Off the Record

by Craig Sherborne

  Then it was all over in a gust of steam. The sky scurried clear except for a sun shower down from the blue. The canvas awning creaking and dripping.

  ‘Words.’

  It was Mai Tran cradling a tray of takeaway coffees. She held her bum against the cafe door to stop it slamming.

  ‘You okay? You look lost,’ she said, and winced with worry that she’d been too familiar. ‘I mean, not lost but, you know, concerned or something.’

  ‘Just ruminating,’ I said, without a polite return of smile.

  Mai took a firmer grip on the bendy cardboard tray. She lowered her head and went off through the wet sunny air, tiptoeing through puddles, past the smashed plastic shell of a disused phone cubicle. The pulse in my throat swelled and fluttered. That phone box. There you go, Words, what a perfect idea.

  ‘Mai,’ I called. ‘Just a second. I have a question.’

  She halted her tiptoeing and turned around with slow high steps as if the bottoms of her shoes were unglueing.

  The moment she faced me I thought better than to ask my question. I held up my hand. ‘Sorry, nothing. Forget it. I might have a story for you. But not now.’

  She said okay and glue-stepped back the other way towards the office.

  My unspoken question was: You’ve worked in the tax department, Mai. Do they follow up all anonymous tips? If you dob someone in over the phone, do they act immediately or let matters drag?

  When I got back to my desk there was a sticky note for me. Words, I’m not feeling well. Justin is driving me home. Man the fort…Jenny X.

  The kiss surprised me. She’d not X’d me before. I must be doing something right, fitting into the team, a valuable presence. This provided a nip of satisfaction to my spirit. Not an all over tonic but some numbing for the GorGrace bruise.

  It only lasted a few seconds. The bruise was too fresh, too purple-painful to ignore. I looked up the tax-office phone number. The toll-free connection called Hotline.

  6

  My aim was to smear Gordon Grace. I’d need a public telephone so there was no risk of tracing, which meant driving to where the public phones actually worked. ‘I’m a concerned citizen,’ that type of thing. Like running a key along an enemy’s car, a well-placed word or two scours reputations.

  The news floor was hushed in that fingernail way of keyboards being tap-tapped. Coffee being sipped and phrases recited in silence, lips moving, eyes squinting. I got my car keys and sunglasses and said, ‘I’m off on business,’ my voice dropping a growly octave. ‘Be an hour.’

  Most working phone boxes these days are in the junkie parts of town. I presume it’s so the destitute can call in overdoses. Across the river to the north they’re like guard huts to the alleyways. The ‘shooting galleries’ where needles and metal spoons, shreds of foil get rained along the cobbles, get stuck there. People sleep and shit and die behind dumpsters unless the phones are used in time to call medics.

  I parked in a two-hour zone off Victoria Street and bought a phone card from the newsagent. Up where nice Korean restaurants are pushing out the Vietnamese cheap eats and some of the magazines in the gutters are actually in English. It’s almost clean there, not middle-class wholesome but not third-world either. No four-foot Asian boys with a wrapping of powder to sell. They were further up by the vegetable stalls, squatting in wait for sales, using their heels as a chair. Must do a story on them, I thought, starting so young to be mobsters. Welcome to my drug lab, said the father to his twelve-year-old.

  My phone box stank, regardless of tidy Korean surrounds. The concrete stained and sticky—piss, fizzy drink? Whiffs of vomited wine. Someone’s strawberry Big M perched above the coin slot. I wasn’t about to poke it backwards away from my nose. I didn’t want to touch the receiver but had to of, course, so I used my handkerchief. Held the dumbbell mouthpiece between thumb and forefinger and gave it a wipe with my hanky edges. Christ knows if hepatitis can leap into your breathing but it was disgusting having my lips so close to what junkies speak into. Their cigarette breath still circulating in the holes.

