Off the Record

by Craig Sherborne

  In Gordon’s case this was simply not possible—for all I knew he’d seen my mantelpiece photos. I decided to trespass like a common burglar and to run like the devil if I had to.

  The house was Art Deco with a bastardised life. Porch tiles of modern slate slabs instead of inch-square ceramic. The old windows stained glass but double-glazed and with metal awnings. The high arches browed with rolled-up canvas blinds.

  The driveway was pebbly and I kept to the side so as not to crunch my way to the bushes. Three rooms were lit up. One upstairs, two down. I settled among the lavenders for waiting. Come on, you silly old prick, I haven’t got all night! I wanted to trample his hollyhocks and rip out his daisies. My bladder was full enough to loosen my trousers and let a warm stream batter them. I strained the last drop out, every drip of revenge.

  There he was in the upstairs room. I presumed it was him, elderly, defective. I thought defective out of malice not from obvious evidence. He walked like a normal man. He was not stooped as I’d hoped to see. Not pot-bellied or atrophy-skinny. He turned out the light and his silhouette levitated down the stairs.

  I crouched closer to the window, knocked a watering can but he didn’t hear. I hadn’t seen a man wear a smoking jacket before, like an old movie actor, green braid lapels and a belt of gold rope. A black turtleneck rising to his jaw, concealing any jowls that might be hanging there. A man I would call an elegant gentleman if I had objectivity.

  I hadn’t thrown a stone through a window since childhood. Even then it was a derelict house and probably haunted. I fingered about for some loose brick from the lavender border. I aimed at a spot between the widest strips of leadlight. I hated him more now for bringing out this delinquent impulse. I put the brick down and turned to go but caught my foot in a curl of plastic irrigation. Over I tipped—crash!—into the roses. Thorns and sticks scratching my face and arms. I yelled Fuck! and Fuck! again. My skin was skewered and there was no time to be careful. I jerked myself free and tugged a branch from my hair. The front-door light flicked on. I clenched my teeth, yanked my leg out of the razory wood. I stayed on hands and knees because the door was opening and I had crawling to do before I reached thick shrub cover. A garden lamp lit up as I scampered out the gate. I didn’t look back to see if Gordon was in pursuit. I got in my car but didn’t start the engine. I put the gear in neutral, used the incline of the street to drift away in silence with no headlights.

  One time I drove like this for three streets before ignition. I’d followed the governor’s son and watched him smoke drugs. Hills are a blessing—you’re a ghost car in the darkness as good as your number plate missing.

  13

  I explained the scratches this way to nosy Katie: last night I disturbed burglars in the neighbour’s yard. I gave chase but lost them in the brambles of Paddock Gardens. I sounded so convincing I almost believed me. They weren’t major scars—they’d be gone in a day or two. I’d applied Vitamin E cream thickly to speed the healing: if Gordon told Emma he’d heard an intruder in his garden, one sight of the scratches and she’d say, ‘Damn you, Callum.’ Katie said the longest scratch down my left cheek looked like a duelling scar. You don’t hear ‘duelling scar’ mentioned in this effeminate century—a badge of honour for today’s men is a Daffodil Day ribbon. Perhaps she was flirting. You have to be careful how you take these things. You flirt back and it’s harassment. I’ve done stories about it, seen lawsuits and fines.

  Everything had been arranged for the stoning. The target would be the Faithflock Chapel, an inner-city gathering of Gen-Y evangelists. They prayed in a town hall on weekends and Wednesdays, with a rock band for hymns and preachers in jeans wailing to Jesus. Corporate rich kids from the office towers repenting their sins in public. What sins? laughed Katie. Spilling guava juice on their Prada?

  ‘I’m ready to go Wednesday. The evening sermon,’ she said. ‘And I’ve hired a beggar, Words, and she’s really nutty. Late twenties and bonkers. If she tried to dob us in there’s not a person on the planet who would believe her.’

  ‘How much does she want?’

  ‘A hundred bucks. And a bus ticket to America. She thinks you can take a bus across water. I told you she’s bonkers.’

  ‘Well done. She sounds perfect. If she turns up.’

