The Ambulance Chaser

by Richard Beasley

  ‘Well,’ Gibbs said, ‘try not to lose your mind as well as your life.’

  Lose my mind? Over the last twelve months I’d lost most of what had been my life. I was a good candidate for shell shock. Then again, it’s a mad, mad world we live in. Wars. Famine. Children behind barbed wire fences. Corporate greed and excess. Mad is believing what the government tells you. Mad is believing in loan gunmen in book depositories.

  A large corporation. Or a government. A mysterious event. The corporation makes money. The government’s fortunes improve. Is dishonesty, or merely luck involved? Provided you’ve only lost your assets, not your marbles, reaching the right answer is easy.

  Nine

  On Thursday night I had to put aside my conspiracy theories, because Thursday night meant I was back in the real world of the Randwick South Legal Centre. Specifically, the world of Tofilau Fanuatapu.

  Tofilau Fanuatapu was my favourite Samoan client. A native of the tiny island of, strangely enough, Fanuatapu, he had grown up on the main island of Upolu. I hadn’t asked, but I think he simply outgrew the isle of his birth. The combination of global warming and Tofilau’s spectacular mass would be enough to submerge permanently any small South Pacific island and probably most of the Maldives. Not to mention that he had a head of hair that could put anything less than the size of Bora Bora into a regular state of solar eclipse. He was a man in stature, depth and weight who was perfectly designed for an island continent like Australia, visa or no visa.

  I had helped ‘Toffee’ extract himself from a number of misunderstandings over the last few years, the most recent being caused when he ploughed his fourth-hand one-tonner van into a Mercedes four-wheel drive on Campbell Parade at Bondi Beach. Toffee got quite a shock when he was served with a letter of demand from the Mercedes’ owner’s insurer for what amounted to four-fifths of the GDP of his country of origin.

  We got him out of it. He changed flats. He used his middle name of Suelelle for six months, and I wrote a letter to the insurance company on RSLC letterhead saying he had returned permanently to the island of Fanuatapu to work in the growing coconut milk export industry. Only to be helpful I provided a forwarding address: Independent State of Samoa, Fanuatapu, Samoa, South Pacific Ocean. I did point out, however, that the local chieftain did not have instructions to accept service of any legal process on Toffee’s behalf. The insurer wrote a response complaining about the ‘insulting tone’ of my letter, but eighteen months later Toffee hadn’t received a summons. I still hope the insurer has some process-server paddling around Fanuatapu at the moment.

  On this visit to the Randwick South Legal Centre, Toffee was not the hunted but the hunter. Some crazy man owed him money, and he wanted to be paid. Toffee had just spent the last sixteen weeks of his life helping renovate homes while ‘employed’ by a Sydney builder. He was part of a large crew shifting around from work site to work site, and he wasn’t the only big bloke from a Pacific island to get a gig. It was hard work, twelve-hour days, but all was well up until seven weeks from the end of the job. That’s when Toffee got his last pay packet.

  ‘Why did you keep working?’ I asked.

  Toffee shrugged. Shoulders like sides of beef rolled up and down. ‘Boss told us we’d get paid at end, mate. Said he was waiting on some big cheques. You do some things on trust, you know, mate?’

  Not really. ‘How much are you down?’

  ‘Twelve grand. My nephew here, nine.’

  Toffee’s nephew ‘Kava’, sitting silently next to him, nodded in agreement. Kava coincidentally had the face of a kid of about nine, attached to the body of an adult bison with a weakness for fast food. This builder was brave.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Every shit job on-site, mate,’ Toffee said. ‘You name it.’

  Bob the Builder, I’m not. Mixing cement and carrying bricks would have been about as far as I could have named things, but it didn’t matter. ‘No union, I take it?’ Toffee laughed. ‘Have you got any record of the hours you worked?’ They shook their heads. ‘Cash money, no super, no payslips, nothing in writing – am I right?’

  Toffee was impressed. ‘You know this guy?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘What’s his story?’

  ‘Says he hasn’t been paid himself.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘Other blokes been paid. White ones.’

  ‘Have you written to him? Demanded your money?’

