The Fix (18 page)

Would that week have been different if the string had been authentic, blessed by Rabbi Joseph Moor
Halevi from the Institute of Kabbalah and Mysticism in Jerusalem, thereby warding off the evil eye and denoting my commitment to the oneness of love for just $18.95 online? I put it out there and the replies came in, scorning me for my eternal cynicism and my blasphemy and my denigration of minority beliefs, and for wasting time, oxygen and red string.

‘How weird,' she said, ‘that you can hang out at home and talk to so many people. Make them laugh, shit them, whatever. Maybe you changed hundreds of people's minds about red string.'

‘I expect so.' I was trying not to stare at her too much. Blogging, for once, felt like the game it was supposed to, and I felt liberated from the crud I waded through most weeks to make it happen. ‘It's a lot of responsibility having all this power. I'm writing about toothbrushes at the moment.'

‘So how do you end up doing this thing with the law firm?'

‘Well, I'm as freelance as a lance can be,' I said, a line that kicked the legs out from under half-a-dozen winning blog stories. ‘My job sort of makes itself up as it goes along. This month the extra bit's media wrangling for Ben – with whom I have a somewhat awkward past – over his act of heroism. If we manage to keep the part about him having sex with my girlfriend all those years ago out of it, we should be okay.'

Hayley's eyes opened wider, and her beer stopped on its way to her mouth. I had wanted to prove something by saying it, but I wasn't sure what.

‘No, really, I'm not bitter.' I made a performance of it, and it drew the laugh I was hoping for. I wanted
more of that. ‘Actually, I'm not. Just this second I'm a lot less bitter than I have been for quite a while.'

‘Good,' she said. ‘That's good.' She drank her beer. ‘It gets you nowhere.'

‘We knew each other at uni. I actually took the job on without knowing it was him. My brother's company handles the firm's PR.'

I could imagine Ben, a few blocks away, working on his laptop in his pristine open-plan living area or lapping in his pool, his shadow dropping through the portholes to glide over his polished concrete floor. I couldn't picture him out somewhere, with people. ‘Some of us have a life,' he had said.

‘Ben seems to have done something genuinely heroic.' I wanted to give him his due. ‘And pretty traumatising, so it's good that I can be there to get him through it. Get him through getting his medal on Monday, and the inevitable interviews. That's this month's one-off job. Mostly I seem to be getting a name for the blogs and quirky articles, and all that looks pretty trivial whenever I read Ben's medal nomination.'

The band had finished inside, and the audience was pushing to get out through the door and into the mall. Around us people drifted by, mostly in groups, high or tired or looking for a last drink. There were boys with chains hanging from their pants in loops, gentle ferals of the kind who sell dream catchers at markets, and two girls in Doc Martens who were carrying guitar cases and looking like they were heading home.

‘What's not trivial, really, when you look at it?' Hayley said. ‘There's only a handful of things that aren't. Any time my life feels fucked up or trivial, I just imagine
it with a Morgan Freeman voiceover. Suddenly, dignity restored.' She cleared her throat, got ready to make the switch to her inner Morgan Freeman. ‘Four days a week, come rain or shine, Hayley makes the long journey across the city in her second-hand Holden Barina to attend law lectures in the great sandstone buildings . . . Et cetera et cetera. He's the voice that made penguins feel good about themselves.'

I could imagine the penguins, huddled in snowdrifts in the Antarctic with their eggs balanced on their feet, the Morgan Freeman voice in their heads getting them through the long nights, the plummeting temperatures, saying to themselves ‘this is noble after all'.

‘I could really use that,' I told her. ‘I could need it as soon as Monday. We're going to the Gold Coast after Ben gets his medal and finishes his hero interviews. It's for another article. I'm putting together a mini-golf tour. So, he puts his life on the line with a crazed gunman, I putt pink golf balls into the mouths of fibreglass dinosaurs.'

‘Easy,' she said, and put on her Morgan Freeman voice again. ‘Josh, armed with the wisdom earned during the long summer holidays of adolescence, drives the ball gracefully across Astroturf flattened by the feet of generations of putt-putters.' She paused, and tried not to look pleased with herself.

‘Was that pathos?'

