by Mark Furness
“I need to know you are playing straight with me, my lawyer friend. From the look on your face, you may have a transmitter stuffed up your arse. Maybe I should check.”
The lawyer shifted uncomfortably on the bench. “How do I know you are being straight with me?”
“What the fuck did you just say?”
“No offence. Jesus, I’ve told you what Henry is threatening to do. If we don’t get him out of Silverwater, he is going to make a fresh statement to the Crown prosecutor and drop us all in the shit.”
The wiry man leaned forward and scooped a ladle of water from a wooden bucket that was sitting on the floor. He tossed the water over a tray-table of hot rocks, triggering an angry hiss of steam. He felt like a wizard setting up a magic trick.
“I can’t take any more of this,” said the lawyer, sweat dripping into his eyes, the salt of it turning the whites pinker. He stood, the crown of his head scraping the wooden-slat-lined ceiling. “I’m out.”
The wiry man threw another ladle of water on the rocks, using the resultant mist to obscure his face as he spoke. “I’m sensing you mean, out. As in, you don’t want to work for me anymore.”
“Correct,” said the lawyer, trying to see his companion’s eyes through the mist. It cleared. The lawyer’s heart banged harder and faster. He eyed the sauna door. His penis retreated even further.
The wiry man wiped a strand of spittle from the corner of his mouth. “That’s a shame, my friend, because if you do leave me, I am going to have to take something from you.”
“You mean a refund? Sure. You can have all the money back.”
“You misunderstand me.”
Staying seated, the wiry man rolled onto his left buttock and kicked his right leg in a fierce, sweeping motion, slapping his foot and shin into the standing lawyer’s lower calves. The lawyer’s feet flew up and he fell onto his back, the rear of his skull whiplashing the wooden floor. The lawyer groaned. Seconds later, he began screaming: “Help! Help me!”
“Go for your life,” the wiry man said. “Squeal away.” He didn’t expect anyone would hear the cries from the sauna room in the garden of Tamerlane. It was a weekday mid-afternoon. The property’s owners - Charles East, his wife, and their daughter - were at their various workplaces.
The wiry man stood, plucked a towel from a wall hook, dunked a corner of the towel in the water bucket, withdrew it and swizzled the cloth around itself. He flick-whipped the lawyer’s rump. The lawyer yelped and curled into a ball.
“Lay on your guts,” the wiry man ordered, “legs and arms straight. Imagine you are diving into a pool.”
The lawyer stayed balled. He was whipped harder. The lawyer rolled onto his stomach, stretched his arms and legs, and whimpered: “Please. Don’t.” The lawyer couldn’t help himself: he covered his anus with a hand.
“You are joking, kaffir,” said the wiry man, who unfurled the towel and laid it like a blanket over the lawyer’s lower back. Leading with his knees and shins, the wiry man dropped at a right angle upon the towel and the lawyer. The lawyer huffed. The wiry man reached with his right hand between his squirming victim’s legs and grabbed. The lawyer groaned.
“Easy, boy. Easy,” said the wiry man, as if he was calming a spooked horse. “Now, do you feel that?” He rolled the twin fibrous knots that he held in his hand against each other. “This is the nature of our relationship for the rest of time, literally and metaphorically. Comprende?”
The lawyer groaned.
The wiry man yanked his greasy captives to punctuate each sentence. “You live in a nice house. You have a nice job. You sleep safe in your bed at night. Don’t mess that up.”
The wiry man rolled the knots again. But as he tormented the lawyer, the wiry man had to fight the flickering of his own arousal. He slowed his breathing and said, “Now, I’m going to let go of these little baby-makers. But if you disappoint me, I will cut them out, dry them like walnuts, and wear them as a necklace.”
When his manhood had relaxed into what he regarded as a dignified posture, the wiry man stood and looked down at the lawyer, who curled up on his side and pulled the towel over his buttocks, tears dripping from his eyes.
“You can find your own way out.” The wiry man bent his neck like a bird of prey until he had eye contact with the lawyer, whereupon he smiled and pretended to roll something in his right hand: “This is our little secret, darling. Okay?”
