The Fix (13 page)

‘You should call me Hayley,' she said. ‘That's the name I go by in the world outside the Spur. Hayley Throat.'

‘Could we just . . .' No, we couldn't pretend I hadn't said it. She was amusing herself too much for that.

There was a stand selling coffee in takeaway cups, and we sat near it, at a round table closest to the grass and the dark courtyard. All but one of the other tables were empty. People were buying their coffees and moving on.

I mentioned that her hair looked different and she said, ‘That'd be Desley you'd be thinking of. Desley's my hair extension.'

‘Not a complete wig, though.' I was thinking of Elektra, though her hair might have been real. ‘You could have worn a platinum-blonde wig.'

‘I could, I guess. I could have bought some big tits too. Would that be better? If I had a platinum-blonde wig and big tits?'

‘I wouldn't change a thing,' I said and went bright flaming red. I could feel it. I went to drink my coffee, and slurped it.

‘Good. Well, Desley's enough then. It's about . . . shifting from this world to that world. Creating a character. And my character is the antidote to platinum-blonde wigs and big tits. She clips on. Plus, long hair and that kind of act . . . it's a thing. There's more that you can do with it, but a lot of guys seem to look for it too. I actually cut my hair myself. My real hair. I read this thing in a magazine that said if you bunch it forward . . .' She tossed her hair in front of her face and then gathered it with one hand, using the other to demonstrate scissor-work. ‘And cut into it kind of randomly, you can get this rock-chick look.' She let it fall, and shook it back into the look. She held her hands up, as if displaying it.

‘I think I've got that piece at home,' I said, wanting not to go red again. ‘Sitting in my research file of things people would never do. There's always a blog in that.'

‘You arsehole.' She laughed, leaned forward and punched me in the arm.

‘The hair's great, though. Really.'

‘Way too late, my friend. Way too late. And don't try passing yourself off as normal. Things people would never do, number one: keep some crazy-arse file of things people would never do.'

‘It's my job. Bizarre magazine advice is a gift for blogs.' The more I thought about it, the more I thought I actually did have the hair article. ‘Though obviously the hair article wouldn't make the cut, since it's really sensible. Just don't tell me you've covered your kitchen walls with foreign newspapers and lacquered them for a bistro feel, or decoupaged hat boxes as gifts or covered your car in Astroturf.'

She gave it the appearance of serious consideration. ‘Hey, I think I might be tempted by the wall thing. Is that a problem? Who doesn't want a bistro feel?' I wondered where she lived, what kind of life she had. ‘Someone really covered their car in Astroturf?'

‘Apparently. It was a green car – environmentally, I mean – with the ironic exception of the Astroturf. Which is green in colour but actually polypropylene, I think. It ran on bio fuel. They were proving a point. I think the point was that, if you covered your car in Astroturf, no one would pay attention to anything else. The bio fuel bit of the story got kind of lost.'

She straightened her watch so that it sat better on her wrist. She looked across the Great Court, at the dark lawn and the glowing row of columns around it.

‘Did you know that close to forty percent of people in my line of work are doing it to pay their way through uni?' she said. ‘It's not what you'd think.'

‘I don't think I was thinking anything.'

‘You said the Spur was less sleazy than you were expecting.'

‘Yeah, but . . .' There was no denying it. ‘Yeah, but I'd never had a law-student cowgirl walk up to me like that before. I probably said a lot of stupid things.'

She looked into her coffee cup, which was almost empty. ‘Dammit. Study time. That'll teach me to go for espressos.' She drank the last of it, and scrunched the cup in her hand. ‘And I haven't even told you any trade secrets yet. The only thing I've given up is Desley, and there can't be more than six words in her.'

‘You should give me another chance then. I'm sure my expenses can stretch to another coffee some time. Or
something else.' Nothing to lose, I told myself, nothing to lose.

‘I think I might take you up on that,' she said. ‘Why don't you give me your number?'

She put it into her phone, and then refused to give me hers.

‘You'll have it when I call you. That's my best offer.' And then she stood and said, ‘Well, thanks for the coffee,' and she was gone.

