The Fix (10 page)

‘I think “prefer large volume” was the expression,' I said. ‘I don't know how big it needs to be to have the desired effect. I mean, does he need it to beep as it backs out?'

‘You're welcome to stay, gentlemen,' the security guard said, still holding the curtain, ‘but I might need you to make your minds up.'

Jett laughed and kept her eyes on me as she stepped back into the darkness. She lifted her non-gun hand to wave, and the curtain fell.

The crowds on Ann Street pushed past as Ben and I paused briefly in the small foyer, repressurising for the normal world.

‘You so lifted your game with that line,' he said. ‘I can't believe you made a girl like you with a line about a turd.'

‘It's a gift,' I told him. ‘That kind of stuff went down a treat in London.'

Traffic banked up at the Brunswick Street lights and drunks ambled onto the road among the cars, shouting harmlessly into windows or up at the sky as their friends tried to pull them back. On the other side of the road, a huge and unruly cab queue blocked half the pavement, without a cab in sight. I was thinking of home, of the girl who had just vanished into the dark, of my unlikely winning line, now spent and gone. I couldn't go back in there, I knew that. I needed to be in a cab and on my way.

‘You'll wait forever here,' Ben said. He could see me sizing up the cab queue. ‘Come back to my place and call one from there. They're much better if you call from a landline. Otherwise you're just another pisshead in the Valley. It's a couple of blocks.'

He led the way through the crowd, keeping his head down and looking like someone with somewhere to go, his dark suit incongruous among people who had come out dressed for drinking or for clubbing, who presumably had nowhere to be in the morning and all night to celebrate that. There were hard men with gym bodies and sleeve tattoos, a girl with her shoes in her hand, crying and shouting at friends who were trying to settle her, emos in clumps in their op-shop flannos or shirts with ironic slogans.

Ben turned into a side street and we passed two new apartment blocks and stopped at an old industrial building that had had a recent makeover. He keyed in an entry code and the heavy steel-and-glass door unlocked with a clunk. When it shut behind us, the building seemed almost silent.

Ben's apartment was on the third floor, with only the rooftop garden above it. He called me a cab and then opened the doors to a balcony overlooking the street, so that we could hear when it arrived.

I wondered if we would talk about Eloise, and what I would say if we did.

The noise of the Valley came in through the open doors. It was an indistinct mess of traffic and people, like the sound of a TV in a nearby room. His flat was no bigger than mine, but it was a loft with a mezzanine, and the dark brick walls were scored with graffiti. The appliances in the kitchenette were European and fire-engine red, and the furniture was made in uncomfortable designer-ish shapes in pale curved wood. The longest wall had a row of three huge porthole windows just below ceiling height, through which blue light fell from a recently disturbed rooftop lap pool.

‘It'll be a while,' Ben said. ‘Even calling from here. This time of night it'd be a while anywhere.' His fridge had an ice dispenser, and he put ice into two glasses before opening the door and taking out a bottle of Perrier. ‘Do you want anything to eat? I have some olives.'

‘No. Thanks.'

I took my mineral water over to the open doors, but the balcony was too small to fit the two of us. I leaned against a nearby wall so that I would still hear the cab in
the street below, and then the graffiti caught my eye. I stepped back and checked my sleeve before I could stop myself.

‘It's all right,' he said. ‘The walls are treated. The graffiti's authentic. Most of it's just tags, though. Junkies, probably.'

A car passed below, slowly, but it was just a car. Not a taxi.

‘How's your mother?' I couldn't talk about graffiti as some hip urban design aesthetic. I couldn't talk about why all his appliances needed to be red, or the story behind the olives. I knew there would be one. ‘I've been meaning to ask.'

‘She's fine,' he said. ‘She's good.'

‘How was she about your father?'

‘Fine. That history was way too ancient.' He looked out into the night.

‘And how are
you
feeling about your father?'

‘That sounds like a therapy question.' He made himself smile as if he'd meant it as a joke. He hadn't. ‘I said no to counselling already. After the incident. I'm sure it would have been a great chance for an absent-father grilling if I'd taken it up.'

