Welcome to Story Club

by Zoe Norton Lodge

  About an hour after arriving I made eye contact with a gentleman. The ‘hey, you’re the other gay at this party’ type of eye contact. I walked over and we started chatting, as was the expectation. We will call him Christopher. Not to protect his identity – I just genuinely can’t remember his name. And it seems like most gay men’s names are Christopher. Christopher or James.

  We talked for an hour or so, said some horrific things about people just out of earshot, then I may have broken a mug, so it was decided we’d go for a walk. Having both finished the drinks we’d brought, we found and stole a box of Fruity Lexia and were on our way.

  The night was warm, and the goon was warmer. We walked and silently passed the sack between us. After a while we stopped, kissed and dry humped against a bus shelter. Christopher looked across the streets and said, ‘Let’s go in there.’ I knew that place, it was Broadmeadow Outdoor Tennis Courts. We used to go there for school sport. The fence was an easy climb. We found ourselves a spot and got back to it.

  Now, let me say this. I am not, and have never been, sexually adventurous. Even then, this was very out of my real character. When it comes to carnal things, I want it in a bed, with nice sheets, and maybe a sandwich after. I devote most of the act to just being quietly pleased to be there. I’m not into any kind of crazy shit. That stuff is for the birds. The perverted birds, like ibises or pelicans. I am now in a long-term and monogamous relationship. Neither of us are into anything kinky.

  If I’m honest, I guess I feel a lot of embarrassment around sex. Here’s an example. There was chatter in my relationship recently about maybe, like, getting a thing. Like, a thing. A sex thing. A toy thing. I was against it, mainly because I just felt like we would be outsourcing a job that could have gone to local home-grown dicks. I’m patriotic where it matters.

  Also, because then they are in the house. There would always be these things in the house. I’d be out and about and constantly thinking someone was going to find them. I’d be hit by a bus and my last words would be ‘MY DILDOS.’

  I have a friend who found his parents’ double-ended dildo. Bit nutso. That is full on, but also good on them. He freaked out but I think it’s kind of a really beautiful modern version of that scene in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp. Anyways.

  So I’m making out with this stranger on a tennis court in Newcastle. We’re standing up in this hut thing. I decide I’m bored, unbuckle his jeans and I go downstairs, because I was raised to be nice to new friends. And I’m down there, and everything’s going great. But then, out of nowhere, it’s not. The mixture of the Double Blacks, and the goon and the movement. I gag a bit. Which was uncommon for me at this point in my life; usually you could open an umbrella in there. But I continue. It’s fine. I gag again. It’s fine. I’m fine. Then, like Icarus, I fly too close to the sun, and I just start hurling. A waterfall of fermented fruit pours over his lap. A Niagara Falls of cheap liquor and shame. He gasps as if . . . as if someone just vomited on him mid blowjob.

  It was pretty quiet for a bit. I took off my new black Saba cardigan for him to clean up. We climbed over the fence, our eyes looking anywhere but at each other. We waved goodbye and walked in opposite directions. I never saw him again, which is quite the feat in Newcastle. I’ve never told anyone, but always wonder which of our mutual friends he told. Probably all of them. It probably helped my reputation.

  I caught up with a school friend not long ago. We were reminiscing about school sport and in particular how bad we were at tennis. ‘God, we sucked,’ she said. If only she knew.

  KATE McCLYMONT

  Kate is an investigative journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2017, she was inducted into the Media Hall of Fame for her contribution to the industry. Kate is a five-time Walkley Award winner, including the Gold Walkley for her coverage of the Bulldogs salary cap rorts, and is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including six Kennedy Awards. She was awarded the 2016 Australian Press Council’s Press Freedom Medal, named the 2012 NSW Journalist of the Year for her investigations into the fraudulent activities of former head of the Health Services Union Michael Williamson and the business activities of former NSW Labor minister Eddie Obeid, and won the 2012 George Munster Award for Independent Journalism.

  ‘Stakeout’ copyright © Kate McClymont 2018

  Stakeout

  by KATE McCLYMONT

  This story was originally performed at the event I Fought the law

  Let me paint the scene for you. It is five in the morning. It is pitch black and I am sitting in my car in Wolseley Road, Point Piper.

