First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  He talked wistfully of working with Heidl in far north Queensland. They had spent the best part of the fifteen months since Heidl had been released on bail getting about the frequently inaccessible parts of tropical Cape York in helicopters and four-wheel drives.

  When I asked him what they’d been doing up there, Ray was suddenly furtive, muttering something about it being secret. When I asked why, he said it was commercial-in-confidence.

  What are you talking about, Ray? Commercial-in-fucking-what?

  Ray was both evasive and, I began to think, ignorant of key details.

  It’s not for the book, right? Ray said finally. You can’t tell anyone.

  Ray lowered his voice to a point of near inaudibility.

  We were looking for a place to build a rocket launch site.

  What?

  It’s a big deal. Crazy shit. NASA.

  NASA employed Heidl and you to find a rocket launch site?

  Not exactly. It’s not like that.

  But it is. That’s what—

  No. Look. I can’t say any more. But…apparently…there’s a need for a satellite launch facility in the Southern Hemisphere. For special satellites.

  How special?

  Spy special. That Star Wars thing, you know, that Reagan got going.

  And NASA paid for you and Heidl to go on this jolly for a year and a half?

  Maybe. I can’t say. Ask Ziggy. I don’t know.

  I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could kick him.

  Well, you’d be right not to, Ray said.

  He cursed Heidl, bought a jug of beer and six Southern Comforts, and grabbed some glasses. We leant in on a small bar table, perched on stools, sloping in as if buttressing each other, and Ray repeated how I was not to tell Heidl anything about my family. He poured the Southern Comfort into each beer glass and topped them with beer. It made the beer taste manky, but taste was never Ray’s primary interest in drink.

  You’re a friendly bloke, Kif. Don’t be a friendly bloke. He’ll want to be one of your mates. Don’t be his mate.

  He’s your mate.

  I know. Why do you think I’m telling you this?

  He says you’re his best mate.

  Ray looked at me blankly.

  There are stories about Brett Garrett in the research notes.

  Ray seemed to suddenly awaken. What sort of stories? he said.

  The book keeper who disappeared, I said.

  I know who Brett Garrett was. What sort of stories?

  Kept asking questions. Wouldn’t let Heidl expand. He was holding the whole show back.

  Weird guy, Ray said. So?

  And then he disappears.

  Weird guy, like I said.

  Heidl said something similar. He’s quoted in a profile saying Garrett was one of those blokes who you find twenty years later hanging around the Kakadu rainforest.

  Ray made a strange choking noise, as if he was trying to both vomit and swallow something at the same time, then blamed it on the beer.

  There was a story that Ziggy did for him, I began.

  Killed Garrett? What sort of story?

  A contract killing, I said. A rumour.

  You believe that shit, you’d believe anything, Ray said; suddenly, strangely angry. Who told you this crap? Ziggy?

  I told you. The research notes the publishers gave me.

  Ray seemed to think about this, or perhaps he wasn’t thinking about it, but something else that was at once very far away and so close he could see and think of nothing else.

  So do you believe Heidl would go that far? I asked.

  Ray downed his beer, poured another, skolled that, and looked at me. His eyes momentarily had the same dying wombat look as Heidl’s.

  The thing is it gets inside you after a time, his talk-talk-talk, all of it. It takes over something in you.

  Listening to Ray, I realised that he, whom I’d never known to be fearful of anybody or anything, was frightened.

  Let him talk-talk-talk, but just tell him nothing, that’s all I’m saying. Nothing about Suzy. Nothing about Bo.

  I went to make a joke, but stopped.

  Don’t tell him Suzy’s pregnant. And if he calls you at home, don’t let him talk to her.

  Ray was staring into the swirling foam lines of his half-full glass of beer and Southern Comfort. It smelt like stale underarm deodorant. Maybe he was seeing the same whorls of wind spume and sea fear that so nearly did for us both in Bass Strait.

