Roger looked appalled. He spoke out loud, knowing the police could hear him.
‘Do you sanction this?’ he said. ‘This all okay with you? I don’t want anything to do with this. Shoot him already!’
Ali Khan had been sitting forward but, on hearing this, he slumped back against the door.
Mitchell turned to Roger and said, ‘You frightened him! Don’t frighten him. He’s as scared as we are.’
Roger said, ‘You think I care that he’s scared? If he’s scared he can put his hands up and let the police open that door.’
Mitchell said, ‘He’s afraid.’
Roger could not have cared less. He looked straight at Ali Khan, pointed his finger and said, ‘If you want that thing off, you stand up and you put your hands in the air and you surrender. The cops will come and get it off. We want to get out of here.’
Ali Khan didn’t respond.
Mitchell waited a few minutes. Then, into the familiar silence, he said to Roger, ‘Don’t yell. I can get it off but you will have to help me lift it. Then we can go home.’
He wasn’t being a smart-arse. He said it very gently. He’d clearly figured out that Ali Khan was scared – maybe as scared as anyone in the room – and that threatening to kill him wouldn’t help.
The situation outside the room – I’ll just say it was dead quiet. Wolf wasn’t saying anything. I was going to say that I was praying but I’m not sure that I was actually praying. I was willing Mitchell on. I don’t know why but I believed that he could do it. He had the look of a kid who knew what he was doing. He turned to Mouse and said, ‘Do you have a pair of nail scissors or a Stanley knife? Something sharp?’ Mouse stared at him for a minute, then she said, ‘I’ve got scissors. In the drawer. We cut the tags off things with them. Some ladies, they’re so happy to get into a bra that fits properly . . .’
She laughed. Mitchell chuckled, too.
‘Sorry!’ she said. ‘Too much information.’
Ali Khan was looking at them, curiously.
Mitchell looked back at him. He said, ‘Is it okay if the lady here just gets those scissors?’
Ali Khan nodded.
Mitchell seemed to relax a bit. He smiled and said, ‘Okay, I think it’s okay. Where are the scissors?’
Mouse said, ‘Here, in the drawer.’
Mitchell looked back at Ali Khan and said, ‘The lady is going to open the drawer and get those scissors out, okay?’
Mouse said, ‘They call me Mouse.’ She was no longer wearing the rabbit ears, but she picked them up and said, ‘Mouse, not rabbit!’
Ali Khan looked at the ears. He wasn’t quite smiling but he was staring. His features were no less unattractive, but he seemed more relaxed, too.
‘Okay, hand me the scissors,’ Mitchell said.
Mouse hesitated. I can’t say I blame her. Wolf stood with his hand on a button that would allow him to speak to the room. He seemed undecided as to whether to push it. He was watching Mitchell closely, and Ali Khan, too, obviously. Mouse opened the counter drawer. She did so without looking at it, looking only at Ali Khan. It slid open silently. Still without looking, Mouse put her hand inside the drawer and moved it around a bit, never taking her eyes off Ali Khan. Her hand stopped moving. Her fingers had closed over the scissors. Very slowly, she lifted her hand.
‘Can you bring them to me?’ Mitchell said.
Mouse stepped out from behind the counter. She moved in Mitchell’s direction. Mitchell took the scissors.
‘Okay,’ he said. His voice was chipper. He had the biro in his other hand. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but the police seemed to understand.
‘He’s making grooves in the tip of the biro,’ Wolf said. ‘He’s cutting four slits in the nib.’
Roger had moved closer. He was not yet close enough to give assistance, but he was out from behind the ladies’ pyjamas.
Mitchell kept working on the nib, stopping every now and then to check his own progress. Finally he said, ‘Okay. That looks right. I’m going to use this pen to pick that lock, and then I’m going to lift the lock up over your head, okay, mate?’
Ali Khan didn’t respond but he was looking gently at Mitchell as he moved the pen slowly forward, toward the bike lock.
‘Don’t move,’ Mitchell said.
He pushed the pen gently into the barrel on the U-lock and turned it. The U-lock gave way.
‘Jesus,’ said Wolf.
Cate said, ‘He’s going to get it off.’
Mitchell was cool as a cucumber. He threw his school tie over one shoulder and smiled at Ali Khan.
‘Told you it would be easy,’ he said. ‘Now the lock’s open. I need you to stand up. It’s not going to hurt. I can see how everything works. Stand up, and we’ll lift the whole thing over your head. Don’t tilt forward. It’s leaking a lot. Stand straight up, and we’ll lift it off. Don’t be scared.’
A few seconds went by. Ali Khan shuffled a bit, and got up onto his feet.
‘Okay,’ Mitchell said, looking him in the eye now. ‘Now, when I say “lift”, me and this guy are both going to lift the whole thing straight up, and you can get out from under it.’
Roger had gone completely quiet. With some reluctance, he stepped forward and took one side of the box in his hands, so both of them had hold of it.
‘Okay,’ Mitchell said, ‘now lift.’