  In the back seat are my two accomplices.

  It’s October 2010 and I am waiting for the arrival of the police.

  The previous day I’d received a tip that the homicide squad were about to swoop on those allegedly responsible for the murder of Sydney businessman Michael McGurk, who’d been sensationally murdered a year earlier – shot outside his Cremorne home in front of his nine-year-old son.

  But the week before he was shot dead, McGurk told me there was a hit out on him.

  Needless to say, property tycoon Ron Medich, who was feuding with McGurk at the time of the murder, was not happy when, less than twelve hours after McGurk was gunned down, there was the Herald lurking outside his Point Piper home.

  Just as I was doing now twelve months down the track.

  On that occasion, young Erik Jensen buttonholed Medich to ask if he knew who murdered Michael McGurk.

  ‘How would I know? Christ almighty! You people are low-lives. You’ve upset me, you’ve upset my wife. Now fuck off!’ he stormed.

  McGurk’s murder was a huge story at the time and the information came flooding in.

  One deep throat had gone to the trouble of buying a voice distorter. After he relayed the information, which, I have to say, was rather good, I thanked him for his call and then said in closing, ‘So I can reach you on this number?’

  The poor chap almost choked. I had to give him the bad news that his caller ID had popped up on my phone.

  Then there was the man whose information was so sensitive and so sensational he had to see me in person to pass it on. When I went down to the Herald’s foyer there was a gentleman of Mediterranean extraction, wrapped in a trench coat. Perched on his head was a blond wig. Think Billy Idol or Rod Stewart. And the wig wasn’t even on straight: it lurched dangerously across one eye. His failure to make any mention of his disguise only added to the general weirdness of the situation.

  And I have to admit it was most unprofessional of me, but when he kept referring to the murdered man as Mr McGherkin and that he might once have driven this McGherkin person in a taxi, I burst out laughing.

  This did not impress wigman, who glared at me from under the synthetic strands of blond hair falling stiffly across his beady eye. When a death threat was delivered to my house five days after the murder, I wondered whether he might have been responsible.

  Anyway, fast forward a year. I had received a tip about the police swooping, so I organised a highly confidential meeting with my editors to work out a plan of attack. One slight problem was that I didn’t know who they were going to arrest or precisely what time the arrests would take place.

  No matter. I drew up a plan of the likely suspects.

  There was Fortunato Gattellari – also known as Lucky, a former boxer who had replaced McGurk as Medich’s right-hand man. He lived in Chipping Norton, thirty Ks from our Pyrmont office.

  Another reporter and photographer were assigned to Liverpool for Lucky’s driver, Senad Kaminic, a former Bosnian soldier.

  I assigned myself Ron Medich’s house, mostly because he conveniently lived in the next suburb to me.

  Police always seem to do pre-dawn raids, so we arrived at our destinations at 5 am.

  Jon, the photographer, and I sat in our respective cars in the darkness. As we waited in the pre-dawn gloom, another car pulled up behind us.

  I became immediately suspicious and opened the glovebox of th
e car to get some light to send a text message to the photographer. Must be undercover police. Just at that moment a text comes through.

  Hi, it’s Natalie from online here. I am in the car behind you. Natalie from online! This is meant to be a top-secret mission and now we have Natalie from online rocking up.

  In the car with me are my faithful undercover operatives – the two family mutts.

  At 6 am, I hop out of the car and walk the dogs.

  Then a parent from school spies me, pulls over and asks me what I am doing walking the dogs in her street. I confess I am on a stakeout. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘would you like to come in for a cup of tea?’ ‘No,’ I splutter, ‘I can’t come in for a cup of tea, I am on stakeout, which requires some degree of vigilance.’

  ‘Do pop in if you’re bored,’ she said, driving off.

  At 7 am, a flurry of household staff and construction workers arrive at their respective places of employment.

  After all we are in Wolseley Road, which is not only the most expensive street in the nation, it is the tenth most expensive street in the entire world. In Wolseley Road, the inhabitants are always knocking down a perfectly grand mansion to build an even grander one as a testament to their extraordinary wealth.

