The Fix (6 page)

After the shortest possible settlement period, I unlocked the door on the hot afternoon when they gave me the keys and I walked in to a stale smell, as though people had sat there too long and failed to live up to their own lowest expectations.

It was mine, though. And it was a start.

I had been on contract in London, rather than being an employee. That had been my choice, since it let me believe I was a serious journalist killing time as a fixer until the right offer came along. But the GFC crashed the party, and I was among the first to go. The contract made it easy for them, but plenty of employed staff went too. ‘Things look a lot less bad in Australia,' my director said to me, in an apologetic tone he was about to become accustomed to. ‘You'll probably end up one of the lucky ones.'

So I took a box, the first box I could find, and I filled it with my stuff. I wanted to get out before people could look at me, before anyone knew. On the previous Saturday, my girlfriend Emily had decided we weren't working out. I had already been packing boxes.

As I caught the lift to ground, I wasn't aware that two banks with head offices in the building were in the process of collapsing. When the doors opened I saw TV cameras, a scrum of media, and they saw me. They caught me, trapped me there. They asked which bank I'd worked for and I told them it hardly mattered now. They asked who I was and I faked a name. It was only when I saw the news that night that I noticed how they had framed the picture. I was carrying a Billecart-Salmon box, Grand Cuvée.

I was that day's perfect picture of the hard landing of greed, even though the picture was all wrong. I was no banker, I had no idea where the box had come from, and greed never landed hard in the end anyway. It was the engine of that machine.

* * *

ON WEDNESDAY I WENT
back in to Randall Hood Beckett. Ben was out at a meeting with a client, but due in by ten, and Frank had commandeered his diary after that for me. Through the glass wall of Ben's office, mid-screen on his sleeping laptop, I could see the post-it note on which Frank had written in bold black pen ‘10am – Josh. No excuses. F'. The laptop was turned around, putting the note on show, and I couldn't know if Ben had left it at that angle, or Frank had turned it.

I had put the siege file aside the day before without going through all of it. I had yet to watch any of the DVDs. I had realised that time was short and that I needed to make some calls, so I had gone through my
media guide and pasted together a list of targets and their details.

When I turned up at the office there were red and blue marker pens on my desk, so I drew a grid on my whiteboard and wrote up my pitch list. Surely rule number one when spinning anything was to spin yourself first, and my big visible list said I meant business, I had a plan. I wasn't just the guy in the room with the boxes.

My first call was to QWeekend at the Courier-Mail. They heard me out and said, ‘You know, it's close. Normally we'd probably take it but we've run a few hero stories lately. And his dad rates as a bit of a white-shoe villain, but there were worse. I'm sure we'll do it in news, though. If he's getting the big gong on Monday, news'll give him a run on Tuesday. We'd have a photographer and reporter going along.'

I left messages on voicemail at the Weekend Australian and Financial Review magazines and, since Frank wanted a broad reach, I also called Who Weekly. I didn't know what line of work his six-to-fifty-staff clients were in but, if they had anywhere for customers to wait, chances were they would have Who Weekly. I had looked through some recent issues at Café Checocho and I asked for Aimee Duroux. On the strength of a couple of her stories, she looked like a good fit.

‘I think we might be up for this,' she said, once I had styled Ben as a self-effacing hero who had looked death in the eye. ‘If we can get some kind of exclusive. What else are you looking at doing?'

‘Well, it'll be news,' I told her, ‘so there'll be some coverage from the dailies. We could look at a magazine feature exclusive, maybe. If you're up for a feature. Like,
if you wanted to give it say, three or four pages and really flesh it out. I could email you some background stuff. He's got a good story to tell.'

‘Okay. Well, I think we might be interested.' Something distracted her then. ‘If you could send me the stuff, that'd be great. I think we're probably up for it, if it's all ours. I'll put it to the editorial team and get back to you. But send the stuff, yeah.'

I hung up, took my red marker pen and wrote ‘PROB FEATURE' on the whiteboard. I took a look at my radio targets and decided to start with the talk formats, feed the content hungry.