  ‘I know the bridge she lives under. She’s there each day I go jogging. I bought her smokes and a burger. She thinks I’m her doctor one minute, the next minute her mum.’

  Pockets said he was thrilled but he was scratching his forearm with no rash or bug bites there to require such gouging. Was he going to jelly at his first journo transgression?

  No, it’s not that, he said. It was his wife causing trouble. She insisted Jenny Angelou be sacked from pry. He was forbidden to work with her. Was to cut off all contact.

  ‘To be honest with you, Words, I’m relieved it’s come to this. Nothing focuses the mind like an ultimatum. I’ll buy out Jenny’s shares, do some sweet-talking, smooth things over.’

  He raised his head as if he’d made a decision but there was no confidence in his voice, just bravado.

  ‘And I’ll be editor,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘That’s the plan. We both agreed.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘We shook on it at Intercourse.’

  ‘Absolutely. I remember.’

  ‘That’s why I’m doing a stoning for you, as a goodwill gesture. I’ll show you the ropes.’

  ‘I appreciate it. You want to know something?’

  ‘Depends on what it is. Some knowledge I do want. Some knowledge I don’t.’

  ‘I made my own lunch today.’

  I frowned. That’s all you can do with absurdities.

  He took a brown paper bag from under his desk. Unrolled the neatly folded top, slow and ceremonious, took out cling-wrapped sandwiches.

  ‘I made my own lunch this morning. With my own hands. These ham and tomato sandwiches are more than just sandwiches. They’re a symbol. They’re something I created myself. Something I haven’t inherited like money. They haven’t been handed to me on a plate but brought to work by me in a bag.’

  ‘That’s placing a lot of responsibility on a ham and tomato sandwich.’

  Should I simply let this strange moment pass, I wondered.

  ‘Wednesday night, then?’ I said. ‘The stoning?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he replied.

  He put his sandwiches back in the bag and folded the crinkled top shut. His office smelt of bread and mustard. He sat in his wicker chair and cupped his chin in his palms.

  ‘Are you not well today?’ I asked.

  He sat there stilly and did not reply.

  I asked him again and he told me.

  ‘The thing is, what I haven’t told you is that Jenny’s pregnant. Was pregnant up until a few days ago. There was a miscarriage.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Makes it complicated. I have to consider her feelings.’

  ‘You’ll still sack her, though. I’m with your wife on this one.’

  ‘It’s the principle of the matter.’

  ‘You’re about to do a stoning using beggars.’

  ‘That’s different. It’s not personal. It’s someone else. It’s a street person. This is Jenny and I don’t want to upset her, given her state.’

  ‘I’m not trying to tell you how to run your life. But—’

  I sat down opposite to speak man to man and see if using my fakes swayed him as with Emma.

  ‘You’re a businessman first—you yourself once told me so. I have a conflict of interest, I’ll admit it right now. However, my being editor is not my concern here. You are.’

  I jerked my chair closer to his desk. Touched his forearm and asked permission to give advice. Asked it not in a servile way but in a raspy monotone befitting a man of the world.

  ‘I am sorry for Jenny. I genuinely, truly am sorry. But for you this miscarriage is the best thing, for a man in your circumstances. No d
ecision needs to made about whether to keep the baby or terminate.’

  He nodded.

  ‘It would have crossed your mind,’ I said.

  ‘It did.’

  ‘A relief for you, then.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘It simplifies a complication. You can concentrate on yourself instead of Jenny and a child.’

  ‘I suppose that’s right.’

  ‘And in the meantime you can say to yourself: I have a problem most men would kill for. I am one-hundred-per-cent tried and tested male and fertile. For men in history that was the ultimate boast. Look at the rest of us, the middle-aged fops of this era. We need IVF to sow our fizzling genes. And Cialis, for Christ’s sake, just to stand to attention. Me included. Me. All I’m good for down there is peeing. But look at you—Mr One Hundred Per Cent.’

  Pockets allowed himself a pout of agreement.

  ‘Where are those ham and tomato sandwiches of yours?’

  ‘Down here beside my cold feet.’

