Either Side of Midnight : A Novel (2020)

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Either Side of Midnight : A Novel (2020) Page 13

by Stevenson, Benjamin


  On a small table in one corner was a record player. It was the only area without shelving. There hung a framed poster with H-A-R-R-Y spelled out in beautifully painted cursive, a flourish beneath each letter. Four dots under the ‘H’. A dot and a dash under the ‘A’. Morse code, Jack figured. A small gold plaque had been added beneath this. Happy 21st, Love Mum and Dad. Harry saw Jack looking at it.

  ‘That’s Morse,’ Harry said. ‘Dad was a radio guy, professionally, but amateur HAM at home. He got me and Sam these for our twenty-first. He had an office just like this when we were younger; he would go upstairs and put the headphones on and dial in to some of his buddies. Kids think Morse is super-lame, I can attest to that from when he tried to teach us. Neither Sam or I even bothered to learn our names. I realise now he’s gone that he was just trying to leave us a piece of him.’ Harry looked at the framed poster with affection and memory in his eyes. ‘I should learn, one day.’

  ‘Your dad worked in radio?’

  ‘Weatherman. These’ – he pointed at the cassettes – ‘are most of his broadcasts. Physical media is under-appreciated. There’s nothing like the pure crackle of a record scratching on the surface. It’s all cloud and digital now. But if we hadn’t kept tapes, we’d have nothing left of him.’ He slotted one in the tape machine and a crackly AM-style announcer gave the weather for the South Coast. ‘Car accident, both of them, maybe six months before Montreal,’ Harry said, then pressed stop and picked a record out. ‘This is Mum. She was a jazz singer. That’s her record player.’ He placed the needle in the groove. His mother had a husky voice, beautiful. The sound wasn’t as clear as a digital recording, but it felt more earthy, real. She was a crooner, each word pain-and-gin-laden. In a concert hall, songs like these don’t fly through the rafters, they sink to the floor. Jack imagined her with a fur shawl, painted fingernails curled around a gleaming silver mic stand. ‘Not famous enough to be able to download, can’t find her online much, and even if you did, what about in another ten years? So it’s the physical stuff that keeps her around. These’ – he pointed to a different section of tapes – ‘are the homemade ones. Her singing us lullabies. Dad recorded them. Part of his hobby.’ He picked up another tape, labelled Birravale 1987. ‘He was a bit of an audiophile. Sometimes he just would go out, sit by the lake or the waves and record that. Or go to a town and sit in a forest, microphone out. Found this the other day, thought you might like it. Up at those wineries, it’s just an hour and a half of birds and breeze. Very relaxing.’

  ‘Birravale is anything but relaxing,’ Jack said. ‘But you know what I’m going to ask.’

  ‘Of course. Dad passed all this down to me but I’ve added my own.’ He pointed to the stack of DVDs. ‘Every episode, opening crawl to end credits, of Midnight Tonight. Five seasons, two hundred eps per season, plus specials.’

  ‘You recorded every episode for five years, but you couldn’t pick up the phone?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘Brothers.’ As if that explained it. ‘This is why I collect on physical. At least there’s something left of him now.’

  Harry rifled through the discs and picked one, slid it into the DVD player. He sat down in front of the screen. ‘Nice to watch the normal ones, sometimes. Seen that other one too many times.’ Jack imagined Harry, pallid grey from the flickering glow, scrolling back and forth on his brother’s death. He was glad that he had come, to see that Harry wasn’t obsessed with the horror of it. He just missed his brother.

  ‘Welcome to Midnight Tonight,’ Sam was saying. ‘Coming up, we’ve got some very good friends of mine, Coldplay!’ He looked happy, enjoying it. His hand, one finger shortened, played that invisible piano. Tap tap tap tap. Maybe, Jack thought, his fidgeting was less nerves and more a symptom of the medication Jack now knew he was on. Either way, Sam was smooth and slick and professional. Jack empathised; he wondered if Sam had had the same feeling he’d had at his sickest, of just having to get up, go to work, and get it done. You put the mask on every day. Sam looked like he was as good at it as Jack was.