‘It was just a question.' I had hit a weak spot. ‘A “one human being to another” question. And maybe if you'd said yes to the counselling, you'd have a better term for it than “incident”. I don't imagine it was quite that abstract at the time.'

He was about to have a go at me. Here I was, drinking his mineral water and taking his hospitality and trying, not for the first time, to back him into the corner in which he would tell me about the siege.

‘I haven't missed him yet,' he said eventually. ‘If you want to know where things stand with my father. I've missed him hardly at all. I couldn't do business and be his son. I'm not his son. I'm a guy with the bad luck to have his name. Absence is the way I've known him best. He worked long hours, he left us, he died.'

So there, in the eyes of his only known child, was Kerry Benson Harkin's epitaph, ungracious and probably richly deserved. Above us, a swimmer pushed off in the lap pool, sending bubbles down into the water and against Ben's portholes.

‘Number six,' he said, of the gleaming white body in black Speedos. ‘Never sleeps, as far as I'm aware. Or does an IT job in a different time zone. Something like that. They can't see us down here, not with the water lights on. The windows just look black.'

‘Could have been you. The IT . . .'

He made a dismissive noise. ‘Not with my rudimentary web skills. I don't think they even call it IT any more. I'd be doing websites for community groups at a thousand bucks a time, tops. I wouldn't have this place if I was doing that.'

He looked around his apartment, mood lit for a mood we were nowhere near. It had the appearance of an apartment in a magazine, with barely a sign of life but for the unnamed swimmer, tumble-turning and making his way back along the windows.

‘You were really into the animation, though.' I wasn't going to let him pretend that he had never had the dream. ‘The Japanese-style thing. Maybe you could have done something there.'

‘Looks like I didn't. With that or the web stuff.' The
topic was over for him. ‘It's only the porn magnates in this town who make real money from websites. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But what about you? All the blogging and the articles? All this . . . whimsy.' It was probably the most dismissive word he could find. ‘Was that the London plan? I thought of you when that guy came out as Deep Throat not long after you left.'

‘Mark Felt. W Mark Felt.' I had assumed we would never know the real Deep Throat. His anonymity was a fixed truth I had been born into, and I had watched the movie too many times to imagine that that might change. And the London plan was only partly about All the President's Men and journalistic ambition. It was as much to do with escape from Ben and from Eloise, from the fallout. He knew that. ‘I don't mind the articles,' I said, though just at that second I hated them. I could choke on whimsy, gag on it. ‘They make a lot of stupid things tax deductible. And people are starting to pay properly. And they're starting to come to me. I got a call a few days ago from a magazine pitching me a story. A national magazine.'

‘Really? What about?'

‘Well, actually . . .' The point had been that it was a national magazine, and they had come to me. I wanted to lie. I wanted it to be some important truth-breaking feature. I wanted to be better than him, to have a better life, a more successful life. Eloise had loved me, I thought, until he got involved. ‘They wanted to send me out speed-dating.'

He laughed. He laughed until mineral water sloshed up the side of his glass and ran down onto his hand. ‘Which you said no to in case you got a crush on
someone. Right? You could get a crush on that Jett chick in five seconds. You probably already did. I saw how you were looking at her. Even when she was fully dressed and your jaw wasn't on the carpet.'

‘She was an interesting phenomenon. I was looking at her as a law student who happened to be . . .'

‘Dressed like a cowgirl, or a biker chick, or kind of close to naked?' He shook his head, and laughed again.

He was right, of course. I had already fantasised about cooking her Gergovian meatballs, which I would call ‘a very old French recipe', on my Bunsen burner or, better still, at her place, which would be quite stylish, et cetera et cetera (fade out during excellent sex, wake the following morning to find her searching for synonyms for ecstasy – it was a movie already, this fantasy). Other than that, I had no kind of crush on her at all.

‘You're very superficial,' I said to him, once I had rolled the closing credits. ‘Our connection was all about personality.'

‘Have you ever told a lie that anyone believed?'

