The Fix (5 page)

There was a silence, or a rasping metal space when he said nothing. I wondered if the call had dropped out.

‘I don't really know him,' he said eventually. ‘It's an unusual question. Why would I not trust him?'

‘No reason.' I didn't have enough. In that second there wasn't one doubt big enough to put a finger on. ‘These stories are often complicated. Not that I do a lot of medals, but you know what I mean. It's also a client-with-a-gun story. Not all good news. And you don't usually get the full story straight up. People have got too used to telling it. They settle on a version that sounds right – often to themselves as well as everyone else – but it isn't always. I've got to unpick a bit yet, that's all.'

‘Okay,' he said, but I couldn't tell what kind of okay it was. ‘Okay, that's good.' Something had distracted him. He had arrived somewhere, or another call had come through. ‘Well, you let me know if you need anything.'

Once I'd put the phone down
, I bashed out a version of the blog. It was good enough, but not great. It was a draft, and it would be better. I saved it, backed it up and stepped away.

I had a post-it note on my laptop to remind me to do neck and back exercises frequently. I had been taught them by a physio in London when I had seized up after some long working hours. He told me I risked ending up with the posture of a medieval monk who had spent his entire life illuminating manuscripts. So the note regularly gave me Name of the Rose flashbacks, and not to the good bits. Name of the Rose summary: young supple guy has sex with hot girl, old manuscript
illuminators get hunchy, bitter and die. Those were the key points anyway. Though they were absolutely no help in remembering the back and neck exercises, which I had completely forgotten, other than that a broom handle was involved, or could be.

So, no sex with hot girls then, and I faced a hunchy bitter death. I had read somewhere – during some idle googling, no doubt – that five minutes an hour away from the keyboard was good for something, and I tried to live by that as a substitute for the exercises. Perhaps that had put me in some kind of Name of the Rose middle ground, where I was round-shouldered and somewhat misanthropic, and had a real chance of sex with an average girl with low standards whose recent luck hadn't been good and whose vodka goggles were firmly in place.

I stretched, I looked up to the ceiling and something in my neck cracked like a starting pistol. If the average girl didn't show up soon, I would be ordering gold leaf, or a neurosurgeon.

There were boxes to deal with, a meal to clean up after, and the substantial Randall Hood Beckett siege file was waiting for my attention on the kitchen counter, all of which meant it was time for a walk.

Outside, the cool breeze had picked up and blown away the last signs that the day had been a warm one. I had come back to a summer hot enough that in City News the prostitutes had headlined their advertisements ‘busty, discreet, air conditioning'. I got the impression that a Brisbane prostitute without air conditioning watched a lot of TV in January and February while she waited for the phone to ring. I figured that made the
air conditioning a legitimate business expense, and tax deductible, and there was surely blog potential lurking in there somewhere. It needed an interview, though. And if she charged me for her time, would that be a legitimate business expense for me? And if she was charging me all that money, and I was there anyway, well, it had been a while . . .

And then I would blog about it, my mother would read it, and another family dinner would take a turn for the worse.

So I called the ATO instead. People give the ATO money all the time, and practically none of us has sex with them in the process, so that seemed safe enough. And, yes, a work-from-home prostitute's air conditioning is tax deductible. In fact, the unit itself can be depreciated, while running costs are tax deductible. As long as the business premises has a separate entrance. Cue Benny Hill double entendre music.

‘We just treat it like any other home office,' the ATO guy said. ‘Accountant, writer, prostitute – it's all pretty much the same to us.' Blog done, and I had a lot less to explain to my mother.

I walked up the hill and turned into Hardgrave Road. The sky was clear and the stars were sharp, and that was unlike the way London had been, most of the time. There was a scent in the air. It might have been jasmine. Something was flowering, but I couldn't see it.

Two joggers in serious running gear ran by, and I fell in behind a group of walkers who were breaking in new Kathmandu hiking boots, clumping along as if their feet had been bricked in and trying to convince themselves that the boots would soften up soon.

