The Fix (11 page)

‘So what was it like for you afterwards? It doesn't seem to have been easy.'

‘What was it like? I've got no idea how to describe what it was like. One day, actually one night, I went up and down the street and took free Toilet Duck samples out of all the mailboxes. Why? Why? I've got no idea. So I wouldn't have to go to a shop to buy it? I don't know. I wasn't even aware I was doing it, and then suddenly I was in the foyer with my pockets full of samples. I came in here and locked the door for two days after that. Until I could account for everything I was doing again, every minute.' He was looking around the room, picturing himself there on those two days. ‘I thought about having another life. Maybe delivering stuff. Going round in a van screwing in new light globes – there's a guy who does that. It's an actual job. How about that?'

‘It's pretty extreme outsourcing.' He had said no to therapy. I was guarding against sounding therapeutic, and I had defaulted to glib. Default. Jett said she had
defaulted
to cowgirl. I could play our conversation through, entirely. Every word of it was still there.

‘There's a whole lot of stuff like that going on,' Ben said, in the world outside my head, my selfish head. ‘Coffee carts, Gutter Vac. I could be the Gutter Vac guy. There are all these jobs where it's just you and the van and the mobile phone. But it's all practical stuff, and it turns out I don't have a clue about anything practical. You can get lost in these suburbs, you know. And do all kinds of things. There's a story – or maybe an allegation – that the fourth-largest music piracy site in the world is run out of an unassuming brick house in Bellbowrie. Fortunately I kept the city job. Things still feel different, I guess. But I'm okay. And Rob Mueller, since that was your question . . . Maybe it was his one clear way out. Maybe there's a point where every other way forward gets sabotaged. Or you just run out of possibilities . . .' He left it there, as if the idea couldn't be finished. ‘Hey, you're looking for an oven, aren't you? Come and take a look at this.'

He led me across the living area to the kitchenette.

‘I thought he was crazy,' I said.

‘Yeah, well. That too. I already said he was crazy, didn't I?' Ben was down on his knees, one hand on the handle of the oven door. ‘You should get one of these. Miele. It's triple glass so it's never hot to touch. Matt finish too. Nice. He stroked the glass. ‘Not that I'm much of a cook.'

I didn't know if the oven had been used at all. I
couldn't even be certain that it was an oven, rather than an oven-look design feature, red enamelled steel with its square of matt glass and a long anodised rod for a handle. I wanted to open the door, just to prove there was an oven behind it.

A car horn sounded outside. My cab had arrived.

‘We'll talk more about the siege, okay?' I said to him as he stood up. ‘We've got a few days.'

‘Sure. Here, let me take your glass.' He set both our glasses down on the empty granite counter, and then said, ‘Oh, hang on a second.' He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. He pulled out a cabcharge ticket. ‘You should have one of these. To get home. Let Randall Hood Beckett pick up the tab.'

He handed it over, and I took it. Perhaps it was a considerate act on his part but it felt like largesse, as if he had just handed me money, tipped me for some unknown and probably menial service before dismissing me from his designer life and sending me off into the night.

‘I bumped into Eloise's mother a few weeks ago,' I told him, though I knew it was a cheap shot. Eloise was not a fair exit line. ‘Complete coincidence. She said Eloise is in Sydney now and doing well in HR, “but she's not the Eloise you'd remember”. That's how she put it.'

Ben nodded, and kept his face close to blank. ‘That cab's not going to stay forever,' he said.

* * *

THE CAB TURNED LEFT
and then left again, merging with the traffic and the world given over to drunks and clubbers, bottle smashers and shoeless girls who had lost the plot.

I met Eloise through Ben, when he first lifted his habitual veil of secrecy and invited me to a party at their flat. I hadn't known him long and I went to see who his friends were, as much as anything, and how his life worked. Most of the guests were Eloise's, though, and Ben's seemed to have been picked almost at random, as if he had a share of numbers to make up. There was no one from TV, or Formula One, though I didn't know to look for them then. It was Eloise's party, I realised some time later. It wasn't a Ben party at all.