HENRY EAST SLEPT POORLY, as usual, on the top bunk in his two-man cell. He rolled on to his right side, then back on to his left.
“For fuck’s sake,” said his cellmate, “will you settle down?”
“Sorry.”
“Here,” said his cellmate, “take one of these. In fact, take two.”
“What are they?”
“Sleeping pills.”
“Thanks,” said Henry, who sucked saliva from his tongue and used the fluid to wash the pills down his throat.
Henry had a dream. He felt like he was leaking: into his pillow, into his sheets, down the sides of his bunk bed. He woke in the gloom with a terrible pain in his face, gurgling, coughing, drowning in warm fluid that had the taste and texture of tomato juice. He spat it out, but it kept coming. His wrists burned.
His cellmate was screaming through the bars into the corridor: “Help! Help! Medical Emergency. Help!”
IV
I WOKE sitting on the floor, back to the wall inside my home office, first room off the hallway from the front door of our two-level, Victorian-era terrace house. My trilling phone was the waker. Tom Steele, the screen said.
“He’s cut his wrists,” said the Crime Editor of The Sydney Daily News.
“What?” My headache from last night’s bar-crawling with Steele returned for a second bout as I stood and almost knocked over an open tin of house paint that I’d been smothering the walls with before the urge for a nap sent me sliding to the floor.
“Henry East. He’s an innovative young man. Used the peel-off lid of a tuna can.”
Steele added that Henry was flat-backed in the Silverwater Prison hospital’s psychiatric wing, sedated and strapped into a bed that was anchored to the floor.
“You sure he did it to himself?”
“You’re a cynical character. Wait ‘til you hear the rest.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Where are you?”
“Darlinghurst.”
“Good. I’ll home deliver the next exciting episode of The Strange Life of Henry East. I’ve also got something tasty in my pocket for afternoon tea.”
I smiled at the idea of home. At the time of our purchase, ours was advertised as a renovator’s delight in the inner-Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. Now the agents might say once beautiful old lady in need of a facelift. To the man or woman in the street, it was a century old building made out of decent bricks, handy to schools and public transport. And at night, I could throw a stone from my front porch across the street through the front window of the nearest pub if I felt like it.
Steele was chirpy for a bloke with whom I parted company at around 4am on a footpath up the street outside the Pickled Pig.
“Are you with me?” said Steele. He seemed to detect that a fair-sized lump of my brain was astral travelling. He’s got extra sensory perception, I’ve always thought, but he just calls it awareness. He’s been my psychological counsellor since primary school when we nicked our thumbs with his mum’s veggie knife and shook hands under his bed on a Friday night sleepover. Our secret club was just that, until a burning candle set fire to the mattress.
While I was revisiting old flames and smoke, Steele hung up. I time travelled back to now and leaned on a stack of cardboard boxes, sending the top one toppling. It spewed stuff I’d just stripped off the walls: photos of the Easts, newspaper clippings about Henry’s case and its lead-up, and glow-pen-highlighted pages of court transcripts. I intended to cremate the past in a bonfire in the back garden and celebrate my East-free future. The tins of Summer Mint paint were going to refresh my mind
as well as my walls.
I scooped a photo from the floor and sat on a sofa against a wall. It showed Henry towering over the Australian Prime Minister. Charles wedged the PM from the other side. The three of them were parading in tuxedos in the winner’s circle at a political fundraiser held about a year ago, smiling at the camera with effortless insincerity. Henry had the sharpest suit, the TV newsreader’s smile. That’s when newspaper gossip writers started saying he was set for a career in politics, and that he had the savvy and connections to make PM one day, given his smarts, his pedigree, and his grandfather being a former foreign minister. My theory was that Charles’s PR people leaked the idea to a toadying scribe, sweetening it with a box of real French champagne sent to the toad’s home address.
