Fake ID

by Hazel Edwards

  The Missing Millions date was only a few weeks ago. ‘What about the date?’I ask.

  Luke thought I meant the Hungarian video. ‘Well ’56 is a bit of a clue. The Olympic Games were in Melbourne. Saw that on Foxtel Olympics Flashbacks a couple of times.’

  I knew, for a different reason. Pa was in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Then he stayed here and never went back to Hungary or even went on holiday outside Australia. He always said that home was good enough for him. I thought it was because he liked Australia so much, but maybe it was because it was dangerous for him to visit some other places.

  ‘D’you reckon your gran watched SBS and the foreign docos to find out about her old life? Wouldn’t her passport be stamped to say when she came into Australia?’ Those glasses were not chick-magnets, but sometimes Luke’s brain connected with his mouth. He often asked questions that led to more questions.

  ‘No passport so far.’

  I pushed the tape in, hit PLAY and stared at the war images of protesters marching. The Revolution. More grey backgrounds. Maybe there was a link with that creased photo. ‘Just a sec.’ I rummaged in my backpack for the photo. ‘D’you reckon this was about the same time? Does the guy look like anyone here?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Luke took a quick look. ‘Might be. Same war-type background. They all look a bit the same unless you know the person.’

  I hit REWIND, then checked frames for face matches. Lots of dark hair, uniforms and beards. Like clones. Why was she so keen on Hungary? Just to help with my assignment? Until Mr Grant gave us that project, I knew she’d come to Australia in 1956, but not much else. You think of your gran as always old; you don’t think about her ever being a kid or even a girl your own age. Gran was just Gran, and she was old.

  Wait. A similar face with a subtitle in English. Activist Tibor. I hit STOP and the frame was frozen. The activist Tibor was captured on video, but what else could be done with him?

  ‘Forgot training.’ Luke glanced at his watch. ‘Mum’s offered to drive us if you want to go. Said she was sorry she couldn’t make it to the funeral. Had an urgent delivery the other side of the city. Triple rates.’

  ‘Did she send you instead?’ I asked. Luke’s mum ran a courier business that was just making a living. She delivered envelopes and packages all over the city and suburbs. There wasn’t a lot of spare cash in the Warne family, but they managed. So I understood she couldn’t turn down urgent work.

  Luke shook his head. ‘Nup. Just thought I’d come. Show my respects, Dad says it’s called.’

  ‘I feel so unlike training tonight,’ I said. ‘Your mum won’t be mad at me, will she?’

  Luke shrugged. ‘Maybe. We’d better go tomorrow if we’re going to try out for the team. Dad’s not keen on players missing training.’

  Since I’d been boarding at Luke’s place, his family had been great. His mum ran Just Couriers, and his dad was an electrician. Because they worked for themselves, they had long shifts, so whoever was there got a meal, and often they ate really late. At first, living with the Warnes had been like getting an older brother. Lately, things had been a bit different. Luke was a techie, but sometimes he looked at me as if I wasn’t a computer screen.

  ‘If we’re not going to hockey, let’s check out these files.’

  Luke opened Gran’s computer. ‘If Gran left you a file, she didn’t mean one for your nails. Let’s look at the places she visited last.’

  ‘Don’t you need a password?’ I asked. I had trouble remembering the different ones for my different schools. It was worse than replacing the locker keys.

  So Luke and I mucked around to find out Gran’s password. Since Luke had helped Gran with her computer at the beginning, I thought he would have put the password in for her. But he hadn’t. So we had to try combinations of bits of her life.

  ‘Most people use birthdays,’ said Luke. ‘But your gran wasn’t like other people.’

  Gran’s password wasn’t her date of birth. Well, not the date of birth of Magda. It wasn’t her name either.

  ‘Try Pa’s name.’ I put the tape in my backpack. Luke often recorded Foxtel footy on top of anything handy. If I wasn’t careful, the semi-final of the night game might just wipe out the Hungarian Revolution or the Missing Millions.

  Luke typed PA.

  ‘No, idiot, she didn’t call him Pa. His name was Janos.’

  Luke typed Janos. Nothing happened. Then he tried another.

  ‘The signature on the painting!’ I suggested.

  Luke keyed in Dagmar. ‘Right!”

  It worked!