  ‘Let me show you this one.’ Harry paused the episode, ejected the disk, and leaned back, reaching above the screen. He clacked his finger along the spines of the cases. Picked one right at the end, took it out and inserted the disk. The vision that popped up was fuzzy, the image slowly coming into focus as if blinking awake. The set was different, a plain desk with a coloured spotlight and a couch for guests. No entry stairwell, no fancy wooden panelling. The main difference, however, was that there were two hosts. The Midnight Twins were both standing in the monologue spot in ill-fitting suits. Jack couldn’t tell who was who.

  ‘Welcome,’ they both said at once and then glared at each other.

  ‘We’re the Midnight Twins.’ Again overlapping. They swapped another comically exaggerated glare.

  ‘We agreed I would do the welcome,’ they said in perfect unison. The audio quality was echoey – you could hear the cavernous sound stage around them. They moved into a routine that had them both talking at the same time throughout the argument:

  ‘No. We agreed I would do the welcome.’

  ‘You said I could do it.’

  ‘You said I could do it!’

  ‘Let’s settle this!’

  This bickering led into their trademark game of rock paper scissors, after which the title card emerged. It was not the flashy neon sign Jack had seen on set, but rather a cartoon font laid directly over the camera image as they both took their seats. The Midnight Show. A different title. This was the pilot episode. There was minimal editing, direct-to-video image quality, clunky transitions and missed lines and retakes. No studio audience or laugh track. The production value lay somewhere between an iPhone held in the air at a concert and amateur pornography.

  What stood out to Jack first was that the two of them had a natural rapport and unique style on screen. Despite the low quality, there was something there. Second, as they took their seats and started delivering jokes and interviews, was that Sam’s hand was resolutely still. Hundreds of episodes later, Sam’s nerves would shine through in his damaged hand, but here, recording his first-ever episode to pitch executives, Sam didn’t fidget once. Because his brother was by his side, Jack assumed. It had its own sad charm.

  ‘I like this bit,’ said Harry, fast-forwarding through. Jack watched with him for a while, but then Harry seemed to forget Jack was there: he leaned closer to the screen, laughed at something his brother said. He was so absorbed, he didn’t notice Jack eventually leave the room. Didn’t hear him rummage through drawers for a pen, leave a note saying, Wheeler’s, tomorrow, pick you up, on the bench next to his empty mug. The room flickered grey and blue through the open door, and the Midnight Twins’ mother’s voice, husky and sad, filtered through the lounge as Harry watched his brother on screen and listened to his mother sing. Jack left him there. Surrounded by the ghostly voices of his family.

  CHAPTER 17

  Liam’s chest moved up and down. Jack watched it for several minutes, the machine pumping it smoothly. A metronome. Liam was so thin his ribs became a butterfly skeleton threatening flight but never taking off. Up and down. Was Liam so different to Harry’s recorded family? It was a dark thought, but Jack couldn’t help it flicking through his brain. Harry kept cassettes, while Jack kept the real thing, preserving a living memory. Switch him on and off when he needed to. ‘Sometimes we have to mourn the living,’ Celia had said, calm and practical. Maybe that was the problem: Jack had never figured out how.

  ‘Hey, buddy,’ Jack said, pulling the chair by the window closer to the bed. ‘I brought you this.’ He put the slice of birthday cake down on the side table. Neither of them would eat it. Jack took the jug he’d brought and poured the nutrient-rich brown sludge into the tube that protruded from Liam’s hip. It gurgled as it sucked down. The chest didn’t alter in rhythm. Jack wondered if Liam knew when he was fed, some small animal part of him that licked its lips. Jack’s soldiers held spears. Were Liam’s strewn on a silent battlef
ield? Was anyone crying for a medic? Part of Jack imagined that the smell of the cake tickled something in Liam’s brain, mixed with the sludge he poured into him.

  Jack sat down and pulled out the iPad Beth had given him. ‘You’ll like this. It’s starting to get complicated,’ Jack said. Waited. Laughed a little. ‘Yeah, I know, mate. With me it’s always complicated. Mind if I run a few things past you?’

  The machine wheezed. The heart-rate monitor kept pace.

  ‘Chronologically speaking, there’s a girl, thirteen years ago, who may or may not have killed herself as well. Her brother and her father think it’s murder. I know – they’re reading from the Harry Midford playbook. Cry murder. Sam agreed, so they say.’

  Beep. Wheeze. Beep.

