by Derek Hansen
‘I’m sorry, Ramon. My apologies to both of you. A slip of the tongue. What can I say?’
‘No damage was done,’ said Lucio. ‘I think Ramon covered up your mistake.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Milos.
‘Hope,’ said Ramon caustically. ‘Hope is what a drowning man clings to before he goes under. You made a catastrophic blunder, Milos, and you hope no damage was done. How long have we known Neil? He is like a dog with a bone. He gnaws away at things until there is nothing but fresh air left to gnaw on. Do you honestly imagine for a second that he’ll just ignore your “slip of the tongue”?’
Milos bowed his head in acknowledgement of his blunder.
‘For God’s sake! If Barbara hasn’t already told Neil about coming to see us, she will within the next ten minutes. Neil will be giving her the third degree and, when he finds out, he will be furious. At her and at us. And I don’t think we’ll be Barbara’s favourite people either.’
‘I’m sorry, Ramon.’
‘Save your apologies for Barbara. I’m sure she’ll be relieved to know you’re sorry. I think Neil has been way ahead of us all along. I think he is attempting something quite remarkable and would have pulled it off but for Barbara’s intervention.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Lucio. ‘What is he attempting?’
‘Use your brain for once. For God’s sake, do I have to hold your hands and guide you as if you were little children? Haven’t you been listening?’
Both Lucio and Milos shifted uncomfortably in their chairs.
‘I think Neil’s original intention was to cure us of the truth by shocking us, which is why he made the remark about taking his brother’s life. But in developing his story he became more ambitious. I strongly suspect there is another story within the story he is telling but he has disguised it brilliantly. His intention is to lay all the facts out in front of us and yet not have us realise the real story he is telling. But for his accident, I don’t doubt he would have got away with it.’
‘Away with what?’
‘You work it out, Lucio. Neil’s story is all about belief and who to believe. I’m convinced he timed his exit perfectly, with us engrossed in wondering who is telling the truth — Grant or Linda. Whether deliberately or otherwise, he is deflecting us from debating the real issue, which is what transpired between himself and his brother. Soon he will tell us what he did to Billy and ask us to believe what he did is true. He said he took his brother’s life but, thanks to Barbara, we know he didn’t. But something equally unforgivable happened. What worries me is that your slip of the tongue might jeopardise the story Neil is really trying to tell.’
‘Which is?’
‘Oh, use your brain, Milos! You’re as bad as Lucio.’
‘Calm down, Ramon,’ said Lucio. ‘Despite your claim that Neil is a terrier — and I concede that he can be — I am not convinced that he didn’t accept your explanation. Why wouldn’t Gancio pass on Barbara’s name?’
‘For God’s sake, Lucio. That is not the issue. The issue is why Milos used her name in such a confident and casual way. It assumed familiarity.’
‘Ramon is right,’ said Milos reluctantly. ‘The question is, how do we respond next week?’
‘That’s entirely up to Neil,’ said Ramon. ‘He holds all the cards. He may choose to confront us, but then again he may not. He will do whatever he thinks is best to salvage his story and, whatever his decision, we owe it to him to go along with it. I don’t think Neil has any choice but to complete his story exactly as he planned it. It appals me that neither of you can see what he’s trying to do.’
SIXTH THURSDAY
Chapter Twenty-seven
‘Today my story concludes,’ said Neil. ‘Today I rattle the skeleton in my closet. I hope you all feel proud of yourselves when I reveal the extent of my shame. Once Ramon decided to involve his murky past in his story, this outcome was inevitable. I suspect we’ve all done things we are not proud of. God only knows what Ramon got up to in Argentina but it’s significant that he’s never gone back there. The generals are long gone but wild horses couldn’t drag him back, not even for a visit. And what about you, Milos? You told us about how you were on the run in Hungary with your brother and your desperate struggle to survive. It’s clear to us that your brother would do whatever was necessary to ensure your survival. Whatever was necessary. Think about that. I’m sure a lot of it would not make for mealtime conversation. Milos, you couldn’t have avoided being party to things your brother did, things that would shame you now, things you don’t want to talk about and left out of your story. I have no doubt that you told us a sanitised version. As for Lucio, anyone who has been in as many bedrooms as he has should be careful throwing stones. You guys rewrite history to protect yourselves and the opinion others have of you, but I’m not going to play your game. I’m going to be very Australian and upfront about what I did wrong and let you judge me on the basis of it. But while you judge me, just remember who you really are.’