  He’s like slime, Ray said, looking into the sea wrack of his glass. He covers you. And you can’t get him off. That’s my dream. He’s all over me, this slime, this fuckn awful green slime, dragging me under, and I scrub and I scrub, but I can’t get him off.

  4

  After I got home to Sully’s place later that night I read Heidl’s manuscript. It didn’t take long. It was a mashup of quotes from newspaper stories about the growth of the Australian Safety Organisation—or ASO as he mostly called it—supplemented by extracts from annual reports, memoranda, letters of praise from various politicians and thanks from public figures—ambassadors, police and fire chiefs, big-name businessmen, retired American generals—linked by the occasional unenlightening paragraph by Heidl. It was in its way as extraordinary as it was almost unreadable. One example will suffice to give the general tone. Describing Heidl as a truly great Australian, the prime minister of the day went on to hail Heidl as an inspiring example of caring, corporate Australia.

  I understood why they needed a writer. There was nothing about Heidl’s background, nothing of his private life, nor anything about the collapse of the ASO, the missing millions, the banks and businesses and jobs and lives that went down in consequence, the manhunt and his subsequent arrest and pending trial. Nothing, in short, that might make a book.

  Next, I finished reading the research folder, a compilation of the extensive media coverage the ASO had received. For Ray, working at the ASO had been like belonging to an elite military unit, with its uniforms, martial discipline, and its expensive toys. The newspaper reports told a similar tale: the ASO had a sophistication in logistics, technology and equipment, unmatched by either government or business, capabilities no one had ever thought of, far less achieved. They were the first in the country to have firefighting helicopters. The first with specialised sea search vessels with mini-subs and helicopters attached.

  As well as undertaking the more conventional jobs training workers in the oil and mining industry in safety, searching for missing walkers and fishermen, and specialist bushfire fighting, there had been some spectacular successes—the putting out of an oil rig fire in the Timor Sea that was threatening an ecological catastrophe; the daring rescue of the world-famous French solo sailor, Olivier Espaze, when his yacht overturned fifteen hundred kilometres south of Australia in huge seas and he was trapped inside; the nation-stopping saving of the “Barrington 17” when seventeen Hunter Valley coalminers were trapped for ten days a kilometre below the earth’s surface after a tunnel collapse.

  But ASO’s rapid rise to an organisation of such size and with such capacities had always been mysterious and frequently controversial. The clippings divided on the matter: right-wing newspapers praising the ASO as a new model for twenty-first-century business, left-wing newspapers condemning the ASO as a covert CIA-funded front like the notorious Nugan Hand Bank, pointing to the shadowy paramilitary organisation Heidl had built.

  Sully was still up when I finished, sitting in his lounge room in a ripped russet recliner, reading. He seemed to know about such things, and between sips of his eccentric nightly drop, cheap sparkling shiraz, empty bottles of which littered his makeshift bookcases, he said that it had been the ’80s, that government was suddenly out, business was in, outsourcing was the god, and even business stripped out costs by paying others for services now deemed non-core. And everything other than being a politician or CEO was suddenly non-core—from welfare to jails to search and rescue. Really, the only mystery was why parliament it
self hadn’t been outsourced. In any case, any business opening up in these areas was going to explode with growth. The ASO, according to Sully, just coincided with a new stupidity in public life.

  And having explained everything, I was at a loss to understand why none of it seemed to add up to an explanation.

  5

  The following morning, determined to make a good start, I arrived early to find Heidl there before me. He was standing at one of the hideous bookcases looking at the hideous books publishers published. As I entered, he was pulling a book out, adding it to a pile he was making on the sideboard.

  He glanced around as I went to the table and we exchanged greetings. For the first time I was able to properly take in his face. I don’t think I saw another like it until the invention of HD TV. You could see multiple imperfections—crooked teeth, an errant hair rising above a highly arched eyebrow. Small details that seemed mistakes, that featured too strongly as though I was looking at a face through binoculars, both far away and very close. Perhaps that’s why it’s hard to say exactly what his face looked like without risking inaccuracy, for it was at once so infinitely vague and mysteriously precise that a child could draw a reasonable likeness, like the moon, and yet the likeness would tell you nothing. Sometimes, it was almost as if he wasn’t really there.

