by David Thorne
“Are you moving, Neil?”
“...I’ve asked you to leave several times and I’m going to lose my patience in a...”
“They look like moving boxes. Where are you moving to, Neil?”
“None of your fucking business.”
The word ‘fucking’ was beeped out because the show aired at 6.30pm. There were a few more beeps as Neil pushed the camera away and slammed the door closed. Frank yelled through the door for Neil to come out and finish the conversation but Neil ignored him.
My phone rang during the program - shortly after the part where Neil answered the door looking startled - but I ignored it. It rang several times more before I answered.
“Did you watch Today Tonight?”
“Yes, Frank.”
“Neil Fairhead was on it.”
“I know.”
“What does this mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s no ship?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t reckon there is a ship. He said he’s been talking with someone about purchasing one, not that it’s already paid for and is on its way here. His office is a bakery. I think it was all a con. Is he going to pay us for all the work we did?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about the printing?”
“I don’t know, Frank.”
“This is bullshit. What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m going to call Yola. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“No, don’t come in tomorrow, Frank. I’ll email you. I’ll email everyone.”
I wasn’t the worst hit of course, others had invested more money. Some had invested their life’s savings. A couple invested just 45K but they were in their seventies and mortgaged their house to raise the money. It’s easy to convince people of anything when you have the right marketing materials. There was no ship, no directors, no backing from the Australian Geographic Society or Tourism Board. Just a shit-ton of lies and glossy brochures.
Neil moved to Queensland, the sunshine state, and set up other businesses. I read a news article years later about one of them, an online advertising business called EasyFind, that folded owing tens of thousands to staff and several hundreds of thousands to the Australian Taxation Office. I spent several thousand in lawyers fees, and months in courtrooms, but all I received for my efforts was 2.8 cents on the dollar and, for the record, the following communication:
From: Ronald Davies
Date: Monday 8 April 2002 11.19am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Case 017029031 /Neil Fairhead
Dear Mr. Thorne.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has accepted two enforceable undertakings from Mr. Neil Harvey John Fairhead.
Mr. Fairhead has undertaken not to be a company officer or to participate in the management of a corporation for ten years. He has also undertaken that he will not, in the future, directly or indirectly give investment advice or be involved in a securities business or sell or promote investment in any scheme or project.
Ronald Davies, Investigations Officer, ASIC.
................................................................................................
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 8 April 2002 1.04pm
To: Ronald Davies
Subject: Re: Case 017029031 /Neil Fairhead
Hello Ronald,
Thank you for your email.
I’ve read through the attached document and, from what I can tell, ASIC’s enforceable undertaking boils down to, “That was a bit naughty, don’t do it again.”
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Regards, David
................................................................................................
From: Ronald Davies
Date: Monday 8 April 2002 1.41pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Case 017029031 /Neil Fairhead
Dear Mr. Thorne,
The enforceable undertaking means Mr. Fairhead can no longer operate a financial or investment business or offer financial or investment services. Yes, it boils down to (an enforceable) don’t do it again but there are penalties if he fails to comply.
Ronald Davies, Investigations Officer, ASIC
................................................................................................
From: David Thorne
Date: Monday 8 April 2002 2.01pm
To: Ronald Davies
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Case 017029031 /Neil Fairhead
Ronald,
Thank you clarifying.
I have a basement full of abducted children that I was planning to sell into slavery but I was concerned about the repercussions of such.
Knowing that the only punishment, if caught, will be that I will no longer be allowed to abduct children and sell them into slavery is a huge relief.
I’m offering a two for one special on under-fives at the moment if you’re interested.
Regards, David
................................................................................................
From: Ronald Davies
Date: Monday 8 April 2002 2.16pm
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Case 017029031 /Neil Fairhead
David,
For what it’s worth, people like Mr. Fairhead eventually get what is coming to them. Until then, it is what it is.
Ronald
...................
“It is what it is” is basically another version of “Walk it off, princess” but you’ll sound like an Amish farmer if you use it in conversation.
“And then she told everyone in the meeting that she thinks the new location should have a rock-tile wall behind the counter from local quarries. Which was my idea. She just stole it and pretended she’d had some kind of interior decorating vision. Who does she think she is?”
“It is what it is, Holly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Winds a’pickin up.”
“What?”
“Storms a’comin. We’ll hoffe to have the barn beams redd before tonight’s affirmation of the Ordnung.”
Yes, I Googled ‘things Amish people say’ to write the sentence above. I found a whole list of Amish words and can now curse in Pennsylvanian Dutch; “Boss a’dog hex” translates to, “Kiss a dead witch.”