Neil finished his coffee. He’d let it get cold. He placed the cup back on the table alongside his empty wine glass. No one seemed eager to interrupt or comment.
‘I don’t know if any of you have ever gone into the chat rooms on the internet. I have. It’s a wonderful Walter Mitty world where you can be anyone you want to be. You can be old or young, male or female, rich or poor. Ramon could get his eyesight back, Lucio his virginity and Milos could have virtual affairs to make up for the ones he’s never had in real life. Chat rooms are a world of invention and fantasy. They’re time out and an escape. That was what we had here before Ramon made his convoluted, thinly disguised confession. We had a world of invention and fantasy: each of us came here and could pretend to be anyone we wanted to be because we were both friends and strangers. We had the right here to be someone other than the person we were to the rest of the world. We had the right to sustain invention and, if we chose, to become characters who were no more real than those who inhabited our fictions. I want you to think about this when I conclude my story, my true story, and ask yourselves whether we weren’t better off.’
‘You overestimate the level of our frankness,’ said Ramon cautiously. ‘As I’ve told you before, my story was not my confession, thinly disguised or otherwise. However, I was happy to let you think that it was. It was a risk I was prepared to take to add tension to the telling. In this company, one has to be very careful of the risks one takes. Do you want to think about that?’
Chapter Twenty-eight
Billy reached into his top pocket for his tobacco and began to roll another cigarette. The calmness with which his fingers went about the task eased some of the tension inside him. He hoped it had a similarly calming effect on Linda who was still rigid with fear.
He’d discovered the sedating effect of rolling cigarettes in Vietnam. The infantry section he’d been attached to had been sent out on a five-day patrol and he’d taken his turn standing guard at night. He’d set mines around their perimeter that he could detonate electronically in the event that the Vietcong launched an attack, but they did little to comfort him. There were so many stories of how the Vietcong secretly watched the crescent-shaped claymores being laid and then crept in under cover of darkness to redirect them inwards. There were also stories of Vietcong silently infiltrating the perimeter and slitting sentries’ throats. Billy had heard all the stories but thought he was up to the task. After all, he went down tunnels and there weren’t many men who were prepared to do that. But the tunnels were silent and the jungles at night anything but. His ears, which had been attuned to picking up the slightest sound below ground, missed nothing above it. He lost count of the number of times he was convinced the enemy were creeping up on his position. He’d held fire, not wanting to risk shooting at shadows or straying animals and giving away their position, and held off detonating his mines in case they had been turned and he blew half of his section to bits. When his shakes got too bad he put his SLR down and rolled
a cigarette to calm himself. He knew he couldn’t smoke while he was on guard duty but there was comfort just in rolling them as though he was going to light up. He stuffed the rollies back in the plastic tobacco pouch. When he was relieved one and a half hours later he was stunned to discover he’d rolled over thirty.
‘Well, Linda, are you going to tell lover boy what really happened?’
Billy ran his tongue along the edge of the paper, tamped the ends and reached for his matches. The match striking sounded abnormally loud. He felt Linda jump.
‘Look, Billy, it seems super bitch has lost her tongue. Amazing, isn’t it? Couldn’t shut her up in court, can’t get a word out of her now. Why do you think that is?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Oh, I will, Billy. You see, my little schoolteacher actress here told the jury I was a really nasty man who got a kick out of beating women. She told them she had cuts and broken bones to prove it. Billy, she had the jury sitting on the edge of their seats. They recoiled when she told them how I’d hit her so hard I’d split her head open from top to bottom. They wanted to gather her up in their collective arms and give her a hug. When she told them how I’d knocked her down so violently that I broke her collarbone, one of the male jurors turned to look at me and, I swear, if he’d had a length of rope on him, he would’ve lynched me right there.