  The hotline was a recorded message that directed you to another recorded message that asked you to speak clearly after the tone and deliver your tip-off. It reassured you of your anonymous status and reminded you of your duty not to allege anything false. On it went about its powers under the law. Criminal activity would be referred to police. Minor matters may not be acted upon. That last statement worried me and I thought of the Yeats line about being ignored—how processions without high stilts have nothing to catch the eye. I was prepared, however. I had a vintage from my anthology in mind: my fashion story about tax havens, Swiss bank accounts.

  ‘I want to make a complaint, or whatever you’d call it. I never thought I’d ring up the tax office to say this sort of thing. But I feel as a citizen who has come into some serious information that I should act on behalf of the taxpayer.’

  I was speaking too plummy, the way we do when feigning piety. Are tax officials schooled in vocal psychology? I put more nasalness into my register just in case.

  ‘It’s wrong of rich people to think they can cheat. Which is why I feel compelled to give you the name Gordon Grace. He’s currently hiding income in bank accounts in Switzerland. He converts the funds to cash there and channels it to Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.’

  I read out the names of his companies, saying each name twice, slow and round-vowelledly. I said thank you and good luck, plummy again with expressions of regret that well-off people behave so badly. What’s so hard about being a good and honest citizen!

  I’d let the mouthpiece touch my lips and hung up abruptly, spitting and hoiking.

  This was no place for a man in my position to be seen—expectorating in public in a phone box in this area. My handkerchief was diseased to me. I flicked it to the gutter and held my fingers away from my clothing. I would have to poke them in my pocket eventually to get money out to buy hand sanitiser at the chemist.

  I would have asked the chemist to fish it out of my trousers but a female served me. I pincered a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and asked her if she’d be so kind as to put a few squirts of sanitiser onto my fingers. I went back to my car wringing green globs through my hands. Wiped my lips and face with it, my wallet and the slit of my pocket. I sniffed deeply to get the Dettol smell down into my lungs, thinking I must do a story about hotlines, the appalling misuse of them for ulterior motives. When is a hotline not a hotline but a weapon for your spite?

  I’d have loved to end the sentence with ‘coldline’, a playful tie-up with ‘hotline’, but it was too cute and obscure and I couldn’t summon the necessary flow. Sometimes it’s best to be plain instead of artful. I was busy pondering this while fiddling with the keyless tag, pressing the button with the tiny open padlock stamped on it, not getting my thumb flush on the sweet spot. The car door wouldn’t open, the handle snapped back against my grasp and it hurt. You have to wonder if petty incidents are signs: a psychic message from your viscera. Failure to open a door conflates to more general failure—your career, your marriage, your finances, your schemes. It causes doubt that has an eye for all your inefficiencies. That phone call to the tax office, for instance. It was hardly a triumph of strategy. No certainty had emerged from it. For all I knew my call, recorded on the robotic spools of a hotline, would stay there unheard until lapsed time deleted it. I had to speak directly to an official.

  I wasn’t about to pick my handkerchief out of the gutter so I sanitised the side of my face and the putrid phone, a farting squeeze of the bottle, a spurting smear. This time I rang an office number that took complaints. Got through to ‘Leanne’ and explained my grievance.

  ‘Your hotline is a flawed system, in my opinion. Given the information I have, the gravity of it, I think one should speak to a person not machinery. I’m informing you of tax fraud, surely that deserves human contact. And where’s the privacy in accusations being left on a message bank? I’m thinking of the accused here. They have rights to
o. We must also think of them.’

  It’s possible I became carried away—my voice too camp with sanctimony—but Leanne assured me she was taking notes. I asked her to read back what she’d written. She’d got most of the facts-lies correct. She’d spelt his name wrong—put a ‘y’ in Grace. I was happy, though. I’d had a good hearing. It was important therefore to end with a compliment. ‘You’ve been marvellous, Leanne. Patient. Very professional.’

  She asked if I’d like to leave my name and number: ‘So I can keep you in the loop.’

  ‘I have faith in you. Leave me out of it. I’m simply doing my civic duty.’

