Off the Record

by Craig Sherborne

  Crossing fingers is just powerless superstition. No sooner did I take my position than the stock market fizzled. Not a ‘black swan’ event like 2008. Stock markets go up again but in the down phase the air of helplessness chills the soul. Your super gets ravaged and the world is not to be trusted, you’re reminded. That God you’ve imagined as an absent parent was probably here all the time watching us with his own dead glitter.

  Pry was not affected in terms of stock value—it’s a private not a publicly listed company, has a commodity that transcends the economy: crime. Or so goes our optimistic theory. Crime is the ultimate entertainment. Perverse, yes, but that’s what people like. For all their sheen of decency, there must be rot at the heart of them.

  *

  My boss is Justin Nash, executive chairman. There’s an editor-in-chief—Jenny Angelou—but it’s Justin who pays the fortnightly wages. A man the same age as me but there ends the equality. Power does not align more fairly due to ages. Justin is the employer and that difference can never be squared. I could be a genius (which I know I am not; or maybe a fraction of a genius like we all think in our daydreams) but that counts for little against Justin’s inherited money. I have worked at this dark art for twenty-five years. Justin has five to his name, all of them in marketing. But he is the son of Rob Nash, Non-Metro News Group founder, dead three years ago from a coronary. Of his four children Justin is the only one in the media. The others do nothing but live off their trust fund. To his credit, Pockets (the mock-moniker for our bankroller) wants to work instead of equestrian pursuits or yachting. He had his wastrel years, which industry gossip called drug-related. If true, the details will always remain secret. In our game we expose the sinfulness of others but never the sins of our own.

  True or not, Pockets was my colleague now and that was all that mattered. While it was Jenny who chose me, it was Pockets who made the thrilling shares suggestion. Who held out his hand, shook mine and called me partner. He said, ‘Welcome aboard, Words.’ Teeth white as bathroom porcelain when he grinned. I expected like all sons he wanted to best his father’s legacy. Be the city entrepreneur instead of the rural one. Bucolic old media—newspapers, radio, TV—was fine for his father’s generation but not the twenty-first century. Pry would be, in the press-release lingo, an ‘interlocutor of the modern masses’. If you spoke to Justin he put it less grandly: ‘In my experience, give voice to the fucking voiceless, that’s the business we’re in, agreed?’

  That ‘experience’, as far as I could gauge, consisted of stints at family assets such as Wagga Radio 2CM, a country-music magazine called Strums and Drawls and the Outback Beef Seller Gazette. It did not extend to editorial meetings, that was clear on my first day working for him. For proprietors to attend such meetings, well, it simply isn’t done, it contravenes etiquette. It is anathema to our journo creed. A separation of powers such as nations have is the normal constitutional arrangement. At pry’s morning parley Pockets waltzed in as if he owned the joint—which, of course, he did. He took his place at the head of the glass oval, put his ballpoint at the centre of his pad like the needle of a homemade compass. He didn’t speak, he cupped his chin in his fists the better to watch and listen. He nodded to Jenny, ‘I’m ready.’

  I sat up stiffly and rolled my shoulders, about to be irate. Surely Jenny would not tolerate Pockets’ intrusion. She might have been born and raised in Dubbo where habits are more countrified and laissez-faire but surely this was not the way one did things. I said as much, my palms flattened on the see-through table. When I finished I leant back as if relieved of a burden. When I lifted my hands their sweat prints took a second to evaporate. I thought, What have I got myself into? I wanted to mutter a petty put-down—‘This is Mickey Mouse.’ Jenny touched my forearm to explain.

  ‘Words, you’re a shareholder, are you not?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I am too, aren’t I? And Justin is, naturally. Which makes us all proprietors, does it not? If we all leave the meeting there’ll be nobody in the room.’

  ‘True.’ I laughed, embarrassed by her common sense.

