by Gary Kemble
Ron’s door opened, and his mostly bald head poked out. For a fraction of a second Harry saw the true man, the unguarded Vessel, the battle-hardened career politician, and then their eyes met and he lit up. Game on.
‘Harry! Good to see you, mate!’
Harry rose so quickly he dropped his notebook on the floor, then kicked it while trying to retrieve it.
‘It’s okay, Harry,’ Ron said, ‘I’m not Treasurer yet, no need to bow.’
The secretary sniggered. Harry flushed.
‘Just kidding, just kidding!’
Vessel offered his hand. It was a firm two-fisted shake, a farmer’s handshake. They stood close enough that Harry could smell the breath freshener, see the broken capillaries on his bulbous nose, the bags under his bloodshot eyes. Scars of a life in politics.
‘I’m sorry I’m so late, I. . .’
Vessel waved away the apology and ushered Harry into his office. He planted his sizeable bulk behind the desk. It was covered in letters, documents, other bits and pieces. In one corner stood a framed photo of his wife and two daughters.
‘Come. Sit, sit.’
He laid a meaty hand on the table, his wedding band gleaming.
‘You don’t mind if I work while we talk?’ Vessel asked.
Without waiting for a response, he started tapping away at the keyboard. After every couple of keystrokes he would pause, peer at the screen, then continue. Harry could hardly complain. He was lucky to be here at all. He opened his notebook.
‘So, exciting times,’ he said. ‘Any word on the election date?’
Harry felt almost like a real journalist, rather than a hack who worked for the local rag. Everyone was obsessed with the election date, and now he’d had his own opportunity to ask the question.
Ron tapped the side of his nose. ‘We have it on good word that they’re going to call a December election. Just before Christmas.’
Harry nodded. That’s what all the pundits were tipping. It was risky, calling it so close to Christmas, but not unprecedented. Malcolm Fraser defeated Gough Whitlam on an election held on December 13, back in the ’70s. They could go as late as March, but there was a raft of hostile reports due in the new year.
‘You must be confident,’ Harry said.
Vessel shook his head but when he stopped, Harry saw the glint in his eye. He was already measuring up his new office.
‘Can’t be confident. This is the longest serving Coalition government in Australia’s history, with a wily leader. If anyone can pull it off, they can.’
‘Unemployment’s up. Interest rates are up. The only thing that isn’t up is the Coalition’s approval rating.’
‘Campaigns can do strange things to people. Anything can happen.’
The interview turned out to be as superficial as Harry feared. No big surprises. No big scoops. Andrew Cardinal was renowned for his control of information. His background was in army intelligence, after all. All the real stories would be dealt out to the national journalists on the campaign trail. Vessel talked about his own family but made no attempt to probe Harry about his personal life. There was no doubt that this was all about showing Harry what a great guy he was, how ready he was to help lead the country. But at least Harry had got an interview. It would make a nice page three lead. Front page, if they were desperate.
Harry closed his notebook and smiled.
‘Thanks again for seeing me,’ he said. ‘That just about covers everything for me. Is there anything else you’d like to add?’
He always asked the same closing question. It was one of the few techniques he’d been taught at uni that actually worked in the real world. Harry expected Ron to shake his head, get up, and show Harry out of the office. Instead he paused, shook his head, then took a deep breath.
‘No. But there’s something I’d like to ask you.’
Harry paused, waiting for the punchline. When it didn’t arrive, he shrugged and dropped back into the chair.
‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’
‘Why are you still at the Chronicle?’
Harry opened his mouth. Closed it again.
‘I mean, shit mate. When we first met I was busting my gut on George Street. And now, let’s face it – off the record – I’m about to become Treasurer.
‘And you. You’re still there. You’re polite. You seem bright. Far brighter than some of those dickheads over at the Brisbane Mail. That Terry Redwood wanker, for example. What’s he got that you haven’t got?’
