Free 30 Days in Sydney by Peter Carey Page A

Should you not have a monument to him at least?
    And then, in my dream, I peered down from the top arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and had the insight which would never leave me, not even in my waking hours. Asleep in my bed in Woollahra I saw the Central Business District as if for the first time. I saw how it held itself back from the edge of the beloved harbour as if it understood how vile and crooked it had always been. In a society which values the view above all else, here was the heart of the city, a blind place with no vistas, a dense knot of development and politics and business and law. This was Macarthur's monument. A physical expression of two centuries of Sydney's own brand of capitalism, the concrete symbol of an unhealthy antidemocratic alliance between business and those authorities which should have controlled it.
    Staring in horror at this ugly thing that we had made, I heard a pitiless grinding noise, some infernal machine, some engine of gears and chains, grinding very, very slow.
    Come on, come on, the voice called, you can't let down your mates.
    Far beneath me I heard Kelvinator's garage roller door growling on its axis. It was six am in Woollahra. Time to drive to Bondi Beach to take our morning walk.
    I stumbled in the dark and as I heard Kelvi-nator start the engine of his Jaguar I was very grateful to feel the floor beneath my feet.

CHAPTER TEN
    TEN MINUTES AFTER THE grinding door had rescued me from this satanic vision of the CBD I was walking with Lester and Kelvinator and his mad brown kelpie along the firm yellow sand of Bondi Beach. In all the world, what metropolitan beach could equal this? Rio? I've never been there. Venice? Santa Monica? Don't make me laugh. This was the great joy of Sydney, that you could have THIS, the embracing yellow cliffs, the breakers long and slow, the texture of the Pacific like a polished Cadillac, a gorgeous eggshell blue with pink showing in the froth of the breaking waves.
    This is what my Sydney friends could do each morning. They were never blind to where they were but they never stopped bantering, heckling, joking. On this particular morning they affected to be astounded that I had not yet got Jack Ledoux's story from him.
    Jesus, we gave, said Lester, his voice rising in that self-mocking plaintive tone which was so characteristic of him. We gave our story, miss.
    We bloody gave the damn storm of the century.
    Kelvin and Lester had been taking these walks together so long, they had become like a pair of high-speed cockatoos, their brisk steps punctuated by familiar patterns of call and response. Pedant, pe-dant, fucking's too good for him. Worn-nin, worn-nin.
    What sort of reporter are you anyway? Doorstop him.
    Door-stop?
    Put your bloody foot inside his bloody door and refuse to leave until he tells his story.
    Jack doesn't have a door. In any case, I never saw him do anything he didn't want to.
    And I never saw you not do something you wanted to do. Go. Take the car. Why do you never use my car? Does it smell or something?
    I could have told Kelvin I had panic attacks on the bridge, but instead I changed the subject to something more congenial - my fantasy that Alison and I would sell the apartment in New York and come back home to live.
    So I couldn't drive across the bridge. All I wanted was to bring our kids to Bondi Beach, to have a dog, to eat oysters at Hugo's over on Campbell Parade. I wanted us all to feel what it is like to live in a city with diminished population pressure.
    What you actually want, says Kelvinator, is something two or three streets back.
    There was a pleasant nor'-easter ruffling our shirts, a silky seductive wind, not strong but sufficient to disperse that dream of the knotted power and corruption of the Central Business District.
    Could I get a house and garage and a pool and four bedrooms?
    The Aussie dollar's worth fifty-six cents.
    With US dollars, you'd piss it in said Lester.
    In New York we cram a family of four into