I found a red marker pen and scrawled ‘why?’ on Henry’s photo, putting the word in a thought bubble and connecting it to his lips. Then I had a cleverer idea; I reviewed the notes that I’d made of the café conversation outside court the day Henry was sentenced. A line from his lawyer stuck out like a fractured bone: We’ve agreed the strategy with your father. Whatever happens today, this ends it, Henry.
It had taken Henry about three months to disagree. I almost cheered for him. The brass ship’s bell with a clapper on a rope attached to our front door donged with a mellow tone for which my senses were grateful.
A bald-headed Steele clutching a six-pack of beer grinned at me when I opened the door. His body strained the seams of a slim-fit powder-blue suit. A tee-shirt and board shorts were his natural second skin. But he was a professional man, being a journalist, and always dressed up-to-the-minute, even though his body hated the idea. His white business shirt had unbuttoned itself at the neck, making his black tie look strangely tight.
In my office, Steele passed me the beers and sat on the sofa where he worked his mobile phone with big, fast thumbs. I opened a bottle, took a decent slug, turned my office chair to face him and sat down. My headache began dissolving.
“You know,” I said, “why do we bother with this stuff?”
“You mean throwing light into society’s darkest corners?”
“What’s the point?”
“That’s too deep for a daylight discussion.” He shook his head in frustration at my high-mindedness. “Just read, will you.” He handed me his phone. “Go to page two, the stuff highlighted in red. I’m holding it as draft copy for now.”
“Shit. He cut his lips?”
“Slashed them back to the teeth and gums in the shape of an X. I can’t publish yet because the coppers won’t confirm, but they won’t deny either. Can you imagine what a mess that makes?”
“I thought he was under special protection.”
“They moved him out three weeks ago.”
“Why would you slice your lips?”
“Makes you pretty unattractive to other inmates.”
“You reckon that stuff was happening to him?”
“Maybe.”
“Or someone was trying to shut him up?”
“That’s a very poetic interpretation,” said Steele, glancing at my office door. “Anyone home?”
“Hugo and Fish are upstairs.”
“Lock the door.”
I obeyed. Steele pulled a small plastic bag from his jacket pocket, tapped some white crystals onto the coffee table and started chopping them with his credit card.
“Not good timing,” I said. “It’s Hugo’s farewell dinner tonight.”
“Small,” he said. He put his card at one end of my line and compressed it, making it shorter but fatter. He took a banknote from his shirt pocket, rolled it into a tube and hoovered his. He handed me the note and I followed suit. High quality cocaine: that cleared my head, though my heart went for a gallop which prompted me to open a fresh beer to calm things down.
“You want to stay for dinner?”
“Naa, thanks. Time for some repair work at home. And you guys should have your private time. Give the nipper my best for his travels.”
He tapped another pile of crystals onto the coffee table, patted me on the shoulder and said, “For Ron.” He left.
I scraped the coke onto a piece of paper, folded it and tucked it in my wallet. For Ron, my father used to say; for later on. It was like having a spare tyre in case of a flat.
I looked at a photo of Charles and Henry East, but I thought about a different father and son. And about that son standing alone in a hostile, alien world inside which the father could not protect him. The longest time Hugo and I had been apart was his week at high school camp. In just over twenty-four hours, fate willing, Hugo would be on the other side of the planet for a year on a student program. Uninvited chemicals worked my insides; I wiped my eyes. My phone pinged. Steele: Update. A third party might have done the job on Henry East. Keep you posted.
Steele sparked an idea. I went back through my notes of the café conversation between Henry and his lawyer.
Lawyer: You won’t go to jail. You’ll be fined at most.
Henry: You can’t guarantee that. They can come after me in there.
It’s funny how people over the years change their friends and spouses more often than their mobile phone numbers. I had one of Charles East’s numbers from a time when he offered me a job. I chanced it and dialled. Someone picked up; I heard classical music far away in the background.
“Charles, it’s Gar Hart here. I want to talk to you about Henry.”
Whoever had picked up didn’t utter a thing. They waited a few seconds and hung up. So I fired off a text message: Who was Henry afraid would come after him in jail?