  *

  Pockets’ work-attire standards were not what I was used to. No fine-wool armour of a single-breasted suit. No white shirt and silver cufflinks. No primary-colour tie and black brogues with rawhide soles walked to pale scuffedness. Instead, he looked en route to a casual outing: polo top, jeans and Gel Kayano runners. Ankle socks that showed his chalky shin skin. He let his greying hair stay uncombed over his forehead and his collar. This didn’t age him the way straggly grey usually ages men—I keep my neck hairs scraped smooth with my razor. Pockets’ jaw was fashionably, greyly stubbled. If I allow myself stubble I look derelict. Pockets, by contrast, looked decorated with icing. It served as a reminder of his sunned, outdoorsy complexion. So did the shape of his excellent torso which the material of his shirts gripped to, displaying lean arms and proper chest muscles. He did not leave his shirt tails out to hide waist flab as I did. I vowed to myself to lose a few kilos—more jogs around the block and maybe some gym circuits.

  Now I mimic Pockets’ dress sense, just for good politics. French cuffs and a fastened top button are not in keeping with pry’s office dimensions. On a floor of two hundred, formal attire betokens senior ranking. Pry has fifteen staff—the who’s-who is established, no need to reinforce status with a pinstripe. Six full-time reporters and four casuals. Two advertising reps who help the five people in admin. Three in production—design, layout, sub-editing. All aged under thirty—I feel like a child-minder. Male to female ratio is half and half. Jenny insisted on that and I’ve no argument. Each view pry as a stepping stone to a bigger outfit. They don’t make it public but ambition is always obvious: a person switches from cheerful to surly at a faster rate. They’re impatient with tasks they consider beneath them.

  *

  The office spans two storeys of a warehouse conversion in Windsor. I’m on the second floor behind partitions that I keep parted to have the journos in my line of sight. Pockets and Jenny have a ground-floor section which is glassed off and hardly provides privacy. There’s a courtyard down there and any smoker can use it, but no smoker wants to do that, have those eyes on them while smoking not working.

  When I stand up from my desk I have a view of the train station. Not the trains themselves, just the brown walls, the zig-zags of white in the brickwork from repaired mortaring. There’s a bike park to the left where clay has been heaped to make jumps. To the right Chapel Street traffic clots and frees at the lights like a neon bloodstream. Beyond that a crane bows mantis-style at half-built apartments. It’s a quaint part of town, cottage-type dwellings in the side streets, exotic eateries. I have no excuse to skip meals. They even have masseurs, legit ones. Twenty dollars for twenty minutes, neck and shoulders. Of all the places I’ve worked this one feels good for me, both my spirits and physically. I said so in an email to Emma. I signed off, ‘Yours forever, Callum. XX.’

  She replied, ‘I’m pleased for you.’ No kisses. No affection.

  Across the road from the station there’s a fire-brigade complex: a long glass frontage of fold-up doors behind which four red trucks gleam ready to go. Boots beside the wheels, yellow coveralls concertinaed above the empty ankles.

  It probably irks most residents to have sirens going at all hours but it’s useful for pry. A reporter can be dispatched to follow if a quiet news day is shaping. Perhaps only fat catching alight in a restaurant kitchen but such accidents can worsen fortuitously. A decent smartphone will get you a photo for the website. Or a video that looks more real the fuzzier it is.

  If three fire trucks set out it might be a tragedy they’re heading to. Paramedics will join in and I’ll send off two staff. Yesterday African migrants at the housing estate were brawling with the Anglos. A dumpster was torched but no one injured. Distasteful as it is, the obvious angle was ‘race war’. I used it and felt the beginnings of a vodka craving. I blocked the urge with a good-hearted piece pasted from Reuters: Doctor
s Without Borders and its latest Congo mission. I included the phone number and encouraged donations, which was unethical.

  My good-heartedness was temporary. A reporter, Katie Brooks, turned twenty-seven on Sunday and celebrated that evening by eating out with her parents and granny. One of those pricey places down by the esplanade: degustation and denatured atmosphere. They sat near the window, which was a bad idea. Beggars on the footpath ruined everything. Not the fact of beggars staring in at patrons—it’s uncomfortable, yes, makes one feel guilty. More the Fs and Cs of their drunken language. One minute sitting cross-legged as if life had cowed them. Next effing and fighting and pissing in the gutter.