‘I think it was.' She was back to her regular voice. ‘Pull it up just short of ponderous and the smallest thing sounds like a triumph of the spirit. I get it, though, the mini-golf tour story. People fly from Japan to play golf at the Gold Coast, but who does the mini-golf tour? I think you're onto something.'

‘Thank you. I've been waiting for someone to get it.'

‘Hey,' she said, caught by a new idea. ‘I know these people at the coast, they do doves for weddings. Japanese weddings. I used to do dove releases as a part-time job. You should do a story on that. I still do the occasional one midweek, when the owners have their weekend.'

‘Why not?' It was an automatic response, just part of keeping the conversation going, but then I thought, really, why not? I saw us there, Hayley and me, on a manicured lawn at a Gold Coast reception venue, doves in our hands. I took a mouthful of beer and summed up all the nonchalance I could muster. ‘You should come. Maybe you could line up a dove release. Ben and I could do it with you. We'll have suits, so we can look the part. But why not come even if you can't line it up? It's low season. I got this deal where I got the third night free and an upgrade to a three-bedroom place.' I was racing her to the end of the pitch, like a cold-caller pushing a holiday package, wanting to get every word out before the phone goes down. ‘You should come.'

It was her turn to take a mouthful of beer. She picked up the plastic table number, as if it needed checking. The conversation had fallen into a hole. I had flung it into a hole, in a sack, with hammers.

‘Maybe I will,' she said.

She turned the number ninety degrees and set it down again. Pizzas arrived at the table next to us, and we both stared at them as if they were really important.

‘Hey, look at that,' she said. ‘Pizzas. I didn't know they still served food this late.'

I needed to say something great about pizzas, late
service, but I was completely stuck. One beer, and I was pitching her three nights at the Gold Coast.

‘You were in the UK, right?' she said, and I assumed we were forgetting my suggestion about the coast. ‘Was that work, or backpacking or . . .'

‘Mainly work.' Mainly work. Anything interesting? No. Learn anything about not rushing girls? No. ‘Some backpacking, but I got sick of my clothes never drying.'

‘Oh, I know what you mean. When I backpacked I used to wear my G-strings as scrunchies after I washed them just to get them dry.'

‘I dare you to do it now.' I was out of my conversational death spiral and back in the game.

‘It'd be wrong now. Scrunchies have been out for years. They weren't even in then.'

‘It'd be wrong because it's putting underwear in your hair, so the fashion argument's pretty minor.'

‘I can make it look quite convincing.' She wasn't backing down. ‘The main issue is hiding the label.'

We talked about Europe and hostels and the antipodean ghettoes of London. Her worst accommodation was a barn that she shared with hens in the Czech Republic. Mine was a London sharehouse with skid-brown toilets everyone refused to clean and a South African who enforced his seniority by renting out any conceivable area under the roof at the rate of his choosing. For three weeks a New Zealander paid five pounds to live under our dining table at nights, rolling out his sleeping-bag after dinner and crawling into it when he had drunk or smoked himself stupid. We eventually overthrew Herschel when he made a move to rent out beds – all
but his own – in shifts. He was last heard of running an escort agency from a houseboat at Camden Lock.

The pizza eaters ate and went, and an hour passed with us still talking. I was starting to wonder if I could do the crime-scene walk-through at Randall Hood Beckett on no sleep at all when Hayley checked the time on her phone and said she should be making a move.

I walked her to her car, which turned out to be in a side street in the opposite direction to mine. The mall noise didn't make it there. It was as if our last few lines to each other were to be delivered in some kind of close-up. It was a movie trick, cutting the background noise to heighten the intimacy, or the stakes.

Further down the street, a taxi pulled out from the kerb. I could just make out voices as two people moved through the shadows to their front door, then the sound of the door closing as they went inside.

‘That's it. The red one,' Hayley said, pointing to a car ahead of us. We stopped next to it and she looked down into her bag, searching for her keys. ‘So, the Gold Coast trip. What's the plan?' She looked up. ‘Assuming you were serious.'

‘I was serious. I was totally serious.' Light was falling on her face from a streetlight well behind me. ‘We're going down Monday, for three nights. I can text you the address. It's at home. I don't have it with me now.'

‘I can get there on Tuesday, some time during the day. I'm doing something on Monday. A family thing. So if Tuesday's okay . . .'

