The Fix (22 page)

I took another look at the phone, as if I was checking something. ‘Yeah? How did you know Frank was texting me? I didn't even tell you I'd tried to call him last night.'

For a second I had him. Then he said, ‘Bullshit,' but he didn't sound confident. ‘Frank never texted anybody.'

‘Well, we've got to get this sorted out somehow.'

‘We will.' On the TV behind him, the weather guy was being thrown around by acrobats. ‘It'll be over by Friday. Just let it be over by Friday.'

‘What does Frank get out of this? What does Frank get out of you ending up with a medal?'

‘Nothing. It's how he saw it.' He was sounding clear about it now, clearer than the night before. ‘And I was too traumatised to work it out. Give me a break. It was
still a horrendous experience. We could both have been killed. And have you ever seen anyone blow their brains out? Everything afterwards happened before I could stop it.' He wanted me to believe him, but I had stopped doing that. ‘Who was the text from, really?'

The TV weather guy was back on the ground, hamming it up and failing to walk a straight line.

I went out onto the balcony and called Hayley. I wanted to hear her voice. Her phone was off, though, and I went through to voicemail. I would ramble – I knew it – so I hung up and put some thought and far fewer words into a text message to let her know where we would be. I wanted to see her. I wanted Ben gone.

After breakfast Ben and I walked to King Tutt's Putt Putt. It was two short blocks away, since I had made sure we were staying at putt-putt central. King Tutt's promised, and it delivered. The front of its brochure featured a camel with a wide grin, dressed like a Florida retiree whose days revolved around golf. He wore sunglasses and a flowered shirt and was sitting in a giant cracked cerise-coloured golf ball, like a chick emerging from an egg. Above him was a curved line of jaunty text reading ‘Mini-Golf at its Best'.

Ben was talking, but I wasn't listening. I should have forced his hand earlier, days earlier. He was walking beside me in three-quarter pants and slides, again looking more like a Japanese tourist than he would ever realise, looking like someone who might be scooped up by a minibus and taken away to pat koalas. I wanted his dirty secret out in public, and at the same time I wanted it buried deep for another few days, until I could outrun it. I wanted him to face the
shame of handing his medal back in its box. I wanted that photo in the paper, instead of the one that would be there in newsagents across the state as we walked to King Tutt's. Neither of us had gone looking for the paper, or even talked about it. I expected he would be on page three. But this was the holiday. Bring on the mini-golf, bring on the doves.

King Tutt's was a warehouse, with indoor and outdoor courses set up to capture the three great eras of golf: Jurassic, ancient Egyptian and African jungle. The beauty of mini-golf – and the essence, surely, of any mini-golf tour article – was not so much to be found in the putting of a brightly-coloured ball across cunningly undulating fake grass. It was in the gratuitous themeing. The greatest moments in the sport would never be witnessed by the public, since they had already happened before the concrete pour, back in the planning stages when the theme dream kicked in. Mini-golf was a gift for the writer of quirk who had run out of steam, since it was quirk already, served up on Astroturf. No funny slant required, just two eyes and a pen.

The Egyptian course was on the left as we walked in. It featured small concrete pyramids as frequent obstacles, plus gold serpents coiled around holes, and a full-sized sarcophagus. The wall at the far end had columns set into it, along with the giant stunned face of a boy king, gazing across flattened fake grass and grit and a single group of holiday-makers leaning on their clubs, debating their scores.

Ben and I opted for the Jurassic course, with its volcanoes and palm trees and holes marked out by the sweep of dinosaur tails.

‘I play some golf,' he said, weighing up the putter in his hand. ‘But that's actual golf. You know, non-plastic grass, six other clubs. I don't imagine that'll do me much good here.'

By the end of the seventh hole he was six shots ahead, since I had maxed out at five shots on the first hill hole and almost come to grief on a second. He stood looking at the dinosaur murals as I klutzed it up, one hole after another, and each time he pencilled in my score without comment.