  ‘And their possessions, Words,’ Katie complained. ‘One guy, he’s like a major-looking dero. But he’s, like, sitting and typing on a laptop. No kidding. I mean, like, what’s going on! I mean, it can’t have been stolen, surely, or he’d have been hiding it. I mean, our deros now have technology. We’ve got prosperous deros.’

  She scratched her crown, dislodging her hair comb. Peeled off her slit-eyed glasses and made a flicking, cudgel movement in the air. She said she had in mind a ‘professional beggars’ story. She’d watched for two hours and done her sums and a beggar begging aggressively, hand outstretched to encumber pedestrians, received a gold coin every five minutes. Silver coins offered in between.

  ‘By my eye that’s like ten dollars maybe an hour,’ she said. ‘Two hundred a week. It’s like a job, Words. And they’ll be on welfare. It’s outrageous.’

  I suggested she hunt up government reports on city poverty. Or the charities, they keep stats on that type of thing. Get quotes from police. And of course, quotes from practising beggars. Social workers will say these people have a mental illness, which is probably true, so she had better include it.

  ‘But put it down the bottom—mental illness is off-putting.’

  I took this idea into the editorial meeting, number six on a list of ten stories. As lists go, it was a fair to ho-hum showing. Suspected insurance fraud at a clinic of dental surgeons. A road rage at Dromana had left a school-bus driver in a coma. If he died the yarn would be better.

  None of these were my stories, they were staff generated. My managerial role requires astute delegation. I am aware, however, that ho-hum lists reflect my stewardship. It is not enough to let staff carry the news-gathering burden. I must make contributions. Summon scandal from thin air, or an uplifting or enraging incident. Tip-offs from the public are heaven-sent if you can get them. But pry’s public is small. Or ‘building’, to put it in marketing lingo. Subscribers total only five thousand at present, though we pad that out to twelve thousand by boasting of hits and likes. We speak of ‘early days’ and ‘promising feedback’. As for ad revenue, we say it’s ‘steady’, which means struggling. Our niche is national crime with a Melbourne bias, so our audience ranges across all demographics. We don’t pitch exclusively to ABs (the rich and well-read), ignoring the lesser classes as unnecessary. Mind you, ABs do attract the ‘gold’ advertising: TAG Heuer, BMW. None of this is my concern. I don’t work that way. I don’t decide how stories are treated based on car and watch sales. I simply keep in mind that ABs think. They enjoy a felicitous phrase, hence my wordsmithing.

  Also on the day’s list was a gritty tale Ryan Scullen presented. He’s the youngest journo at a mere twenty-one. He could be fifteen by the look of him: spotty skin barely whiskered, teeth bands bridling his overbite. Yet, I’ll grant him this, the boy has gumption. On rumours bikies had bought into a King Street strip club rookie Ryan strolled past bouncers, flashed his pry card and demanded to see the establishment’s manager. ‘Is it true you have gang members for your silent partners? Is it true a convicted rapist is among your shareholders?’

  He was chested off the premises but had the wits to memorise the purple-dark surroundings, sufficient for me to elevate sleaze to garish poetry:

  Take a look at the guy halfway up a ladder shining spotlights onto the thighs of a tabletop dancer. Is that ‘Dutch’ Van der Hout, who served eight years for sex crimes? It’s him all right, skin tattoo-blue, head shaved skull-white with street-fighting scars for engravings.

  I read this aloud to Pockets and Jenny and they approved with slow nodding, their bottom lips stuck out, somewhere between laughing and pouting.

  Another of Pockets’ traits is his humour, his attempt at it. A mix of childish piss-taking and snideness. My list was ho-hum, yes, but far from a worthless offering. Major news groups would sign off on it happily, give it the imprimatur of ‘our bread and butter’. Pockets kept nodding and pouting. He scratched his jaw, the sound of static, and said, ‘I guess we can’t sack you on the basis of this.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Just revving you up.’

  ‘That’s a solid list.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s just, is it going to boost our numbers? I look at the numbers and I’m yet to see much movement. Where’s evidence our audience is growing? There isn’t any.’

  ‘That’s not my lists.’

  ‘What is it then? Don’t lists define us?’

