The Fix (31 page)

I had boxed Eloise into a corner. She slept with Ben instead of talking to me. It happens all the time, that kind of thing. It wasn't about anything particular to us. I had resented him more deeply for that than I should have, and had wanted every day we had worked together to punish him for my imperfect life. I had blamed him for the cascade of mediocre events that followed our friendship, because that had been far better than owning any of it myself. And I had pushed him and scrambled his head and sent him after Frank with a gun, to be saved only by chance, by climbing in a particular window, the window of a child's bedroom.

But he wasn't there when I arrived at his flat, so all
the rehearsing I had done in my head on the way across town was no good after all.

There were removalists at work, supervised by a small stylishly dressed Japanese woman. His mother.

‘He's gone to Japan,' she said, once she had recognised me from a handful of meetings years before. She still had quite an accent. ‘It happened very quickly. I have family there . . .'

She said it as though she was hanging it out for the breeze to take it. She had no more idea of what his trip might hold than I did. I noticed then that she had a box in her hands. She was gripping it firmly, and inadvertently opened it. It was his medal box, with the full-sized medal, the miniature and the lapel badge all in their places.

As I drove away, I took a final look in my rear-view mirror and saw his father's green lamp being carried into the removal truck. I googled it when I got home – Behrens plus lamp – though it took some time to work out the spelling of the designer's name. I saw pictures of the original, and its glass wasn't green at all. The green lamps were available from an absinthe website, and made to order.

A few more weeks passed before a postcard arrived from Ben. Hayley and I were both at my flat. My new oven had just been installed, and it looked shiny and almost too new next to the dated laminate of the benchtops. The camp stove was sitting nearby, back in its box, ready to be returned to my parents. Behind it on the windowsill was a new pot plant that Hayley swore I could keep alive if I put in any effort at all. So far, it was still green.

The card was a Hokusai woodblock, one of his many of Mount Fuji, and on it Ben had put, in his small neat writing, ‘This place is crazy. The pachinko parlours are noise a mile high. I'm foreign here. It must be the way I walk, I don't know. I have a job interpreting for a film crew who are shooting a whiskey ad with an American star. We're all in a big hotel and I've met a girl. It hasn't worked out for her with her photographer boyfriend. We seem to have clicked.'

I told Hayley I thought it sounded great, and she said, ‘Sure it does, because the girl's Scarlett Johansson and he's worked his way into the plot of Lost in Translation.'

I wanted to argue, but there was no argument to be had. He had slipped away and sent us this story, this new facade. I wondered where he was. I wondered if he might even be dead by now. I looked at the picture again, at the top of Mount Fuji covered like ice-cream, and I imagined Ben putting clear-cut Hokusai footprints in snow, trudging through it with purpose. I thought of him digging a snow cave on a mountain in Hokkaido, somewhere remote, and sealing himself in, to be found only in the spring thaw and without identity. A Japanese man, lost and never claimed, never a story here at all more than likely.

I was imagining Hokkaido, though, and the mountain. Imagining that end and any others. I had nothing else to go on. I had stopped being sure, long before, that I knew one true thing about him.

The following week, I took Hayley to the Sunshine Coast to meet my parents for the first time. We had the camp oven in the back and planned to stay the night,
since it fitted with her lecture timetable and her shifts at the Silver Spur.

As we headed north, I realised we would pass close to the street where Miriam Mueller lived. I knew her address from organising the settlement. I told Hayley I wanted to check something. I think I wanted to see Miriam Mueller's house, just drive by slowly and see that all was well.

I turned left off Gympie Road, and took a right into her street. I was sure I could remember the number, but when we got there the house looked empty. I pulled up, to make certain of it. There was junk mail overflowing from the mailbox and the grass had grown long. There was no furniture on the small front verandah.

One of her neighbours was mowing his lawn, and I got out of the car and walked over to him. He stopped the mower, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his arm. I asked him about Miriam Mueller, and he said she had gone. He told me an Asian guy had turned up one morning in a cab, and she had left with him.

‘He was about your age,' he said, trying to be helpful. ‘Chinese, Japanese, something like that. She had a suitcase. I don't think she's coming back. I think she came into some money.'