  ‘Called him yesterday. He said if he ever saw me again I’d be in that Villawood place in a week. Then back to the jungle.’

  Villawood. As in Villawood Detention Centre for Australia’s tired, poor and huddled unwanted refugee masses. Not to be confused with the accommodation offered to visa applicants who are donors to certain political parties.

  ‘Toffee,’ I said, ‘I’d be right if I suggested you still don’t have a visa. You don’t, do you?’

  Toffee hesitated. ‘Not really,’ he said eventually.

  ‘And Kava?’

  ‘Not really, also.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  There are nice people in Sydney. Across the whole nation. There really are. There is goodwill out there, waiting to be tapped, harvested, educated, set free. If we ever elect people of goodwill then one day it will happen. I truly believe that. Then there are those who choose people like Toffee and Kava for slave labour, let them risk their necks on dangerous jobs, then threaten them with the Immigration Gestapo when they dare to ask for their money.

  Lawyers strategise a lot. Litigation is sometimes like combat. You make sorties, withdrawals, peace offerings, all hell breaks loose, then cease-fires occur. You need to know when to parry, when to thrust, when to fire a shot over an opponent’s bow. Now that I was struck off, I didn’t need to bother with any of that. I could go to Defcon 3 any time I wanted to. ‘Would you settle for ten, Toffee? Say, ten each? Twenty grand between you?’

  Toffee looked at Kava, who appeared pleased with the suggestion. ‘That works for us,’ he said calmly.

  ‘Here,’ I said, handing Toffee a pen and placing a sheet of paper in front of him. ‘Write down the names of everyone from your part of the world who ever worked for this bloke, okay? There’s more than you two, right?’

  ‘Definitely,’ Toffee said.

  ‘All their names, then.’

  ‘Solomon Islanders too?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘Solomon Islanders too.’

  There’s a $10,000 fine for knowingly employing illegal workers. All part of the federal government’s legislative arsenal of dealing with unwanted guests from outside our shores. That, and pointing automatic weapons at them. I don’t know whether John R Hunter of John R Hunter Builders Pty Ltd knew that, but he soon would. And whether he knew it or not, ignorance of the law is no excuse. By Toffee’s calculations, John R Hunter was looking at $160,000 in fines if the authorities were notified. Twenty thousand looked a steal.

  I drafted the most aggressive letter I could. On RSLC letterhead, of course. Which was naughty of me, but I’m a naughty boy according to a lot of right-thinking people. Twenty thousand dollars cash, delivered to the Randwick South Legal Centre by 4 pm next Thursday, or the immigration boys start turning up at your work sites. You lose half your workers and get fined for the pleasure. All bluff and bullshit, of course, without a nuke in sight, but worth a try.

  ‘I’m surprised you and some of your friends haven’t paid a visit to this builder at his home to discuss your money disagreements,’ I said to Toffee as he got up to leave.

  ‘What you call it? Plan B, mate,’ he said. ‘We thought we’d see you first.’

  I was Plan A. I felt rather pleased with myself. I told Toffee to stick to weekly payments next time, to think about going to that migration agent for that visa, and that I’d see him next Thursday. Plan C was still a drink with Gabrielle at the end of the session. I had to get through an unfair dismissal before that.

  After my last client, the few of us left got ready to sh
ut down the centre for the night, but I had one more delay, from Mrs Cruz. Mrs Cruz was born in Peru, but had subsequently lived in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina. Having witnessed the World Bank plunge all but the most corrupt of the inhabitants of her homelands into fourth-world status at the behest of the cartel that owns it, she chose to immigrate to Australia. She told me that she was desperate to live in a country that was run by four banks rather than just the one.

  The economic and social destruction of all of the countries she had lived in should be no surprise, Mrs Cruz told me during our first conference. Economists, after all, are people who were too dumb to get into medicine or law. The capitalist markets, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO are full of these dunce failures. Mrs Cruz had a heavy Spanish accent, and, upon reflection, she may not have told me any of this. Perhaps Alan Greenspan had rung me one night to confess it. Or was it the head of the World Bank or someone senior from the US Treasury? I’m buggered if I can recall now, but I do remember that I had helped Mrs Cruz out a few months earlier in a financial settlement claim she had against her ex de facto. An ex de facto who disavowed all knowledge of Mrs Cruz despite being both her former live-in partner, business partner, and the father of her seven-year-old daughter.