I’ve never met an actual Amish person but there’s lots of Mennonites in the region of Virginia I currently live in. Mennonites have similar religious beliefs to the Amish, they’re both Anabaptist sects, but when it came to the whole ‘not owning cars, laptops or mobile phones’ thing, the Mennonites decided, “We’re allowed to have them as long as we only use them while we’re wearing a special outfit. Just the women have to wear the outfit though.”
On my first trip to Virginia from Australia, Holly took me a bunch of caves called The Luray Caverns. Caves are alright, I don’t have posters on my wall about them or anything but I’m fine visiting one every twenty years or so. To ensure the natural beauty lasts for generations to come, most caverns protect and preserve their rock formations but Luray Caverns decided they’d lop off dozens of their stalactites at varying heights and install little hammers that remotely activate in sequence to play a tune. It’s called The Great Stalac’pipe’ Organ. I wish I was making this up. After standing around awkwardly listening to Popcorn in an echoey chamber with our tour group - some of which were wearing ankle length floral dresses and a weird bun-hat which I just put down to local fashion - Holly leant in and whispered, “Look, Mennonites.”
Having subscribed to a rock collecting magazine that came with a different mineral each month (and a free binder) when I was ten, I loudly declared, “That’s Calcite, not Mennonite. What the fuck is Mennonite?”
Yola received a job offer from Mary Harben Design a week afte
r we shut everything down and we kept in contact for a few years until she married a guy she met on the Internet and moved to Albania. She sent me a camera-phone picture of herself holding an AK47 and a hookah outside a mud hut and I sent her one back of Frank and I holding up glasses of beer at the Grace Emily and giving her the finger. Her husband replied asking me not to contact her again because it was inappropriate for her to have male friends. She’s probably a member of ISIS or something now.
Frank applied for a deckhand position on a cabin cruiser he’d read about while doing research for the SASC project and, years later, made bosun. He sent me a picture of himself standing on a deck in a white uniform with turquoise waters behind him and text that read, “My office.” I sent him one back of my office at de Masi jones - it showed a messy desk covered in brochure and stationery proofs - and one of Seb eating corn in the bath.
I didn’t keep in contact with Huang, as she stole my Playstation and dance mat when she left, but Justin and I caught up fairly regularly. He taught himself to code and we collaborated on the interface and graphics for a couple of shareware games. We went halves in the profits and made around twenty dollars a week until a Japanese software company purchased the rights to Battle-Beetle for eighty-thousand dollars and later released it under the name Mushiking: The King of Beetles on the Nintendo DS.
I paid off my credit cards, Justin moved to Sydney. I can’t remember why he moved to Sydney but he did send me a photo of himself standing in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge with a fat gothic girl so perhaps it was for love. I’m just going to say it was for love. He made a name for himself writing analytical software that tracked statistics in real time. In 2008, he sold a predictive modeling program he’d written to a company called Omniture for $4.5 million (and $2.5 million in assumed vested stock options) and Adobe Systems purchased Omniture a year later for $1.8 billion. I like to imagine Justin purchased a shit-ton of Christmas lights with the money.
I looked up Neil Fairhead on Facebook while I was writing this article; his profile picture shows him and his Fijian wife smiling happily. His red hair is grey now and he has a matching little goatee. I have a few grey hairs myself. I pluck them out but they keep coming back. Holly told me that if I pluck out a grey hair, two will grow, but she also once bought one of those wax ear trumpet candles that you stick in your ear and light to ward off evil spirits or something so her scientific knowledge is questionable at best.
I considered, for a moment, messaging Neil to ask if he felt bad for the elderly couple who lost their home, for the people who lost their life’s savings, for taking everything I had - or if he simply saw himself as deserving of our money because he was smarter than us, because we were gullible fools for believing him. It’s possible of course that given enough investors, Neil fully intended to buy a ship. That the lies were a means to an end and if enough people believed that he owned a ship, and enough of those people invested in that belief, he would own a ship. Perhaps to him, the difference between ‘do’ and ‘will’ was semantics. Or perhaps it was all bullshit. The money wasn’t held in a ‘special ship savings account’, it went to the mortgage on his Queensland property and his E-Class Mercedes and his Malibu speedboat - all in his wife’s name.
Most of Neil’s Facebook posts are blocked from public view but his wife’s profile is full of photos of the two of them holidaying in Fiji and other exotic locations. There’s one of Neil sitting on a jet-ski holding his thumb and little finger out in the ‘gnarly’ gesture. He’s wearing a tank top that says Island Life and his cap is on backwards like the cool kids wear them. He probably has to order them made to his size. One of the photos shows his wife leaning against a Porsche with the text, “Vinaka Siganisucu e sega ni mudu, kemuni tagane vakawati dau lomana!” which roughly translates to, “Best birthday gift ever, love you husband!”
