In that cheery mood I invited Ollie to walk with me north towards the lumpy rock pools. I could hear his stomach rumbling. With his braces glued tight over his teeth he was forbidden to snack on lollies or Mars Bars, they got trapped in the metal. When hungry he needed proper food he could rinse from the wiring. I promised him we’d get something in half an hour up the road at the servo but first I wanted to attempt some wholesome, funereal reminiscence. It might flush Gordon Whatever-his-name-was from my imagination, which he had caused to become enflamed.
Merricks is not a surf location. On clear days you’d think the water wears no surface. You see the kelp forest swaying deep down in the glassy green. Petrified sticks lying at the sea’s bottom. Big shells scoopy enough to be kids’ shovels. The water is flat and washes up to the sand with barely a flip of energy. Not enough force to flush anything away, let alone jealousy.
4
That night we ate burgers for dinner—the gourmet kind that allows parents to feel pious for saving their child’s arteries. We brought them back to my apartment and spread out napkins in front of the television. Ollie had nagged me to hire some Emma-banned DVDs—The Inbetweeners and Family Guy—which she denounced as ‘gross’ and ‘cynical’. I admit I gave in to competitive urges and wanted Ollie’s favour more than I worried for his tender morals. I wanted his gratitude, his ‘Thanks, Dad’ and affectionate grabbing of my arm and gentle headbutt on my bicep. I wanted him to think I love Mum but Dad is my best friend.
It is embarrassing hearing crude language, hard-mouth sex talk and giggly scatology in front of your offspring. Yet, your senses adjust and the TV noise takes its place with the grating audio of the city coming up from the streets. I left Ollie to his chokes of laughter and stepped onto the balcony, pulled the sliding door closed and rang Emma. I hadn’t told her I’d call, but it was normal to do so when Ollie was with me. In fact she rang me if, by seven, I’d not obliged. It was 8 p.m. now and I’d heard nothing.
I called the home line. She was always home, always quick to pick up the receiver. The phone rang through to the machine. I didn’t leave a message. I hung up and felt my Gordon inflammation burning.
I tried her mobile but there was no answer. In the absence of her voice I whispered, ‘What are you playing at, Emma?’ I put the phone down and spoke to the air as if I was capable of telepathy. ‘What are you playing at, my darling Emma? Have you been out all day with this Gordon fuckwit? Have you touched him? Have you kissed? Are you with him this very moment?’
She was not even trying to be discreet this morning in our bedroom, her dresses laid out for my noticing. Her shorter fringe and brushed-back man-look, the different shades of yellow that said, I’m a new woman.
‘It’s eight o’clock, Emma. Where are you?’
Was this the way she’d chosen to end our marriage? An indirect ending with implied infidelity?
At 8.15 she called.
‘Hello, Emma,’ I said, calmly enough that she would not have detected my gall.
‘How was the beach? I hope Ollie didn’t get sunburnt.’
There was shortness of breath in her voice. Was it guilt catching in her throat? Or was she weak from the labours of copulation?
She said, ‘I should have called earlier but I had the supermarket to do. My routine was broken this morning, so I just finished the shopping.’
I thought, Be honest with me, Emma, but I did not say a word. Only hopelessness could be gained from honesty. There was still hope if the truth was left unspoken. Emma was still the wife I could woo back if the subject of Gordon was left vague.
‘How was your film?’
‘Good, thanks.’
‘And you went with your friend.’
‘A friend from work, yes.’
‘Did you go out afterwards?’
‘Yes, Callum, we went out afterwards.’
‘I’m only asking.’
‘He’s just a friend.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means what I said.’
It did not mean what she said. It left room for interpretation. Friend means friend in other contexts, never this.
‘Do you want it to evolve into more?’
‘Callum, please, he is just a friend.’
Her ‘please’ dragged the ease sound out like boredom. Or coquettish pleasure at my jealousy. I was not certain which.
Now was the time to be a big kind of man. Rise above petulance or rage for the sake of my dignity. That’s the boys’-own scripture we are told will make us men. Very grand in theory. Too grand to apply to life. I wanted to inflict terrible violence on Gordon. I wanted to drag him from my house if he set foot in it again. Bash him with my fists. Hold him under water and let him up with this warning: I will kill you if you continue to contact Emma.
The dead glitter was in me. It cast such a sensual spell a mist had formed between my face and the outside world.
‘Callum. Callum? Are you still there?’
‘What? Yes. I’m still here. I’d better go and finish my dinner.’
‘Put Ollie on.’
‘Of course.’
‘Just to say goodnight.’
‘Of course, of course.’
I spent Sunday trying to decipher that ease sound. Much of Monday too. It fogged me from working. I had so few ideas my news list was blank at midday. This required lying to Ryan Scullen to get a lead going.
‘Mr Scullen,’ I said. ‘I’ve had a phone call from those bikies. They’ve threatened to do you if we give them more grief.’
Thankfully, bikies are a breed for which such lies are flattering. I told Ryan I needed five hundred words, a first-person narrative on the fear the lad was feeling. ‘They said they’d use a baseball bat on you. They talked about kneecaps and broken bones. Include that in the opening pars.’