  Siegfried, how do you…how would you like us to do this? I asked.

  You do it, Heidl said, his voice particularly gentle. That’s how.

  Not without you, I said, thinking he was joking.

  That’s what they’re paying you for, he said, returning to his browsing.

  I was taken aback. I pointed out that I could only order his thoughts; write up whatever he might wish to have written up about him, but that I couldn’t exactly make it up.

  This seemed to strike Heidl as news that was both unexpected and unwelcome. He looked at his watch, and asked if I had seen Gene Paley on my way in.

  I hadn’t.

  It’s my advance, he said. They’ve only paid me a third.

  And, in an instant, his mood changed from one of placid serenity to a ferocious rage as his voice built from a low register to a near scream.

  How the fuck? How exactly the fuck am I expected to get done all that I need to get done, if they fucking won’t pay me?

  That’s the system, I said. A third on contract signature, a third on delivery of finished manuscript, a third on publication.

  Heidl muttered something about it being his money; pointing at me, he said that, thanks to him, I was there so the finished book was a given and now Paley should pay up.

  I tried to change the mood by changing the subject, asking him about his childhood.

  As abruptly as he had begun raging, he stopped, said nothing more, and went back to browsing his glossy picture book.

  I asked a general question about his parents.

  Heidl put the book in its shelf and pulled another out.

  I asked if he was close to his mother.

  Here, he said, walking over to me with The Chocolate Lover’s Guide to Tuscany held open. Why don’t you take this home?

  They’re not our books.

  Heidl smiled.

  Take it.

  It’d be theft.

  You’re a writer.

  I am not a thief.

  Maybe. But you like books.

  That’s not a book. It’s a joke.

  Oh, Heidl said, looking around as if someone were watching. I see. What sort of book would you like then?

  I don’t want any book here, Siegfried. If I wanted one, I’d ask. I’m sure they’d happily give me or you whatever we want.

  Take it then, Heidl said, smiling. If they don’t care, you can’t either. You want it. Take it.

  I don’t want it, I said.

  If you don’t want it, take it for your wife. What’s her name again?

  Suzy, I said.

  Suzy, he said, and as he said it, I remembered Ray’s warnings. Suzy likes chocolate, right?

  I tried to answer with another question about his parents but Heidl cut in.

  She does, doesn’t she? Ray told me all about her. And twins? That’s right, isn’t it? She’s due to have twins any day now. She’d crave some chocolate, wouldn’t she?

  I was unsure what to say—with how I might divert this spilling river back to within its own banks.

  She would, Heidl continued. Who wouldn’t? Ray says she’s lovely. Maybe I should come to Tasmania and we can work on the book closer to Suzy. That’d be so much better for you, surely?

  As he continued talking, the book remained open in front of us, a large photo of molten chocolate pouring out of a beaten copper pot into a mould. For the first time, I felt an odd panic seize hold of me.

  We need to get back to work, I said.

  6

  I began my work with Heidl with the intention of taking notes of our conversations, assuming in this way I would amass the necessary material for the autobiography, my job then to order and personalise Heidl’s memories in the form of a book. But I got nowhere. I may as well have used a pair of scissors to pick up spilt mercury. My method changed. I would pursue a direct line of questioning with him on this or that subject. When I had gleaned what I could from his ramblings and riddles—at best fifteen or twenty minutes—I would halt the conversation and suggest he make some calls while I typed up the next few pages.

