The Fix (27 page)

‘But respectful of the medal again.' I was always the nag in these situations. ‘Any time it's in shot we've got to think about that.'

‘Of course, yeah,' she said, and laughed. ‘I suppose we'd better keep the shirt on then. Damn the star protocol. Maybe with the jacket and tie off, and some kind of close-up?'

‘If it was up to
me
the shirt'd be off,' Ben said. He fanned air across his face. ‘You sweat a lot under those lights.'

‘Maybe Josh could get you a drink?' she said, not even looking at me.

* * *

WHEN WE GOT TO
King Tutt's, Richard decided he liked the light outside. It was overcast by then, but bright. He walked around taking readings with his meter, and chose a hole on the African jungle course. He crouched at the far end of the green, looking back up the slope to the tee, checking out the surroundings, framing the shot.

‘Okay,' he said. ‘Okay, this is good. If we could have Ben at the tee, with the friends in shot . . .' He had lost our names somewhere between Focus and King Tutt's. Hayley and I were the chorus. ‘And, Aimee, if you could take two steps to the left and bend that branch down a bit so that it comes into shot, and Abs over to the right here with the flekkie . . .'

Two steps to the left put Aimee off the course. She looked at the spot where she was supposed to stand, as if looking might change it for the better. She took her Jimmy Choos off, lined them up on the edge of the Astroturf and stepped barefoot onto the wood chips.
Ben placed the ball and looked ahead towards the hole, lining up his shot. He was back in the T-shirt, three-quarter pants and slides.

‘Just lean on your putters, guys,' Richard said to Hayley and me. ‘Look casual, but also kind of impressed by Ben's shot. Fascinated by it.'

‘Fascinated,' Hayley said, just to me. She gave me a look of mock fascination. She was wearing a polka-dot sundress. Back at the apartment, Richard had called it perfect.

Richard moved Ben a centimetre or two, redirected the light, asked Aimee to dip her palm frond a little further. He took a step back, to the edge of a water feature on a different hole, and he crouched again.

‘All right, this is it, I reckon,' he said, looking down at the image on the back of his camera. ‘Okay, Ben, what I want you to do is keep your body steady, and just putt the ball into the hole. I'll keep shooting all the way in. Sound okay? And if you could not drill it at the hole, that'd be good. I'd like to get about ten shots in. So, try to hit it so that it just drops in . . . Allowing for the slope of course.'

Aimee laughed. ‘You didn't expect putting skills would be quite so important for this, did you?'

‘You should have seen me on the Jurassic,' he said, like an old golfer recalling a mythical round from his youth. ‘I tore it up.' He lined up the shot as she laughed again. ‘Deepest darkest Africa? Somehow it's not so easy.'

‘Ready when you are,' Richard said. ‘And, Aimee, if you could hold the branch still . . .'

‘Sorry,' she said, looking at Ben as though they had
both just been naughty. I couldn't see the look he gave her in return.

He putted, and he putted perfectly. He swung gracefully and the ball seemed to glide along the surface, picking up speed as it ran down the slope. It moved in an arc with the contour of the course, swung down from a bank and plopped into the hole.

Aimee let go of the branch and applauded.

Richard flicked through the images, checking them, and then showed the sequence to Ben and Aimee. She said they were exactly what she wanted. They were perfect. Richard, being a photographer, took twenty or thirty more photos of us just to be certain.

Aimee confirmed times for the next day for the brief phone interviews she needed with Frank and Max and then she said, ‘You. I've got to get a quote or two from you as a friend.' She pulled out her notepad and clicked her pen. ‘You've been friends since uni, yeah? Is this the kind of thing you would have imagined Ben doing?'

We had finished on the green, with Ben holing a short putt. It had been a tight shot, so I was close enough to touch him. He started bouncing an orange golf ball on the head of his putter, trying to keep it in the air. Friends since uni – had he told her that, or had I, when I was lining up the interview? Ben's eyes were on the bouncing golf ball. He started to move away, but the ball caught the edge of the putter and dropped into the wood chips.

‘What he did was exactly the kind of thing I would have imagined him doing, in the circumstances,' I told Aimee. Lying, hiding something – exactly the kind of thing.