‘I watched my barrister get up, Billy, and I thought, here we go, he’ll get the truth out of her. I mean, I was paying him three thousand dollars a day. He was a gun silk, Billy, the sort of interrogator the Gestapo would’ve treasured as a shining example of their craft. He told the jury what really happened, how we were getting ready to go out to dinner. Linda was rubbing one of her fancy oils into her skin when I got out of the shower. We were clowning about, Billy. I said something to her that was a bit naughty and when I turned around to get my towel she flicked me with hers. She can make towels snap, Billy, like cracking a whip, and she got me a beauty right on my arse. I spun around to grab her towel off her. Understand this, we were playing. It was a game. It was something we’d done a hundred times before. Linda was laughing. I was laughing. We were a happily married couple having our own naked tug of war in the privacy of our bathroom when she slipped and let go. Do you hear me, Billy? She slipped and let go of the towel. Slipped and let go. That’s all. Bathrooms are unforgiving places, Billy, and nice, expensive Italian marble is especially unyielding. My little Academy Award-winner split her head open and broke her collarbone.
‘I dressed her, Billy. I carried her out to the car and drove her to hospital. I stayed with her until she’d been stitched, sedated and X-rayed, then went home to take care of our daughter. The babysitter was just a kid herself, studying for the HSC, and had to get home. My daughter knew Linda had slipped and fallen, so did the babysitter and the doctors and nurses who looked after Linda in the hospital. But do you know something, Billy? Nothing my three-thousand-dollar-a-day barrister did could make Linda admit that she was lying, make her change her story, get her to retract a word. I was home free until she told her lies. I would’ve got off, Billy, I would’ve got off. But the judge and the jury believed the bitch. They believed her. And they thought it was too much of a coincidence that both Linda and Sharna fell and hurt themselves. The two events were years apart, Billy. Where is the fucking coincidence in that?
‘She lied, Billy. Your little girlfriend put her hand on the Bible and swore to tell the truth and then lied through her teeth. In hindsight, you’ve got to take your hat off to her. She got everything she wanted and I got six fucking years in gaol. Six fucking years! Have you any fucking idea what gaol is like, Billy, have you any fucking idea at all?’
‘Yeah, I do as a matter of fact.’ Billy calmly butted his rollie in the beer can. He looked up at Grant. White flecks of spittle had gathered at the corners of Grant’s mouth, a vein in his temple was throbbing and his eyes were bulging. Billy had the feeling Linda’s eyes had widened a bit as well.
‘You’ve done time?’ Moments earlier Grant had looked like he was about to explode but the shock of Billy’s admission somehow defused him.
‘I got twelve months, served nine.’
‘What for?’
‘Assault. I was living in Sydney and trying to get my life back together. I was having a quiet beer in a pub when these student types, all long hair, sideburns and Uncle Ho T-shirts, came in. To cut a long story short, they got stuck into me for going to Vietnam. Called me a killer. Accused me of murdering innocent women and children. There were seven or eight of them, some of them girls. One of the girls actually spat at me. I had three of the dickheads on the deck and out for the count before the barman and a couple of other blokes pulled me away. The barman stood up for me in court and said I’d been provoked. The judge said that I was a menace to society, all the more dangerous for being a trained soldier. In the end he gave me the benefit of the doubt. Gave me six months’ suspended sentence and a caution that if I reoffended I’d go straight to gaol.’
‘What happened?’
‘I reoffended.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘No. A few days later. Same scenario. Vietnam vets weren’t exactly the flavour of the month. None of us wanted to go to Vietnam but, when we got back, those of us who got back discovered we were saddled with the guilt of the nation and loathed for it. I decided I wasn’t going to wear it.’
‘But you knew you’d go to gaol.’
‘I didn’t care.’
‘Christ. Where’d they send you?’
‘Long Bay.’
‘Twelve Wing?’
‘For a while. Until I got reclassified from C1 to C3 and transferred to the training centre. Have to thank my parole officer for that. I didn’t give a shit where I went or what I did.’