I wrote the first line for him and said, ‘You take it from there.’ Death threats are killing me, I’ve got night sweats, mad dreams.
Ryan swelled out his chest, an important young man now, excited to be hated and on the right side of justice. ‘Thanks, Words.’
Opposite my desk, along the whitewashed front wall, I keep my ‘classic files’—old cuttings, my life’s work anthologised. Two hundred stories I can’t bear calling ephemera. They are that, of course—news stories are detritus from days past. But to me, their author, they have diary-entry status. I can trace my life in paragraphs, what took up my time on what particular date.
They also serve as inspiration for subject matter or a decorous turn of phrase. I have years of them laid down like wine. A 2006 vintage here. A ’97 there. I read them and judge whether they’ve aged well. Good colour but poor finish.
I closed my eyes and lucky-dipped the middle section. Drew out a 2009 folder and started reading.
First a ‘human’ story about ballet dancers overdosing on diuretics. Then a ‘moral outrage’ feature—wild rave parties on sacred Aboriginal land. The best was a money-laundering yarn with a rag-trade angle. Fashion labels hiding income in overseas tax havens. They’d used Swiss bank accounts to convert company finances to cash, then wired it to Bermuda for secret investing. I put it on my list, marked ‘update and reuse’.
That was all I could find from 2009. Except for a half-page column I’d written on Walter Pereza, the Brazilian journo who specialised in murders. Always first to a crime scene, blood still pooling on the pavement and onlookers gathered around corpses in horrified utterance. Turned out he was first because he’d arranged the murders. An extreme form of news-breaking but not without its logic: an unsurpassable method for knowing the details of crimes you report. I’ve often fantasised about it in my bleary-eyed daydreams. I’m surprised there haven’t been more Walter Perezas. Probably have been and nobody noticed.
I admired my intro and jotted it down like a calendar quote: Just as there are blood diamonds and blood money there is blood journalism.
My list was far from improving. Yet, when I thought of Ollie my spirits lightened. In
the moments before I’d dropped him home on Sunday morning we had an out-of-the-blue conversation while sitting at the Wattletree lights. I’d reminded him please not to tell his mother about those irreverent DVDs I’d let him watch.
‘I won’t,’ he promised.
The lights went green but we couldn’t move because roadworks shunted traffic into one stagnant lane.
I said, ‘Given much thought to what you’ll do when you leave school?’
His school had advised us to encourage the topic, a gentle prodding to get him focussed, eyes set to the future. He produced no more than a shoulder shrug normally but this time he answered.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind journalism.’
‘Excuse me?’
My head stretched out on its stem, mouth dropped open as if a lever in me had been pulled.
‘A journalist.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Like you.’
‘Me?’
‘You’re good at it, aren’t you? You know, the Wordsmith tag and that.’
My throat closed up from the honour being bestowed. I coughed it open.
‘They tell me I’m good at it.’
‘It’s like an important job to do, reporting on stuff, isn’t it?’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean, it’s like you’re the police of everything.’
‘I guess.’
‘Cool.’
‘It’s not easy to get into, but I can help. I have contacts and I can open some doors. But you’ll need better marks than you’re getting.’
‘I know, I know.’
His tone implied I was nagging him. I wanted the honour bestowed with no disclaimer of being a nagger.
‘All I’m saying is, you take care of that and I’ll do the rest. And whatever I know about the game I’ll pass on to you. I’ll mentor you. Me the master and you my apprentice. What do you say about that?’
‘Sweet.’
‘Very sweet.’
The traffic stretched and contracted like metal elastic. I hoped its slow progress would last for hours so long as Ollie was confiding his blueprint future. I was happy idling behind a removalist van.
‘When I was your age I was practising stories. You ought to do that, type up things you’ve seen and heard. I used to follow my folks around and take notes like a child snooping. I even hid and spied on them and jotted it down.’
‘Spied?’
He smiled at the worldly mischief of the word. My cue to add ‘within reason’ or some other straitening rider. Instead I let the word work its mischief in me. I inched my car forward in the van’s wake, closed the vents against diesel fumes.
‘I can set you exercises. You interested in that?’
‘What sort of exercises?’
‘In my job your challenge is to find out difficult things. For example, what’s this Gordon’s surname? Have you kept your ears and eyes open?’
He shrugged that he had not.
‘There’s a task for you, then. That’s your practice.’
‘Finding out his surname?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why?’
‘As an exercise.’
‘How, though?’
‘Think, son.’
‘I could just ask Mum.’
‘No, no, no. Come on, think harder. Asking Mum isn’t very subtle, is it?’
‘I could peek in her diary, or the contacts list on her phone.’
‘That’s better. That’s a starting point. The trick is to do it and not be found out.’
The van veered towards the freeway, exposing me to a clear homeward run. I gathered speed, turned left and chose the hospital route—it would be slower, with the likelihood of getting caught behind a tram.