They had a two-bedroom place near uni, in an old block from the sixties or seventies. The pavers of the path that led in from the front gate had long ago been lifted by poinciana roots, and the railings on the steps had a coat of new green paint over blooming rust. Ben had not been there long. Eloise had stated a preference for a female flatmate in her notice on the campus accommodation board, but Ben projected fastidiousness and never looked like someone with a posse of boozy mates. She told me later that she had thought he might be gay. I never knew why Ben had moved in, why he happened to be looking at the board at that time and had torn off a tab with Eloise's number on it.

I met her late in the evening, just as I was about to cut my losses and head to the bus stop. I had drunk most of the bottle of cheap red that I had brought, spilled a little while dancing and pulverised my share of Jatz into the carpet. I was the standard unremarkable partygoer
in the world of student parties, but she noticed me anyway and introduced herself. She had fought with her boyfriend and he had left with someone else. I kissed her when I had the chance. I missed the second-last bus and then the last one. I slept on the floor of her room, on an ancient brown shag-pile rug at the foot of her bed, because she had worked out she was drunk by then and said she'd prefer to make her next mistake sober.

I fell for Eloise in a big way. She seemed to be into me too. We loved and hated the same things, and usually to the same degree. Red wine over white, indie bands over stadium acts, the book over the movie. In our first conversation, she said she thought palimpsest was a fair description of the relationship between the book and movie of The Name of the Rose. We had both seen the word in the opening titles, and looked it up afterwards.

It worked for more than a year, or I thought it did. I started telling her I didn't want it to end. Maybe I rushed it, or rushed her somewhere she wasn't sure about going. Or maybe the future just didn't look the same to her. I had turned the dial to ‘crush' and perhaps she saw me as nothing special.

‘You could get a crush on that Jett chick in five seconds. You probably already did.' Ben had talked as if he knew me completely, and as though we would both be amused by his snide remarks. I wanted him to be wrong, but he read me well enough and it felt as if I had laid a weakness bare to someone who could choose to be an enemy.

When I got home I knew I wouldn't sleep, so I got online and checked responses to my recent blogs. I had the intention of interacting, as I was supposed to, but
it turned out I couldn't care enough. It felt even more pointless than it usually did, and I was happy for it to go on without me. I fell asleep on the sofa with late-night TV doing its worst and cookie fortunes on my lap. ‘You will enjoy good health and be surrounded by luxury . . . A pleasant surprise is in store for you.'

I made a slow start to Thursday. I missed breakfast TV and moved straight to mornings, through which infomercials had long ago spread with a metastatic force. Among the toning devices and multi-function peelers and diet schemes, I found myself paying far too much attention to a classic package of low-res eighties video games, eighty-four in one, with free second console and light gun for credit card orders. ‘That's under three dollars a game,' the spruiker said, his eyes bulging at the prospect of the hours that might be blissfully wiled away.

I dragged my laptop over, typed ‘Eloise MacLean' into Google and then deleted it. I turned the TV off and added the two new fortunes to the pile, though I was sure I had had them both before, so far without either change in my luck.

I opened the siege file from Randall Hood Beckett.

By day three, the media focus had moved from Rob Mueller to Ben. The headline was a quote from one of the law-firm staff: ‘He Saved All Our Lives'. There was a photo of Ben taken outside the building. He was in fresh clothes and his arms were folded. The wind had swept some hair across his eyes. ‘This is a very brave young man,' a police sergeant was quoted as saying.

I had never seen that in him. I was still making room for bravery in the picture I had of Ben from years before.
I was bringing grudges to bear, and a mean spirit, as I sat in my shabby flat among unpacked boxes and a life without a plan.

* * *

‘HOW ABOUT THAT?'
Selina said from behind me. I had just written ‘CONFIRMED' on the whiteboard next to Who Weekly. ‘You do realise we put you in the junk room, and that old whiteboard was the only piece of junk that was too big to put somewhere else?' She scanned the names on the board. ‘That'll keep him on his toes. You've got him on
all
the TV newses?'

