Dreamland

by Gilling, Tom

‘Yes.’

  As the market researcher trudged away in search of another victim Jess looked at Nick and said, ‘You don’t clean the bath. And your name’s not Duncan.’

  ‘I don’t think the man was really interested in my name.’

  ‘Then why did he ask you what it was?’

  Nick put the fabric softener in his pocket. ‘He needed a name, Jess, to show he wasn’t making it up. I don’t think he cared what name it was. I could have told him I was Bob the Builder.’

  ‘What if he didn’t believe you?’ She studied him from beneath her blonde fringe. ‘You should have told him your real name.’

  ‘I was playing a bit of a game, Jess. That’s all.’

  ‘Was the man playing one too?’

  Experience had taught Nick that the best way of ending an awkward conversation with Jess was to pick her up and put her on his shoulders. He picked her up and put her on his shoulders. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘what shall we do now?’

  ‘Nick.’

  The familiar voice came from the driver’s window of a white Commodore parked in a narrow laneway near Central Station, within sight of the squat red-brick building that housed the Daily Star.

  ‘Danny.’

  The Commodore was parked in a space marked ‘Loading Zone’ outside one of the scruffy rag trade outlets that dotted the streets and lanes around the Star. A hand-painted sign in the shop window said ‘Trade Only’.

  ‘Can we talk?’

  Nick approached the car from the driver’s side, ignoring the invitation to get in. He could tell straight away that this wasn’t the same Danny he’d seen in court. He looked up and down the lane. ‘What do you want, Danny?’

  ‘I should have called you. To say thanks, I mean. For getting me off the hook. I owe you, Nick. I won’t forget it.’

  Nick leant against the roof of the Commodore. He noticed a yellow sticker on the rear windscreen that said ‘Harbourside Rentals’ and wondered why Danny was driving a rented car. Maybe the insurance money hadn’t come through yet. ‘I’m surprised you remember any of it,’ he said. ‘You could hardly stay awake.’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea, Nick.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Your father made you do it.’

  ‘He’s a hard man to refuse, Nick. He said it was the only way. I believed him.’

  Nick didn’t say anything. He didn’t need Danny to tell him how hard it was to refuse Harry Grogan.

  ‘Please get in, Nick. We need to talk.’

  ‘About what, exactly?’

  ‘Just get in. Please.’

  Nick hesitated. ‘Five minutes,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’

  Danny waited for him to shut the door. ‘There’s something you need to know.’

  ‘There’s a lot I need to know. But I don’t think you can tell me, Danny.’ He looked at Danny’s hands gripping the steering wheel. The nails were bitten down to the quick and the skin on the inside of his wrists looked raw from rubbing. It was as if his hands belonged to someone else—as if he didn’t trust himself to control them if they weren’t clamped to the wheel.

  ‘I’m clean,’ said Danny. ‘If that’s what you’re wondering.’

  ‘Save your breath. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Nick.’

  ‘Sorry. But I just can’t think of anything you could tell me right now that I’d feel better about knowing.’

  ‘It wasn’t me who drove the car that night.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Nick answered sarcastically. ‘I think I remember reading something about that.’

  ‘It was Sophie, Nick. Sophie was behind the wheel. She wanted to score. I was already off my face. She knew this dealer…She’s only fourteen, Nick. Do I have to spell it out?’

  ‘You’re fucking a fourteen-year-old?’

  ‘I didn’t know she was fourteen. She told me she was eighteen.

  I believed her.’

  ‘Let me get this straight. You’re telling me I lied to save your fourteen-year-old girlfriend.’

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend. I’d never seen her before that evening. I haven’t seen her since. You’ve got to understand, Nick…I couldn’t take the risk. It would have been statutory rape. We had to keep Sophie out of it. You’re a journalist. You must understand that?’

  Risk. The word detonated dully in Nick’s head. Danny Grogan and his father knew all about risk. Nick had always thought of risk as something intangible, a statistical concept. But risk could be traded, just like gold or wheat or palm oil. Nick was the owner of one hundred thousand dollars worth of risk. The cheques were sitting—uncashed—in his wallet. And it turned out that he hadn’t lied for Danny at all, but for some child junkie.