There was no tram: the road lay lonely and greenly sentried with oaks and bushy creepers. Roof-high hedges for fences around the bigger homes. The sun was shimmering like water on the footpaths. House bricks shone like brass. The kind of morning more pastoral than city, with breezes coming up and sounding like leaf fire.
I parked a few houses back from our home in the spirit of our spy-talk and secrecy. I said, ‘How about a deadline?’
‘What?’
‘For getting the surname. You’ll have to get used to deadlines in my game.’
Ollie reached behind his seat for his duffle bag.
I said, ‘How about we make tomorrow the deadline? How about I ring you at lunchtime, 12.45?’
His school bans mobile-phone use in school hours but no one obeys—the equivalent of smoking in my day.
‘Don’t text me or email me if you’re successful. I’ll call you. You don’t want to leave evidence when you’re spying.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Good boy. Give me a hug.’
He leant over and let me hug him, then twisted his shoulders free from such an unmanly act. He didn’t have his usual undergrowth odour. He smelled of the menthol and mints of my cologne.
‘You’ve been into my bathroom stuff.’
‘No,’ he said, his green eyes wide and guilty.
‘Yes, you have and it’s fine by me. What’s mine is yours.’
‘Thanks, Dad. Bye, Dad.’
He swung his legs out of the car. My smell was going into the house with him. I liked that idea. He was my son and my fragrant emissary.
5
Lunchtime the next day I sat at my pry desk and placed the phone to my mouth. Spoke into my hand’s screen as if cupping Ollie’s ear.
‘Hello, son. Day going well?’
‘Yeah, pretty good. I…’
His sentence became lost among the seagully voices of playground boys.
I cupped my hand closer.
‘Speak up, Ollie.’
‘You there, Dad? I got want you wanted.’
‘You did? Excellent. Good boy.’
‘It’s Grace.’
‘Say that again.’
‘His surname is Grace. G-r-a-c-e. Gordon Grace. I went into Mum’s purse and found his business card.’
‘You keep how you did it quiet.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Discretion. It’s very important.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Also, you shouldn’t make a habit of going into your mother’s purse.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Not unless I say to.’
‘I won’t.’
‘This is a special circumstance. Well done. Good work.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘You didn’t get any other details? What was the company name on his business card?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Remember in future. Details are very important.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. You did well.’
‘Sweet.’
The seagull-boys screeched from what I presumed was a chase or ball game.
‘What book are you reading at the moment, Ollie?’
‘Book?’
‘For school.’
‘I don’t know. There’s a choice of things. Like, young-adult fiction or a harder thing. But that’s for advanced kids.’
‘What’s the harder thing?’
‘Animal something.’
‘That’d be Animal Farm?’
‘Yeah, that’s it.’
‘What are you going to choose? I think you should choose the harder thing. It’s a masterly novel. If I recall—and it’s a been years since I read it—there were some grammatical matters that needed editing out in Orwell—the overuse of informals such as “sort of ” and “kind of”, but his books are very serious for all that.’
‘It’s advanced.’
‘So? You take on that challenge.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do it. Try.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I said try.’
‘If you think I should.’
‘I do think you should. You’re in training now. A trainee wordsmith.
You still want to be, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Haven’t gone cold?’
‘No, I want to.’
‘Good. Then choose the harder book.’
‘I will.’
‘We can read it together.’
There is an equation to shame where wrongdoing is converted to rightness. It requires no thinking—it does the reasoning itself. My asking Ollie to spy was a shameful act for a father, but my religion of family made it dutiful.
Gordon Grace. I treated him like a suspect for investigation. Searched his name on pry’s electronic library: every news story in the nation for the last thirty years.
No matches found. I clicked on ‘land titles’ and ‘company records’. And yes, there he was, four pages of property holdings, all the plush locations. Toorak, Armadale. A retail block on Collins Street. The Toorak title I presumed was his home. It was three titles in one like the rich have for tennis courts, buying next-door’s backyard and putting in floodlights.
Ten companies were listed with him as sole owner—GorGrace NurseCare Limited, GorGrace Aged Service, GorGrace this, GorGrace that. They caused me to slump in my chair, these documents of wealth. I took no comfort from his birthdate—he was sixty-four last May. A man of means and thus a good catch despite the miles on him. If Emma put us side by side in a ledger his ‘for’ column would have more entries than mine. The definition of life is holding on to where you are in society. Hopefully getting ahead or not falling back too far. It’s having loved ones looking up to you, admiring how you’ve held your position. In holding on well in the world you hold on to their hearts.
I stood up to walk my despondency out. Clomped down the stairs onto a blinking footpath. Lightning was shining the way for a storm. Thunder rumbled across rail tracks like lorries. Wind pulled on the oars of tree branches. I jogged to get under the nearest awning—Go Joe’s cafe, where outside tabletops suddenly spat up pips of hail. The first hail of spring. It clicked along concrete and stone, became loud enough to switch my thoughts to its drama. Sinewy arms of water reached along drains, grabbing at sticks and paper, unable to hold them.
Off the Record Page 4
