The Fix (4 page)

I heard the word ‘satchel' from Brett, and then Max said, ‘In here, in here.' He ushered me into a room with a large copier/printer and shelves of toner and paper. In its own quiet way, it looked like a carbon crime in progress. Perhaps, in some wild place, Randall Hood Beckett paid for a forest to grow with this room's name on it.

‘Take a look at that,' he said. He was pointing to my photocopier blog, which had been zoomed, printed and stuck on the wall above the open copier lid. ‘Did you really follow the repairman around?'

‘Yeah, I did. It was one of my first blogs. I hadn't worked out then how much you could cover without stepping away from Google.'

Max was reading it, and not really listening to me. ‘Hilarious.' He pointed to a part he had gone over with a highlighter pen. I knew which bit it would be.

December was the worst time of year for office photocopiers and, prospecting for blog topics, I attached myself for a morning to the surliest repair guy in the business. As the city geared up for Christmas, he came upon the tinselled offices as some kind of anti-Santa, an Ebeneezer Scrooge turned up a century or so later as a malcontent mechanic, cursed by the frivolity of the season. So why was December the worst month of his year? There are two crucial pieces of copier info every responsible office should circulate in the weeks before the Christmas party: the maximum weight the glass can bear is fifty-five kilos and the temperature of the light is 170 degrees. He made it plain that scorched body parts
were not his problem, and he drove a vanful of replacement glass around every December.

A few hours of his grouchiness and I had myself a blog, and a place on the wall in this windowless room at Randall Hood Beckett. At the bottom of the printout there was a note in blue pen that read, ‘RHB accepts no responsibility for buttock or other trauma due to misuse of this copier, whether the owner of said buttocks (or other body parts) weighs above or below 55kg. MV'.

‘What I think is great,' he said, ‘is that, even now, when everyone could do it, it's not the same to take a photo of your arse and email it.' My blog seemed to mean we were already mid-conversation, and the topic was arse imaging. ‘Technology may have moved on, but there's still something special about pale butt cheeks pressed onto hot glass. What is that?'

People would warm to Max. The media, audiences. He would be good interview talent, if I could keep the lid on. Frank was focused and he could tell his story, but not in a way that would make people like him. There was a hardness to Frank, made harder by the scar.

‘Your office,' Max said, when no more great buttock thoughts would come. ‘I should show you your office.'

It was two doors down the corridor, on the internal side. Its three off-white walls had empty hooks for art to hang on, and boxes were piled high in one corner. There was a desk with a computer, and a whiteboard with a half-finished game of noughts and crosses smeared across it, but no sign of marker pens.

‘We figured you'd need to be close to Ben and the rest of the unit while you're getting this sorted out. I'm down at the end.' He looked around the office, as if he
wanted it to be better. ‘We thought you might need a whiteboard.' Through the glass wall, something in the corridor distracted him. ‘Selina, Selina.'

Selina stopped in the doorway. She was maybe late thirties, with bordello cleavage that wasn't easy to look away from, and pewter knick-knacks on chains around her neck. She was the owner of the Dilbert mug and the Simpsons toys, and she was giving Max a wary look, probably not for the first time.

‘Selina's our admin person,' Max was saying. ‘She keeps us all on track. We'd be a shambles without her. Well, I would be. It
is
him, Selina. I was right.
The
Josh Lang, the one who does the blogs.'

‘Great,' she said, as though it wasn't. ‘Max was hoping. Well, I'm pleased to meet you anyway. And I hope your personal life improves.'

‘So do I,' Max said. ‘Hilarious.'

* * *

HILARIOUS. UNLESS IT'S YOUR
own life. In which case, not so hilarious. The version of me in the blogs wasn't quite my life, though it did make its way in there, remixed for comic effect. The guy in the blogs took the pratfalls I mostly managed to avoid, but that was the job.