‘Can you say any more about it? Anything particular about the siege?' She wanted a lie from me too, to put in print along with all the others.

‘I was out of the country when it happened, but I've read the reports and it was obviously a harrowing experience. I think I'd just hide in a corner.' I wanted Ben to look at me, but he wouldn't.

‘Good,' she said, writing it out longhand. ‘That's good.'

She slipped her Jimmy Choos back on and instantly grew taller. She shook my hand and thanked me.

‘This'll run the week after next,' she said, mainly to Ben. ‘I think we'll get a great response.'

‘We're off,' Richard said. He had a bag over his shoulder and his camera in his hand. Abi was taking a shortcut through the course with the lights. ‘Nice one, that action sequence. Magic. Hope they use it.'

He followed Abi over a bridge and past a crocodile, in the direction of the car park. Aimee was already on the phone, calling for a cab.

‘King Tutt's Putt Putt,' she said in the clear tone needed for voice-recognition software. ‘
King Tutt's Putt Putt
.' Her ankle buckled as her heel landed on the edge of a fairway ridge, but she corrected and kept walking.

‘My vote is we play,' Ben said. He was putting his orange golf ball repetitively against a log that marked the edge of the Astroturf. ‘We haven't done this one before.'

He led us back to the beginning of the course so that we could play the whole thing, and he decided that Hayley would go first.

‘I reckon that went well,' he said to me as she played her tee shot. ‘We should do all right with that piece. She seemed to like me.'

‘I don't know if
like
is the word.' I couldn't let it go. I wanted to, but I couldn't. ‘I'm not sure all that outrageous flirting of yours was such a good strategy.'

‘I wasn't flirting.' He said it condescendingly, as if I wouldn't know enough to recognise it anyway. ‘And she was the one who wanted me to get my shirt off.'

Hayley putted hard at the hole, and missed.

Ben tapped his putter against the side of his shoe. ‘I thought the way I handled it would work well for the story. It was all about rapport. Remember rapport?'

‘It wasn't rapport if she thought it was sleazy. Don't do it with Australian Story, okay?'

‘All right, boys.' Hayley stepped towards us and waved her putter between us. ‘Play nice. I didn't see the interview, but I've seen all those supermodel shows and no one oiled Ben's pecs, so I think it'll be okay. Now, you two can fight it out in some manly way to see who goes second. And whoever's scoring can put me down for a two.'

‘How many did it take you?' I was sure it hadn't been two.

‘Four, but you weren't paying attention, so I'll take a two. Except we don't have a scorecard, do we?' Abi had gone inside for balls and putters while Richard had checked the light. A scorecard hadn't been on the props list. ‘I'll go get one, since I know you'll both want it to be a competition. And while I'm gone you can wrestle, or play the hole, whatever suits you.'

She handed me her club and ball, and Ben and I both
watched her walk past the stern mock-sandstone statues and plastic tables and into the building.

‘Go ahead,' he said, pointing towards the tee-off circle with his putter. ‘After you.'

I walked over, took a look in the direction of the hole and placed my ball. I worked out where I wanted to hit it, and brought the club head back. He
had
flirted with Aimee. I was in no doubt about that. And he had milked his story for all it was worth, choked on the moment of tragedy in a way that looked unquestionably real. Flashbacks, she had thought, as his eyes glazed over and he faced down his demons once again.

I stood up straight. ‘Why did Frank nominate you for the medal?'

Ben looked over to the entrance, but Hayley was nowhere to be seen. ‘This is nearly over.'

‘Yeah, but why? When it wasn't true.'

‘I don't know. I've told you that. He got hit on the head. Maybe it's exactly how he recalls it.' In its own way, it was now as practised as the flashbacks.

‘That's all you've got? Still? And somehow by the next day he was recalling it in
exactly
the way that would make sure you'd end up with this country's second-highest decoration for courage. I've seen where the wording came from. I've found it. I know this story's rotten.'

He shrugged. I stepped away from the ball.

‘I'm playing if you're not,' he said, moving past me.

He tapped my ball aside, placed his own on the circle and mis-hit it. It went off at an angle and rattled from one side to the other. It didn't make it halfway to the hole.