  ‘Believe me. If I could have done this some other way—’

  Nick cut in suddenly. ‘Why did you torch the car?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You went back and set light to the car. Or someone did. What

  was that supposed to achieve?’

  ‘It was insured,’ Danny answered lamely.

  ‘I don’t care whether it was insured. Whose idea was it to burn it?’

  Danny waited a few seconds before answering. His hands were still gripping the steering wheel. ‘Hers…I think.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Hers.’

  Nick studied his expression. What did he remember about that night? It would have been a couple of days before anyone at the Roads and Transport Authority even glanced at the photographs from the speed camera. In any case, what sort of person burnt a seventy-thousand-dollar car to avoid a speeding ticket? Nick remembered the damage to the wing panel and passenger door. There was something Danny wasn’t telling him, perhaps because Danny didn’t know, perhaps because he knew but couldn’t say.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Nick.

  Danny looked straight ahead without speaking.

  ‘Am I supposed to be grateful? Because somehow I don’t feel grateful. I feel used.’

  They sat there in silence while the late afternoon traffic careened down the steep hill towards Central Station. Nick knew he was being hypocritical. He was behaving as though taking the blame for Danny had been an act of generosity when the truth was he’d been well paid for giving Danny his alibi. If it turned out that Danny wasn’t the only beneficiary, did that change anything? Did a liar have any right to protest about being lied to?

  Danny reached inside his jacket and pulled out a wad of fifty-dollar notes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Nick.

  ‘The fine,’ Danny said. ‘Six hundred dollars, wasn’t it?’

  Suddenly Nick felt ashamed. Maybe Danny didn’t know that he’d done this for money. Maybe Danny actually believed he’d acted out of friendship. Nick let him push the six hundred dollars into his pocket.

  ‘No need,’ he murmured, ‘but thanks.’

  ‘I guess my old man would have coughed up,’ said Danny, ‘but I’d rather do it myself.’

  Nick had his hand on the door handle. ‘I’ve got to go, Danny… I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Yeah…me too.’

  As Nick walked up the lane Danny called out, ‘You should drop by the club one night…have something to eat.’

  Nick didn’t look back.

  Flashing his staff card at the electronic scanner, Nick passed through the short glass tunnel designed—according to the security briefing that followed its installation—to trap any would-be terrorist or assassin in an air-tight, bullet-proof chamber, where they could be safely observed until the arrival of the police. Its more usual function, of course, was to trap employees attempting to enter the building with a damaged or expired pass or one that belonged to a colleague; all common enough ploys that had gone unpunished in the era of human security guards.

  Nick entered the lift and pushed the button for the third floor: home of the canteen, the cuttings library and the well-equipped but rarely visited staff gymnasium.

  The cuttings library occupied a corner of
what had been the compositors’ room, until the compositors were made redundant and the presses were moved out. When Nick had started as a copy boy the library had a staff of half a dozen and clipped every newspaper in Sydney as well as the national dailies, the Melbourne Age, the Bulletin and a couple of Fleet Street papers.

  As well as the Star’s own archives, there were cuttings from the Herald, the Sun and the Mirror going back as far as the Second World War and even beyond. On his breaks from fetching pictures, making coffee and buying cigarettes, Nick used to enjoy browsing among the files of brittle brown newsprint.

  Over the years successive management regimes had retrenched staff and uprooted files for so-called ‘long-term storage’ at a warehouse in the western suburbs. In the meantime every story that went into the Star was now automatically archived by the huge computer that whirred and muttered away in its own airconditioned glass pod on the eighth floor. The few remaining library staff were supposed to be working backwards, systematically transferring newsprint files to computer discs, but the truth was they didn’t have time to do it. So, for the Daily Star, recorded history now began somewhere in the early 1990s. Before that there were only fragments.

  After chatting briefly with one of the female librarians, Nick sat down at an empty computer terminal. Jerry Whistler would be at the afternoon news conference until 4.30 p.m. and none of the other subs would care if Nick was a few minutes late.