I thanked him, and I walked back to the car.

I wondered when it had started between Ben and Miriam. If it had been because of me, pushing him to stay involved with the settlement, pushing him to meet her. Or if it had been much earlier.

I wondered if Ben had shown me anything true, ever. I could retrace the steps as far as I liked – from the Hokusai woodblock, back to Frank Ainsworth's house
and the Gold Coast and the medal, back further still into the past, to Eloise and to Tokyo Speed Ponies – but I knew I would never find the start, the point where the last allegiance to the facts was lost, where a better story broke away from the truth. And made Ben Harkin who he was, and made him rich, and gone.

Acknowledgements

I saw a movie in this story before I worked out the novel, and Rob Marsala's insightful questions about the first draft of the script helped lead me to the pieces I needed to tell it in both media.

I'm also grateful to Meredith Curnow at Random House Australia for her unwavering support, and to Sophie Ambrose for asking me for more (and sometimes less) of exactly the right things. And to Pippa Masson at Curtis Brown for her advice, for keeping so many things on track (or getting them back there) and for her tolerance of my whingeing.

More than 500 people through Twitter and Facebook volunteered their names for characters, sight unseen and despite the fine print that said I was at liberty to make the characters be/do/wear/consume/say anything. Thanks for playing the game. About twenty of you made it to the finished version, though some may consider themselves luckier than others.

Finally, I'd like to thank Sarah and Patrick for making it clear to me every day that there's a great life to be had any time I step away from this keyboard.

Nick Earls is the author of twelve novels and two collections of short stories. He is the winner of a Betty Trask Award (UK) and a Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award.
48 Shades of Brown
and
Perfect Skin
have been adapted into feature films, and five of his novels, including
The True Story of Butterfish
and
Zigzag Street
, have become stage plays.

Also by the Author

THE TRUE STORY OF BUTTERFISH

Curtis Holland wanted to make music. Derek Frick wanted to be a rockstar. Derek won that one. Luck and sales in the millions came Butterfish's way, and Derek lived the rock dream to the max, with Curtis on keyboards, just holding on.

It was a relief, really, when the third album tanked and Butterfish imploded, letting Curtis escape back to Brisbane, to a home studio where he could produce other people's music away from the glare of the spotlight.

When Annaliese Winter walks down his driveway, Curtis is ill-prepared for a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who's a confounding mixture of adult and child. He isn't at all ready, either, to find himself drawn to the remarkably unremarkable family next door. To Kate, Annaliese's mother, who's curvy in a way that's sometimes unfashionable and sometimes as good as it gets. Even to fourteen-year-old Mark, at war with his own surging adolescence.

But Curtis has to work himself out before he can bring anything positive to the lives of the Winter family, and Annaliese makes it all the more complicated when she begins to show too much interest in him.

Then Derek flies back into town . . .

NOW AVAILABLE AS AN EBOOK

ZIGZAG STREET

Here I am, on a work day of some importance, riding out of town in a cab with a babe I've just concussed with footwear.

Richard Derrington is twenty-eight and single. More single than he'd like to be. More single than he'd expected to be, and not coping well. Since Anna trashed him six months ago he's been trying to find his way again. He's doing his job badly, he's playing tennis badly, his renovating attempts haven't got past the verandah, and he's wondering when things are going to change.

Zigzag Street
covers six weeks of Richard's life in Brisbane's Red Hill. Six weeks of rumination, chaos, poor judgement, interpersonal clumsiness . . . and, eventually, hope.

‘A comic masterpiece' –
Who Weekly

NOW AVAILABLE AS AN EBOOK

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

The Fix

ePub ISBN 9781742744605

Copyright © Nick Earls, 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A Vintage Book

Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

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First published by Vintage in 2011

This edition published in 2012

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Earls, Nick, 1963–
The fix [electronic resource] / Nick Earls.

ISBN 978 1 74274 460 5 (eBook : epub)

A823.3

Cover design by Peter Long

Cover photograph by Scott Rudkin, courtesy of Flickr via Getty Images

ePub production by
Midland Typesetters
, Australia

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