  ‘Good point. Alibi is water-tight. They were both stuck four metres above the ground, it’s extremely well documented and they didn’t even know she’d died until they got home. Hence the guilt. I mean, I won’t know for sure until I see the letter whether Sam believes it’s murder too, but at this point, I think it’s fair enough to believe it. So, then we track forward to now. Sam’s had this girl’s death – her name’s Lily, did I mention that? – hanging over him for his whole life. He’s struggled with depression. Feels he let her down. Yeah, you’re right. Survivor’s guilt.’ Jack didn’t dwell on the irony, engrossed in conversation with his silent brother. Both of them were faultless, and yet both to blame. You carry that on your shoulders and it can turn into anything: depression; an eating disorder; a dial tone and a We Interrupt This Broadcast. ‘Five years ago he made an attempt on his life, was admitted to the Prince Alfred. Let me know if I’m going too quickly for you.’ The sludge gurgled. ‘And now again, although this time he succeeded. Even with the history, there’re too many holes. The biggest one of all is the way the blood drains from his face during the broadcast. He finds the gun. He didn’t put it there.’

  Beep. Wheeze. Beep. Jack could hear his father downstairs, clattering in the kitchen. Out of time with the surgical mini orchestra upstairs.

  ‘So we’ve got three questions, the way I see it, that will lead us to a suspect. First, where did the gun come from and how did they get it into the studio? Assumedly on this same day they planted the pornography on Sam’s laptop. Fair? Yeah, I thought so too. Secondly, how did they get in his ear? And third, what can you possibly say to someone to talk them into killing themselves? Especially to have them make that decision in less than eight minutes, on national TV.’

  Wheeze. Beep. That third question was a doozy, as far as Jack was concerned. His business for so long, when he was putting together a podcast or a television show, had been convincing, even tricking, people how to feel. He’d once convinced an entire country that a jailed man was innocent. Jack knew how to make people cry or laugh on cue. But he’d had the whole suite of senses to play with – music, images, words. Could you convince someone to end their life with words alone? And what words would you use?

  Words killed people all the time. A parent signs a DNR. A politician in a velvet chair writes a memo that says Mission approved. A general yells, ‘Fire!’ A teenage boy leans across the gearstick, looks at the speedometer, and says to his friend, ‘Dare ya.’ Hell, Jack could pick up his phone, talk to a doctor on the other side and end a life tomorrow (it’s not killing).

  But that was thinking abstractly. He loaded up and plucked through articles on the iPad. Trying to google cases, see if it was possible. There was more than he was expecting.

  In 1816 a convicted larcenist, George Bowen, was charged with ‘murder by counselling’ after encouraging an inmate in the adjacent cell to hang himself rather than face the gallows. Words, chattered through the bars. His cellmate had used his bedsheets. But with advances in the internet and communication technology, power and reach had changed. In 2014 a young Massachusetts girl was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after convincing her boyfriend to gas himself in his car, going so far as to suggest the parking lot in which he should do so and the details of the carbon monoxide pump he should use. News websites had published the full suite of text messages between them. One chilled Jack: Just park your car and sit there and it will take, like, 20 minutes. It’s not a big deal. Later, when he’d started to feel woozy, she’d told him, Get back in. That was one of many. In 2017 a boy had purchased his girlfriend a rope and filmed her suicide to a live stream, providing a running commentary throughout. In 2019 a teenager had posted an Instagram poll on whether she should live or die. Sixty-nine per cent of people had voted for her to die. She’d thrown herself off a building mere hours later. Back in 2006 a woman had pretended to be a high-school student on MySpace to encourage her daughter’s bully to kill themselves, which they did. The law took some time to adapt. In the 2014 case, the charge was involuntary manslaughter. In 2017, as the law caught up with the technology, the charge was child abuse homicide. A long way from 2006, when the woman was merely charged with violating MySpace’s terms of use, and even that had been subsequently dropped.

  Jack scrolled through more and more cases. ‘Yeah,’ he said. He absent-mindedly took a spoonful of chocolate cake and ate it. In his mind, he and his silent brother had reached the same conclusion: Sam wasn’t the first, and he wouldn’t be the last.

  Beep. Wheeze. Beep.