When I got to Ben's door at exactly ten, an itinerary was already beginning to come together. He was standing crumpling the post-it note from Frank in one hand and realigning his laptop on the desk with the other.

‘I've started to book in some interviews,' I told him. ‘We're going to need to spend some time together to get all this clear. I need to get a sense of the story you'll be telling.'

He threw the note towards the bin, but it hit the edge and fell to the floor.

‘It's not a story,' he said.

‘You know what I mean. We did media subjects together. You know what I mean by story.'

He nodded, and smiled in a way that said he was resigned to his fate. ‘Yeah.'

‘Are you avoiding this? Or avoiding me?' I couldn't read him yet. The new Ben had even made my memories of the old Ben slippery, less distinct. As he stood in front of me, he looked like someone who had
once played the role of Ben Harkin, but in a less than convincing amateur production. I could place someone like him in my past, but not this man, who seemed elegantly wounded.

He laughed, but not convincingly. ‘Not for a second. I'd be happy to put this in the past – the medal was definitely not my idea – but I'm not avoiding anything. It turns out the world doesn't stop because they start handing out medals. That's all.'

‘And after next week you
can
put it in the past. I've read the nomination paperwork. You deserve this, and people want you to get it. It might not feel like what you need right now, but maybe it'll help put it in the past, once it's done.' This was not unfamiliar territory, this mixture of cajoling and therapy, though it felt more contrived than usual telling it to Ben. ‘You're going to have to drop your guard, or look like you're dropping your guard. You're going to have to let something out, and I'm here to make that as painless as possible. To help you find a version of what happened that you can tell.'

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘I know.' He looked at me. He half-smiled again but his guard was up. ‘How weird that it's you, doing this.'

Behind me, there was a knock on the door. ‘Josh,' Selina's voice said as I turned. ‘Phone call for you. ABC TV, Australian Story.'

‘You're avoiding me, Josh,' Ben called out as I left. ‘Why are you avoiding me?'

I turned back, and he threw a ball of paper at me. It bounced off the glass and landed in the corner, near a filing cabinet. It was a forced gesture, a fake, and we both knew it.

Selina put the call through as I got to the door of my office.

‘I've looked at everything you've sent us and it looks like our kind of thing,' the producer said. I hadn't caught her name. ‘I'm happy to go to a production meeting with it. Who else can you get us apart from the medallist? Could we get other people who were involved? Maybe some family? A mentor?'

Yes, always yes. Keep them on the hook. ‘We've got plenty to choose from. I can line them up for you. There's people at the firm for a start. A couple of the partners. I can get you the partner Ben reports to, who was in the building at the time. And the one who got hit on the head. He's still got a scar.'

‘A visible scar?'

‘Sure. He's got practically no hair.'

‘Excellent.'

‘Harry Potter at fifty. That's what people have said. It's a jagged sort of scar going back from his forehead.'

‘We like that,' she said.

By the end of the call, I had another ‘PROBABLE' to write up on the whiteboard. I turned in my seat to write it, then swivelled back around to find Max Visser in my doorway in sky-blue lycra bike shorts, genitals like a pressed pigeon.

‘Hey, good work,' he said, looking at the board, the stink of exertion starting to infiltrate the room. Sweat ran from his chin and his elbows and dripped onto the carpet. ‘Australian Story, hey? That's the TV show?'

‘That's the one.' I pushed and rolled my chair back behind my desk and away from his anatomically correct crotch. ‘If it works out they'll probably want
you and Frank, so maybe we could have a talk. Once you're . . . ready.'

‘Ready? Oh, yeah.' He looked down at the vibrant Gatorade shirt that stuck damply to his stomach, pink flesh showing through the white parts of the lycra. ‘One of my kids is sick, so I started off the day at home. There's a shower at the other end of the floor. Did they tell you that?'

‘No. Well, I don't want to keep you from it.'