I walked past a Vietnamese medical practice and restaurants, the laundromat and a thrift shop where you could buy the fifties at close to fifties prices. Outside Café Checocho, the feral-styled kids of Labor lawyers clattered their skateboards against the kerb while men in hats hunched over chessboards.

After three or four months of these sights on a near daily basis, they still made the neighbourhood for me. West End had poets who lived like poets, and graffiti that meant something, and eateries that proved you could take the gluten out of anything if you were so inclined. All soft targets for five hundred crass words and yet, for me, unbloggable. To mock them might be to change them, just slightly, at least in my own mind, and that was a risk I couldn't take.

I turned left after Mick's Nuts, then right, and I walked past building sites and new high-end apartment blocks that were going up in places where light industry had given way. Red lights blinked on top of cranes against the night sky. The wind kicked through the huge Moreton Bay figs at the edge of Davies Park and the plants of the community garden, and it felt as if it was here that the two kinds of West End stared each other down. On one side of the street, herbs and vegetables indistinct in the dark and unfenced. On the other, screened off by the long vinyl sleeves of advertisements promising a better life, future underground car parks punched their way into bedrock.

The ad sleeves featured rainforest and falling water and Greek columns, and they talked about tranquillity. On a huge billboard above, a woman about my age, blonde and almost inconceivably beautiful, trailed her
hand through the water and looked off into the distance. She was dressed for business, a serious professional just home from the city and back in paradise.

She could have been the other half of the Vogue lawyer photo with Ben Harkin. I wondered how many of the buyers of the apartments were twenty-eight, how many were beautiful, how many had perfect lives of a kind that could lead them to only this spot.

Not so many years before, Francesca would have been the woman in that ad.

Brett didn't deserve her. That's what I had felt at the start, and the feeling had not completely gone away. Even as the real Francesca hadn't quite lived up to the fantasy, she had come close enough. Every time a conversation moved on without her I let myself believe, or at least hope, that she kept her best thoughts in her head, if only to honour my adolescent catalogue fantasies in which she had been clever, as well as lingerie-clad, on my bed and ecstatic at the prospect of the hottest sex of her life with a pasty thirteen-year-old virgin.

A detached corner of the vinyl banner flapped in the breeze, a corner of rainforest lifting and then slapping back down against the wire mesh of the fence. I could imagine it as Brett's next document satchel, the green spikes of the leaves of its generic forest undergrowth fanning out, Brett talking it up.

I wondered when I last gave my brother credit for anything. For giving me work when I could really do with it, for instance.

Brett met Francesca on a shoot while he was working for one of the big advertising agencies. Her face was everywhere then, and her body. She was on
the list for premieres, she never paid a cover charge, and every club in town dropped its velvet rope as she approached the door. Brett must have met her when her guard was down. If our family put on a version of The Name of the Rose, we could cast him only as Christian Slater's Adso of Melk, the young guy who gets to play entirely out of his league when the hot chick disrobes, jumps him and nails him. In the midst of it, the movie has a fleeting close-up of his face, a mixture of bafflement and beatitude as he surely thinks he has died and gone to heaven and then realises his luck is even better. He is not dead, and heaven has come to earth, and specifically to him.

Brett ended up riding his luck way better than Adso of Melk. He kept the girl and at the same time started his own business and turned it into some kind of success. Francesca now worked only when she chose to, taking on the occasional yummy-mummy modelling job for fun and to catch up with old friends. Most of the time she redecorated, and taxied Darius and Aphrodite around to their many extracurricular activities.

Perhaps the only part of my life about which I had no ambivalence at all was my nephew and niece. I had missed the start of their lives when I had been in London, and I was determined to make up for it now. I was the reckless tree-climbing ice-cream-buying wastrel of an uncle who undermined any piece of discipline their parents put forward, and they had quickly decided they loved me for it.

I heard a late CityCat surging along the Regatta Reach of the river, just beyond the end of the street, and I turned for home.