  7

  Don’t imagine for a second I was at ease with myself, settled back at the office in my old black chair, its leather peeled from two decades of bearing me, the stuffing flattened from my bum bones. Only the mad take pleasure from an act of malice. Yet from time to time we need to put aside decency. I thought of it as that—doing necessary wrong.

  More pressing was the strangeness in my physical shape. The backs of my legs were not in their grooves as usual. The front ruts of the chair were not exactly as I’d left them. There were new dents formed, very shallow, but I sensed them. And my desk was not perfect, with each thing in its place. Why was my ballpoint pen not parallel with my square coffee coaster? Why was its nib not retracted but pointing out as if just used? My family photos hadn’t been moved—Emma and Ollie still faced me on my right-hand side. But the spare reading spectacles I leave in the blue case by my computer were in another place entirely, beside the big red dictionary. I’d had that dictionary since third form and here it was open instead of closed. And my calendar with the hibiscus flowers on it was facing the wrong way, as if someone had pushed it aside. My folders, they felt to me disordered. Why was the 2006 vintage on top of the 2009? I’m sure I’d left them the other way around and positioned at the far corner of my desk. I always leave my reading matter there, lined up along the edges—my mind works that way. Now they were not flush with the desk but askew, the papers in them poking untidily from their elastic band.

  I stood up and clapped my hands to get the floor’s attention.

  ‘Listen here, everyone.’

  They craned to view me over their screens. Ryan Scullen, pinkie finger picking food from his side teeth. Katie Brooks, still typing as she listened. And that kid by the far wall, Theodore Katsipis, shiny-skinned as an olive, brown eyes so big you wonder how they ever closed, staring at the world as if frightened and guilty. One of them had been sitting here, pretending to be me, imagining they were promoted and I was long gone. Look at them. Probably each had had a turn, spinning my chair around and mocking, ‘Words the has-been. Words is too old.’

  ‘I just want to say to the person who has been sitting at my desk: I admire your belief in yourself. I hope you one day assume my role. But until that day comes, do not ever again sit your arse down here. Do not ever trespass on my workspace. Do not ever touch my personal property. This chair knows me, every inch and ounce of my bones. It tells me when I’ve had an intruder. People think a chair is just a chair. How wrong they are. My chair speaks to me by making adjustments to my mould.’

  They all looked at each other, their neighbour on the left, neighbour on the right, the one behind them. They shook their heads and Katie Brooks took her glasses off to speak.

  ‘Pockets was at your desk, but none of us were.’

  ‘None of us was, although it sounds ugly.’

  ‘Sorry. Was.’

  ‘Lesson for you: if it sounds too ugly then keep it at were.’

  ‘Were, then.’

  ‘You say the culprit was Pockets?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’ll have to have this out, won’t I?’

  I had to appear angry, I had to appear proud, but not storm off in front of them as if I’d airs to punch the boss’s nose. I nodded for them to carry on with their work. I sat down, embarrassed and stood straight up again.

  ‘Today’s news list, how’s it shaping?’

  Katie Brooks had her own airs. Up she got and opened her mouth as if possessed of birthright leadership. ‘There’s less stories today.’

  ‘There are fewer stories today.’

  ‘Fewer stories, then.’

  I saw that roll of her eyes as if too good for the English language. Master’s degree in creative writing and she couldn’t parse a fucking sentence. I had that over her. Over all of them. Christ knows where they learned to read and write. They probably don’t read, I mumbled. Just write. They type and yawn and trust in autocorrect.

  ‘What about your testament on boulevard beggars?’

  ‘I’m not quite finished yet.’

  ‘Not quite finished yet? Quite is a degree adverb. How many times must I tell you? Adverbs kill action. Banish them from your lexicon.’

  ‘I thought adverbs were when “ly” was tacked onto verbs.’

  ‘Did you? Goodness me. I’ll have to go back to school then, won’t I? Quite is a degree adverb. Check it. And when you’ve checked it, apologise to me.’

  She took the reprimand in silence, which in my job equates to good manners. She’d googled adverb as I was speaking.

  ‘Sorry, Words. You’re correct.’

  I stopped picking on her and cast my gaze widely.