‘Not so far.' I didn't think I had. I wasn't good at it, when it was about me. ‘It's amazing I'm in this job. Maybe I can send other people out to lie about themselves. Maybe I'm good at that. But I'm all about the truth, remember. Just finding the best, most survivable version of the truth. I spin the truth – I'll admit to that – but I don't dismember it.'

‘Really?' He was giving it thought. ‘Is that a genuine distinction, or is it what you tell yourself?'

‘Don't get all meta on me. I'm not sure this bears analysis. It's what I do, for now. For the next week or so. That's all.'

He took a mouthful of his drink, stepped out onto the balcony and looked up and down the street. ‘No cab,' he said. ‘They're not quick tonight.'

In the distance, glass smashed. Someone had dropped a bottle. Ben didn't seem to hear it.

As he came back in, his elbow touched a lamp that stood on a table next to the door. He stopped to steady it, to check that it was okay. Its base was a graceful bronze woman's body that held up a canopy or a pair of curved wings made out of tiles of green glass.

He noticed me looking at it and said, ‘Paul Behrens, from the twenties. The glass is Tiffany. He made it for his own house. He made every fitting and every piece of furniture from scratch. It's often copied, this lamp, but this one was his.'

‘It's from your father's apartment at Surfers, isn't it?' I could remember it. Ben had thrown lavish parties when he had the chance. When he had access to better real estate than he tended to live in, usually a place in the temporary hold of his father, but at times when Kerry was conveniently out of town. The theme of that party had been the twenties, The Great Gatsby. He had studied the novel, I thought.

‘It's the one thing of his I still have,' he said. He reached beneath the lampshade, pulled a cord, and broken green light refracted onto the walls. ‘I took it years ago. The receivers had been called. It was one of those times. I was there on the right day, before they came and made their list.'

‘But it smashed at that party, didn't it?' It seemed a stupid thing to say with the lamp intact in front of us, but I remembered it distinctly.

‘Well,' he said, touching the glass, ‘here it is.'

I had been the one to find the dustpan and brush. I had swept up the broken glass.

‘Anyway, how about that Jett chick?' he said. He stepped away from the table. ‘Aside from the crush. Look at her. We could get the band back together. She'd be just right for it.'

‘There was no band. Or does that not matter to you?' It must have been another lamp back then. But I was sure he had told me the Behrens story before the party started – the Tiffany glass, everything made from scratch. And then the Gold Coast social crowd turned up. There were models and iron men and some local TV people, and a guy who'd made it through a couple of seasons in Formula One. Not friends of his, but Ben always knew who to call.

‘Cloud-Sized Cloud could have been a hit.' He was still on about the band, as if he had a genuine point to make.

‘It wasn't even a song.'

‘It
sounded
like it could have been.' He was smiling, making some kind of game of it. ‘She'd be great. Just for a photo. Everyone believes a photo. We know that. We only need her top half, and we know it's up to the job. A cowgirl drummer. Think about it.'

‘You'll have me writing articles next if I think about it.' I was thinking about it. Thinking about the cowgirl drummer, who would be extremely cool. I was dreaming about Jett in a useless way. She had used us to kill time. That was all. She had chosen me as the room's most innocuous person. ‘I'm not going to think about it.' He knew I already had. ‘So, tell me about this Rob Mueller guy.'

He kept the smile up, but it was less real now. ‘Rob Mueller . . . I don't know. In the end, I don't know. He seemed crazy. I don't know what does that. I don't know what makes you get a gun, or how you get a gun and what makes you . . .' I could almost watch the ideas falling apart. ‘I don't know.'

‘Sorry, I . . .' I had pushed him there, dragged him back to the trauma, just because I'd had enough of the game, enough of him picking away at my work, my stupid gawking at a stripper.

‘No. No, it's fine. We've got to talk.
I've
got to talk. I signed the thing saying yes to the medal.'

Maybe it was better starting it here, on his turf, his sterile designer turf, away from the glass walls and co-owners of the story at Randall Hood Beckett.