‘Was it Frank who stopped them getting evidence, who stopped them getting your shirt? Who stopped them from taking it and showing it had no gunshot residue?'

‘There was no . . .' He looked down at his grip on the putter, and adjusted it. ‘I don't know. I honestly don't know about that. I got this kind of smock at the hospital and they put my stuff in a bag.'

I waited for more, for the bag to be explained. It was plausible that the hospital staff had done what he had said, but I wasn't inclined to believe any of it.

‘I think I threw it away,' he said. ‘I don't know. You can't expect me to remember that day as clearly as you'd like me to.' He walked down to where his ball lay, took a step off the course and into the wood chips and played an acceptable second shot.

‘What the fuck is going on?'

As I said it, Hayley came out of the building, a scorecard in one hand and a pencil stub in the other. She saw us watching her and she stopped to mime the writing of a two on the card.

‘What's going on?' Ben spun the putter in his hand. ‘I'm about to play my third. This hasn't been my hole.'

* * *

IT SEEMED THEN
that I would get no more truth out of Ben. Predictably, he was a few shots up at the end. I was never going to beat him.

That evening was the warmest of the week as we set out from Focus looking for dinner. We had no plan,
but Ben told us he felt like Italian. He found a Vintage Cellars that sold chianti and bought two bottles of it, carrying them along the street in brown paper bags, one in each hand.

Hayley put her arm around me. I didn't want her stripping again at the end of the week. It was the first time I'd had that thought, and I kept it to myself. I wasn't so concerned with the job itself, I just wanted her in my flat. My post-Ben life was scheduled to start on Friday evening and I wanted to spend it with her, not alone with bad TV and a box of fortune cookies, scrolling through blog responses and adding a line here and there.

‘Perfect,' Ben said when we came upon a place where the waiters were arguing in Italian and the walls featured paint-by-numbers murals of the Tuscan countryside. There was a strong, enticing smell of frying garlic. ‘Now, let's get pissed.'

I hadn't realised that had been on the agenda, but he said it was our last night at the coast and his big interview was done. He was over the hump now. He drank his first glass like cordial while we waited for bread, and then he drank a second. He announced that he was going to the bathroom and his toe clipped the leg of an empty chair on the way. He stumbled and almost pulled the chair over.

‘You should challenge him to eighteen holes now,' Hayley said. ‘I wouldn't have guessed today was so stressful for him.'

‘Exactly. You weren't supposed to guess.' Down a corridor, the bathroom door slammed. ‘He can be quite convincing.'

Ben refilled his glass as soon as he was back with us. He thanked me for everything I had done, he thanked Hayley and he raised his glass and toasted us both.

He asked Hayley about her Law degree, and if there were any particular areas that interested her. He said Randall Hood Beckett was expanding its commercial practice. He seemed to be implying that there might be something there for her, but he never specifically said it.

‘Josh, Josh, Josh,' he said. ‘One day you'll be like one of those Watergate reporters. You've got a nose for it. For other people's business.'

He put it as if he was being collegiate, but he wasn't. He raised his glass again. It was another toast, perhaps to me and my distant brilliant future, or my nose. I couldn't tell if he was genuinely as drunk as he seemed, or if it was an act that would give him permission to say things he otherwise might not.

The restaurant forgot our bread, but the mains were large serves when they came. Ben started talking about the Silver Spur and my behind-the-scenes tour. He said it sounded fascinating.

I told him that maybe Hayley didn't want to be grilled about work over dinner, but she said, ‘It was okay to talk about law. Is it not okay to talk about this?'

‘No, that's not . . .' I wanted to fix what I'd said. She didn't sound happy with me. ‘It's not about the job itself.' It was about the gun. I was convinced he was about to mention it, to blurt that secret out with diners all around us. ‘This is time off from work. I just thought it'd be like me having to go through the minute details of blogging.'

‘But not much,' Ben said, before turning back to
Hayley, his half-full wineglass in his hand. ‘So how does it work? How do you move between the backstage bit and the public area? You can't see anything connecting the two when you're in the club. It's as if you magically appear.'