The Fix (7 page)

‘Okay.' He stopped to think it through.
‘I was on the edges of it, really. It seemed to be pretty much out of the blue. The guy was a client of Frank's, an importer. Teak furniture from Indonesia, I think. I was in a meeting room on the floor below, but there was mayhem when it happened, so all of a sudden people were pouring out of the fire stairs. The meeting room's quite near the door. They were pretty shaken up.'

‘Apparently Rob Mueller turned up saying he was on some kind of mission from God.'

‘I heard that. But later, afterwards. Not from the people who got out. That stuff really only came out when he had them trapped in there – Frank and Ben. Before then he was obviously disturbed, by all accounts, but not in that kind of way. It went bad pretty quickly. The gun came out, he herded people out of there, barricaded the three of them in.' He stopped as our coffees were put down
in front of us, and waited until we were alone again. His latte had a sweeping cursive M drawn into its foam, mine had a fern. He didn't seem to notice. ‘We were all just waiting for the shots, frankly. And then Ben saved the day. It was still quite a while before we knew that it was Rob Mueller himself who'd been hit. I was trying to get the building evacuated. You plan for that, supposedly. It's a black alert, a code black. I found that out afterwards as well.' He paused, stuck in his recollection of it. ‘We want to do a lunch at the firm. Did Frank tell you that? For Ben, when he gets the medal. It hasn't been right yet.'

‘In what way not right?'

He poured sugar onto his drip-etched initial and plunged his spoon through it. ‘Not right for Ben. Not right because someone died. It was a big adjustment for Ben. He killed a man. He's a wheeler-dealer who gets his suits tailor-made. He's a damn good lawyer, but you know what I mean. A life-and-death struggle involving a shotgun is not part of his world. Or anyone's obviously. Not in this country. But he's coming good now, don't you think?'

He stirred his coffee. I didn't have an answer.

‘He told me about the band you guys were in,' Max said. ‘Tokyo Speed Ponies.'

‘It wasn't much of a band.' I couldn't believe Ben had chosen to keep his life outside Randalls to himself, but had mentioned Tokyo Speed Ponies.

‘I looked at the website,' he said insistently, as if I was unjustly playing it down. ‘I tried to download the screen saver, but it didn't work. There was chat in the chat room. I don't know from when, though. There are people waiting for the next album.'

‘Please try not to sound like you're one of them. It's not going to happen.'

He laughed. ‘I haven't been able to track down the first one yet.'

* * *

IT THREW ME,
the reference to the band. The ‘band'. Inverted commas definitely necessary. There was no band. Not in the usual sense of the word, that being people getting together and playing instruments.

Back in my office at Randall Hood Beckett – and for the first time in years – I googled Tokyo Speed Ponies.

It made no sense that there had been chat room activity, but there it was, people raving about the album and comparing rumours about the follow-up.

But there had been no album, just as there had been no band. I stared at the screen, at the evidence, at the facts. It looked as real as my own hands, as the chair I was sitting on.

At the time when the law had turned on Kerry Harkin, Ben became preoccupied that the family stain would seep through to him, no matter what he did.

‘They won't touch me,' he said. ‘The law firms'll never touch me.' He said it like a rebel, but he felt it like an outcast.

Then he decided it wasn't what he wanted anyway. He wanted to live a different life, to create things. Music, art. He decided to learn how to put websites together, and that he would work with bands and artists. So, for the brief course of this fantasy and for the purpose of
showcasing his skills, he came up with Tokyo Speed Ponies. Other people might have chosen something real, a friend's band that was on the rise, and offered to do their site for nothing, but not Ben.

He was into Japanese punk, particularly Japanese girl pop punk like Shonen Knife, and he decided Tokyo Speed Ponies would be that kind of band. He said the name had come from something he had seen written on a shirt while visiting his mother's family in Japan, though I had never been sure that was true.

He took my photo with a borrowed bass guitar, and I became the bass player. He found a picture of a hot Eurasian model in a magazine, and he photoshopped her top half in as the drummer. Ben was the guitarist and lead singer. I took those photos, and I took plenty before he was happy. He was aiming for a particular look, and said he would know it when he saw it.