I teed off first at the eighth, putting up a slope towards two caves at the base of a volcano. Each cave had its own hidden tunnel leading to the plain that lay below and to our left. One tunnel opening put you right near the hole. The other left you in a far corner. There was no way of telling which was which. My first shot clarified nothing. The ball decelerated rapidly on its way up the slope, defied gravity for a millisecond and then rolled back down, gathering speed all the way to the back board. It ended up a few centimetres behind where it had started.

My second shot was crisp and firm, and drilled the wrong cave. I two-putted from there.

Ben picked the right cave and had a tap in for a birdie.

The ninth was surrounded by rock walls, but the path to the hole was easy enough and we both made twos.

I was lining up my first shot at the top of the steps at the tenth when Ben said, ‘Come on, what's eight shots between friends? The brochure says this is the very best fun you can have on your feet.'

‘That's why we're here.' My eye was still on the ball, and the track to the hole. I wanted him to talk on his own time, not on my putt. I didn't want him to talk.

The ball plunked down the steps, bounced well past the hole and ended up tucked in a corner.

‘Experience the fantastic adventure of putting amongst the ruins of ancient Egypt and also the ferocious dinosaurs of Jurassic Park – both eighteen-hole courses,' he said, reading from the brochure. ‘Light refreshments on site.'

There was a family playing back on five and there were two groups out on the Egyptian course. There was music in the background, and automated noise from the Bullseye Barn Shooting Gallery, which was unattended in the far corner. Ben was scanning the brochure for something else to read.

‘How can you do this today after telling me what you did last night?' I should have been playing my second shot, edging my ball out of the corner that had trapped it and making some kind of attempt at the hole. ‘How can you play mini-golf?'

He closed the brochure. He was irritated and didn't hide it. ‘How can I do anything? For eighteen months now. I'm a hero, and I'm a guy who . . .' He looked around, checking to see how near the other mini-golfers were. He lowered his voice. ‘I'm a guy who fell on a body and got a medal for it and I don't know what the hell I can do about it, okay? You should be taking more photos for your article. Here . . .'

He held his hand out for the camera, and clicked his fingers. He took it from me and placed his own blue ball in the worn tee-off zone, harder than he
needed to, so that it hit the ground with a loud clunk. He stepped down to the hole and crouched, pointing the camera back up my way. ‘Putt that and look happy.'

I putted, and the ball dropped down the steps and ended up in the same corner as my first shot.

‘Well, it's a good photo anyway,' he said as he reached over and hooked the ball with his putter.

He came up the steps and gave me back the camera. He lined up his shot, tapped the ball gently and, as it fell step by step towards the hole with an unwelcome inevitability, I looked away and saw Hayley at the entrance to the building, standing in the bright sun. She waved, and started to walk the course in reverse to reach us. She was wearing a sundress with large hibiscus flowers on it, and sandals, but her hair still had a hint of the rock-chick look.

‘If this doesn't stop you being shitty, there's no hope,' Ben said as she walked across seventeen, the triceratops-skull hole. He spun his putter in his hand.

Two more interviews, and we would be done. I nearly said it to him. And I nearly said that if he made one move on her, his secret would be out.

Hayley stopped on the tee-off circle at the eleventh and said, ‘Well, this looks tense. Is it close?'

‘No.' I got in first. ‘I've had a few technical problems. Mostly to do with hitting the ball.'

She introduced herself to Ben, saying they hadn't met properly, not by name anyway. I didn't like the way he looked at her, as if she was still Jett in his head and not Hayley, as if he could recall almost every bit of her without the sundress.

She took a look at the scorecard and said, ‘You'd better let me play a couple for you.'

I handed her my putter and she hit the ball wildly on eleven, but didn't seem to care. It pinged around like a bagatelle ball and no one could guess where each shot would finish. She even drove it fiercely at the hole when she was less than a metre away, sending it rattling around the boundary boards again and almost back to the start. With the addition of out-of-bounds penalties, I was fourteen shots behind when she gave the club back to me after the twelfth.

‘There you go,' she said. ‘You can finish him off.'

Ben outsmarted himself at the triceratops skull and wedged the ball behind the mandible, but that was as close as I came to having a chance to finish him. He was twelve strokes ahead when our balls dropped into the hole in the floor at the eighteenth.