  ‘What cold feet?’

  ‘If Jenny found out about the stoning.’

  ‘So what if she did? She can’t tell you what to do.’

  ‘She’d think it’s beneath her and not what we’re here to be.’

  ‘She’s not old-school like I am. That’s why it’s important not to have her as editor. What happens when there’s a crime slump? In the old days you didn’t get down in the mouth. You didn’t cry If only there were more murders and thieves. You certainly didn’t start switching from crime to celebrities like she’d do. You made your own luck. A stoning here, a stoning there. Just to tide you over till there’s better stuff. I would have thought you’d applaud that as a businessman.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m being flaky. I’m embarrassed. So fucking piss-weak.’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone.’

  I stretched to pat his sleeve. I must have been wrong about his dead-glitter capacity.

  ‘In this game,’ I said, ‘weakness is the greatest sin. You’re laughed at. Derided. And worst of all you’re irrelevant.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m embarrassed. Fuck. A spineless excuse for a man.’

  ‘Don’t rubbish yourself. This stoning is small-fry. You’ll look back on it as a trivial moment in your personal history. Something we’re using as a stepping-stoning to bigger stories. We’re scheduled for Wednesday. Don’t have cold feet, because we’ll have a hoot. I hope you’ll come with us to cut your journo teeth.’

  I wanted him to be there so he couldn’t claim ignorance. If somebody outed us he couldn’t easily wash his hands.

  Journo teeth. He liked the gnashing in the words. Spoke them over and over and smiled at me, proud to have journo teeth and be a man again. He unwrapped his sandwiches and offered me a slice. He bit into the bread with mock savagery, for my benefit, to assure me he was ready and had a raw-bone mongrel jaw.

  14

  Look at me! Back where I started! I was the wordsmith who wanted to be editor someday. No more flyscreen confrontations, no getting my hands dirty. Yet here I was in the warm Wednesday dusk planning how a vagrant should humiliate Christians. It must be all I’m any good for, my true station in life. The old vodka cravings returned and with them a desire to punch Pockets. He was across the road at the parkland fountain, pacing back and forth nervously. I told him to wait there as if expecting friends but, it being his first time at this sort of thing, he was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap for hiding. Be honest, Words, would you recognise me? I told him, No way, it’s the perfect disguise. If it made him happy let him think he was in danger.

  This town hall had the usual civic pillars and fence of iron. High timber-slab doors and red carpet shiny where the years had trodden. Bronzes of mayors and soldiers, plaques for the respectable dead. Doorknobs brass-bright, the chandeliers twinkling and swaying because, up ahead in the Grand Meeting Room where gladioli stood guard in white pots, music was thudding and twanging. The glass doors were closed but the music wouldn’t stay in, the massed voices out of tune drifted towards the heathen streets. Whatever they were singing had ‘Lord’ repeated over and over in the lyrics and got screamed more than sung. Through the glass I saw hands held up as if embracing something invisible and spherical.

  I’d say the crowd ran into the hundreds. Three hundred. Three-fifty. Aged in their twenties, thirties. Mostly Anglo. Crew-cut men, women with salon-sleek hair. Eyes closed in blissfulness as if their troubles were none. Katie had chosen well, a crowd like this wins no sympathy from the world. All sympathy would be with the accuser.

  I walked out and across the street to Pockets. Katie wasn’t here yet. Her job was to get her vagrant friend on location by seven. At eight the service finished. We’d need an hour to perform our stoning, then we’d go to the office and write our story, compile our pictures and video and post them on pry. I’d use the old heading from my ’99 file. The same opening paragraph, the whole package really.

  Katie had created a bogus bus ticket to America. That and a hundred dollars cash should keep her friend compliant. Around the corner they came—Katie pulling the skinny girl by the elbow, or rather the tattered jumper sleeve with an elbow poking through. Torn jeans with dirty kneecaps showing. Brown hair matted into rat-tail dreadlocks. Her face was grey-clay in the street-person manner. Grime like pencil lead in the lines of her old-young face. Her toes blackened like rot. Her fingertips too, and her teeth.

