The Fix (19 page)

‘Urine?'

‘Yes. Yes, fuck it, urine. That's what this was like. It's not about paragraphs of some report you can quote.' He started to pace up and down in the small space. ‘It's about blood and piss and a guy's brains getting blown out.' He turned, and he pointed. His arm was shaking. ‘Against that wall. We slipped. There was a struggle and we slipped. I fell on him as the gun went off. Or just after, or something. Neither of us stopped to make notes about the details. And his bladder emptied when I fell on him. And I didn't think I'd feel like wearing those clothes again. Does that surprise you?'

‘I thought the police would have made sure they got your shirt for GSR.' I sounded like a bastard, I was certain of it, taking such a hard line and pushing him about the details in the face of his story of carnage.

‘GSR?'

‘Gunshot residue.'

‘What the fuck . . .' He threw his arms up on ‘fuck'. He turned away from me, and made it to the door in three or four steps. I wondered if he was going to leave, but he turned back to face me again. ‘What are you doing?' I could smell his sweat now. It was in the air, with the caustic odour of the cleaning fluid. ‘This isn't CSI. It was a hostage situation. There's no doubt about what happened. The police didn't need to ask how the gun fitted between us. They didn't need my shirt. The gun went off and it was fucking loud in here and there was smoke and all kinds of shit flying around. Blood and brain and bone and bits of wall panel. No one came in dabbing stuff for GSR, or doing any other smartarse thing.'

He pushed a cubicle door open and sat on the toilet, with the lid down. He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, and he stayed quite still.

‘Okay. Okay, I'm sorry.'

I had taken my doubts about his story and pistol-whipped him with them. I had wanted him to confess, though I didn't know to what. Something that meant that I was smarter than him. That there was a scam going, but it wasn't getting past me. It was old vengeance at work.

I opened my folder again. I had the relevant page of the report of the Governor-General's secretary in there. I had highlighted the wording that almost exactly matched Frank's nomination.

‘No,' he said, down into his hands, before I could make him read it. ‘No,
I'm
sorry.'

‘What?'

He sat up. He looked calm, steady, as if his hands had been fitting a different face.

‘I'm sorry about Eloise,' he said. ‘You hate me because of Eloise. You think I'm some kind of liar because of what happened, and I'm sorry. I know you. You would have had such big ideas when she thought she was pregnant and you thought it was yours. I'm sorry for the way it turned out, for the whole thing.'

* * *

AND THAT WAS THE
END
of the interrogation. I didn't play my trump card.

Eloise had become pregnant. She sat me down, looking pale and in need of sleep, and she told me she was nauseated and had missed her period. And as I started to say that didn't necessarily mean just one thing, she told me about the positive pregnancy test. She said she didn't know what to do. I told her I would back her, whatever, but I said it because it was what you were supposed to say. I wanted to throw up. I wanted life to be less hard than it had become in that instant.

She cried into her hands and I felt like I'd hurt her in some way.

But the shock passed, or started to. And I worked out I wanted to be with her. That was what mattered. I had told her I had money – though I didn't, in fact, have much – and that I would drive her wherever she needed to go. I said we would get through it. She said, ‘Do we tell people? How do we tell them? How do we not?'

But I started letting another possibility creep in, the
possibility of a different life. We would be together, this would be our child, the anguish would go. I let myself become amazed by the idea that we had made something that might one day be alive and breathing, and like us.

And then Eloise had to tell me no, not necessarily. That it would come half from her, but I was no sure thing. She told me she had been mad with me one night around the crucial time, or afraid of how quickly I was moving, and that she and Ben had had a stupid amount of wine to drink, and they had slept together.

She couldn't even remember it, but she had woken up in his bed and it was clear that it had happened.

A week after telling me that, she miscarried a blighted ovum. It was never a child in the making. She and Ben had planned not to tell me that they had slept together. They had lied to me for weeks already, and I had been clueless.

All of our relationships tore apart that same day. I didn't expect that I would ever trust Ben again, because he could betray me without a hint of it. I suspected – continued to suspect – that he had not been half as drunk as Eloise, but I couldn't face either of them over an argument about semantics.

I threw out everything she had given me, threw away shirts of mine that she had worn to bed.

I realised how little I had come to know Ben in the times we had spent together over close to two years. He had made himself a good listener, and a mirror, and that could seem like friendship sometimes. I knew almost nothing about him, and he knew everything about me. Including my feelings about Eloise, before he had opened the third bottle of wine and taken her to his bed.

I failed exams, but talked my way to conceded passes. I got through my degree, and I ran. To London, and the fantasy of a new start. I had lost a vision of a very different future, blighted just as I had seen it and wanted it. I still sometimes thought about how old that child would be, even though it could never have been a child at all.

So Randall Hood Beckett had picked the right media wrangler. I would not be soft on the talent in his vaguer moments. I would question everything.

I was home before I remembered the text message. I took my phone from my pocket and flipped it open.

It was from Hayley, and it read, ‘Great. See you Tuesday morning. Save some putt putt for me.'

* * *

I CALLED BEN LATER
that afternoon.

‘We should make a fresh start,' I told him. ‘As much as we can. We've got to focus to get through tomorrow.' I had made a mess of both of us. I had taken him to the scene of the crime, armed with pictures of shredded human tissue and something close to malice. ‘We've got to be on the same team.' He said nothing. I could hear music in the background, though not a song I recognised. ‘I believe that you're a hero.'

I said it because I owed him something. I said it because it was my job, and because even a liar might go through something horrible, something that might shear the clarity of his perspective and leave him a genuine hero in a jumbled story.

On Monday morning, we went through it again in my car, and I coached him. It was okay not to remember completely. It was okay to say that things had happened too quickly to grasp. There was only one moment he truly needed to own, and that was the moment when, faced with the impending death of Frank Ainsworth, he chose not to run or to cower or to stand numbly by, but instead he moved towards the loaded gun.

