The Fix (2 page)

‘We should get you a coffee,' he said, struck by the thought for the first time and glancing around half-heartedly for staff. ‘Except we're going to have to head off soon. You could get it takeaway.' He reached into his pocket for some coins.

‘I'm okay. Thanks.'

He opened the document satchel again, and pulled out another sheet of paper. ‘There's some background,' he said. ‘Some more on the story. They sent through this article from when it happened. Late September the year before last.'

‘Are you planning to give it all to me one page at a time?'

‘I didn't want to overwhelm your Gen Y concentration span.' It was a longstanding joke making a comeback.

We were a clear half-generation apart in age, and it mostly felt like one of those halves that rounded up. We hadn't had enough common ground to work the way brothers were supposed to, but on our better days we had still connected in some ways – the music he brought home, mainly, and movies. And I had of course spent my teenage years in a relationship with a photo of the woman he later met and married.

‘Somewhere out there is a demographer I want to slap over all that Gen Y stuff,' I told him, ‘but I'm too distractable to find out who.'

He laughed. ‘I'd give you more, but that's all I've got. Just those articles. I'm sure the firm'll have more.'

The older article had more details of the siege, though it hadn't really been a siege, not in the way it was conceived or carried out. Perhaps the word siege had come along early in the coverage, and stuck. The gunman was an aggrieved or troubled client. He had taken Ben and the managing partner, Frank Ainsworth, hostage and blocked the exits. Ben had saved the day but, in the struggle, the man had been fatally shot by his own weapon. I got the impression it hadn't lasted long enough to become a siege.

‘So, Ben Harkin's a friend of yours?' Brett was saying.

I didn't look up. There was a photo of Ben being led to an ambulance, and an older man – Frank Ainsworth – on a stretcher with a bandage wrapped around his head. ‘Well, I'd happily never see him again, but don't let that bother you.'

Brett picked at his nails. It was a habit that had always irritated me.

‘But you're okay with this?' he said, as nonchalantly as he could manage. ‘I've told them it'll be you doing the job. I've pitched you based on what you did in the UK.'

‘I'm okay with it.' I straightened the two sheets of paper out in front of me, one on top of the other. ‘I'm a professional. Watch me. I can be the most professional guy you've ever seen without a tie.'

‘Remember that job you did with the contaminated water in the UK? That went really well. You'll be great with this. And it's easy. In and out in a week or so.'

‘I did practically nothing on that. The contaminated water job.' I had already said I was okay. I didn't need to be persuaded. ‘I was really junior then.'

‘Maybe, but it was a tough sell. This is good news. The water story shows you know how to find the angles to play. It's a good example.' It wasn't any kind of example, but I was going to take the work, even if Ben Harkin was to be right at the centre of it. ‘And there was more, right? Privatisations? A toll road through some piece of unspoiled wilderness?'

‘It wasn't exactly unspoiled wilderness. It was the Midlands. But, yeah, I ran interference on that kind of stuff. Spun it till its eyes popped, if I had to. A good-news story like this looks like a gift in comparison. I'm your man, Brett. So stop pitching. At least stop pitching me to me. Or to you.'

‘Just talking things through. You'll be great.' He looked at his watch, then straightened it on his wrist. ‘Mum said you picked up the camp stove from her a week ago.'

‘Yeah. My oven kind of conked out.'

So this was where it all came together – my oven, the visit to my parents, the out-of-the-blue call from Brett offering work. Not so out of the blue, as it turned out. Aspen now sounded too obvious, a cliché. I wondered if the job was complete charity. I took a long slow breath, and I sucked it up.

I was tucked under the overhang of a mortgage, I had money coming in but only in fits and starts, and Randall Hood Beckett was to be my oven job. The camp stove was a very temporary solution. It had to be. It was no more sophisticated than a Bunsen burner.

‘I want to make the right choice with the new oven,' I told him. ‘I don't want to rush it. It might be smarter to do the rest of the kitchen at the same time. Renovate the lot.' I had no plans for that, but it sounded like an adult thing to say. ‘The camp stove'll be fine in the meantime.'