I can curse in Fijian now; “Biuta na baleka nomu boto, dautane” means, “Shove a coconut up your arse, whore.”
She blocked me; which is understandable as it was pretty immature.
…………..
Holly frowned and held up an A4 page from a freshly printed stack, “Is that it?”
“Is what it?”
“This story about Neil Fairhead. You just ended it on the bit about his wife shoving a coconut up her butt. She didn’t even have anything to do with the story.”
“No, I ended it saying everything turned out fine in the end.”
“Not really, he got away with it.”
“Yes, he got away with it, but there wasn’t much we could do about it so we all walked it off. It’s like an Aesop’s tale.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. It’s like that one about the fox and the crow. The one where they have a race. It’s about moving on.”
“The fox and the crow don’t have a race. The crow has cheese and the fox wants it so the fox convinces the crow that he wants to hear her beautiful singing voice and the crow opens her beak to sing and drops the cheese.”
“Exactly, it’s about letting things go.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s about flattery.”
“What’s the one about grapes then?”
“What?”
“The one about having to get a fox and a sheep and some grapes across a river but only two can fit in the boat at the same time.”
“That’s not an Aesop’s tale. Besides, telling Neil’s wife to shove a coconut up her butt is hardly moving on or letting go. It just comes across as if you’re still cross and haven’t walked anything off at all.”
“That’s a valid point. I’ll have to remember to delete that bit as it does kind of undermine the serendipitous message.”
“There’s a serendipitous message? Where?”
“Everywhere. If it hadn’t have been for Neil, I wouldn’t have taken the design director position at de Masi jones, which means I wouldn’t have started a stupid website, which means I wouldn’t have met you. Frank probably wouldn’t have become a bosun and Justin might not have designed software that made him a multi-millionaire.”
“Yola married a mean Albanian man.”
“Not right away, after working for me, she went to work for Mary Harben which was quite a step up. She didn’t marry the Albanian man until years later. Also, I think he might have actually been Armenian. Or maybe Turkish. He definitely had a moustache.”
“You said she’s probably a member of ISIS now and you didn’t even mention what happened to Huang.”
“I was joking about the ISIS thing and I saw Huang a few years later at a trade show for new food products. I designed the packaging for a client’s range of crackers that were being exhibited and went to take photos of their booth and saw her there.”
“Doing what?”
“Flogging jars of homemade Chinese simmer sauce. She gave me one and I told her the label was shit and she told me I was stupid. Her product ended up getting shelf space in supermarkets so I assume she made out okay.”
“You should have included that, it’s nice to know.”
“Bitch stole my Playstation.”
“Well at least add a bit at the end about how if you hadn’t met Neil you wouldn’t have met me. That would be a much happier ending.”
“Not everything has to be about you, Holly.”
“It never is.”
“Walk it off, princess.”
About the Author
David Thorne is a precocious but outgoing child known for his avant-garde day-glo and multicolored attire, along with his pigtails. His father walked out on his family, then his mother abandoned him at a Chicago shopping center, leaving David alone with his dog Brandon. Afterwards, David discovered a vacant apartment in a local building.
The building was managed by Henry Warnimont - an elderly, widowed photographer with a grouchy streak. David hit it off with young Cherie Johnson, who lived in Henry's building with her grandmother Betty. Henry discovered David in the empty apartment across from his, and listened to his story. The re
lationship between the two blossomed, despite red tape from social workers, and Henry applied to the courts to become David’s foster father.
As their day in court approached, the state forced David to stay at Fenster Hall, a shelter for orphaned and abandoned children, which made him realize how close he had grown to Henry. Finally, their day in court arrived, and the court approved Henry to become David’s foster father. Shortly after, Henry's downtown photography studio was destroyed in a fire and it seemed for a time that he would not be able to recover from its aftermath and resume his career. As a result of his stress, Henry ended up hospitalized from a bleeding ulcer.
During this time, Betty and Cherie made arrangements for David to stay with them until Henry recovered. Everyone's stability was halted when bureaucratic social worker Simon Chillings showed up, found out about Henry's condition, and deemed the worst: he found Betty unsuitable to care for David, because she was a single woman with long working hours, already raising her granddaughter. Chillings also felt that Henry was unfit to be David’s legal guardian in the long term - due to his health, age, and uncertain financial future. Chillings made David a ward of the state yet again, and he returned to Fenster Hall.
David’s many efforts to escape from Fenster included a trick pulled by a friend, in which they dressed up and pretended to be David.