Free Coda by Thea Astley Page A

sleet-filled night.
    Two years ago another of his more exotic failures, for which he had, without a doubt, a kind of genius. Over the years there had been sharp exchanges with his brother-in-law, the minister for transports. Own up! He couldn’t stand Len, couldn’t bear his lamp-tanned ego-ridden confidence, the spanking way he hefted his cheapskate schemes through the barriers of local councils to make another financial killing.
    Jealousy? Sure. Ferocious unabating envy.
    Brain nosed around.
    No wonder Sham and her husband wererolling in the stuff. The Mercedes and the Porsche were hardly products of a backbencher’s salary.
    He nosed around.
    He kept alert at parties.
    He kept his ears open. Their antennae sensitively recorded the slightest frisson of shonky dealing. The wealth, he noted, had followed swiftly on electoral success. He was engaged by rumours of land deals up and down the coast and vast profits made from Japanese investors. Between his own misdirected concerns Brain conceived an ironic revenge whose jokiness might yet be turned to profit.
    On a shaggy block of land on the highway north of Reeftown, a block he had purchased fifteen years before, he had begun erecting a three-storey … what? Humanoid? Pioneer figure? Tourist goggle-butt? The land was a poor few unserviced acres on the hillside above the sea, picked up cheap before the boom. Except when the bill for rates arrived each year, he had almost forgotten he owned it.
    Come down in the world, Brain was working as evening bar manager at one of the glitzier resorts, a grocery-money job that gave him the days free. Bosie spent her mornings at the local golf club trying to achieve a hole in one. Connections who owed him a favour at aplastic and fibreglass mouldings factory became involved in his project, making mysterious sections without ever being aware of the total concept.
    No one twigged.
    Over three months of near-furtive activity, he trucked up huge anonymous pieces of bildakit and by the time legs, belly and chest were assembled, the monstrous torso was visible above the uncleared scrub on the fence line. Another week and he would be ready to lug the questing head up on ropes to drop onto its swivel axle so that Len’s slack, tanned features could inspect the Coral Sea. North, south, north, south, to the whim of the trades, in the harbour, in the islands, he hummed, remembering his father and the singing in the Ascot evenings. His first political coup! Already busloads of tourists heading for the Port had noticed with excitement this mammoth artifact skulking behind acacia, and visitors in rented cars had been stopping to take photographs.
    Wisely he slung a six-foot chain-wire fence across the frontage of his block and extended it partly up each side. He put a padlock on the swing gates. At the end of that week Len’s conniving features were lowered into place by ropes and pulleys in early tropic darkness. Brain was so enraptured with the result he sat below histowering god savouring the proxy ecstasies of a pagan worshipper.
    Within two days the council intervened.
    â€˜What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the shire engineer asked. ‘Did you apply for a permit? Anyway, what in God’s name is it?’
    Brain smiled modestly. He was choked with laughter. ‘It’s the Big Developer,’ he said slyly. ‘Related to the Big Cow, Prawn, Pineapple, Banana. It’s a work of art. I don’t have to apply for a development permit for a sculpture.’
    The two of them stood in the shadow of thirty feet of moulded fibreglass and poured concrete, dodging the slab-like heat and humidity of mid-day. There was Len—hi, Len!—sporting natty tropical safari suit painted in semigloss acrylic, gold chain and white developer shoes. His legs, Brain pointed out to the unliterary shire engineer, bestrode the world like a Colossus. The tanned rubbery features and neurotic eyes moved on their