  At the log-in prompt he was about to type in his own name and password when he changed his mind and typed in SUB1—a generic user-name for casual subeditors and anyone else who’d forgotten their password.

  It puzzled him that nobody had reported the destruction of Danny’s Audi. During the court hearing it had been mentioned only once. The police seemed willing to believe that whoever had ripped out the stereo had also incinerated the car. There was no evidence to suggest that the destruction of Danny’s Audi was anything other than a macabre coincidence.

  He typed the name ‘Danny Grogan’ into the search box, together with the words ‘Audi’ and ‘burnt’. There was no shortage of would-be satirists around town ready and willing to hammer out a few hundred words of laborious whimsy at Danny Grogan’s expense—Jerry Whistler for one. The computer hummed for a few seconds before displaying the message: NO ARTICLE MATCHED YOUR SEARCH CRITERIA. PLEASE MODIFY SEARCH AND TRY AGAIN.

  Nick deleted the word ‘burnt’ and tried again. This time the search produced four results. The first was a picture story from page three of the Sunday Star, with a photograph of Danny standing alongside his ‘brand new toy—a gleaming German speed machine with the cheeky numberplate CR1PT’. The second, also from the Sunday Star, showed Danny and his girlfriend of the moment, posing in Formula One suits at Eastern Creek International Raceway before a charity event in which Danny finished third. The other two stories were both from the Daily Star: a front-page news report the morning after Danny was arrested for drink-driving outside the Bat and Ball Hotel, and a report of the trial at Waverley Local Court, where Danny escaped with a suspended sentence.

  It was nearly 4.30 p.m. Nick logged off the computer and walked out of the library and down the long windowless corridor to the lift. The search hadn’t told him much—except, perhaps, that if the police really had found anything suspicious in Danny Grogan’s car, they were keeping it to themselves.

  He got out on the editorial floor and headed straight for the male toilets. Moments later he found himself, rather awkwardly, standing next to the editor-in-chief, Les Perger.

  Staring resolutely at the white ceramic tiles, Nick mumbled, ‘Hello, Les.’

  ‘Nick,’ Perger replied in a tone that was, as usual, devoid of any semblance of warmth or even courtesy, even though it was Perger himself who had hired him.

  They stood shoulder-to-shoulder as the editor-in-chief wrestled with his flies.

  ‘See the paper this morning?’ Perger asked. ‘The gambling yarn was all over the radio news.’

  ‘So I heard,’ said Nick.

  The ‘gambling yarn’ was the sort of story that defined the Star under Les Perger. A mother playing the pokies at her local RSL had left her two children locked in the car. The carpark attendant found the children, smashed a window to let them out and then, charitably, phoned the Star. Nick hadn’t needed to be present at the midday news conference to recognise Les Perger’s hand in the decision to put the children back in the car for a picture, which showed two little faces gazing shyly through the broken glass under the headline, HOW COULD SHE?

  ‘Tracey did a nice job,’ said Perger.

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘She’s a smart girl.’

  Nick zipped up and waited for Perger to add the ironic rider he felt certain was coming. For a man of such volatile temper, with a long record of tearing doors off their hinges, Perger could be disarmingly patient. You never knew whether it was better to admit and apologise for a mistake or to brazen it out in the hope that Perger had more important things to worry about.

  The naming and shaming of dangerous drivers had been one of Les Perger’s first innovations as editor-in-chief of the Star. Gone was the back-page picture of the dog of the week, banished to some rarely visited space among the weather details; in its place was a mug shot, the less flattering the better, of a recently convicted dangerous driver, together with the numberplate of the offending vehicle. Derided—and then copied—by the broadsheet Herald, this was vigilante journalism and Les Perger was its acknowledged master. For some reason Nick had forgotten all about Perger’s dangerous driver obsession when agreeing to provide Danny Grogan with an alibi.

  Perger followed him to the row of basins and squirted pink soap into the palm of his hand.

  ‘Listen, Les,’ said Nick. ‘I’m sorry about the Grogan thing.’

  ‘What Grogan thing is that?’

  ‘I never thought it would end up in court.’