  Jenny leant forward. ‘This bikie story’s been legalled?’

  She was asking not out of fear of defamation—what bikie had good standing enough to sue? She wanted to snip the tension in the room lest it became more animated. And her question was fair, it was her job to ask it. She was editor and had a criminology diploma to boot.

  ‘I’ll have it checked if you want,’ I said.

  ‘Bikies have no reputation to lose.’

  ‘Defo risk, zero, if you ask me.’

  ‘I agree. I like your intro to it, Words.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Has a nice swing.’

  ‘I think so.’

  Jenny has a hybrid accent the way some travelled Australians do. She pronounces ‘swing’ as ‘swang’, a legacy of her American period. ‘Sound’ was ‘sarnd’ in the posher English manner. It doesn’t grate as pretentious or weaken her presence as confusing. It suits her air of worldliness. Her dark hair is cut short. Her eyes large and brown peer deeply into yours, measuring your mind and weighing your opinions. She favours pale dresses and flat-heeled shoes that say, I’m tall enough, I do not need extra inches. I like her. In a professional way. I do look at her looks, but I just look. I’m not about to act out revisited failings. Even if I wanted to I’m sure I give off an obvious taint of the tried and untrustworthy husband.

  At the next meeting my list was treated the same—the nodding, the pouting, the pushed-out bottom lip. I’d assigned Mai Tran to cover the courts for a month. She has a commerce background, once worked at the tax office. What I wanted from her was money crime and rorts. Rip-offs that gave the reader a ‘this could happen to me’ fear. Made them read on for assurance the villain was punished for his frauds. She delivered two pieces I marked as ‘strongish’. First, a migration agent who’d stolen client funds and disappeared. Mai, being Vietnamese, was incensed: ‘It could have been my relatives.’

  She put in hours with victims, had heartbreaking interviews. She got a lead that the agent had switched his assets to his wife’s name and his business licence was obtained using false credentials.

  The second story was a will dispute between two siblings. We couldn’t name them—suppression orders from the judge in court—but we didn’t need to, given the readable nature: a brother accusing his sister of killing their father. Said she’d done it by hiding his insulin. The old man had vowed to leave his millions to charity, called both of them ‘parasites’ and ‘indolent bludgers’. I set the scene by imagining the domestic dynamics:

  Dad is dead and now they’re fighting over his things. The weak son who never had a job in his life. The callous daughter who couldn’t bear to nurse the old boy. She wanted him dead and only visited for his money.

  Ryan Scullen was hoping for menacing phone calls from the strip-club bikies, but bikies are smart, too smart to gift him a ‘pry journalist is threaten
ed’ story.

  ‘The list is good,’ said Jenny.

  ‘It is good,’ I said, lacing my fingers. I muttered it again: ‘It’s good,’ and wished I hadn’t. I sounded unconvinced, defensive. I looked at Pockets. ‘And you, Justin? You don’t think so?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘There’s no but, Words. We can only report what’s out there to report. Would be good to get ownership of a story.’

  ‘Ownership?’

  ‘Something big,’ he said. ‘Something uniquely ours. That we’ve got the inside running on.’

  ‘We all wish that,’ I said, letting a tired sigh blow the sentence from me.

  Then I made myself sit up straight. I chopped the table softly with the side of my palm to affect confidence, certainty instead of insipidness, dithering. ‘It will happen. Just takes time.’

  ‘You think?’ Pockets said.

  I detected vulnerability in him suddenly, as if he was genuinely deferring to me and my old-hand status.

  Then he said, ‘You think?’ once again, but this time I construed it as a worrying code. His ‘You think?’ was not really a question, it was a statement of hope. My glow went dim. What if his vulnerability had a financial source, an indication that pry needed revenue, needed it now? Patience is a virtue but we could no longer afford it?

  It was not my job to keep track of accounts. My minor shareholding was for my set of talents. Pockets was the bankroller, with Jenny guiding him. Pockets would not have money trouble, surely. A man of great means—one hundred, two hundred million—a man like that is not fooled by stock markets and their precarious promises. They have advisers who instruct them. They have diversified portfolios and if the world dies they still have a fortune tucked away.