A High Calling

By the end of the Council meeting Sam Malone was really pumping. The adrenaline was pumping as his anger grew towards his usual adversaries, Quartermaine and co. They were such a bunch of complete idiots. He really couldn’t understand how they kept getting re-elected. Offering to serve on Council was indeed a high and noble calling in which one was given the opportunity to make decisions that concerned the better good of the whole community. How was it that they could not see the huge benefits for Quarabup that the Spandos International proposal would bring. They seemed more interested in scoring political points by opposing him than looking after the real interests of the community.

As he left the Council building to get into his car he unconsciously stamped his feet as if contemptibly shaking off the dust of the conflict that had occurred inside. His mind was racing with ideas of how he might ‘bring them down’ one day; make it clear to everyone in the village how small minded they were. His bravado gave birth to a desire to laugh in their faces, and yet despite all his efforts over the years he had not been able to shake them off. They made it a personal thing.

As he wheeled his black beemer onto the highway to make his way home, he turned his CD player up real loud and cruised off. Soon he would be in the arms of his beloved Nicki. She always waited up for him. She always made him feel welcome when he came home. She knew how good he was. As he went further down the road towards home he conquered the niggling self-doubt that crept around just beneath the surface of his bravado.

He knew that if it wasn’t for him and the effort he had put in as Shire President this village would be on the road to nowhere. He had forged the tourist opportunities that were turning the fortunes of the village around, attracting more and more people in who wanted to buy in to their little bit of the lifestyle – incidentally assisting his own business ventures. He had created a much more flexible Planning Scheme for the village to allow for the possibility of all sorts of developments in the future, attracting one new housing estate developer and now this project from Spandos International. This village will one day be a town, a city even, and all because of him – then everyone will be grateful for his efforts. And he did this with no ulterior motive. Serving your community was a high calling and he accepted all the responsibility and kudos that went with it.

The light in the upstairs retreat was on as the beemer glided into the garage with Michael Bublé crooning, Frank Sinatra style, at 100 decibels, his 100watt sub-woofer making the floor of the car vibrate and the flexible panes of the Rolla-Door rattle. There was a skip in his step as Sam got out of the car and entered the darkened downstairs part of his riverside mansion.

Nicky was ensconced on a chaise lounge that nestled in a bay window from which a large plasma screen TV could be watched comfortably. Council Meeting night was fortunately her favourite TV night – Crownies, followed by CSI: Miami and then Letterman. She was more than happy to wait up for her man. She heard the sound system of the car before it entered the garage. She heard to door into the kitchen close with a thud, and she heard the steady shuffle of Sam’s shoes as he climbed the stairs into their private little retreat upstairs. She could actually stay up here all day if she chose – everything she needed was here, food, drinks, computer, telephone, bathroom.

Sam entered the room with such self-assured presence that Nicky was sure he had had a good time at the meeting that night, so good was Sam at passing things off as positively as they could be. He went to the bar fridge and extracted some soda water and ice cubes to add to a generous sloshing of Glenfiddich. He kicked his shoes off, wrenched his tie from his throat and collapsed onto the chaise lounge alongside his princess. She knew how to respect him and all he had done for the village and for himself. That was one of the things that brought them together.

Sam was first married to Amy Fitzpatrick. They had been an item in school and so it seemed natural, inevitable almost, that they would be the first in their crowd at school to tie the knot properly. They had lived together for nearly two years before they thought they had better get done properly. Two girls were born to them close together in the early years of their marriage, Cindy first and then Lara. They were good kids. Sam loved them dearly, but when Lara got to Year 5 Amy decided it was time to go back to work.

When Amy left school she gained a TAFE Certificate 3 in Book Keeping and then secured a job with a local Accountant. She held this job right through till she was pregnant with Lara and had also done some special courses in computer book keeping but the financial programs available then were very complex. In the time she had been at home BYOB and QuickBooks had both been developed to greatly simplify the Book keeper’s work. She opted for MYOB and got some training in it to quite a high level before offering herself to a different accounting firm and they were very pleased to have a mature person to fill the position.

They encouraged her to do further studies until she ultimately qualified as an Accountant herself. All these achievements fired up significant ambition in Amy and she gave herself very much to promoting her prospects.

It was three years ago that Sam went off to a Real Estate conference in the Gold Coast. There he not only picked a national Sales Award for a Regional context he found Nicky. She worked in Perth and had decided that Sam was her hero, and she did a great job pandering to his ego in making him feel better about himself than anyone had done for years.

Not surprisingly, in the ensuing months Sam found frequent excuses to travel the 400km to Perth for ‘business’ and he began casting an ever more critical eye over everything about Amy. This grew into hostility and finally, 18 months ago, Amy had had enough and she took her girls and left Sam to himself. She decided that she and the girls would be better off in Perth as the girls got into their secondary schooling.

The scandal in the village was palpable and people were often seen muttering behind their hands as Sam walked by them in the street. But Sam held his head high, making everyone think that he was the innocent party here. He didn’t actually tell lies. He simply did nothing the rebut suggestions that Amy had left him for another man.

Amy’s move to Perth made it easier for him to continue his relationship with Nicky – he had an obvious excuse for coming to Perth: to see his girls. It soon seemed to Sam that it was no longer necessary to keep Nicky so under the wraps as he had before and eventually Amy and the girls were fully aware of the situation. This revelation, however inevitable, had the opposite effect he had hoped for and neither Amy nor the girls wanted any further contact with him so far as possible.

Six months ago, the Divorce was obtained and Sam did a masterful job of making himself look much poorer than he really was and making Amy settle for far less than she perhaps should have, but she was still able to secure a significant interest in a house in the area of Perth she wanted to be in, and with her Accounting qualification she was able to secure a nice living. She did manage to get an agreement that Sam would pay for the girl’s schooling at one of Perth’s leafy private girl’s school.

Notwithstanding these expenses, Sam was able to set up a new home in a spec house a friend of his had built on the riverbank and had then not been able to move as quickly as he needed. Sam got it for a song.

With all this settled Sam and Nicky made plans to get married in Perth – Sam had few friends from the village that he wanted to invite along, and Nicky had a wide circle of friends that she wanted to impress with the catch she had made. All Nicky’s friends were suitably impressed, although some could be seen with quizzical looks on their faces or muttering quietly behind their hands, and so it was that a month ago Nicky, a complete stranger to the Village, had moved into Sam’s house as the new Mrs Sam Malone.

Sam had agreed that Nicky could help out in the business, especially given her sales record in Perth, but realistically she knew that it would take her quite a while to get to know the market in this area and begin to make a significant contribution to the business. She was happy to take a back seat and quietly adjust to her new life as the wife of the Shire President in a seaside holiday village that some referred to as ‘sleepy hollow’.

She had not expected that she would be a sensation when she arrived. First there was the sense of ‘oo la la!’, as the French would say, that seemed to be written on everyone’s face when they realised who she was. But then some of the women of the village, women who were clearly from the landed gentry stables asked her if she would be interested in joining them in the various community groups that such prominent citizens needed to be seen to be part of – the CWA, of course, which looked after significant community catering events, and the Apex Women’s Auxiliary through which many community projects were supported by their fundraising activities, and of course she must join the golf club, where they were sure they could scoot her past the other women of the town waiting to be offered memberships.

Sam was right. It was a high calling to give one’s self to the community, and she for one was going to enjoy every minute of it.