Maybe it was the cocaine and beer doing my thinking, but firing a shot into Charles seemed like a cracking idea: poke the nest, see what happens. I leaned back in my chair, grinning with admiration for my slick tactical manoeuvre, and glanced out my window in time to see my daughter climbing out of a car I didn’t recognise. Alice had a red and white beach towel over a shoulder. I hid the beer bottles in an empty box by the sofa, stepped from my office into the hallway and opened the front door for her.
“What’s that around your nose?”
I scraped the rim of my nostrils with a thumb. “I must have missed some shaving cream.”
“Come on, Dad. It’s Hugo’s last night.”
She walked along the hallway to the bathroom and calmly closed the door. I stood outside, clenched a fist and poised to knock. I heard the shower start. I went to the kitchen and rinsed my nose under the tap in the sink.
It was Hugo’s idea to go to his mother Charlotte’s birthplace in seaside Brighton, England, to stay with his grandparents, Malcolm and Kate Halliday, on a student exchange for a year. Another boy from Sydney was joining him at the same school. Clancy was a bit shifty, I thought, but a companion made of flesh and bone instead of digital bits was a good thing for Hugo. They were flying out the next morning. I trudged upstairs to Hugo’s bedroom and knocked on his door.
“I’m packing, okay,” he grizzled from behind the locked door. I heard Fish scratching at the door and Hugo let him out, then he shut his door again. Fish had been a rolling ball of grey wool when he crawled over his sleepy rivals in a puppy box to lick the kids’ hands and join our pack, not long after Charlotte died.
Fish followed me as I walked back to the stairwell, moving as elegantly as a dog with three legs can. He lost his left back prop in a steel-jawed hunting trap at our place in the bush a few years ago.
Alice was still in the bathroom as we passed it, so I went back to my office, sat on the sofa and pulled a faded newspaper clipping out my East box.
The headline read: China Behind ‘Made in Australia’ Media Bid - by Business Editor, Gar Hart. It was dated about ten years ago. Charles East was heading a syndicate of local businessmen who’d launched what they dubbed a patriotic ‘Made in Australia’ takeover bid for the Mirror News Group that owned the collection of television stations and newspapers that employed me. I’d been trying to prove anonymous tips from other businessmen that claimed Charles and
his mates were a front for Chinese industrialists backed by the Communist Party in Beijing, who wanted to use their money and our media to exert power and influence over Australian business, politics and foreign policy. The problem that Charles appeared to be fixing for the Chinese was that foreigners were not allowed to own and control Australian media companies. The Poms and Yanks would have been bad enough in the public eye, but China was a bogeyman like no other. In the midst of my investigations, I received a call from Charles, who invited me to dinner, over which he offered me a job as a public relations man for his family company at twice my reporter’s salary. We had a big home mortgage, so the bribe to stop me stuffing up his bid and damaging his reputation was tempting. A few days after rejecting his offer, another businessman gave me a document, following which I phoned Charles.
“Mr East,” I remember saying a tad too gleefully, “I have a letter that says you are being retained by China’s Golden Bell Corporation to buy the Mirror News Group on their behalf. It is signed by GBC’s chairman. If this is true, you would be in breach of our foreign media ownership laws, as well as faking your patriotism. Are you a Trojan horse for the Chinese?”
East said: “That letter’s a fake, Edgar; you’re being had. Forget about it. Listen. What you should be focusing on is your long-term career and your family’s future.”
“Why would you care about my family?”
“Don’t be paranoid. I’ve been pondering our dinner conversation. I really do want someone on my PR team with fire in their belly. So why don’t you come on board with us on a consultancy basis? We can pay you a very decent monthly retainer and you can help us with our press releases, strategy, that sort of thing. And you get to keep your journalism job as well. It’s a win-win.”
“Do you think that is ethical?” I said, holding a straight face, even though he couldn’t see it. Secretly tape recording our conversation would have been illegal if I had done so without telling him. Inconveniently my recorder had jammed when I commenced the call.
“It’s simply an employment offer,” he said. “It’s up to you.”