‘Tuesday's perfect,' I said, because any day would have been. ‘There's an interview Wednesday, but Tuesday's
a day off. Nothing but putt putt. And whatever else we want to do. Not just putt putt.'

‘Good.'

She looked at her keys, moved them from hand to hand. Then she set them on the roof of her car and stepped forward. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me on the mouth. I put my hands on her back, and then the bare skin of her shoulders and in her hair, and she pressed her body against me.

I could hear a car, coasting down the hill behind me. Its lights caught us, and we stepped apart to let it pass.

‘Okay then,' Hayley said, as we watched its tail-lights move away from us, towards New Farm. ‘I'll talk to the dove people.'

* * *

I COULD STILL TASTE
her mouth all the way back to my car. I was replaying the conversation, the parts that said she was coming to the coast and that I would see her again in not much more than two days.

I got home and lay on the bed with my shoes still on, expecting my thoughts to keep racing, but the next thing I noticed it was light, and eight-thirty. Five hours had passed.

I found the address of the Gold Coast apartment, and I texted it to her. I made toast and willed my phone to beep with a reply, but it stayed quiet.

My notes about the siege were spread across the table, and I gathered them in a folder and read them through on the CityCat on the way into town. I
waited ten minutes under one of the jacaranda trees before Ben arrived.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘Lost track of time.'

He was wearing three-quarter pants and a snug-fitting Mighty Mouse T-shirt. He looked like a Japanese tourist. He swiped his card across the reader and the small side door unlocked with a clunk. Our footsteps echoed through the stone foyer as we walked to the lifts.

‘Much less crazy here on weekends,' he said. ‘I wish it was like this all the time.'

I wanted him to ask me about Hayley, to ask if I'd heard from her.

In the lift he used his card again, and pushed the button for the thirty-eighth floor.

‘So, the grilling begins,' he said as the lift rose. He was looking down at my folder. ‘I can't wait to see what you've got for me in there.'

‘It's not about what I've got in here. It's just a few notes.' There was a pinging noise and the lift stopped, at thirty-seven. ‘I wasn't there, so I can't keep it all in my head.'

The doors opened. A cleaner was standing there, with a trolley that would fill the lift. She had a blue uniform on, and the bright night cityscape painting covered most of the wall that was visible behind her.

‘No problem,' she said. I thought her accent was South American. ‘You go. I have thirty-nine next. I'll get the next elevator.'

‘I like that painting,' I said to Ben once the doors were shut again. ‘The one on the wall behind the reception desk.'

‘Yeah?' He looked as if he couldn't recall it clearly,
even though it had been in front of him seconds before. ‘They're all leased. They turn them over every couple of months. I think it's to stop us getting bored.'

The doors opened on thirty-eight, and we stepped out. The air was close and warm and lights started flickering on. Ben looked right and left down the corridor, as if someone might have just ducked from view.

‘They're motion-activated,' he said. ‘The lights. I think the lift doors opening activated them.' He put his security card into his pocket. ‘So, grill. Let's get this over with.'

I asked him what had been going on before Rob Mueller arrived, and where he had been at the time. He walked us around to the open-plan area where Selina worked. A sunflower made out of yellow-and-red ‘sign here' stickers had been left propped up against one of the computer screens.

‘There was a table here,' he said, though there didn't seem to be room for a table of any size. ‘We didn't have all these workstations then. There was an afternoon tea on. Someone was leaving to have a baby. This is where I was standing. Somewhere around here.'

He leaned on a divider and looked around at the desks, as if he might be about to show me the exact spot. A sheet of phone numbers, held to the divider by one pin, snagged on his shirt and fell off when he stood back. He picked it up, and set it down on a desk.

‘So there were a lot of people around?' I was trying to imagine the scene.

‘Yeah. But he got rid of them. Down the fire stairs. Two doors down the corridor.'

‘But he didn't get rid of you?'

‘No. He needed two of us to block the fire stairs door once the others were out. Frank and me. We used the table. Actually, we used a bookcase that isn't here any more. It was against that wall.' He pointed beyond the workstations. ‘Then we used the table.' He nodded. ‘Yeah. That was it. And Frank – God knows why – told him they'd break through it anyway.'