I watched her walk along the colonnade, caught by the light of each archway until she turned into Forgan Smith without a backward glance. I sat with my coffee for a minute or two but she didn't reappear.

‘You want another one of those?' the guy at the coffee cart said. All the other tables were empty now, and I was his only potential customer.

I told him I had to be somewhere, and I left the Great Court imagining Hayley among the shelves of the law library, deleting my number. Or calling me at any second, telling me she couldn't possibly concentrate on study and had to see me now. My head was full of her, because that's what I did. I got crushes, I got big ideas, I got ten steps ahead of myself. I placed any small prospect in a vice-like grip, and I applied the crushing force that broke it. Francesca, Eloise, Emily in London and not just them.

Heart on my sleeve, my mother had said, and I didn't know what was wrong with having a heart and not keeping it hidden like some state secret.

I imagined introducing Hayley to my mother. My mother, who saw me with a patchwork job that she didn't understand, and no oven, currently being bailed
out by her more successful son. Add dating a stripper to that list, and my fall would be seen as complete. Add being turned down by a stripper, brushed off by a stripper . . .

But she took my number. There was rapport.

She refused to give me hers. There was nothing.

Athletes were training as I walked along the top of the grassy slope that led down to the running track. They were practising their starts under the lights, launching themselves forward and then turning the engines off and coasting to a stop. They were too far away for me to hear a thing. They were focused, purposeful. I couldn't tell how good they were. A coach was talking to one of them, explaining something, while the athlete stood with his hands on his hips and looked down at the ground.

I felt unusually solitary watching them, down there in the light, even though they were mostly in their own heads as well.

I had just passed the rowing sheds and left the campus when a text message came through to my phone. It was the loudest noise in the street. It was from Ben, and it said, ‘yr business with max was clrly important . . . b'.

I caught the next CityCat that was going downstream and I sat behind some college girls who were showing each other pictures on their phones. They were heading into town and talking about boys.

The ride lasted about a minute and I wasn't yet ready to be boxed in for the night, so I took a long way home and walked around West End. I followed the river, and eventually turned in near Vulture Street. There was a new signal box at the traffic lights near the school. It
had been painted to resemble a CBD skyline and already graffitied with ‘greed sux'. I had written something for a magazine on the city's signal-box art, so I knew that most of the artists were neither rich nor greedy, and they spent seventy dollars a time on materials.

On one of the power poles outside the cafés, there was a soup recipe. Someone had taped it there, and written ‘So good I had to share it with you all' at the top. The soup was mostly sweet potato, with smoked almonds and basil and garlic to flavour it. I borrowed a pen and paper from Café Checocho and I copied it out.

As I walked down the side street towards my flat with the recipe folded in my pocket, I imagined making it for Hayley. But coffee was just coffee, and it was done, and it was better to believe that she would never call.

I re-heated a serve of Gergovian meatballs and I told myself not to crack a fortune cookie, because I would read far too much into it, either way.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING
, after emailing Max Visser to book a meeting in his diary, I played the DVD footage of the siege for the first time. It was a compilation of news pieces from that week. I took the days in order, matching the print coverage with TV and watching the story evolve.

The siege had occurred in late September almost nineteen months before. Summer came early that year and a hot dry spring brought the jacarandas madly into bloom by the time Ben was led from the building, his
head down, his shirt soaked with blood. The cameras followed him, as he had told me, all the way to the ambulance. It looked like a re-creation, with the trees out of season, as if they had got no good pictures at the time and staged it again a month later to do better.

It was something Frank said two days afterwards at a press conference that caught my attention. ‘Ben showed conspicuous courage in circumstances of great personal danger.' He was sitting at a table with a bandage around his head and two police behind him. He was speaking without notes. He had a work shirt on, but no tie, and his blue eyes looked straight ahead into the cameras.

I had seen that line before, or something very like it.

I searched through Frank's written statements and newspaper articles, and the dry and circumspect reports of the police, and finally found it in the Australian Bravery Decorations pamphlet. The Star of Courage was ‘awarded only for acts of conspicuous courage in circumstances of great peril'. It wasn't identical, but it was close.