  ‘I’d bet that too. So now we just need to know who was talking to him.’ The machines hummed. ‘No, Liam.’ He tapped the iPad. ‘You’re right. If anyone was in his earpiece the whole team would have heard it. That’s a half-a-dozen people. They can’t all be in on it. So who else is talking to him?’

  Jack tried to remember what it was like on set. He’d never hosted a show, but he’d been on plenty of sets for interviews. He recalled the stimulus. Flesh-coloured tape on your chest. Sanitary pads under your arms (to avoid this, one of his colleagues had gotten botox in his armpits so they didn’t sweat under lights). Dots under your eyelids from the spotlights when you blinked. Script in your hand. Different coloured highlighter on different sections – here a cut to video, here an ad break. But the coil in your ear, the producer, the director, they’re the only ones who talk to the host.

  Hang on. Script in your hand.

  ‘You’re right,’ Jack said, giving Liam’s leg a little shake. ‘Maybe it’s not what he was hearing. Maybe it’s what he was looking at.’

  Jack loaded up the video on the iPad. The crowd shots showed the three cameras in their taped positions as Jack had seen in the studio. Sam had a script on the desk. He faltered on the early line, drummed his fingertips with nerves. Squinted. Like he was squinting into the barrel of the camera. No. He was re-reading a line. He was squinting at the teleprompter.

  Jack’s heart was hammering. Liam was chattering away in his brain, talking back. Alive in memory. Recorded. Jack zoomed through the footage, hoping for a glimmer of an angle where he could spy any of the words on the prompt. Nothing. A chunky unit that looked like a camera, the teleprompter had side visors to prevent reflections on the text screen, where white text scrolled up a black screen, but unfortunately that blocked any view in audience shots. As always, Sam was on set by himself for the opening monologue. The words were for him and him alone.

  Someone was hunched by the unit, in stage blacks and a cap. Sunglasses. As automated as the other production technology became, the autocue remained resolutely antiquated. It still required a manual operator to adjust the speed of the scroll to the presenter’s cadence. The video flitted past them so quickly, and they were so bunched up in their coat, that Jack couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. Not Beth. She was there in crowd shots, headset mic a black line on her jaw.

  Jack reached the end of the video. The gun went off. Sam dropped out of shot. The plasma fell behind him and then it was static. Cut to Gareth yelling at the camera. Why was Gareth at the recording? Beth had told him he sometimes dropped in, but it still struck Jack as odd that he was at this specific recording. Jack checked back. Gareth wasn’t in shot when the vision showed the telepr
ompt operator, so no alibi. But he was wearing different clothes when he demanded the camera be shut off. That ruled him out.

  Through the whole recording, there wasn’t a glimpse of the teleprompter screen. A theory Jack couldn’t prove. He’d have to talk to Beth about the staff logs tomorrow. Prove it some other way. He squeezed the corners of the iPad in frustration. He wished he could see what Sam was seeing, but his view was only one way. He’d need the camera to literally film a mirror to see back through Sam’s eyes. No mirrors on set.

  Jack had a memory. Standing backstage, finger on the small perfect circle of the broken plasma television, his foggy self reflected back at him. He scrolled the video. It all happened so quickly, but in the few seconds after the bullet hit, before the screen fell, it had shorted out to pure black.

  The perfect surface to reflect white text.

  Jack paused the video. Sam was a blur of colour falling out of screen. Behind him, the TV, blank and black, had the fuzziest of text reflected in it.

  Jack’s one thing list was growing.

  Did he believe that the pornography was planted? Maybe. Everyone seemed surprised by it, but then, why wouldn’t they? He hadn’t decided. But there was plenty that he did believe now. He believed that Sam was not prepared to die, based on his behaviour, his clothes and his past. He believed that it was a strange choice to die in public, in front of his partner and child, without leaving a note (more than the one Ryan had suggested, in any case). It was a leap of faith to believe that someone could talk someone else into killing themselves. But the cases he’d researched were reputable sources. It was possible. Add that Sam was of fragile mind, on medication . . . And now he knew – not believed, knew – one more thing. That someone had been talking to him.

  Jack zoomed in. The text was mirrored backwards. Jack took a pen and wrote it one letter at a time. Tried not to jump ahead – he wanted to see it all in full. Breathed. Looked at the last words Sam Midford ever saw.

 

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