‘Well, they're all sending crews, and they know Ben's the story. I've talked it through with them. They're as confirmed as they can be. You can't totally confirm TV news.' Who Weekly was a feature, locked in, probably three pages. I had just sent them hi-res news pics.

‘He's out of his meeting and back in his office.' She leaned against the doorframe and the chains around her neck rearranged themselves. They made a sound like a pocketful of change. ‘If you want to grab him, now would be a good time.'

Ben was at his laptop working on a document when I got to his door. He held up one hand, then went back to typing at high speed. He hit a full stop theatrically and pushed his chair away from the desk, looking up at me properly for the first time.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I was on a roll. So, have you blogged about last night yet?'

‘I've already got a panicky email from Max practically begging me not to and telling me how sincere he was about it being karaoke. Then there's the issue of how to write the piece without looking like a racist.'

‘Racist? It wasn't the Koreans who came up with it. Didn't they get the idea from those Aussies in Manila?' He reached out and straightened up his pen. ‘Lucky there was nude pool to come to the rescue. Who'd have thought?'

‘Did you get my email?'

‘No, I've been out. When did you . . .' He looked back at the screen, checked for it and found it. He read it quickly. ‘News. TV news. Is that really . . .' I had sent him my pitch to the TV news reporters. It was headed ‘He Saved All Our Lives'. ‘Anything could happen with TV news, like . . .' He seemed to get stuck there. He looked at the screen again, and frowned.

‘Like what? Like you could be on it?'

He shut the document. ‘There were TV crews on the day, when it happened. That was the last thing I saw before the ambulance doors shut. TV cameras. I didn't . . . I'm really not sure about this medal, the more I think about it.' He looked at me, as if I could somehow let him off the hook.

‘Look, this is going to work.' Tough love, part of the job. I was used to doubt surfacing. ‘You deserve a way through it, and we'll find it. That's why I'm here. And I've got a major appliance riding on it. It has to work.'

‘Well, if you put it like that . . . We can't have you living on toast. But how far does it have to go? Honestly. Between you and me. How much of the
whole thing will I have to get into? How much of the father thing?'

‘It'll be okay.'

It wasn't just the job, I realised. I wasn't sitting there working my way through a script because there was an appliance at the end of it. I had taken the job for money, but his fears were real, and mine to fix. Ben needed me. More than tailor-made suits and three-hundred-dollar haircuts and designer appliances. At uni, when his father's most recent disgrace had finally lost the eye of the media, he gave me a bottle of Hill of Grace that he said had ended up in his car. ‘It's not a fair swap for what you did when the shit was at its deepest,' he said. ‘Not a lot of other people stuck by me. You kept calling. A lot of semi-famous people didn't.'

The bottle was dusty when he gave it to me. It was from his father's cellar, I was sure. At first I thought it was too good to open, and then I hated him and couldn't. It had ended up in a box somewhere at my parents' house, with junk.

Ben was waiting for more, for the next line in my script and some details that would show I had found him a way through the week ahead.

‘It really will be okay. I gave Who an exclusive, so that takes other magazines out. They'll do a good, warm story. We'll keep it to one serious TV piece, and I think we've scored there with Australian Story. And there'll be news coverage on the day and around it. Some print, some TV, some radio interviews. But they're short. We'll work on some messages you can stick to for them, some straightforward things to say. It's all fine. There's only two big stories.'

He nodded. ‘Okay. Good.'

‘And don't be too concerned about them. Australian Story will be one longish interview, probably. They'll talk to Max and Frank as well, and I'll be putting some time in with the two of them to get them ready for it. And you and I can do a walk-through on the weekend, room-to-room on the thirty-eighth floor, with you taking me through what happened. As far as Who Weekly goes, they want to mix it up a bit, get a look at the real you. “Hero at leisure” photoshoot stuff.'

He looked amused. ‘Really? And what do I do for leisure?'

‘It turns out mini-golf.'

He laughed, and leaned back in his chair, putting his hands behind his head. ‘Okay, this is much better now.'