I told my mother she shouldn't read them and, if she did, she shouldn't believe them. ‘But it's in the paper,' she said, as if there had to be an editor checking that I had truly eaten a stock cube thinking it was fudge, or been dropped by a girlfriend in a particular way.
I had, in fact, got my hopes up about the stock cube, but worked it out in time. The girlfriend blog had been mostly true, but that was beside the point.

I went home on the CityCat with a file of documents and DVDs that Selina had given me about the siege. It was a Monday, so I had five hundred words due, and now I had Ben Harkin to wonder about.

I had cast my net wide when I returned home a few months before, and the Brisbane Times was the one regular thing I had snagged. I was to be their new Gen Y guy, blogging about life, the universe and not much, each time posing some kind of question or point of interaction. We had talked through names, and they had wanted to stamp my generation all over it and call the blog ‘Y Indeed' or ‘Y Us' or ‘Y Exactly', until I told them that sounded like a very baby boomer thing to do. It ended up being called ‘Random', since that was what I was hired to be.

It ran with a photo of me in a tie and surprised hair. That created the illusion that I had a job, that I went out somewhere to a workplace that had certain standards, when really it was all styled at the shoot. They had borrowed shirts from some boutiques with the promise of a photo credit, but they had sourced them all in large, so I ended up with a row of bulldog clips down my back. By then their hopes about aesthetics were on the slide, and the stylist lassoed me with the first tie to come to hand and there I was, your best idea of the perky office junior, blogging subversively from a cubicle right near you.

It was a fraction of a job, though, so that saw me whoring myself around anywhere that might take a
few words on anything, or fund me to subject myself to any mildly degrading experience that might have a story in it. I had found myself living at a time when trivia had been elevated to high status, and it turned out I could make myself far more trivial than I had ever imagined, when there was money on offer. But it was journalism of a kind, not PR, and I had come back determined to work in journalism. I had been telling myself it was a start. I had so far broken no bones, I had vomited only once and it was a start. Randall Hood Beckett was, if not a cave-in, the first sign of subsidence.

The ‘out-of-town commitments' I had mentioned to Brett amounted to as many games of mini-golf as I could fit in over several days at the Gold Coast. I had a travel magazine waiting for thirteen hundred words on that, plus pics. ‘Everyone writes about golf tourism,' I had said to them in the pitch. ‘But what about mini-golf tourism?'

It was not quite the life I'd had in mind when I was at uni with Ben Harkin. We first met in a tute group in a small windowless room in Arts. Back then he seemed to be doing Law on the side, as if it was expected of him. It was two months before I found out who his father was, before he could trust me enough to tell me. Kerry Harkin, like several others, had been high on other people's money in the eighties and come unstuck quite spectacularly late in the decade. A decade or so later, he was back and showing off a tin of Mozambique diamonds, a suite of Angolan oil exploration permits and one or two other traps for the unwary. He was promising returns of twenty percent plus, but it all turned out
to be a Ponzi scheme, with new investors funding the dividends of old, and little business conducted other than that. There were no diamonds beyond those in the tin, and the oil permits had been pock-marked by other people's dry dusters before being written off and sold to Kerry Harkin for next to nothing.

Those were almost certainly the facts, but they proved very hard to pin down, as Kerry had built a paper labyrinth around them and had a story of wellintentioned failure ready to tell. Still, he was charged and it made the front pages as the semester ended. His passport was taken when the court discovered he had booked a ticket on a flight to Spain. Ben told me he couldn't work out whether it would be better to be the son of a fugitive or someone soon to be a criminal.

‘At least I've got my disguise,' he said. ‘Thank God for my Japanese mother. Though a place to crash on the Costa del Sol mightn't have been so bad.' But we both knew he would never have seen it. His father was gone from his life by then.

It seemed that Ben's main ambition that year was to become someone other than his father's son. Mine, as he had recalled, was investigative journalism. Brett had shown me Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in All the President's Men when I was twelve, and I wanted to be that kind of guy. Mainly the Robert Redford version of that kind of guy, because he looked like the one who might also score a girl occasionally. I wanted to live lives like theirs, to put stories together from discarded bits of paper, terse phone calls and ballsy truth-chasing. They lived in mess and they looked scrappy. Even when they found ties, their collars would stay open and their top
buttons undone. But they were smart and determined and right, and they shook the system.