  ‘This is Alice,’ said Katie. ‘Today she’s Alice. Yesterday she was Prue. Tomorrow she wants to be Gemma, don’t you, Alice?’

  I could smell her, her sweaty pong. Pockets stepped back and made a poo sound. He fanned his face with his hand.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Alice,’ I said. ‘I hope you enjoy your trip to America.’

  ‘She leaves tomorrow, don’t you, Alice? I envy you so much,’ said Katie. ‘You’re a lucky girl, aren’t you? What a bus it must be.’

  The sun was sinking but Katie too wore sunglasses. She lifted them up and winked her relief that she’d delivered Alice as promised, on time.

  ‘I’ll let this man explain what you do now.’

  She waved the girl forward to receive my instructions.

  ‘It’s very simple, Alice. See that building there? Well, all you have to do is go in and walk up the hall to the big doors and go in through them to the nice people inside and ask them for money.’

  ‘They’re going to give me money?’

  ‘Oh yes, but you have to beg for it. You have put your hands out like this and beg and if they don’t give it to you, you must demand it. Because giving money is what they’re meant to do. If they still don’t give it then you yell, “You hypocrites!” Feel free to yell your lungs out and curse them all to hell.

  ‘And then I want you to come outside and find me. I’ll be standing over there under those big trees.’

  Alice blinked at me and my blizzard of instructions. I should have spoken slower, in a gentler, avuncular tone. Poor girl must have thought me a bossy parroter of orders. I repeated the instructions but with pauses and smiles. I asked if she understood. If she was happy to do this or should hand back her bus ticket.

  She raised her chin to snub my offensive presence, turned to Katie and asked if I was stupid and needed putting in an ambulance like crazy people. She wanted Katie to tell her what to do, not me. Katie did, cleverly couching the whole business as helping us. An act of friendship.

  Suddenly Alice leapt up and tried to kiss me. I dodged and weaved and she cackled. Half her bottom teeth were missing, her tongue quivered in the gummy space like a rancid reed. I spat and wiped my face with my sleeve. Alice said she’d do exactly as we asked but only if I kissed her in return.

  I said I would. I promised to do it when she’d performed her church begging. But not until then. That was the bargain. She had my word.

  She ran to the hall and bounded up the steps. I made Katie go and watch her.

  ‘Keep your distance. Don’t look associated. Find a place to witness what the g
irl does, nothing more.’

  I de-Aliced myself with hand sanitiser. I wasn’t going to mix with the Alices of this world and be caught out not bringing hand sanitiser.

  ‘Can I try something out on you, Words?’

  I’d forgotten about Pockets. My dead glitter was upon me, the sick enjoyment of its easy lies. My wits like a whetted blade slicing forward not off to the side, where Pockets was standing.

  ‘I’ve written this. What do you think? “Desperate individual Alice was spurned”…no…scorned…no, spurned is much better, don’t you think?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wait on. This is better: “People who claim to be…” I was wanting to say holy, but holier than thou would be great, don’t you think? “They’re holier than thou but they spurned a waif.”’

  ‘Sounds like a biscuit.’

  ‘Desperate outcast?’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Writing this up.’

  He had a flip pad, a thin silver biro.

  ‘What do you think? Can we use it?’

  ‘To be honest, I’ve got my own style. My vintage formula.’

  He put his head down, his pen scratched out his efforts.

  Katie came hurrying across the street, her sunglasses hopping on the end of her nose, her hair slipping out of its claw-clip. She was miming expletives. She was not bearing good news.

  ‘Is she begging?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Katie.

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’re giving her money.’

  ‘Bastards.’

  ‘She’s got a whole handful.’

  ‘Don’t panic. This happens. You need to make her abusive.’

  Alice appeared at the hall entrance, staring into her palm, fingering its contents. I whistled but she didn’t respond. Katie had to go over and wake her from her reverie. A nudge and push, a tug of clothing. Eventually the girl began walking. She skipped as she strode and called herself moneybags.

  ‘What’s all this?’ I said to her.

  ‘I’m moneybags.’

  ‘Good for you. We need you to help us further.’