‘Sure,' he said. ‘And there's always salads. Most of us don't eat enough salads.'

The job was charity. I was sure of it then.

He checked that I didn't want the takeaway coffee, took the last mouthful of his latte and led me out of the coffee shop in the direction of the nearby office towers, and Randall Hood Beckett.

As we waited for the traffic lights to change, I realised that the news photo had been taken from exactly the spot where we were standing. I could see where the ambulance had parked. I could see the jacaranda trees that had framed Ben's exit from the building.

‘Does he know it's me?' It was the building diagonally across the intersection. He was up there now, somewhere, high up behind the gold glass, waiting.

‘Who? Ben Harkin?' Brett glanced at me just as the green walk sign came on. The woman to his right bumped his elbow as she stepped out onto the road. ‘Yeah. I guess so. I'm sure he does. I sent them that CV you emailed. They said he'd be glad to know it was someone with the right experience.'

Like most respectable CVs, the facts – the dates and places – were true enough, but I read better than I was. Since my job was spin, though, there would have been a kind of negligence involved, surely, if I hadn't applied just a little steady torque to my own story.

We crossed the street and the granite forecourt, and cool air rode out of the open glass doors ahead of us as we approached the building. In the foyer, the granite floor was polished and people in dark suits – men and women – crisscrossed between the lift wells and the doors. It looked almost choreographed, like the opening ceremony of a lawyers' Olympics. In two places, a pair of camel-coloured leather sofas had been arranged as if for conversation, in an L-shape with a potted rubber tree where they met. The Ls were mirror images of each other, and the rubber trees nearly identical. The sofas were empty.

Mid-foyer, Brett stopped. ‘Ben wasn't the one with Eloise, was he?'

‘Yeah. He was the one with Eloise.' It was the one question I had wanted him not to ask. ‘This has always been, and remains, a small town.' A small town, and I had come back to it, come back and stuck myself to my past like a moth to a pantry moth trap. Eloise was in my head, vividly. I tried to force the image of her to pixelate, to erase. I had worked my way clear of all that, almost clear.

Brett was looking at me, measuring up what this might do. I could tell he was expecting flight – gutless little-brotherly flight – and already planning for its consequences.

‘That was then and this is now,' I said. I realised I could live with the camp stove, pretty much indefinitely. It wasn't the point after all. ‘I'm not walking away in the foyer of the building on the way to the meeting. You've pitched me. They're expecting me. And you know I can do this job.'

‘Okay.' He had something big-brotherly that he wanted to tell me, some toxic platitude or perhaps an update on the benefits of salad, but he held it back. It's a rare moment when a family member works out in time that every single thing they want to say would be wrong. ‘I think it's on thirty-seven. Reception.'

Half of the lifts, I noticed, went only to twenty, while the others serviced the upper floors. We stepped into one as the doors were closing.

‘As good-news stories go,' I said to Brett, ‘this one should be easier to work with than most. At least it's got a good story. A real story.'

‘Yeah, right,' he said, too positively. It was as if he had held his breath since he'd mentioned Eloise, and now he could let it out. ‘Yeah. And I don't think they've done much with it yet at all.'

At thirty-seven, the lift doors opened to a curved white marble reception desk and, behind it, a broad painting of the city at night. It was an aerial view, with the vigour of the brushwork on show and picking up all the colour and mess of the lights without being gaudy. On the front of the desk, fixed by steel rods to
the marble, the names Randall, Hood and Beckett had somehow been worked into a wave of bluish glass. I wanted a tie. I should have looked harder for one, back at the flat. I should have thought it through.

‘They're expecting you on thirty-eight,' the receptionist said when Brett signed us in. ‘Let me sort that out for you.' She took a pass on a lanyard from her drawer and led us back to the lift. When the doors opened, she stepped in, waved the pass in front of a sensor and pushed the button for the next floor. ‘For Mister Ainsworth's office, you turn left out of the lift, then keep going to the end. I'll let him know you're on your way.'

She was leaving the lift as she spoke, but she kept her hand on the doors to stop them closing on us as we got in.