Chapter Twenty-eight
There were plenty of things I didn’t like about being a priest. I didn’t like the idea that people thought that I had a direct line to God. I didn’t like the way people came over all humble in my presence. I didn’t like the way I’d get ushered into a room like I was somebody important, when I should have had the same status as anyone else: child of God.
There are some things I miss. I did like counselling people. I even thought I was pretty good at it. People who had lost a child or a spouse; who didn’t know what to do about some problem in their life . . . if I give myself points for anything during the twenty years I spent as a priest, I’d say I gave some reasonably good advice, nothing to sneeze at when you think about how limited was my life experience.
One person I didn’t like having to counsel was Roger Callaghan.
It was the coroner, Ian Hanrahan, who asked me to do it. He knew that I’d been at Surf City in my role as police chaplain. He knew that it had been traumatic for everyone and, since I was a chaplain, and since I’d seen it all, he decided that I should be on hand to assist others who had suffered through it.
I was given a formal role to counsel witnesses before, during and after the inquest, which was going to take a year to organise. That time frame is not unusual. The coroner’s court is under pressure. They can’t do things as quickly as they’d like. It takes time to pull all the evidence together. There are forensic tests that have to be done, statements that have to be taken.
I’d be the point of contact for people while we all waited for the hearing to get underway. None of them were compelled to see me, but I’d be there if needed. I suppose I could have refused the role, but if not me, then who? Not everybody feels this way but I think, if you’re called upon to serve in an official capacity, before or after any kind of tragedy, you should step up.
I suppose the fact that it was never compulsory to see me explains why I never met Kimmi K.
I tried to find her through the contacts the police gave me, but her uncle told me she’d gone back to Vietnam, and the village where she lived was primitive. They didn’t have telephones.
I didn’t believe it. My feeling was they wanted nothing to do with this strange horror that had stormed into their lives. Just in case, I went by the nail salon where Kimmi had worked. I wore my clerical shirt and collar. Again, I was guilty of doing so in order to increase the odds that the staff would oblige me. They wouldn’t tell me to mind my own business or to go away. I met Kimmi K’s old manager. She was the only woman in the room over the age of twenty-five. She didn’t wear the uniform of skinny jeans and silk shirts w
ith short sleeves and embroidered letters on their shirt pockets.
She wore black pants and a white shirt and her manner was crisp. She’d been cleaning the fish tank when I’d gone to see her, with one of those double-sided magnets. She had on rubber gloves and she whipped them off and said, ‘No, Father; Kimmi K, she not here.’
One of the girls was bent low over a pair of white, Western feet. She was putting one of those strange foam toe-dividers into place. Another was wearing a face mask, using some kind of drill or spinning tool. Both had raised their heads to look at me but were now back at work.
‘Her name not Kimmi K, you know,’ the manager told me, and I said, ‘I know that. Can you tell me where to find her? She might have to be a witness at the inquest.’
The manager shook her head saying, ‘No, no, no, no witness.’
I said, ‘She doesn’t have a choice. She will be subpoenaed. It means she has to go or else she gets in trouble with the court. It can be hard on the stand. She might feel upset. She can talk to me.’
It had no effect. The manager simply repeated herself: ‘No, no, no, no witness.’
I considered the possibility that she’d spirited Kimmi K out of the country, or even out of the State, or that Kimmi K’s uncle was hiding her away, not that she had anything to hide. Kimmi K did nothing wrong. The whole time she was in Cups and Saucy, she kept her head down. Immobilised by fear, she hardly moved.
In the end, I left my card.
‘She doesn’t have to talk to me,’ I said, ‘but I can be a good listener.’
Things were different with Mouse. She answered my call immediately. I told her, you can make arrangements to see your own private counsellor, somebody who isn’t affiliated with a church, but I’m here if you need me. She said, no, you’re good, Father, and we were soon pretty good friends.
Then there was Roger. By the time I got in touch, he’d become quite famous. He was also a newly single man. I can’t remember how exactly I found out that Amy had left him; I think I read it, maybe in New Idea. I remember being surprised. Amy didn’t strike me as the type to leave her husband because the whole world suddenly knew he’d been cheating. That was surely something she already knew. Believe me: I’ve seen enough infidelity in my life to know that almost every woman who asks the question ‘Is my husband having an affair?’ already knows the answer.
Amy’s humiliation had been quite public. Not everyone knows this but Krystal had turned up at Surf City, all sparkly shoes and hair extensions, and she’d told reporters that she was Roger’s girlfriend, so that had been over the news. Roger had no choice other than to admit to Amy what he was doing in Sydney.
There can’t have been a women’s magazine that wouldn’t have tried to get Amy’s story after that. I’m fairly certain money would have been offered. I’m not making any judgements about it. Amy must have turned them down because while there were a lot of stories about ‘The Cheating Scandal!’ uncovered by the Surf City siege, none featured Amy.