I went to London wanting to be them, but London cast me in another role, as one of the people in the shadows changing the story's shape, keeping it from being caught. Not that my job was ever about outright lies – it was about picking the right bits of the truth and casting the right light on them, while the other side picked different bits and tried to do the same. I had gone there to break the truth, and instead ended up bending it. That was a skill too, I told myself, but so was juggling toasters. When All the President's Men came on TV one night, I watched it for a few minutes and then changed channels.

* * *

I OPENED THE DOOR
to a flat full of boxed-in warm air and the sound of my upstairs neighbour vacuuming. The aluminium frames of the kitchen windows screeched when I pulled on them, but a cool breeze came in right away.

I had got used to walking around the boxes, I realised. I had yet to feel the impetus to unpack most of them. ‘Make sure you label the contents of every one,' my mother had said in yet another nagging email to me in London, so I hadn't. I had eventually located most of the things crucial to everyday life, and then run out of steam. And then blogged about it. Five hundred words on the subject ‘Packing and Un'. Most reader feedback on my side, one suggesting I could consider unpacking my head from my arse for a change. Fair enough.

A copy of Cooking with Asterix was open on the kitchen counter. It had been a childhood Christmas present that, back then, had resulted mostly in fried cheese sandwiches. As if my London boxes weren't enough, my parents had a rule that, every time I visited them, I had to leave with more of the junk I had burdened them with for too many years. Snow domes, board games, smooth stones or chunks of petrified wood picked up on a beach somewhere. My childhood bedroom was a museum being sacked one cardboard box load at a time. I had copped a box on the night I borrowed the camp stove, and Cooking with Asterix had been on top. My mother told me it might inspire me to great feats with the camp stove.

Despite that, rather than because of it, on the night of my first Randall Hood Beckett meeting, I turned to page twenty-four. I took my domestic Bunsen burner, made myself a potful of Gergovian meatballs and set my sights, inevitably, on five hundred words. I could already quote Obelix, facedown in a basin on the same page as the recipe declaring the meal ‘shuper shenshastional'. The meatballs he was eating, though, were a rich cinnamony brown in colour and neatly arranged on a bed of peas, while mine ended up more like grey fists of beef in a pea swamp. But they held together, and they tasted pretty good. I could report a genuine partial success.

I started typing. ‘It turns out the last village in ancient Gaul to hold out against the Romans wasn't powered by only magic potion and fried cheese sandwiches . . .' Twenty-five words. Easy.

My phone rang on the table. It was Brett. Four
hundred and seventy-five words fell straight out of my head, I was sure of it.

‘Just calling to see that everything's okay after the meeting today,' he said when I answered.

‘All fine from my point of view.' Except for the greatest ever blog about Asterix cuisine, now a stub twenty-five words long. ‘Are you worried about something?'

‘No.' He paused. I waited it out. ‘I thought it went really well. It's just that you're, um, you're on my team this week. This is a team call. Standard practice. Just checking that there's nothing you need.'

‘I think everything's okay.' Standard practice. Useful code for non-patronising. ‘I haven't cracked Ben yet as far as the siege story goes. There's work to do there. I think they should have pushed harder with the therapy, maybe.'

I could imagine the conversation Brett would have had with our parents when they made him offer me work. ‘But what about when you made me have him as wedding MC?' Brett would have said, in the whinier version of his voice that none of us liked. And our parents would have stayed silent, and the silence would have broken him.

‘Maybe. But you'll get him there.' There was some static on the line now. I couldn't be certain if it was a statement or a question. I wondered if he was in his car. ‘Frank's got it all ready to go.'

‘Yeah, I think he might have.' Frank had certainly had it ready for us. ‘
People aren't usually that prepared.'

‘You'll probably find he did interviews back when it all happened,' Brett said. It was a good point.

‘Do you trust him?'