  During her visits to the RSLC, Mrs Cruz had become very concerned about the state of my hands. Almost from the commencement of my financial meltdown I had developed a bad case of psoriasis on the tips of most of my fingers and under my nails. I was convinced that at any second I was about to turn into the Singing Detective. She had been threatening me with a cure for some time, and now here she was, at reception, potion in hand, just as I was about to manoeuvre over to Gabrielle to secure our exit.

  Mrs Cruz insisted on applying her restorative herself, which led to the spectacle of me standing at the RSLC reception, hands outstretched, while my client massaged away. I can’t say it was an altogether unpleasant experience. Mrs Cruz was exotic and, to be as neutral as possible, not unattractive. Her hands were soft, my fingers obliging, and the substance she was rubbing into them had the consistency of Vaseline, even if, unfortunately, more the smell of Valvoline. I expected either complete cure or sudden death by the morning. After five minutes of rubbing, Mrs Cruz at last seemed satisfied. I thanked her profusely and promised to report on progress.

  ‘What is that?’ It was Gabrielle, coming over to inspect my glistening digits.

  ‘Ancient Incan balm,’ I said.

  ‘It looked like an ancient Incan mating ritual to me. What’s the matter with your hands, anyway?’

  ‘I’m decomposing,’ I said. ‘You should see me on the inside.’

  ‘It’s not contagious, is it?’

  I shook my head. ‘Self-inflicted.’

  Ten

  There was a time when my choice of venue for a first drink with someone like Gabrielle Shepherd would have been considerably different to what it was now. When I was a young counsellor at the Bar I drank everywhere. I am still a VIP member of one particular bar. My black card is still in my wallet, the only piece of plastic I have left, a memento of a previous life. All those years of collecting gold cards had come to nothing. In the end these relics hadn’t burnt a hole in my pocket, they themselves were victims, liquefied in a more general and catastrophic meltdown. None of the old places would do. I had been expelled, all privileges revoked.

  We headed for the RSLC local. Not quite working class, but we weren’t going to bump into a visiting Hollywood star thinking it was Sydney’s Viper Room either. I walked close to Gabrielle. She smelt delicious, and not only in comparison with my hands. This is just one of the things you think about when you’re taking a girl out for a drink the first time. How she smells in comparison to . . . I felt fifteen again, on my first date. I was just less solvent this time.

  I bought us a couple of beers and asked Gabrielle how her studies were going. Apart from working at the RSLC she was completing a PhD on how the law serves men and screws women. She was in the middle of a chapter on how, in western society, women convicted of white-collar crime get much harsher sentences than men for the same offences. She rolled off the names of some of the members of the Pantheon of the World’s Greatest White Male Corporate Crooks. She had a point, I had to admit.

  Gabrielle drank her beer the way you’d expect the Trotskyite daughter of a left-wing union official to drink it, then took my hands in hers and examined both the damage and Mrs Cruz’s handiwork. She looked up at me and smiled and, for a moment, I sank without a trace. She had hazel eyes, real killers. She looked sexy and honest. My heart sent up a flare but there were no survivors.

  ‘You know, Chris,’ she said after a pause, ‘I remember your name from when I was a paralegal. I sent you a brief – well, the firm I was at did. It was a medical negligence case. I put the brief together. It was probably a couple of years ago now. I’ve forgotten the name. Was that your specialty?’

  I shrugged, knowing roughly what was coming. It had to be gotten out of the way, and the sooner the better. ‘Discrimination cases, harassment claims, immigration appeals, plaintiff’s personal injury, unfair dismissals, underpayment of wages, and a bit of crime,’ I said. ‘Your standard ambulance chaser with a few bells and whistles.’

  ‘I read in the papers about you – it may have been twice.’ She paused. ‘You don’t have to –’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  She smiled. ‘What do you want to tell me?’

  ‘The whole sorry story?’

  ‘If you like.’