So Ben's bravery was either an almost exact natural fit for the Star of Courage or, by day two post-siege, Frank was tailor-making quotes with the medal in mind.

I went back a day, to Frank's hospital bed interview.

‘We're very grateful for Ben's . . . intervention,' he said. He was sitting up in bed in new pyjamas. ‘I'm very grateful. I could have been killed in there. That was the gunman's intention. And it's unlikely I would have been the only victim.'

Even then there was a formality to the way he spoke, a composure, but it was nothing like the fit with the
Star of Courage wording. I went forward again to the next day.

He talked about the siege itself, recalling the details, and then he stopped himself and seemed to refocus, and that was when he said, ‘There's one point I want to make clear. Ben showed conspicuous courage in circumstances of great personal danger. I could have understood if he had escaped alone and left me there, but he chose not to. He chose to remain.'

It wasn't all out of the manual. I could find nothing in the pamphlet to match Frank's observation about Ben's choice to remain. Perhaps Frank, to use Hayley's word, had simply defaulted to formality. When he had most wanted to make his point, he had talked like the lawyer he was.

I looked for Ben's version of the story, but he went unquoted on the first two days. One newspaper article said he had been sedated. He surfaced on day three, but didn't have much to say. He called it a blur, and said he couldn't put it all together yet. But Frank had done all the telling by then already. Perhaps the story was what it was, Ben was a shell-shocked hero and Frank was focusing on gratitude. Maybe it was as simple as it looked, and Ben had been precisely as brave as a person needed to be to win a Star of Courage.

* * *

THAT AFTERNOON, WITH
five minutes to kill before my meeting with Max Visser, I put ‘Randall Hood Beckett' into Google, just to see what would
come of it. There were hundreds of hits – newspaper reports about the siege, all of which I recognised from their dates and key words, and among them other sites that suggested a firm simply going about its business. There were several hits from their own website, a Lawyers Weekly web announcement about a new commercial property partner, an appeal to the Planning and Environment Court, and appearances in Chinese and Japanese business directories. There seemed to be nothing on the siege that I didn't already have.

The first few hits on the second page looked as unremarkable as the first, but one stood out halfway down. It was a newspaper report from months before the siege, and I brought the article up on screen. It was headed, ‘Law partner “foul-mouthed and aggressive”' and the article read, ‘Complaints have been made to the Law Society from three former administrative staff at the Brisbane firm of solicitors Randall Hood Beckett. The most serious alleges that managing partner, Frank Ainsworth, called one staff member a “stupid slut” when she questioned his billing practices. The complaints called Mister Ainsworth intimidating and aggressive, and claimed he commonly used language that was offensive and demeaning.'

I wasn't shocked, though I hadn't expected to see it put so plainly. I wondered where the story had gone from there, where it had come from. But it was time to find Max.

Selina walked out of his office as I stepped into the corridor. She saw me ahead of her and said, ‘He's all yours, hon.' She was holding her security pass by its lanyard and swinging it. ‘Oh, and I got your email about
Rob Mueller's legal file. I put the request in, but I don't think I've seen it. I'm just going to chase it up for you.' She caught the pass in her other hand.

‘Thanks.'

I wanted to ask her about Frank, about the Courier-Mail story and the allegations, but Max was standing in his doorway.

‘Josh. Come in,' he said. ‘Come in.'

He waited in the doorway for me, and then pointed me towards a seat.

‘Oh my God, I still can't believe Wednesday night,' he said, as he went back around to the other side of the desk. He made it sound as if it had happened about a minute before. ‘Vince said they were there for hours more. The things you do to nail down a deal . . . I had to go home and tell my wife everything. She's not a big fan of strip clubs. She quite likes the karaoke, since she says it gets the singing out of my system. Oh my God. “Watch a lady move her bowel.” I really think the toilet should be private.' He shook his head, as if it would shake the bad image away. He was moving his mouse around and clicking. He found my email on the screen. ‘Okay, what's first? It's background as well as the incident, right?'