‘Yeah, right. There's a place near here where they make great coffee. Why don't we go there once I'm decent and I've checked there aren't any fires needing putting out?' He retreated, leaving a dark damp patch on the floor.

Ben was still the issue. I could line up all the interviews and prep Max and the others without a fuss but, without getting Ben worked out, I had only trouble ahead. I put the cap on the pen, held back from the next call.

Selina was waving her hand in front of her face as I approached her work station.

‘Phew, man sweat,' she said, as if it was still coming back at her, like a disturbed hive of bees. ‘How is it that it's okay to wear that stuff, just because there's a bike involved? Allegedly. Sometimes I turn round and, there it is, a face full of package. I swear he sneaks up on me. How do men think that, just because it's got the name of some European bank across it, it's acceptable? Blog about that some day, would you? He's also got a totally white pair. Is anything more wrong than white lycra? Does anyone look good in white lycra? Brazilian dancers don't look good in white lycra.'

‘You should see my floor where he sweated. It's like I just got a puppy.'

She laughed. She pushed her chair away from her keyboard, and turned so that she was facing me. She had three photos on her desk, two of fluffy white cats and one featuring her, probably drunk, hugging a man with a shaved head and thrusting her hand towards the camera to show off an engagement ring with a splinter of diamond. The thrust put her hand out of focus, and the diamond was mostly a dot of white light.

‘Is there any chance I could see some of Rob Mueller's legal file?' I said to her. ‘In case there's anything in it that would help me get Ben ready for next week. I'm not expecting that there will be, but I want to cover all the bases. I don't know what's confidential and what's not, though, so if I can't that's fine. No big deal.'

‘I'll give it a go,' she said. ‘It's probably not one to take home with you, though.'

‘No, I'd figured that.'

She wrote herself a note. ‘Now do you want me to fumigate your room if the Tour de Max has been in there? I have spray.'

* * *

IT WAS AN ALTOGETHER
more presentable Max Visser who met me soon after for coffee. I had tried again with Ben in the meantime, but he was out of his office. He seemed to be nowhere on the floor. He had got past us somehow.

Max took me to a coffee shop around the corner where they knew him by name and beverage. It was dark inside, and wood-panelled, and we took a booth up the back, beneath a black-and-white image of one of the market stalls that had been near the site a century before. The stallholder was gaunt, with a moustache like Henry Lawson and cheekbones that cast shadows. He was selling knives, and meeting the camera with a fixed unsmiling stare.

Max sat back in his seat and leaned his head against the wall behind him.

‘Sleepless night at our place,' he said. ‘My youngest daughter's not well. She finally got to sleep around six, by which time I couldn't, so I started work instead.' He glanced over to the counter, where they were making our coffees. ‘So, Australian Story. I like that show. I like the way they get a bunch of people on, and you really feel like you're getting the detail behind the story. From the horses' mouths.'

‘Exactly. So I think it could be good for this. And I think you'd make a good horse. I'd want to steer them towards you because I think you can humanise the story, and because Ben reports to you. We could cast you in a kind of mentoring role.'

‘I don't know that Ben looks for a lot of mentoring.' He smiled wryly. I could remember the Ben who knew it all, and perhaps he hadn't gone away.

‘No, but you know what I mean. I'm sure we can make it work.'

He thought about it for a while.

‘I think you'd come up very well on TV,' I said. ‘And you do work with Ben.'

‘Yeah, I do.' He had a sachet of sugar in his hand and he was tapping one end of it on the table. ‘And we'll be working into the night tonight. We've got a dinner with a client and some Koreans he's trying to tie a deal up with.'
He noticed he was tapping the sugar sachet, and he set it down. ‘I don't know about Ben. There's plenty I can say about him, but it's all pretty impersonal. I can't say that I know much about him outside Randalls. I don't think he's even got a photo on his desk. Some people, you get to know their whole lives inside out in the first five minutes. But not Ben. I can talk about him at work, though. And I can talk about the incident. About how it played out anyway.'

‘So, tell me a bit about that. What could you tell Australian Story?'