  No. 1 name: Madga. No. 2 name: Dagmar. No. 1 surname: Kiss. No. 2 surname: Kovacs. This was getting complicated. Not having Gran here to ask made it so hard. I missed her for lots of reasons. Finding Gran’s past looked like a long job for both of us.

  Probably I’d be the one who had to pack up Gran’s things because Mum wasn’t here. Mrs Donna had suggested donating those things we didn’t want personally to one of the charities. While Luke went through Magda’s files, I went through the wardrobe with the long mirror doors. Old luggage. Worn tags with destination names like Paris or Melbourne. Shoes. Boxes. Jewellery. Scarves, including her belly-dancing veils. Dress-ups with see-through colours.

  I wove a red veil around me and stared at myself in the full-length mirror. I swayed as if the music were playing. I lifted the veil and held it over my big nose, so just my eyes showed above. Did I look like her? We both had big noses. But her genes were inside me, weren’t they? Then I stuffed Gran’s red veil and dancing outfit into my backpack. It smelled of her rose perfume.

  I opened the next box and pulled out Pa’s footy program. Gran had kept his sporty things. England v Hungary Football Association International. Wed Nov 25, 1953. Empire Stadium. Wembley.

  Luckily, it was in English. I flipped over to Who’s Who for Hungary players and there was a photo of young Pa. Janos Kovacs, centre-half, the most outstanding player on the field. A political leader, Janos combines politics and sport and is married with a son, Sandor.

  A son? That was a worry. Gran and Pa had a daughter, Katalin. My mum. And in 1953, she wasn’t born yet! At least his Kovacs name was the same. My family history was getting wobblier. Nothing seemed sure.

  I looked for more picture clues. Photos of athletes. A Hungary Pictorial Exhibition showed action shots of swimmers, fencers, table tennis teams and footballers. The cover photo was Pa.

  ‘One day you may play for Australia, Zoe,’ Pa had said. ‘Like I played for Hungary.’

  I picked up another program: Melbourne Olympics, 1956. Was Pa in this one too? Yes, he was. Three years later. But no mention of a family. Who was with him? If he was married to Gran then, was the son hers? And a newspaper clipping inside: Hungarian athlete decides to stay in Australia and a blurry photo, which could have been Pa. There was no one left to ask why he had decided to stay.

  Was it the same photo in the ‘DO NOT OPEN’ newspaper clipping? YES! A match. So this had been important for Gran. I scrabbled for the old photo, the soldier with the maybe young Gran. No, it was a different man. But he did look a bit like that Tibor over the sub-title on the doco. In the freeze frame. Dark curls. The beard was different. But the eyes looked much the same. How could I check?

  Who was fighting who in the Hungarian Revolution? And which side might Gran have been on?

  The charity bag might be hard to fill. I didn’t want to throw away parts of my grandparents’ lives, but the house would probably be sold eventually.

  Meanwhile, back in the other room, peering at the screen, Luke was tapping his keyboard super-fast.

  ‘I’ve found a web site called Final Thoughts, which she visited eight days ago.’ Luke grinned. ‘One night, we had a bit of chat…after I had my third helping. She asked me, half-jokingly, if I’d be her hi-tech Guardian Angel.’

  ‘Gran didn’t believe in angels…not religious ones.’ That’s one thing I was sure about. Gran didn’t have much time for anything religious.
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br />   ‘A cyber-angel,’ said Luke, ‘to send a reminder to finalthought.com. Just as I’m doing now.’ Luke hit SEND.

  Chapter 4 Www.finalthoughts.com

  ‘Remember when your pa died?’ Luke tapped madly. ‘Magda couldn’t find a marriage certificate to show the lawyer.’

  ‘Yeah. They’d never discussed what Pa wanted …for his funeral and stuff. Or who should get what. Gran wanted to be better prepared,’ I said.

  Luke pointed to the screen. ‘She definitely visited this finalthoughts site. I can tell from this history on the computer. And left her own message for after her death. But maybe she didn’t expect it to be read so quickly?’

  ‘Where’s the message?’ I peered at finalthoughts.com on the screen.

  ‘I’ve logged in and sent the command to get it,’ said Luke, excitedly. ‘This site stores e-mail messages on-line so they can be sent to family and friends after each writer has died. You have to choose a Guardian Angel to e-mail finalthoughts after you die. For your gran, that’s me. I agreed to do it.’