He had always had an interest in anime and manga and got himself some animation software. He made a start on a video, but I didn't think he had done much with it.

‘You're the writer,' he said, when we were most swept up by the idea and wondering how far we could take it. ‘You should write articles about the band. Do some gig and album reviews.' So I did. Then he dared me to try to have them published, to send them out to magazines. I did that too, under another name. A couple were even picked up by street press, and Ben scanned them once they were published and put them on the website's media section.

He called our album Tangerine Coloured Hot Spot, which he admitted meant nothing but insisted was just right for the genre.

He started talking about the band as if it was real.

Then it stopped. I thought it stopped. We fell out, I left the country and in our last conversations we had no reason to turn to Tokyo Speed Ponies. But the website was still there. It was linked to nothing, and I could hardly believe it was still afloat at all. In the vast ocean of the internet, it sailed on like the Marie Celeste. Abandoned, a shell of a journey, a ghost of a band. Dreamt up for practice, but pushed out into the world with enough belief that, years later, it looked as real as anything.

‘I hear the next album's a step on from Tangerine,' someone called pinknantucket wrote in the chat section. ‘Same cranked up bpm and choppy guitars, but even more so. Can't wait!!!'

I told myself to stop looking, and clicked my way to Google.

My back and neck felt stiff, so I stood up and stretched them, in an imprecise way that would make no physio proud. I needed a break from the keyboard, the requisite five unstiffening minutes, and it seemed as good a time as any to go to the bathroom.

I wondered who pinknantucket was, who any of them were. Where was the parallel universe in which this band was a real thing? I could just manage to suppress the fear that it might have been real after all, and I had buried it somewhere.

I was about to open the cubicle door to leave when I heard someone come into the bathroom. It was Frank, and he was on the phone.

‘No, don't go softly with this one,' he said. There was a pause. He had stopped in the middle of the room
while the other person spoke. ‘Like a ton of fucking bricks. We've been waiting for this, and it's a clear breach if they've used another supplier. Make it clear, eloquently clear, that if they don't remedy it right away – and that will include damages – we'll screw them. We won't stop till they've used their tea lady's super to pay their legal bills and we've got locksmiths coming round to change their locks.' He listened to the reply. I could hear his shoes on the tiles as he paced. ‘That's it, Justin. Good.'

He ended the call there, and I sat out his time at the trough and several more minutes before going back to my office.

My phone was ringing before I got to the door. It was a radio producer returning my call. She wanted Ben for Monday. He was turning out to be an easy sell. The siege had made three consecutive front pages when it happened, and no one had forgotten it.

‘What's he like as talent?' she said.

‘He'll be okay. It's not the easiest thing for him to talk about but, you know, that's real. It works. I don't think we want to lose all that.'

I was writing ‘CONFIRMED' on the whiteboard when Max Visser stopped in my doorway.

‘Just checking,' he said. ‘You're coming tonight, right? It'll be a good insight into the kind of work we do. The non-boring part, anyway. And who knows what kind of blog material you could get? Oh God, the karaoke stories I could tell you from trips to Shanghai. I can just imagine Mister Park tonight putting his heart and soul into I've Never Been to Me or Wind Beneath My Wings. It's really not to be missed.'

He was keen, more than keen. He was my biggest and possibly only fan in the world. I couldn't remember him suggesting before that I might be part of dinner, but it wasn't an Asterix re-heat on a camp stove. I wasn't going to say no.

* * *

BEN WAS ALONE
at Terroir when I got there. I had gone home to put in some more work on a blog, and arrived back in the city at close to seven-thirty.

‘I'm just bagging the table,' he said, sitting there lazily, low in his seat with his legs stretched out. ‘Max and Vincent have gone to pick the Korean guys up in a cab at the Stamford Plaza.' He seemed to want to show me that he was blasé about the surroundings, about the whole occasion. He sat with his back to the windows – full of the lights of the Story Bridge – and ignored his water glass, which was frosted with condensation. I assumed Vincent was the client.