Harry laughed. His face was burning. He remembered being drawn into the story-by-story dogfight with Redwood at uni. He hated himself for it, but Terry really pushed his buttons. At extremely low moments, Harry wondered whether he would have gone ahead with the Cherry Grove story if not for the desperate urge to land a knockout blow on Redwood.
‘I don’t know. You know what happened, right?’ Harry said. When Ron didn’t say anything, he continued. ‘The uni almost got sued. I almost got sued. I had to put my name to an extremely embarrassing apology. And pretty much every door, except this one,’ he threw a hand in the vague direction of his office, ‘closed in my face. Before I even graduated.’
Vessel wiped his mouth. ‘But the story. The story was good. And God knows how an undergrad journalism student got it.’
‘Well, I wish you were there back then to tell the Vice Chancellor that.’
Harry rubbed the back of his neck.
Ron shrugged. ‘Shit happens, Harry. You’ve stewed in purgatory long enough.’
Harry stared down at his closed notebook. This certainly wasn’t what he expected.
‘Harry, why don’t you come on the campaign trail with us?’
‘What?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the Chronicle is a local paper. We can’t justify devoting basically half our staff to a federal election.’
‘This isn’t coming from me, Harry. This was Andrew’s idea. He wants you on the bus. Local angle, and all that.’
‘Thanks for the offer, Ron. But I can’t.’
Ron shrugged. He finished the sentence he was typing, then stood up and shook Harry’s hand, over the desk.
‘All the best for the campaign, Ron,’ Harry said.
‘Likewise.’
Harry tried to pull away, but Ron held his hand a moment longer. ‘I mean it, Harry. This shit is beneath you.’
***
Harry pulled into the Chronicle’s undercover car park, head still spinning. On the drive back he replayed the conversation over and over again, vacillating between anger at Vessel for basically reiterating Bec’s prime criticism of him, and anger at himself for saying no. He wondered if he could phone Ron back, tell him he’d changed his mind. Then he wondered if he wanted to phone Ron back.
The story was good.
Harry rubbed his face. His lecturer had certainly thought so. To begin with. Harry had been looking into allegations that elements of the former Bjelke-Petersen government were engaged in rorting the Brisbane City Council’s planning process. The word was, they had the ear of a Labor Party councillor, who was taking kickbacks in exchange for smoothing the approval process for certain property developers. Brian Swenson, then just starting out, was the one developer named in the article.
Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s party was kicked out in 1989 after investigative journalist Phil Dickie uncovered widespread corruption throughout the Sunshine State. There was a Royal Commission; people were sacked, disgraced, in some instances jailed. The broom went through. A decade on from the Fitzgerald Inquiry, the idea that someone from the Labor Party – pitched as saviours who promised a clean slate – was in cahoots with the bad boys from the old days was too good to be true. It was the sort of rumour that did the rounds but never went anywhere.
Harry had dug through mountains of newspaper clippings and public documents. Found someone who’d give him details, off the record, and provide documents backing up the claims. His lecturer had insisted that he confirm the information from at le
ast one other source. For weeks it looked as though this wouldn’t happen, and the story would never be told.
He remembered Swenson’s secretary, breathless over the phone, telling him she knew the real story. Harry’s world exploded. No-one wanted to believe that a journalism student had landed such a scoop. Harry had, in effect, shamed his potential employers.
Then the secretary recanted, saying she’d been taken out of context. No problem, Harry thought, I have a tape recording of the interview. He had the documents. The tape – handed in with the assignment – went missing. The documents were dismissed as fakes. ‘Correct’ documents appeared. The newspapers and TV stations took great delight in saying, ‘I told you so’. Harry’s lecturer, who had guided him each step of the way, took a few steps back, scared for his future.
With nowhere else to go, Harry apologised to Swenson. Retracted the story. And lost his taste for investigative journalism. Why put yourself out there when you could earn the same money writing colour pieces and advertorials? He graduated, somehow landed a job at the Chronicle, and put it all behind him. End of story.