  ‘Unreal name. I’ve had enough real death this week,’ I couldn’t explain to Luke about funeral-overload while he was so pumped about cyber-death sites. Sometimes he looked a real nerd and I was glad he wasn’t my boyfriend. I squinted at the yellow banners with links to grief-type places. Even a Pet-memories and finalthoughts about your dog! So, how many dogs read e-mail? ‘How’ interested Luke more than ‘why?’ which interested me.

  ‘Cool. After-life e-mails.’ My voice went uncontrollably high. ‘What if you change your mind or delete? Wouldn’t some people freak out if they suddenly got a message from a person whose funeral they just attended?’

  ‘OK. You’d better freak out. That’s what you’re getting.’ Luke was downloading now. ‘I’ll print it out.’ The printer started to whirr. ‘I think this file might be like your gran’s will delivered by me, her Guardian Angel.’ Luke nudged me.

  ‘But you didn’t, you know…witness it…like? Did you?’

  Luke shook his head.

  ‘So is it legal?’

  ‘Dunno. It’s here. And it’s a message from her.’

  Gran’s message was scrolling out on the printer…now.

  ‘My dearest Zoe,

  This is an unusual way to tell you, but I have little choice now, especially if Kat doesn’t return in time…

  You started researching your assignment the same month the doctors told me about my illness. So I knew it was time to tell you about your real history. No one else knows. My secret was going to stay secret but things have changed, and you may need to know.

  Today, in Hungary, a law has been changed. Some people may trace me. In fact, a man has already tried internationally via Red Cross.

  When Pa died last year, he left this house and all his belongings, ‘to my wife Magda.’ That was NOT me, even though everyone here, even your mother Katalin, thought it was. And Pa had intended for me to have everything, but there was a legal problem. Your Pa was married, earlier, to another Magda Kovacs. I took on her name and adopted her past. Since 1956, Pa and I have lived together. Katalin, your mother, was born in the year after I arrived here from Hungary, but she is not the only child of your Pa.

  Many years ago, as a university student, I was involved with a journalist. That’s when the secret police recruited twenty-year-olds to work with Communist journalists to interview dissidents. They were called spy media. Now, Hungary is to investigate paid informers, and my interviews are included. My name is on the list. So is my photo.

  Look through my things marked ‘Not to be opened until after my death.’ You’ll find a photo of Tibor. Always he was known as just Tibor. A political activist and journalist. I was student editor of the university newspaper. It was an exciting time. Our ideas were important, we thought. We would do anything for them. We agreed to interview people.

  Then I started to question whether I was right to destroy people for ideas. Tibor and I no longer agreed on the reasons for our actions. I didn’t like all of what he was doing, but we had been linked in photos and reports. Some things grew beyond what we intended. Suddenly it was very dangerous to be known as Tibor’s girlfriend. He was arrested. So was I. And now something else has happened.

  The printer stopped. FILE CORRUPTED. The screen blanked. ‘Did you back it up?’ I screamed at Luke. Was I going to lose answers before I even found them?

  ‘No.’ He stared helplessly at the blank screen.

  ‘Some Guardian Angel!’ Gran was almost mine again, and somehow he’d lost her in cyber-space. At that moment of cyber-crash, there was a knock on the front door. Still madly fiddling at the keyboard, Luke ignored the knock. Taking a big breath, I went to open the front door.

  Chapter 5 Trustee

  There was a strange man on the doorstep.

  ‘Hi, Zoe. I’m Bruce Trewin, and my job is to help you look after your grandmother’s estate. I’m your Trustee. Sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to you at the funeral. My condolences about your grandmother.’ His enormous glasses with green frames were cool. So was his green family tree tie which had branches on it. ‘Thought I‘d just pop in and see if I could catch you now…Here’s my ID.’ He held up one of those plasticky pockets with a photo and name in heavy black print.

  I pretended to look closely, so he wouldn’t think I was a fool letting a stranger into the house. But how would I know whether this ID was real or fake? Name labels can change. With Photoshop, Luke can scan in anyone’s photo on an ID. He did it for me when I lost my student card, first day at Hedge High.