  I smiled back. ‘I’d better get us some more beers then.’

  When I returned from the bar, I recited for Gabrielle the more notable extracts from the most celebrated chapter of my life. The year that had been my annus horribilis, as the Queen of Australia had once said, in what I could have sworn was an English accent. Well, she can talk.

  I guaranteed a debt. The debt had crystallised, as they say, then it had gone bad, as though it was some kind of overripe fruit. Then the borrower had gone north. Then, in order, there was a phone call, a threatening letter, a formal demand, a simple Statement of Claim, a judgment, and then a bankruptcy notice. Then I was ‘put through’, as my trustee described it. This chain of events had blown past me like a silent, deadly breeze, and before I even felt it tingle my cheek, I was on the ground, twitching, gasping for air.

  ‘Wasn’t your father involved?’ Gabrielle asked.

  I looked across the bar at the pokies whirring and the zombies sitting silently and glassy-eyed in front of them. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘My father was involved.’

  My father was a chemist. He was perhaps something more akin to a faith healer in the end. Only he was a man in whom no faith should be held, and he had not, to my knowledge, ever healed anyone. He had a series of pharmacies, spread strategically throughout the metropolitan region. The more shops, the more profit. A humble capitalist, he was attempting to become the McDonald’s of the pharmaceutical world. He encouraged me to become an investor, and I was already a director of the family company that ran things.

  He had a scheme too. He and others. A range of herbal products, internal exfoliants, liver cleansers, stress relievers. All kinds of rubbish. Even psoriasis cures, ironically enough. It wasn’t that they didn’t work – no one expects these things to work, do they? They actually made some people sick. Quite a few people, and some of them very sick. There was a Securities Commission prosecution, a charge against my father for negligent assault occassioning actual bodily harm, and the threat of a similar charge against me. Then those seeking miracle cures who had ended up in intensive care bought a class action for personal injury. An action that was passed on to my father’s insurer, who refused to indemnify him or the family company on the grounds of material non-disclosure. Something about not informing them that his range of naturopathic tonics and balms contained large dosages of known toxins.

  The business went under, and I had guaranteed the whole thing. The overdrafts, the fixed-rate loan, the car lease, th
e leases on some business premises, the mortgages. Now Max Blake was up north near Noosa somewhere, working under an alias for some spiritual centre of alternative medicine, giving massages, prescribing cures. An aging and debt-riddled apothecary who was still, occasionally, dodging summonses and indictments. Leaving me with the most rotten fruits of his endeavours.

  I wasn’t the only one who saw the irony in the situation. I was a self-confessed ambulance chaser. A tort lawyer. Someone who had pursued purveyors of dangerous products. Yet, there I was, director and shareholder of Blake Pharmacies Pty Limited, the country’s leading small business supplier of naturopathic human pollutants.

  ‘It seems so unfair to strike you off for going bankrupt because you guaranteed your father’s debt,’ Gabrielle said, sounding sincere. I nodded in acknowledgement. I wasn’t portrayed as a mere guarantor, though, and no one bothered to point out that I had no idea about the herbal cleansers or any other contaminant my father was pushing. No, I was an investor in this scheme, a duel conspirator, a co-director, a rich member of the legal profession making money out of poisonous hocus-pocus. I was an ambulance chaser who literally chased plaintiffs into ambulances. ‘I mean, it’s not as if you weren’t paying tax or were doing something illegal. I don’t understand why they’d be so tough.’

  I raised one eyebrow and smiled. I wasn’t sure if she was taking the piss again. And what was the phrase? The whole truth and nothing but the truth? ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I didn’t exactly get around to paying all of my tax in the end.’

  A slight smirk crept over Gabrielle’s mouth and now she was raising her eyebrows. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Oops.’

  ‘It wasn’t deliberate,’ I said. ‘I used the money I’d set aside for tax to pay his debts and our legal fees. Because I was a director of the family company at one stage, a charge against me of causing grievous bodily harm was on the cards. Fortunately, everyone fully recovered. My involvement looked worse than it was. It reads one way in a newspaper, when they spin everything to suit themselves, but the whole story, all the bits and pieces, well . . . it’s just different.’