  ‘Am I meant to do everything?’ I said, folding my arms. ‘Provide the stories? Do the rewrites? Will one of you please impress me with your genius? Mr Katsipis?’

  The boy’s eyelids flicked up so high you’d think it harmful, bruising his forehead or retinas.

  ‘Do you have a contribution?’

  ‘Um. Not really.’

  ‘I see. If you didn’t come so cheap I’d say get a new job.’

  Poor kid wore his nerves on his fingertips. He tremored like disease. He swallowed so loud his throat squelched. ‘I do have one thing.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘There’s tobacconists. I mean there are tobacconists stocking cigarettes that are bad for you. Well, worse. Illegal stuff. No quality control. They say the mafia grows it.’

  ‘Good. A chop-chop story—always use the vernacular when the vernacular is so staccato. Tobacco is a boring word. Chop-chop’s more sinister. I’m not against vernacular for all my fussing about language. I live in the world as you do, Mr Katsipis. As the poet said—English is the dirty bottom-feeder of languages. It thrives in the gutter. But you need to know the rules and the formalities before you break them.’

  He grinned and said thank you.

  ‘Anyone else? Mr Scullen, is your death-threat-bikie masterpiece ready for consumption?’

  ‘Not far off.’

  ‘Good. Then here’s another piece to go on with: Little Vietnam north of the river, where the drug barons are children and the police force does bugger all.’

  I told Mai Tran to get a move on—more court stories, please. And made a point of smiling at Katie Brooks in case she resented me.

  Mai stood up. ‘I’ve got one,’ she said, and flicked her notebook to a page. ‘It’s about a woman who killed her newborn, a baby girl. Murder charge commuted to infanticide, which means no jail time. She has another child, a two-year-old daughter, and wants access to her, but the Children’s Court’s handling the matter and can’t decide. It’s been going for months. Talk about dragging heels. I’ll follow it up. Do a feature. Scary, weird stuff, don’t you think? Even the term, Words—infanticide.’

  She gave her shoulders a shiver.

  ‘Stop right there.’ I put my hand up for reprimanding. ‘Don’t waste my time. For Christ’s sake, listen. Basic lesson for you. The law draws lines. The Children’s Court is completely off limits to journos. Forbidden. Illegal. I shouldn’t have to teach these fundamentals.’

  The daylight moon was out with its unshaven face. Someone, probably a poet, wrote that, or it might have been me: I think so many lines in a single day I could be original or I could be plagiarising. What horrible grammar! I could be a plagiarist is better. I’m only
human. I’m only a hypocrite.

  Pockets’ face was beaming with whiskery white on tan, there in the conference room drumming the glass table with his thumbs. I once knew a schoolteacher who used makeup to get his skin that gold. He was queer and I was certain Pockets wasn’t that. Sunlamps are bad for you, fake tan is the orange of carrots. I’ve heard B12 has properties producing such glow. I’m going to buy some, I thought, and hope I can look exotic, look mixed-race like he does, a half-caste white man. They say whites are the privileged and no doubt that’s so, but here I was watching a man of faux brown and wishing I were that attractive.

  It was one of those secret moments when a man’s man like me finds another man turns him on. The speech I had about his trespassing at my desk went to sticky water in my throat and dissolved: ‘Don’t sit in my chair’ turned into ‘I called this meeting to keep you posted on the news list.’

  ‘I wanted to see you on that issue too.’

  I re-armed myself for criticism or a worse blow. A pain shot through the crown of my scalp. It spread there and ached as if my blood was biting me. I did not speak. I closed my eyes and let my breath whistle through a blocked nostril.

  ‘While Jenny isn’t here,’ he said. ‘Just you and me.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Words. It’s just, I have an idea. I went to find you at your desk—you know you’re a neat-freak?—and I was so taken with your pile of old stories. Your anthology—isn’t that what you call it?’

  ‘I call it that. I also call it this vintage or that vintage.’

  ‘I couldn’t help but flip through a few.’

  ‘Those are my private documents.’