  Trustee Bruce was about as old as my dad would have been, if he’d been around. But he wasn’t. And Bruce was most definitely not my dad!

  ‘Your gran contacted us after I introduced the Missing Millions program…That’s my other job…being a TV star.’ He gave a little laugh, as if he expected us to be impressed.

  Ah! That’s where I’d seen him. Was he joking about being a star, or did he believe he was one? Bruce followed me into the front room.

  ‘Great tie,’ admired Luke. IT guys collect cartoon-style ties. It’s sort of expected if you’re an old geek. ‘Hi. I’m Luke.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I introduced them. ‘Meet Luke Warne. I board with his family while my mother is away working.’

  They shook hands, both glancing back like a pair of screen junkies. Luke had been trying to get www.finalthoughts.com up again, but the screen was blank now.

  ‘Er…I think your tape is in here…’ I moved across to Gran’s set-up. . I hit PLAY. ‘Here’s the Missing Millions one. You’re in this, aren’t you? Gran recorded it.’

  Bruce nodded as the screen-Bruce talked. Having two of them in the same room was weird, like Bruce had been cloned. There was the cyber-Bruce and the real one.

  ‘Tonight we’ll investigate “Eugenia”, the woman who left thirty million and no will. The woman with thirty-one aliases.’

  ‘Yes, that’s me, the compere,’ said Bruce proudly, staring at screen-himself. He was wearing the same tie.

  ‘Where d’you buy the tie?’ asked Luke.

  ‘A birthday present from my family,’ said Bruce. ‘A one-off.’

  ‘OK. Want to have a look around here?’ I suggested, before Luke could offer to swap his t-shirt for the tie. Then I suddenly remembered what was in my backpack. And what had been in Pa’s box of sports stuff. And what was lost on the file in cyber-space. Maybe inviting Bruce to look around was not the way to go.

  ‘Just a quick look for the will and stuff,’ Bruce dragged his eyes away from his other self. ‘Usually lawyers have one on file. For some reason it’s missing.’

  Suddenly I wasn’t sure what was real. ‘What if you can’t find a will?’ I asked, partly because I needed to know and partly to stop me feeling guilty about holding stuff secret. Finding out the facts about Gran’s life wasn’t just a job for me, it was my history. I had to start somewhere.

  ‘So how do experts like you go about finding relatives?’ Luke asked Bruce.

/>   ‘Check files. Advertise. Ask neighbours. Show photos. Like, your gran came to us after she saw me on the Missing Millions show. She contacted me for more details about the bigamist Mr X. Wanted to know who’d inherit: the children of the first family or the second? And she also wanted to know about Eugenia with the thirty-one aliases.’

  ‘Did Gran know her?’ asked Luke quickly. ‘Or know about her? Was she a relative?’

  He was so eager to find out. At that moment, I felt really mad. I’d changed from sad about Gran to mad. Luke and the Trustee had taken over my relative. ‘Magda wasn’t Luke’s Gran,’I exploded. ‘She was just mine and I’d like to find out about her.’

  ‘Zoe’s gran,’corrected Bruce. ‘We always have lots of calls after the program. A few nutters. Most claim to be relatives and want to inherit the money. Proof is needed: documents or DNA or family resemblances, like the same shape noses. But your…Zoe’s gran was just interested in how Eugenia managed her complicated life. I think that’s mainly why she rang.’

  ‘Was she interested because her life was a bit like that?’ Luke suggested with a quick look at me. ‘What’s that, er, bigamist guy?’

  Immediately Bruce looked delighted that someone wanted to know about things he knew.’ A bigamist gets married more than once, at the same time, without getting a divorce.’

  A bigamist! My gran couldn’t be mixed up in something I can’t even spell!

  ‘Sometimes my dad says he should never have got married in the first place…but he’s joking,’ said Luke.

  That was true. Luke’s parents were OK. They actually liked doing things with each other. Most kids in my classes had parents who just argued, or else they didn’t even live together, or they lived with someone else’s parent. Luke’s parents were cool and they lived in the same house, together.

  ‘Who does get stuff,’ I asked, ‘from your lady?’

  ‘The first family, if the second isn’t legal. Bigamy is illegal.’ Bruce fiddled with the monitor, increasing the brightness so his tie showed up better.