  After I had worked away for half an hour or so, I would seek his attention, always beginning with the necessary fiction—Can I just check a few facts with you, Siegfried? When I could get him off the phone, always a difficult task, I would read out what I had created out of his delusions and evasions. He would lean forward on his desk, face resting on a right-hand fist. The more outlandish, the less related my story was to the few, vague facts he had outlined, the more ludicrous I was, the more pleased Heidl seemed, and the more he would claim that it accorded exactly with his own memory. Within five minutes he would be on the phone to Charlie at 60 Minutes or Greg at the Herald or Margot at Seven. In that first week he cut three deals for paid interviews about himself on the basis of such inventions.

  Because birth had proved impossible and childhood vexed, I thought that we might move on to what, presumably, was something easier: adolescence. It wasn’t. Other than a single mention of the city of Adelaide, which may or may not have amounted to a fact, it was an hour of increasingly tortuous evasions, after which I said I had had enough and he could get on with his work. For several minutes I stared at the blinking cursor and strobing screen.

  I stared—

  —and stared.

  But there was no other way. I would have to make it up. After another half-hour of Heidl reading the newspaper, Ray dozing and me working, I asked Heidl if I could check some details. Without looking up from his paper, he nodded, licked a finger, and turned a page.

  I began to read out a lacklustre invention in which I described a Heidl adolescence in ’60s Adelaide. I had done the best I could with some hoary clichés about monstrous heat, the solitude of adolescence and excessively wide streets, describing a place and time about which I knew nothing. Speak, Memory it wasn’t. But as an explanation of Heidl’s otherwise absent youth it was the best I could do. Bizarrely, Heidl seemed to like it.

  I read on.

  Yes, Heidl murmured in a distracted way, yes.

  I read on. The high point of these teenage years for the young Heidl was, elongating the only other fact I knew about mid-twentieth-century Adelaide, the Beatles visiting in 1964.

  Absolutely, Heidl said, now more attentive.

  The Beatles’ example had woken in the young Heidl—who I claimed saw them from a distance while working as a bellboy in the hotel in which they stayed—a desire to make something of himself.

  Heidl put the newspaper down, lifted his arm, pointed at me and, jabbing his finger for emphasis, gave a reptilian hiss.

  Yes, exactly! Exactly! That’s exactly how it was.

  And smiling as if he had just spott
ed a lost credit card, he leant forward, picked up the phone, dialled a number, and began talking. Within moments, he was cutting a deal for a paid interview about his adolescence, the high point of which he described as the Beatles visiting Adelaide. He was telling the journalist what I had just told him as if it were some forgotten piece of his own personal history, which, I could hear, it was quickly becoming. Only in Heidl’s telling the story was replete with details I had never mentioned, as if my version was a poor gloss of the truth.

  Heidl told of how a fight had erupted when a photographer had sneaked onto the Beatles’ floor. John Lennon smashed the photographer’s camera, punched him, and flushed his head down a toilet. Heidl, then a young bellboy, had been called to the floor to clean up the incriminating smashed camera. Lennon, who he remembered had chewed fingernails, was drunk, and there were several young women, including two topless in bed with Ringo, with whom they were drinking tea.

  His storytelling was an astonishing performance, a masterclass, but better was still to come.

  It was close to midnight, Heidl continued, and when he went to leave, Lennon asked him what time he had started work and Heidl told him noon.

  That’s a tough day, the Beatle said, giving the bellboy a five-pound note.

  And not knowing what to say, Heidl said, I blurted out that it’d been a hard day’s evening. I remember Lennon laughed, saying it would make for a great song title. And then one day I hear this new song on the radio…

  At that point, what little sense I had left of my own worth as a writer evaporated even further. I didn’t even know if I knew what I was doing, working with a man who wasn’t even sure if the life we were writing was the one he had lived, but who—nevertheless—was happy to sell on subsidiary rights to chapters as I made them up, in the process making of my dreary inventions something infinitely more interesting.

  A depression came on me.

  Writing had once been passion, ambition, hope. Dreams. Now I no longer knew if I was a writer or if Heidl was me, or several other even more disturbing possibilities. And yet the more I doubted myself the more I had to make sense of him and his quixotic ramblings.