‘All right,' he said, his eyes on the glove box. I thought he was picturing it then, Frank on the floor, Rob Mueller standing over him, all of them closing in on the moment. He reached forward and fiddled with the air conditioning, directing more of the air at his face. ‘Let's talk about the mini-golf,' he said when he sat back in his seat. ‘You've got the good life. You really have. Even though you don't appreciate it.'

So we talked about life, but not about any real details of either of our lives, until we drove up Fernberg Road, where cars were being parked, and families in suits and their best day dresses were making their way up the hill to Government House.

‘Your parents – have they still got the newsagency?' Ben said, sounding as if he was already absent from his own question, but using it to stop me bringing up what was ahead. ‘Have you told me that already? Are they still at the Sunshine Coast?' He was watching the people. A man with crutches was being helped out of a cab.

I talked about my parents for most of the walk from the car, and I knew he wasn't listening to any of it.

‘Remember Paris Hilton's advice,' I told him at the Government House gates. He was looking up at the old
stone building, and had stopped to let other guests pass us. ‘Always act like you're wearing an invisible crown.'

‘What?' A gust of wind blew down the hill and pushed his hair across his forehead. ‘That's what you've got for me now? Paris Hilton?'

‘You were expecting Henry the Fifth? I'm more widely read than that. Just remind yourself that you're entitled to be here. You got plunged into something ugly, and came out a hero. You have to let people acknowledge that today.'

An usher was standing nearby with a clipboard, and he marked our names off and said, ‘Mister Harkin, congratulations. You'll need to be fitted with a decoration hook for the Governor to put your decoration on.'

‘A hook . . .' Ben wasn't following. His eyes were on the vans from the TV networks, which were parked further up the hill.

‘Yes, sir. It's much smoother than the Governor trying to pin it on you. It's a small black hook that's fitted before the ceremony. You won't even see it against your suit.'

He told Ben exactly where he needed to be and when, but he kept looking at me to see that I was taking it in too.

‘Too late to run, then,' Ben said when it was just the two of us again.

We followed the crowd along the curved road, past the well-groomed bushes to the entrance steps. The function room had rows of chairs set out in front of a fireplace. There was a portrait of the Queen on the wall, and a display of Australian honours. I could see the bravery awards clustered together, with their
two-tone ribbons the colours of venous and arterial blood.

Ben was taken away to have his hook fitted and I was left alone, wondering how the day would pan out. I tried to imagine Robert Redford at Government House, standing, in a useless moment between tasks, in a big borrowed suit that in daylight had turned out to be browner than he had realised. I checked my phone, but there were no new messages. The audience, yet to take their seats, stood around talking quietly, as if quiet was what the room demanded. Two young girls in bright dresses chased each other along the rows of chairs, almost tipping one over in their hurry.

From the other side of the room, Max Visser waved, and he and Frank came over, holding programs.

‘All okay?' Frank said. His scar was a vivid pink and his scalp almost looked as if he had polished it.

‘Well, he's here,' I told him. ‘And he's as ready to play the hero as he's going to be.'

I threw it out like bait,
play
the hero.

I watched Frank for a reaction, but he just said, ‘Good,' and looked past me, towards the front of the room. ‘Been to one of these before?'

‘No. I didn't make it onto the Queen's invite list in London.' Max laughed. Frank didn't. ‘You're ready for this? Ready for afterwards?'

‘It'll be brief today, won't it?' Frank said. ‘Brief for me, if any of them want to talk to me.'

‘That's it. That's the idea,' I said. ‘Have one or two sound-bite-sized things ready to say and don't be afraid to use them more than once. Save the detail for Australian Story. Talk about the bravery, talk about the lives saved,
talk about the danger, but try to keep it natural. Try not to sound too much like an award citation, or an official document.'

‘Right,' he said. He glanced at me. He was trying to read me. The look was gone in no time, but I'd caught it while it lasted. ‘Good advice. You're worth every cent.'

I had him. I had something. There had been a flicker of a response. If the wording overlap had been chance, I would have got nothing at all.

We were asked to take our seats for the ceremony. Frank moved first, which left Max sitting between us.

‘Quite a few awards,' he said, looking at the program. ‘Only Ben for the Star of Courage, though.'

I opened my program too, but I was still back at Frank's look. Nancy Drew would have had more to go on than that. And what did it mean – what could it mean – if Frank had searched out the wording and used it? It did nothing to alter the facts. The siege was real, and the gunshot, and the death of Rob Mueller. If Frank's search for the right wording amounted to anything, it was the act that gave the story a hero. And the simplest, most obvious motivation for it was that Ben was one.

The TV cameras set up on one side of the room. An attendant placed them where he wanted them, and appeared to mark out an imaginary line that they were not to cross. It would not be like the back of the ambulance, cameras careering around on the pavement and the steps nearby and closing in. That was good. I checked my list of reporters, and made certain I could see them all before putting the piece of paper back in my pocket.

Ben glanced at the cameras when he was led into the
room, then looked down at the floor. He was shown to a seat in the front row, next to other award recipients. His expression read like stoicism, but most of the others didn't seem too different.

The ceremony began. For twenty minutes or more, there was nothing I could do for him.

I wanted to be in the next phase of my life, my business with Randall Hood Beckett done. I let myself imagine Hayley in my future. I advanced myself several minutes of unrealistic expectations before pulling my hopes in and reminding myself of my mother's well-worn advice about taking one day at a time, not getting ahead of myself. I was ahead, always ahead. It was always better ahead.

And
she
had kissed
me
. In the recent past, in a dark street, the move had come from her. That was rocket fuel for high hopes. Back on earth, my mother's voice grew faint.