The flat still had a damp boiled-mince smell about it, so I opened the sliding door to the balcony. I stood at the kitchen counter with a new box of fortune cookies telling myself only two, only two. I took only two, and stepped away. I had become attached to their sweet wheaty flavour, and now they were my standard dessert. It tended to go one of two ways. Either I helped myself to a finite number at the counter and had some chance of sticking to it, or I took the box to my beanbag – another piece of detritus from my childhood bedroom, recently re-beaned by my mother – and woke up hours later covered in shrapnel and fortunes.

‘Food and conversation in a box', I had written down once with a blog in mind before backing away from suggesting to the world that I was quite that sad.

I dragged the beanbag over to the balcony door, turned the TV on and the lights off and sat with my two cookies. I cracked them open, and waited for a daylight scene so that I could read them.

* * *

SOMETIMES I BREAKFASTED
at Café Checocho to prove I could, to prove that every morning didn't start when it became too warm to sleep, that every day wouldn't be spent in only boxer shorts until well into the afternoon. Convention dictated that a meal out required more than one item of clothing. It required shoes, interaction. Some days that was a lot to ask, but the upside was caffeine in quality form and a kickstart to the day, plus a chance to read the paper in the old
way, and every detail of it, rather than just staring at the screen at home, soaking up the pixels.

The morning after the meeting at Randall Hood Beckett began like my other days, though, facedown in a messy forgettable dream. I missed the call from Selina that came through around nine and went to voicemail.

‘Just checking to see that you've got the media file on the incident,' her message said when I picked the phone up from the table an hour later. I had been about to charge it when I noticed someone had actually called. ‘I'm not sure if you're aware that files don't leave the office without high-level approval.' There was a pause there, as though I might want to make excuses to her recorded voice. ‘I've marked it down as checked out to you. Not that I'm high-level or anything,' she said, ‘but consider your arse covered, new boy.'

My toast popped, half-done as always.

I called Selina back right away, worried that my arse was even in play, and she said, ‘It's probably my fault you didn't know the score. Anyway, Max okayed it just now. And it's not like it's a legal file. So, enjoy.'

I gave my toast its second go through, Vegemited it, and thought about having fortune cookies instead.

I opened the file and took my first good look at the photocopy of Ben's medal nomination. It had been submitted in Frank's name, and he had signed the covering page. The form asked the nominator to attach photographs and statements from eyewitnesses, and Frank's covering letter itemised a dozen or more. It was a lawyer's letter, making a case and making it robustly. I couldn't imagine him doing it any other way.

I read through his own report of the incident and some of the material he had included to support it. Rob Mueller had appeared psychotic, deranged, crazy. Different people put it in different ways, and some said only that he was angry. He had been a client of the firm once, though in a minor way. Another lawyer who mentioned that made it seem like nothing, just routine business.

It was Frank's letter I kept coming back to. It had the story. ‘My head wound was bleeding profusely. By this time Mueller was even more agitated. It was clear he was going to shoot me. I was on the floor when Ben rushed him. In the struggle, the gun discharged.'

Ben in his sharp suit and his neat hair, rushing, struggling, with a loaded gun as part of the fight.

I could hardly imagine what it would be like to be tested that way. Perhaps none of us could know how we might respond. I wasn't planning to flatter myself by thinking I would do the same.

Ben was a hero and I was building a solid fraction of my next career on pieces that began with lines like, ‘Whoever invented shiny toilet paper anyway?' He was owed a good investiture, and I would put the past aside to give him that.

When I had left for London I had assumed that I would be home one day, but I had imagined arriving if not in triumph then at least in something – some state that said my time away had amounted to time well spent. Perhaps buying the flat was proof of that.

I had big ideas about what my deposit would get me, but then I converted my hoarded sterling into dollars and saw what had happened to Brisbane real estate prices while I had been away. The Venn diagram of my first
weekend driving around open houses would have had one circle for places in which I would have liked to live, one for places I could have afforded and no intersection. My expectations duly got beaten down. I gave up city views for city glimpses, and city glimpses for a balcony that opened out to the next block of flats. I gave up character for something solid. I gave up fully renovated for workable, or thought I did. I found my box of a flat and told myself it was four times the size of anything I could have bought in London, and I signed on the dotted line.