He walked into the office, relishing the cool air. He sat at his desk, logged on and reached for his glass of water, hand shaking slightly. He took a drink. Christine, the other half of the Chronicle’s reporting staff, watched him, peering over the top of her hipster glasses.
‘How was the Ronmeister?’
‘Yeah. It was. . . interesting.’
‘Interesting? Doesn’t sound like our Ron.’
Harry waved it away, and Christine went back to her work. He didn’t want to get into it while he was still processing the information himself.
He hadn’t told her about Bec yet. Telling her would require admitting that it was not just a temporary thing. Maybe it was a temporary thing. He tried the idea out like trying on a pair of pants. It didn’t fit. There were many things he could bounce back from, but not from the bombshell that Bec couldn’t imagine spending the rest of her life with him. After six years. Harry had thought that if you could spend six years with someone, you could spend eternity with them, but clearly not. His parents lasted thirteen. He and Bec lasted six.
‘You okay?’ Christine asked.
Harry nodded. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘You don’t seem fine.’
She peered at him. Harry tried to imagine that there was more in her eyes than concern for a colleague. But again, it didn’t quite fit. She was sweet and, yeah, Dave’s observation that she was also ‘hot’ wasn’t too far wrong. But she wouldn’t be around for long. She was marking time, waiting for her big opportunity. He could picture her on commercial TV, but thought she could do better. He’d miss her, but he didn’t want the youngsters to get stuck at the Chronicle, doing the same stories over and over again like some journalistic hell.
Youngsters? Fuck me. I’m only thirty-six.
He felt much older today.
‘I didn’t say I was fine, I said I’d be fine,’ Harry said. He forced a smile, for her benefit. ‘Hey, when did you get that?’
He gestured to the gear on her desk. There was a small video camera, and a cordless lapel microphone and pick-up.
‘Oh, that,’ she said. ‘We’re trying to get into online video, apparently. Some trial or something. Miles wanted me to give it a go. It’s pretty cool. High definition. Streams straight to YouTube.’
She looked embarrassed, as though Harry would be hurt that he hadn’t been asked. And normally he would have. But today he was just glad of the distraction.
‘I think you’d look good on TV,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
He stared at the blinking cursor on his screen, then opened his notebook. He skipped back past the Ron Vessel notes, to the article he’d been working on Friday afternoon. Accident waiting to happen. There were maybe half-a-dozen types of stories he and Christine got to write. ‘Accident waiting to happen’ was the one about how the council refused to fix a traffic problem that was, in the eyes of the punter, extremely dangerous. Usually it had to do with rat running or traffic calming, or both. An intersection that needed traffic lights. Or an intersection that already had lights, but the lights were the problem. Harry had written thousands of these stories. Sometimes the council did something about the problem – if it was a problem – sometimes they didn’t. He doubted it ever had anything to do with his articles.
He started typing, glancing back at his notebook. Normally it was like automatic writing, after all these years. Taking the basic structure of the news story, whacking the slabs of text in, rearranging them and then cutting them down to the required length. Thirty-five column centimetres for a front-page lead, twenty centimetres for a feature, fifteen for pretty much anything else. Knowing full well that by the time the ads were in, at least five centimetres and probably ten would be cut by the subs over at head office, and that there would be no consultation with him, unless it was the front page. And even then only if he happened to be sitting at his desk when they called.
Usually, the familiarity was soothing. But he couldn’t concentrate. The tattoo. If he didn’t get it at West End Tattoo, where did he get it? Did he go back into the city? Stones Corner? Sian said it didn’t look like it had been done by a tattoo machine. Could that be right? Had he been drugged, abducted? Was that what the nightmare was about?
And now, on top of all that, Ron’s helpful advice. His uni contemporaries – some of whom he’d run rings around – popped up all over the place. The Brisbane Mail, obviously, but also The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald. One had even landed a job with the Guardian in the UK. Then he remembered sitting in the Vice Chancellor’s office, waiting for Brian Swenson to arrive, wondering how in hell he was going to afford legal representation if Swenson went after him. That sick feeling, frantically looking for a way out and seeing none.