  I am beginning to wonder whether I should have worn a fluoro vest and a hard hat or perhaps a maid’s outfit rather than masquerading as a dog walker.

  It’s now 8 am. We have been there for three hours and there is no sign of any police or any raids. I do a coffee run.

  By 9 am, I am thinking any decent police officer would have arrested people before they head off to work. I mean that is the point of a pre-dawn raid.

  At 10 am, I pack it in and I am on my way back to the office when I receive a call from Vanda Carson; she was meant to be watching Lucky Gattellari, but hunger had got the better of her and she had snuck off to the Chipping Norton pie shop. Who should come into the pie shop but the head of homicide.

  It was on! We all rushed back to our posts.

  Tom Reilly followed Senad Kaminic to Lucky Gattellari’s and it was chaos. Police in armoured vests, the riot squad, guns pulled, Kaminic and Gattellari lying on the ground in handcuffs.

  Back in Wolseley Road: nothing.

  But half an hour after the arrests, Medich came roaring out of his driveway in his black Merc. In hot pursuit were me and the mutts, Jon the photographer and – bringing up the rear – Natalie from online.

  We pursue Medich into his lawyer’s office in the city. It’s another fortnight before he’s arrested.

  It later emerged that finding a reliable hitman is not so easy. In this case, the quest to find a gun for hire was a shambles from start to finish.

  The murder plan was in such disarray that only weeks before the killing, a prospective hitman – the fourth to be offered the job – was being interviewed at the Maroubra RSL Club. He wanted $100,000 up front and $100,000 afterwards but Lucky thought this was too expensive.

  One hitman was meant to kill McGurk while he was skiing at Thredbo, but he wasn’t organised in time.

  Another hitman had reneged on the murder but had kept the down payment for the killing and used it as a deposit on a house.

  The ultimate assassins were an unlikely pair. Haissam Safetli, forty-six, was the general manager of a Pymble accountancy firm and Chris Estephan, a nineteen-year-old friend of his nephew.

  On the night of the murder, the pair was so jittery as they waited for McGurk to arrive home that the ‘kid’, as he was called, went to the Cremorne bottle shop to buy something to calm their nerves. Due to his age and lack of ID, he was refused service. So back came Safetli to buy the bottle of bourbon, which was special. Fifteen minutes later McGurk was dead.

  As the pair sped away, they almost crashed at the first roundabout, and, because they didn’t have an e-tag, they were photographed for not paying the toll on the Harbour Bridge.

  When the two hitmen arrived home, they burned their clothes, but Safetli forgot that some of the murder money was still in his back pocket.

  And to think we thought it was a professional hit!

  The police still don’t know which of the two fired the fatal shot.

  Lucky and Kaminic both pleaded guilty and received discounts on their sentences for agreeing to give evidence against Medich, who they claimed was the mastermind.

  Safetli got seven years and the kid four and a half. He is due out next month.

  As for Medich, he is still out on bail and yet to stand trial. He has pleaded not guilty, claiming that Lucky was off on a frolic of his own.

  Meanwhile, the law finally caught up with me. There I was walking along Wolseley Road, minding my own business as well as Ron Medich’s, when I was nabbed.

  It was the dog ranger. My two mutts were off the lead. My pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears and I was fined $220 for EACH dog.

  No doubt Medich, who subsequently sold his mansion for $38 million, would’ve enjoyed that.

  TOBY SCHMITZ

  Toby is an award-winning writer, director and actor. Maybe you have seen him in some things on stage at the Sydney Theatre Company, or Belvoir St Theatre, or another theatre entirely. If theatre isn’t your thing, he’s also been on TV a fair bit, on Newton’s Law and Blue Murder and on Black Sails, where he played – in his own words – the ‘not butch talky pirate’. There are a lot of other shows and plays – including a few he’s written – that aren’t listed here, but if you’re keen on more info, fire up Google and have a look. He’s performed at Story Club five times, and has not once stuck to the time limit.