‘But that's only a few blocks away, the Stamford Plaza.'

‘Well, it's not as if we can make our guests walk . . .' There was sarcasm in the way he said it, though I wasn't sure if it was directed at the expectations of the guests or my ignorance of how they should be treated. ‘Not brilliant for our green credentials, is it? Maybe we'll get the cab company to plant a tree. We're so full of shit sometimes. You've probably noticed that already.' It wasn't a game I planned to be sucked into playing, not yet anyway. He smiled when I didn't respond.
‘Ha. You have noticed, obviously. We should get you a drink. You
are
drinking, I assume? I'm expecting the Koreans to get shit-faced on Scotch, but maybe that's a racist stereotype.'

He explained that this was the firm's first Korean project, or at least the first time one of the firm's clients had a real chance to do some serious business with Korea. The client created software for toll roads.

‘I could explain how it works,' he said, ‘but both of our lives are far too short for that, and I'd be grateful if you didn't even pretend to give a shit.'

‘I think I can manage that.'

‘We'd like to do something in Korea,' he said, making it sound as if he called the shots, and possibly from a jacuzzi somewhere amidships on the corporate jet. ‘We can cover Japan and Max speaks passable Chinese, but we don't have a Korean speaker. Luckily, this time one of the Koreans, the junior one, speaks pretty good English.'

He had forgotten about my drink already, but I didn't need it.

I mentioned that Max had suggested karaoke was likely later, and he said, ‘Max is always hoping someone'll suggest fucking karaoke.' Then, in a Japanese accent, he corrected himself. ‘Karaoke. Half my genes gave the world that artform.'

‘Oh, be proud. It's a great leveller, bringing down statesmen and businesspeople across Asia and beyond. I hope you're up for it tonight.'

‘You know me. I couldn't carry a tune unless it was strapped to my back.' He was still lounging in the seat, like someone watching TV.

‘And yet somehow you managed to have your own band. What possessed you to tell Max Visser about Tokyo Speed Ponies?'

‘He asked about our past.' Ben shrugged. ‘It seemed like one of the better bits.' He was smiling, as if we could be okay about the less good bits now.

‘But it was made up. It only existed because you were teaching yourself to build websites back when you were pretending you weren't going to be a lawyer. The whole thing was a fake.'

‘Hey, the evidence is there to support it. You wrote some great fake articles. Not even fake articles. You got them published.' He pretended to look around the room, as if the wrong people might be listening. ‘You might have even accepted some cash for it. So don't go holier-than-thou on me. Anyway, it was a good website.'

‘I don't remember any cash.'

‘Convenient.'

There had been no cash.

‘Max Visser is trawling music vendors across the electronic universe trying to track down an album called Tangerine Coloured Hot Spot that never existed.
Never existed.
' I had put on a tone of exasperation, but it was hard not to laugh at the prospect of it. ‘If he starts featuring you, me and your anime fantasy chick as his screen saver I don't want to know about it.'

‘I've still got that screen saver, probably. A version of it. I could sneak it onto his computer one day while he's riding in to work.'

‘Don't even think about it. Stop thinking about it. And what is going on with the chat part of the site? It
had me thinking I'd actually been in a band. I felt like one of those Days of Our Lives characters coming back after years of amnesia.'

He laughed. ‘Sorry. I would have told you. In different circumstances. That was just me, a couple of years ago. I got bored for five minutes. I went looking for the site, figuring it wouldn't be there, and there it was. Pristine. I don't know how. It's not like I pay anything for it. It must have slipped into some accounting wormhole or something, some warp in the space–time continuum. So, I played around a bit. Without even the intention of messing with your head. That's just a bonus. I wish I'd been there when you read it.'

‘Arsehole. I've had second album pressure all afternoon. I mean, how do you follow up Tangerine Coloured Hot Spot? Particularly now that I've seen at least one person call it a classic.' In the low light of the restaurant he looked more like himself, more like the way he used to. Only the suit was different. ‘And where would Frank Ainsworth be if you'd been bunkered down in a studio with me and the top half of your anime fantasy chick trying to knock out album number two?'