale blue linen shirt with egg running down his face, turning a slow half-circle in the middle of a country main street, hands half raised, still smiling, still working the room.

And the room, for the first and only time, not leaning in.