‘Security,' Brett said as soon as it was just the two of us. ‘I think that's since the incident. I heard they'd had a security revamp.'

‘But wasn't it a client? Wouldn't he have got in anyway?' I was trying to work it out, not trying to pick a fight.

‘I just heard,' he said. He cleared his throat, and watched the thirty-seven change to a thirty-eight on the liquid crystal display. ‘I think if a client turned up on thirty-seven with a gun and looking kind of crazy, it'd be a hint that you wouldn't take them to thirty-eight.'

‘Good point. Here's hoping I'll do all my work on thirty-eight then.'

The lift doors opened to a corridor of glass-fronted offices. We stepped out onto a dark blue carpet with a recurring green motif, and just enough give to underline its quality.

Frank Ainsworth stood as we arrived at the open door to his corner office.

‘Brett, come in,' he said, his voice a little louder than it needed to be. ‘And you must be Joshua.'

Through the windows behind him, the office blocks paraded down Charlotte Street, the afternoon sun flaring from their glass faces. I could only see the middles of most buildings and the tops of some, and couldn't tell between them. One or two of them might even have been built while I was away. I recognised the street less than I expected to. Maybe it wasn't Charlotte Street, but one of the other queen streets instead.

Of the two walls without windows, one had a dot painting that at a guess would have cost ten grand, and the other had shelves full of the kind of books that make a classic lawyer backdrop in TV interviews. I had never seen them close up, and wondered if they were legislation, or textbooks, or something you bought by the metre – a kind of office dressing from the age of encyclopaedias.

Frank came around his desk to meet me with a bone-crushing handshake, a wave of manly sandalwood aftershave straight out of the eighties and his pale blue eyes working me over, summing me up, already checking whether or not I was up to the job. He was not someone to be sucked in by a well-massaged CV. He wore a crisp white shirt and a club tie and could have been any other hard-edged, no-nonsense man in business, had it not been for the pink scar on his tanned bald scalp, zigzagging back from his forehead.

‘Don't worry,' he said, tapping the scar with his left index finger. ‘I've heard it all before. Harry Potter at
fifty.' He gave a bark of a laugh and then quickly said, ‘Sit down, sit down,' motioning towards the two seats on the opposite side of the desk to his. ‘I'm only forty-eight anyway. Just a bit weather-beaten.' He took his own seat, straightened his tie in a way that looked like a habit and said, ‘You're going to be an asset to us over the next week, Joshua.'

He looked well over fifty, with his sun-leathered skin. He had deep frown lines etched into his forehead. The backs of his hands were mottled, and the veins and tendons stood out as his fingers tapped on his desk. But he looked as if the years had toughened him, not worn him out.

There was a family photo in a simple silver frame on the desk. It was black-and-white, a formal portrait, Frank with a smile as comfortable as an ill-fitting suit, his wife, two dark-haired teenage daughters.

‘It was dreadful in the days afterwards,' he said. ‘Particularly for Ben.' He looked across to Brett, and then back to me. ‘We offered him counselling, but he said no. He had time off. When his medal was announced a couple of months ago – it was in the papers, we might have sent that one to you, I think – he couldn't do the interviews. We had to say he was in Japan on business.'

‘But there's no escape at the investiture, and you want him to be ready.' Already I had the answer about the skydiver story in the paper.

‘That's right,' he said. ‘More than that. We want it to be the positive experience, and the recognition, that he deserves. Part of the healing process.' He seemed to choose the words carefully. They had the sound of a prepared statement.

The phone on his desk rang, and the noise seemed to surprise him. He grabbed the handset.

‘Did I tell you I wanted to be interrupted?' There was no hello, no start to a conversation. ‘No. No, I didn't think so.' On the other end of the line, a woman hurried to explain herself. ‘Later. We can deal with that later. Let's have no more calls unless there's a fire, or somebody wants to shoot me. Right?' He tried to smile but it was the smile of the photo or one quite like it. It was for Brett and me, not the caller.

He put the phone down.

‘Do people often want to shoot you?'