‘How did Rob Mueller take that?'

‘He said something like, “But I'll hear them and you'll be dead by then.” Then he made us take a desk to the lifts. He'd already got one lift stuck on the floor by hitting the emergency stop and jamming the doors, and he got another one to come up and we jammed it with the desk. It seemed like we waited forever for the lift to come. We couldn't put the desk down. He wouldn't let us put it down. He pointed the gun at the doors. I don't know what would have happened if someone had been in there. No one was.'

‘These are good details. This is exactly right. Exactly what you need to be able to say.' He wasn't listening. ‘So, he was here for Frank, and you were just kept to move things?'

He sat on the edge of a desk and folded his arms. ‘I guess.'

‘You guess? But you'd know.'

‘Would I? Frank's the managing partner. I suppose that made him a target.'

‘I thought I'd been told Frank
was
the target. Rob Mueller was a client of his.' He had nothing to say to that. I opened my folder, and looked at my notes. ‘So did you have any chance to get out?'

‘We'd barricaded the fire door and disabled the lifts.' He said it as if I had just insulted his intelligence.

‘So, no chance then?'

‘I don't have wings.' He almost said more, but stopped himself. He smiled. ‘That's a no. Tomorrow, or whenever this is official, I'll just say no.'

‘That's good. Sarcasm, for some reason, seems unbecoming in a hero.' I took the copy of the nomination form out of the folder. ‘Could you have got out before then? Before you barricaded the door?'

‘I don't think so. No.'

Frank's report on the details of the incident was attached to the third page of the form. ‘In Frank's nomination for your award, he says, “Ben could have left me there. He could have gone with the others.”'

Ben stared at the form, though he couldn't see the part I had read. I wondered if he was going to take it from me. He stood up, and moved away from the desk. He looked towards the fire door, as if it might cue a memory.

‘I don't really remember,' he said. ‘Frank remembers better than I do.'

‘Frank who got hit on the head?'

‘Yeah.'

I waited for more, but there wasn't any. ‘I'm just getting you ready, okay? Just getting you ready for the media. One of the criteria for bravery is that you have a choice. Which doesn't necessarily mean a choice to leave. It might be about other things.' I put the form back in the folder. ‘So, everyone else has gone, you've blocked the fire door and jammed the lifts – where to next?'

‘Frank's office.' He was already turning to go there.

‘Have we covered everything we need to here?'

‘Yes.' He didn't look around.

‘You might want to think about why you don't remember some of the things Frank remembers.' I was behind him, still catching up. ‘If it's because it was a traumatic experience, it's all right to say that. It's better to say that than not.' He made a hmmm noise. ‘You won't look less heroic, or less worthy of a Star of Courage if your memory's patchy.'

We walked into the office, and Ben stopped just inside the door. Outside the window, the glass of the next building blazed brightly in the morning sun and the piece of sky beside it was a vivid blue.

‘We were here for a while,' Ben said, this time without waiting for me to push him. ‘This is where Frank got hit. With the butt of the gun. I think he fell . . .' He took a few steps into the room and indicated an area on the floor. ‘About here. Round about here.'

He was staring down at the spot. There was sweat at his hairline, but I was starting to sweat too in the boxed-in air. I looked at the floor, as though it might have some sign of Frank's fall, but there was only the blue-and-green carpet, without a mark on it.

‘And why was he hit? Do you know what provoked it?'

‘No.' He thought about it. ‘Not exactly. There was a lot of talk going on. But not involving me. I was . . .' He took several sideways steps, as if measuring a specific distance. ‘I was here. Standing here. It was surreal. It was like I was watching it a lot of the time. Not part of it. It was like a TV with the sound down, or YouTube with
a bad connection. Frank argued with him. I don't know what about, but I can see his face and I was thinking why the hell are you arguing with a guy who's got a gun?' He put his hand on the back of a nearby chair, perhaps to steady himself. ‘And then he hit him. Rob Mueller hit him with the butt of the gun.'

‘So, how did you feel when that happened? That's the kind of question they'll ask. You're doing really well, by the way.'

