Read The Butcherbird for Free Online Page A

assessments of risk and pricing. But Mac swept these doubts aside.
    ‘And what do you think I know about risk assessment and pricing a book? What do you think I know about coefficients of variation and central estimates and all the other jargon and palaver the actuaries go on with? That’s why we have actuaries, Jack, so people who create businesses like you and me don’t have to spend our lives crawling around a pile of papers. Did you ever meet an actuary who built a business? And there are the regulatory authorities like APRA and ASIC and the ASX and every other alphabet coven of bureaucratic witches who pore all over the stuff. You wouldn’t believe the truckloads of documents we pack off to these leeches. So you don’t have to worry about everything being kosher—that’s the one benefit of all this crap. But who brings the business in? Who creates the revenue instead of just reporting where it’s kept? Isn’t that what a business is really all about? And that’s where you come in, Jack. You’re a genius at selling. Don’t tell me you’re not. I’ve checked. And the banks love you; you’re the only major property developer who’s never missed an interest payment through all the market’s peaks and troughs over the last fifteen years. They trust you, Jack. Do you know what trust’s worth in this business? Think about it. For ninety per cent of our customers we do nothing every year except send them a bill—only about ten per cent make a claim. They renew because they trust us to pay out if that fire ever comes, or the burglar ever breaks in. Trust. It’s what insurance is all about. You have it from the people who matter, the guys with the money, and you’ll build it with the customers. And you know everyone in the building industry and all the associated services, and particularly in home finance. We insure homes, Jack. More than half of all the homes in this country. But how do we increase that share, get the new business, the first-time young buyers? Jack Beaumont gets it for us, with his contacts and his salesmanship. You can push us forward, instead of treading water while the weight of regulatory bullshit tries to pull us under. You’re a visionary. We need you.’
    What words that tug at the core, he thought. Not we want you, but we need you. Jack was already partly lost with those words, he knew it even though he wouldn’t yet allow a decision to form. He certainly wouldn’t voice one to Louise, to anyone.
    ‘So what’ve you been up to with Mac Biddulph? Out on the floating girlie palace and all, I hear?’
    He started at the stentorian tones of Tom Smiley. How could Tom know he’d been seeing Mac Biddulph? Was this city the glass bowl people said it was, where a thousand eyes watched every time the orb was shaken and the fake snow fell on a different branch? He tried to change the subject, to laugh off the question with a Jack-the-lad response, but if Louise could detect dissembling, the professional antenna of Thomas Smiley caught the false notes as clearly as bellbirds calling in a forest.
    The barrage that followed pinned him with its forensic intensity and before he was aware of the prising open of his soul, he was spilling details of not just the weekend’s capers but the conversation in Mac’s office, his initial doubts, even the possibility, the possibility he hadn’t admitted to himself, that he might take this challenge. Yes, it was a challenge—a stretching of his abilities, a leap from being the charming property developer to the leader of a major business, a critical business for the average Australian, a business people depended on in crisis, a complex, intellectually demanding exercise that he could drive forward better than anyone else. Mac had said so. Before he knew it, all this had tumbled forth into Tom’s waiting arms where so many witnesses had relieved themselves unsuspectingly of their burdens in the past.
    ‘Be careful, Jack.’ The shrewd eyes assessed the