  Perger stood there lathering his huge hands. ‘You thought you might sort it out over a few beers, did you, Nick?’

  ‘The police wouldn’t accept my statement. There wasn’t a lot I could do about it.’

  ‘They reckoned old man Grogan put you up to it—is that the story?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And did he, Nick? Did the old crook put you up to it?’

  Nick was startled by the question, and by Perger’s casual use of the word ‘crook’. Of course Harry Grogan’s ruthlessness, his bullying, his duplicity, were qualities known to anyone who had ever glanced at the business pages of a major newspaper. Grogan had demonstrated them all during his celebrated appearance before a public inquiry into price-fixing in the building industry. His fifteen-minute cameo, shoulders hunched over the table as if at any moment he might lean forwards and bite the microphone in half, had been endlessly replayed on television. At least two promising legal careers had died in that wood-panelled room, as Grogan hectored and ridiculed his questioners, wagging his finger at the counsel assisting every time she attempted to bring him back to the question. But ‘crook’?

  Rumours abounded about Harry Grogan’s involvement in the fatal amusement park fire that proved so profitable to his company, but despite the efforts of a coronial inquiry not a shred of evidence had ever been found to prove it. And there was no shortage of scuttlebutt to explain the cosy relationship between Grogan Constructions and the New South Wales Department of Public Works, but all of it was hearsay. Like every other newspaper in Sydney, the Star had paid out handsomely over the years in libel damages when such insinuations found their way into print. On the other hand Les Perger wasn’t the sort of man to throw around a word like ‘crook’ without knowing something.

  ‘Shit, no,’ he said. ‘I was the one driving the car.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, that’s all right then.’

  Their eyes met in the mirror. There was something in Perger’s lopsided smile that made it clear to Nick that everything was far from all right.

  ‘It was an Audi tt,’ said Nick. ‘
I just got carried away. I didn’t even notice the speedo.’

  Perger shook the water off his hands. ‘You read this newspaper, don’t you, Nick?’ Rule number one at the Daily Star and every other newspaper in the world: the journalist who can’t be bothered to read his own paper will soon be looking for another job.

  ‘Of course, Les.’

  ‘So you know what we think about dangerous drivers.’

  Nick reached for a paper towel, but the dispenser was empty. ‘Yes, Les.’

  ‘Yes, Les,’ said Perger. Nick knew what was coming next. First the moronic repetition. Then the word ‘mate’. It was like a replay of the Milhench fiasco, only worse. Far worse. Then Nick was the scapegoat, sacrificed for an error of judgment Perger himself might easily have been guilty of in his youth. Even as Perger chastised him for his ‘cowboy’ reporting, Nick had the feeling that, secretly, he approved—that what Perger wanted for his newspaper was a staff full of cowboys. That hadn’t saved Nick, of course. Bombarded with phone calls from the premier, the minister of police and the chief commissioner, and threatened with the wholesale withdrawal of government advertising, the editor-in-chief had done what he had to do and hung Nick out to dry—on the foreign subs’ desk, under Jerry Whistler.

  ‘Mate,’ said Perger. ‘Have you any idea how this makes us look—like fucking hypocrites.’

  ‘If you think it’s damaged my byline, I’m sorry.’

  Perger glanced at the empty paper towel dispenser, then walked to the other wall and tugged on the roller towel. ‘If you had a byline to damage, mate, I’d be worried.’

  He didn’t need to say any more, and he didn’t say any more. Nick listened to him slapping his palms together as he strode away down the corridor.

  The evening went slowly. Nick spent nearly an hour blending wire stories for a potential page one story about a plane crash in the Philippines. Filipino authorities were reporting two honeymooning Australians among the seventy-nine dead: if the picture editor could get photographs of the newlyweds to put side-by-side with the crash scene it would have been a shoo-in for tomorrow’s splash. At 9.15 p.m., with reporters and cadets and a couple of copy girls ransacking the phone book for people with the same name as the crash victims, a report came down the Reuters wire saying the couple weren’t honeymooners or even Australians but middle-aged Filipinos with family in Brisbane, transforming the story in a flash to three paragraphs on page twelve.