  ‘No Booze’ copyright © Toby Schmitz 2018

  No Booze

  by TOBY SCHMITZ

  This story was originally performed at the event On Second Thoughts

  Sunday 28 April, Anzac Long Weekend in the winter of ’96. I was with two friends editing the university newspaper. Not the cool monthly my father had helmed but a single-A4 weekly newsletter that we arranged ads on like a Chinese puzzle to allow a slender margin for our juvenile commentary.

  The St Kilda–Footscray game was on the radio, to my annoyance, but Ross ‘Plugger’ Duckham, who wrote the sports marginalia, was avid, and my best friend at the time, Danny, didn’t mind a game. Ross now does town-planning in Europe. I don’t know what Daniel does.

  I was still decanting the fact that Rex Hunt, who I understood to be a television fisherman, was calling the game, when he interrupted himself to announce an appalling event unfolding in Port Arthur, the body count already thirty-two, making it at the time the largest single-shooter massacre ever.

  Who got him those stats so quick? I thought, and then, Huh. I assumed there’d been larger. I must have paid respect to the awfulness if not the scale of the catastrophe – did the match itself stop? I don’t remember. I got back to inserting barely coded messages to female Arts students in my allotted margin.

  I was treating my responsibilities to several drinking fraternities as if a career in alcohol was at stake, so perhaps my foggy reaction to this fresh hell was fathomable. Less forgivable: I knew full well my parents were holidaying in Tasmania, Port Arthur to be exact, and had failed to make a single connection.

  I careened home from a pub to find a mass of missed calls on my mobile, which we didn’t always carry around back then for fear of being ridiculed in a Tim Minchin song.

  ‘Mum and Dad are OK,’ were my brother’s first words. He was astounded at my nonchalance. He’d been worried white as the news ensnared the world; I’d been oblivious. This is the only time I remember us reversing these roles. I found myself on the floor – my share house had no furniture but lots of floor – and I remember my phone hand shaking.

  I called Mum. They were in a Hobart hotel foyer battling journos for a room. She was in shock and low on details. Dad, with bankable brio, said: ‘It’s like a Tarantino film.’ Also low on details. I needed more, but the facts remained elusive. Occupied by whether to specialise in beer or spirits at the time, I was in a self-involved plac
e. And they didn’t really want to talk about it.

  Eventually I saw the leaked crime-scene video footage on the net, which I advise no one to watch. Every caked corpse where it fell, days later, in the café, the gift shop, the carpark . . .

  Here’s what twenty years has gleaned me.

  They’d booked a holiday to Tassie and had done vineyards and mountain hotels and driven south that Sunday to Port Arthur for the requisite convict masonry appreciation.

  The weather struck them both. Tasmania’s default setting is cold and cold it was but under a blue sky, white sun, everything stark. The ruins popped in severe relief to the isolation of the bush, the still grey scrub, the glassy gunmetal water on the bay.

  Here’s my Dad: ‘The overall effect was steel and flint. Port Arthur is punitive: it was intended to punish people who ended up at the end of the world and to keep punishing them.’

  Dad, an ex-history teacher, said the place seemed made of sadness. My mother, not a history teacher, agreed, and wondered why they were there at all, and said so. One suspects a spat.

  Around 1 pm, they started the search for somewhere to eat and followed signs that said cafés, souvenirs this way. The Broad Arrow was the closest.

  A few spare tables inside and out. They examined the menu, resigned themselves to truck-stop fare and Dad joined the queue.

  Mum browsed the gift shop, where extremely soon someone would be pleading fast: No no no, please –

  Dad was ordering – you ordered, took your tray and sat down – when he gathered the place wasn’t licensed. He looked back to Mum, who’d just found a seat. Was he really ready to cancel the order just because he couldn’t get his buzz on?

  Mum, having sat, was transfixed by Martin Bryant through the window, eating outside: how could you not be? The hulking albino, the pudding expression muttering to itself with its mouth full.

  ‘Wizza?’ my Dad called out. ‘No booze.’

  They held a look across the space. Mum shrugged, hungry. Dad thought, Well OK, we’ll eat here, then, in turning to the register, reconsidered in the snap of a synapse.