‘There’s the difference between you and me, Billy — I do give a shit. They tried to send me to Vietnam too. When I got the papers, Christ, did I curse the day I was born. May the fucking eleventh. Don’t you think it’s ironic that the day you’re born should determine whether or not they’re going to try to get you killed? I assume you got balloted in.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What was your birthday?’
‘May eight.’
‘There you go. The difference is, you went, Billy, like a lamb to the slaughter and I didn’t. The rugby club doctor gave me a medical certificate saying my back was buggered and went on for eight pages about the treatment I was supposedly getting. Thing is, we were running second in the comp and they didn’t want to go into the finals without their star breakaway. Nobody went to Vietnam who didn’t want to go, Billy. You either had to be terminally stupid or you wanted to go.’
‘I had no choice.’
‘You had choice, just as you had choice over whether or not you went to gaol. That’s the real difference between us, Billy. I’m the one who had no choice. No fucking choice at all. Super bitch here saw to that.’ Grant picked up his rifle and pointed it towards Linda. ‘Know what I want now, Billy? I want revenge. I want to get my own back, make Linda pay for her lies and what she did to me. It’s time she paid for the two thousand, one hundred and ninety-three days I spent in gaol. It’s time she paid for destroying the fabulous life that I had and the brilliant career. It’s time she paid for stealing my company. I want to kill her, Billy, and that means I’ll also have to kill you. Sorry about that, but when you hang around super bitch you have to expect to get hurt. I’ll have to shoot you first, Billy, because just shooting Linda would be too kind, too quick. I really think she deserves to be roughed up a bit first. Roughed up until the bitch is begging me to shoot her, pleading with me. I’m told, Billy — and you can probably correct me here if I’m wrong — that a bullet in the belly is the most agonising way to die. I do like the sound of that. The most agonising way to die. That’s what she deserves, Billy. What do you reckon?’
‘I saw worse in Vietnam.’
‘What do you think, Linda? What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue again? You know,
Billy, when I left home a couple of days ago there was no doubt at all in my mind what I wanted. Above all, I wanted to get even in the way I’ve just described. But that’s not all, Billy. I want more. I want my company back and my old life back as well. I want things back to the way they were before super bitch ruined everything. You know, it took me a whole day’s driving and thinking to realise that I couldn’t kill her and get my company back. Can you imagine what a bitter pill that is to swallow? I have to choose, decide what I want most. On the one hand I want to kill her, but that could complicate things when it comes to regaining control over my company. I mean, if she signed the company over to me and then disappeared, how would that look? I have the problem of making sure there’s no suggestion of coercion or duress. Follow me, Billy? How unfair is that? How unjust? If I want my company back, the bitch has to go unpunished. Unfucking-punished. What would you do, Billy?’
The tension began to seep from Billy’s body as he realised Grant had already made his decision. He hoped Linda had realised it too, even though she gave no indication.
‘If I were you, I’d show Linda where to sign.’
‘Is that right?’
‘It’s hardly a tough decision, is it? If you shoot Linda, you’ll be the first person the police will suspect. Even if you don’t go back to gaol, you’ll have no company, no career and nothing to live for. That doesn’t make much sense to me.’
‘You know, Billy, on balance I think you’re right, although the decision is a lot harder to make than you think.’ Grant reached into his backpack and pulled out the documents his lawyers had drawn up. ‘You’ll find I’ve been more than generous, Linda, far more generous than you deserve, but we want everything to pass the sniff test. Basically, you’re selling your interest in Film Gate to me for half a million dollars. Ahh, you look surprised. I must admit, half a million is a very generous offer, but then again you have given me very generous terms. Very generous terms. You’ve agreed to let me make the payments over twenty years. I give you twenty-five thousand dollars every year for twenty years. I know I spend more than that each year on entertainment, Linda, but you know, I think you could live quite well out here on twenty-five thousand a year.’ He looked around at the blank canvases on the walls. ‘You’ll be able to finish your paintings and maybe even sell a few. God forbid, Linda, but you might even end up thanking me.