‘Well, Frank was on the floor bleeding.' He was looking at the spot again, sizing it up from the position he had stood in at the time. ‘There was a lot of blood. This carpet's totally new, the whole room. I thought he might be dead, for a second, but he was just unconscious. And I was shitting myself, obviously. Frank's head was split open where he'd been hit. There was nothing special about Rob Mueller physically, but he was wired and he'd hit him hard. He was really angry that Frank was knocked out, that he wasn't awake to . . .' He was back there, in the moment, putting it together. ‘To suffer in the way he was supposed to. So he made me drag Frank by the feet to the bathroom. I had to pick him up and drag him. He was a dead weight. I had him by the ankles and I dragged. Blood ran into his eyes and his right ear and onto the floor.' He pointed to where the blood trail had gone, out the office door. ‘Rob Mueller wanted to stick his head in the toilet to wake him up, so he would be awake when he killed him.'

For the first time, he had shocked me. It had been grotesque.

‘So, the toilet then,' he said. ‘That's next.'

It was close by, a few doors down the corridor on the way back to the lifts. Ben pushed the door open and reached for the light switch. The fluoro tubes in the ceiling flickered and blinked, and then came on fully. The room was tiled and a clinical grey-blue in colour. It smelt of cleaning fluid. There were basins near the door, a trough along one wall, and two cubicles. It didn't look like a place where anything significant might happen.

‘So, this is it,' Ben said, looking around. ‘This is where I had to . . . make my move.'

‘So you tackled him, and that drove him against the far wall.' I was going by my notes.

‘Yeah.'

‘And Frank saw that?'

‘No. He was still unconscious. He was . . .' He started to indicate an area of the floor, but then stopped. ‘No, wait, maybe he was coming round then.'

‘In his nomination, I think he even quotes what you said. What Rob Mueller said and what you said.'

‘Well, then he was conscious. Obviously.' He shrugged the discrepancy off and walked over to the far wall. He stood close to it, facing it, and he put his hands up on the panel in front of him. ‘I pushed him to here, and that's when the gun went off. It was between us.'

‘Pressed between you and therefore pointing up.'

He took one hand from the wall and moved his arm into the position of the gun barrel. ‘Pointing up. Yeah.'

He was wrong. I had led him to it, but he was wrong.

‘Or actually pointing more like this.' I put my back to the wall panel next to him, and made an imaginary
gun in front of me with one hand, moving it around until I had the angle about right. It needed to be about thirty degrees to the vertical. ‘It's in the report, the inquest. There's a photo.'

I went to open the folder again, but he grabbed my hand.

‘I actually don't need to see the photo,' he said. ‘I don't know what you're doing.' He let my hand go.

‘Just getting the details straight. We can't have you saying he shot the ceiling if he shot the wall. They'll get the photos too. Australian Story will.' I pulled the forensic report out, without the photo. ‘Here, it says wall.' I went to show him, but he wouldn't look. ‘“Samples collected from the bathroom
wall
and floor revealed tissue consistent with cerebral cortex, bone and scalp. Blood and tissue dispersal,
wall
damage and the pattern of embedding of shotgun pellets in the
wall
 . . .” Et cetera. So, the wall, not the ceiling. It seems like there was no damage to the ceiling.'

‘Your point being?'

‘The gun wasn't pointing straight up. Which is worth remembering in itself, but here's another question. Somehow there was enough room between you for the gun not to be vertical. You'd tackled him, with the gun between you, and yet the gun was at an angle. A shotgun. They're quite long, aren't they? I'm just wondering how that all fits together. If you tackled him. The police asked you about all that, surely.'

He blinked, and stepped away. He took two steps towards the basins before turning back. He looked at the ceiling, and at the wall, again as if measuring something up. My phone beeped loudly with a text
message, and the tones echoed around the hard surfaces of the room.

‘Yeah, the wall,' he said. ‘Not the ceiling. That's a new panel. And maybe the gun butt slipped out from between us. I don't know.'

‘Okay.' I waited for more, but there wasn't any. ‘Okay, let's go with that. And your clothes. They look pretty messed up in the news footage – the footage of you leaving the building – but there's no report on them.'

‘What kind of report would there be? I threw them out.'

‘Didn't the police want them for evidence?'

‘No. I don't know. No one said they wanted them. Not to me. They got thrown out. That's the answer.' He was frowning. ‘They had blood and urine all over them.'