Maybe this wasn’t so bad. Telling the same half-dozen stories over and over again. The war veteran, recounting his stories for Anzac Day. The accident waiting to happen. The 60th wedding anniversary. David versus Goliath. Like an incomplete tarot deck, dealing the same fortunes over and over again, fourteen years later.
‘. . . phoned.’
‘Huh?’ Harry said. Christine was staring at him. ‘Sorry?’
‘I forgot to tell you – Fred phoned,’ she said.
Fred Mackay. World War II veteran. Christine, like all the junior reporters who came before her, groaned when she had to take a call from him, but Harry didn’t mind. If you stripped away the conspiracy theories, there was sometimes a nugget of interesting – maybe even useful – information.
Fred wouldn’t talk on the phone, because he thought he was under surveillance. But that was okay. Harry liked getting out and about. While Christine was happy to do most of the job at her desk, harvesting news from social media and putting in calls to verify the information, Harry would much rather rack up a few more kays on his Corolla. It was how he’d always done it. He was old-fashioned. To Harry’s mind, you couldn’t really relate to someone unless you were looking them in the eye, seeing the truth or lack thereof in their manner and surroundings.
Christine gasped. ‘Holy crap!’
Harry turned. Christine stood behind him, her coffee mug swinging loose in one hand.
Shit!
‘Is that real?’ she said.
Harry wanted to deny it, but what good would that do? What was the option? Tell her that Dave had drawn it on with Nikko pen? He nodded.
She walked over to him. ‘Give us a look.’
Harry bent his head forward so she could see it better.
‘Cool. Kinda retro. Where’d you get it done?’
Now this was something Harry could have lied about. He could have said West End Tattoo, seeing as that was the most likely option. But he was flustered and he blanked.
‘I. . . I don’t know.’
Christine backed away, dropped into her chair. ‘You don’t know. You. Don’t. Know?’
‘I don’t know.’
> He told her the story, waiting for the laughter. And to his surprise he got all the way to the end before it erupted between the fingers of the hand pressed to her mouth. She laughed so hard, despite trying to keep a lid on it, that Harry couldn’t help smiling.
‘Yeah, yeah. Get it out of your system.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just, you know. . .’
‘Yeah. I do.’
She turned back to her computer.
‘If you could keep it under your hat – you know, off Twitter – that’d be good.’
She pouted. ‘You’re no fun.’
‘I’m going to get it removed, so. . .’ he said, not even sure if that was true or not. He didn’t feel like it was his tattoo. It made sense to get rid of it. And yet. . .
‘You should keep it,’ Christine said. ‘It suits you.’
He glanced over at her. She stared at her monitor, slight smile touching her lips. He couldn’t tell if she was joking or not, and he didn’t want to ask, because he knew he wanted her to be serious.
‘Thanks.’
CHAPTER 4
Harry backed into the driveway and climbed out of his car. Despite the heat of the day, it was cool under the house. Unlike many similar homes in the area, it hadn’t been built in underneath. Instead of fibro walls, there were just wooden slats, spaced far enough apart to let the breeze through. He thought he might sleep down here on really hot nights, then remembered the mysterious scratching noise. He needed to get some rat traps.
He walked out to the front gate, grass whispering against the cuffs of his pants. He pulled the wad of mail out of the letterbox. Grocery pamphlets. An Indian take-away menu. Three letters, all ‘To the Householder’. Christmas toy-store catalogues. And the green flyer. He remembered the man shoving it into the letterbox, after witnessing Harry ‘christening’ his new place. The pamphlet was crinkled, after being caught in the rain and then dried. He opened it carefully.
SAVE THE TOWER, the headline screamed. It was boxed in by clip art – a cement mixer down one end, a dump truck down the other.