Hayley had a black dress laid out on the back seat of her Barina, which she had parked on the gravel behind King Tutt's. Ben climbed in over the tilted passenger seat, and sat with one end of the dress on his lap for the two-minute drive. Hayley chatted like someone on a holiday. I wanted to match her. I wanted to impress her, to make her laugh. I kept looking for angles, as if I was blogging on the fly, while Ben talked like a normal person and made it seem easy.

‘Nice,' she said when I opened the door to the apartment. ‘It's big.' She stepped inside and put her bag down at her feet. ‘So, where's the medal? Let me see the medal.'

Ben fetched it from his room and found himself in Olympic-champion mode again. He opened the box and
took her through it item by item, explaining the different uses of the full-sized star, the miniature and the lapel badge. Like everyone else, Hayley took the star in her hand and talked about how solid it felt, how heavy.

‘You realise it's part of the deal this afternoon?' she said to him. ‘I pitched us as the deluxe wedding package. Suits, medals, little black dress for me. That's how I persuaded them to give us the job.'

‘So, I wear this?' Ben said as she put the star back in his hand. He looked down at it. I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

‘That's why they put the pin on it,' she said. ‘I reckon they make these things for wearing. So don't be bashful. And don't go checking your pamphlet about it, since I'm sure Japanese weddings require the full big star.'

‘Okay,' he said, closing his hand over it. He smiled at her. ‘I'll wear it. And I won't be Bashful if Josh won't be Grumpy.'

His medal and its bits and pieces put an aura around him. It drew people in. I didn't want Hayley to be one of them.

‘Some of us default to Grumpy,' I told him. ‘Me, the Queen's face. Have you noticed how grumpy she looks when she's taking in yet another passing parade? The muscles relax and out comes Grumpy.'

‘So, you've just got the Queen's face then,' he said. ‘My mistake.'

‘Was there a dwarf called Smartarse? Or did they get the shits with him and chuck him out before Snow White arrived?' My status as Grumpy was confirmed. ‘We should hang this dress.' I was still holding the little
black dress Hayley had brought for the wedding. ‘Let me show you your room.'

I had kept the best one for her, but the unused room reminded us both that we were only acquaintances. I had already pictured us as much more. We had one-and-a-half good conversations behind us, and one rather fumbled kiss in the street. That was all. Separate rooms, no big assumptions.

I felt like a valet – like Anthony Hopkins in a stiff shirt with a wing collar, or an actor in an Edwardian play – as I walked in there with her dress and hung it in the wardrobe.

She set her bag down on the bed and said, ‘Nice room. Thanks. I hope they're all this good.'

Over her shoulder, I could see Ben in the living room, watching us and smirking.

‘Well, Ben and I don't have our own en suites,' I told her, ‘but we should be able to share a bathroom as long as he's not in there for hours buffing and plucking before the photoshoot.'

‘I already waxed,' he shouted out. He had picked up the TV remote, and was pretending to be interested in it while listening to every word.

‘This is starting to sound just like work, like backstage at the Spur,' Hayley said, and he silently held a knuckle to his mouth and bit it.

* * *

WE WENT OUT FOR PIZZA
, since it was the nearest option and the wedding was at two. It turned out I even liked the way she ate pizza.

When we got back to the apartment, Hayley changed into her dress and put on her hair extension. She wore it in a ponytail and said she was aiming for ‘demure, but stylish demure'.

Ben came out of his room in his suit, looking like a suit model.

‘Very nice,' she said, ‘but where's the medal?' She took it from the box and pinned it on, smoothing it flat over the jacket pocket. ‘We're not all brave, you know.'

She stood back to check that the star was sitting straight. He modelled the medal for her too, setting his chin at an angle that conveyed resilience in the face of an unspecified threat, or quiet nobility. He looked like the statue of an admiral who had lost men but won the day.

‘That's better,' she said. ‘That's deluxe. It's the free low-season upgrade I promised. Like this place. A dove wrangler, one of our nation's heroes and –' she turned to me – ‘our driver.'