All were with Krystal. She talked to everyone. I’m certain she got paid. I’m fairly sure she did a Zoo shoot, too. No doubt when she gets knocked up one day, we’ll hear from her again, ‘My Baby Joy!’ and then ‘I Love my Baby Body!’ and then ‘Krystal Bounces Back!’
Amy clearly didn’t go in for that kind of thing. The only story I saw about her marriage break-up, when it was finally announced, was in one of the Sunday magazines. There was a picture, obviously taken by a guy with a long lens sitting in a car on the other side of the street. Amy was wearing a blue-and-white striped top, like the old French fishermen used to wear, and cream jeans rolled up to expose her ankle. She had one of her sons with her – his face was pixelated – and she was pushing a shopping trolley. The cameraman had zoomed in on her purchases: flat-pack shelves, plastic storage buckets, bulk-buy cleaning products, the stuff everyone buys when they’re setting up a new house.
From the look of it, the photograph had been taken without Amy’s knowledge. She might have been as surprised as anyone to see it in the newspaper. It’s called getting ‘papped’ – short for paparazzi. There weren’t any comments from her. The reporter had written, ‘When approached, Mrs Callaghan was polite but told The Sunday News she did not want to speak about the end of her marriage.’
The reporter had also quoted what she called ‘friends of the couple’ – whatever that means – saying Amy was devastated to discover the sheer scale of her husband’s infidelity. ‘Amy might have been able to forgive one indiscretion but Roger was living two lives. And the stripper is crazy if she thinks she was the only one; there were dozens of them over the years and there would have been more in the future. Roger got away with it because he was good-looking and he had charm and money to burn. If he was fat and bald, it would have been a different story,’ this so-called friend said.
I’m not so sure about that. Being short and fat seems to me to be no barrier to having sex outside marriage.
As for Roger, he did an interview with one of the big current affairs programs immediately after the siege – I’d say for money, since he needed quite a bit of it, and quickly, to save the real estate deal that had gone bad in Melbourne.
Over time, that somehow led to a role on one of those reality shows, Cooking with the Stars or some such thing. He lasted only two rounds but the attention flattered his ego. He opened a Twitter account, and a Facebook page – it’s called ‘I’m the Real Roger Callaghan’ – and he seemed astounded when people left abusive messages for him.
‘People want to be judge, Jury and Executioner!’ he replied, with precisely that punctuation.
‘You blokes are cowards, leaving anonymous messages. You don’t know me. Don’t judge Me – You were NOT there.’
He seemed to be coping with whatever trauma Hanrahan felt he might have suffered during the siege, in other words, but I did what I was asked to do and got in touch, to see if he wanted to talk. Apparently he was only half-listening because he said, ‘I’ve got an agent. All requests for interviews have got to go through my agent.’
From the sound of things, I’d caught him in the car. I found myself visualising him, maybe with aviator sunglasses on, maybe checking out his profile in the rear-vision mirror. I told him I didn’t want an interview, I was a chaplain employed by the New South Wales police and now by the New South Wales Coroner’s office to offer professional counselling services to him, on the basis that he might have been traumatised by what he’d seen during the siege at Surf City.
I was based in Sydney but I was able to fly down to Melbourne to talk to him if he wanted.
He said, ‘Free of charge? I don’t have to pay?’
I said, ‘That’s right. I was there at the siege. I’m happy to talk about what you saw, how you might be feeling. It can be helpful to people, to talk it out.’
I can’t say I was surprised when Roger agreed to meet. He’s not the kind of bloke who often turns down an opportunity to talk about himself. I got an evening flight from Sydney to Melbourne. I checked into a hotel on Flinders Street, about a five-minute walk from the train station. It wasn’t the Crown, or even the Sofitel; it was just a $150-a-night, three-star hotel, but when I woke the next day, I discovered they still wanted $27 for what they called the ‘continental breakfast’, which seemed to be a box of Sultana Bran, a jug of skim milk with Glad Wrap stretched over the top, a pot of scorching coffee, cold toast in a piece of folded cardboard and two miniature butter packs.
I passed, and made coffee with the kettle in the room.
The milk was in those little pods; you need three, and they’d only given me two. WiFi was supposedly $28 a day, so I passed on that, too.
I hailed a cab to Beaconsfield Parade in Port Melbourne. Roger had moved out of the family home and into an apartment but he hadn’t wanted to meet there. He wanted to meet at what he called ‘my new office’ – a little café on the flat bay with a couple of straggly palm trees and two cold aluminium tables out front. I took it from that that his real estat
e business hadn’t survived the scandal, or maybe the downturn had finally taken its toll.
I arrived first and took one of the chairs outside. I can’t say why I’d worn the collar, but I had. Maybe to make it easier for him to find me; maybe to try to exercise some moral authority over him. I’m not sure he’d have seen that for what it was.
Roger turned up about twelve minutes later, parking right outside the café, in the disabled parking spot.
‘You’re not worried about getting a ticket?’ I said, rising as he strode toward me, arm outstretched, chewing gum.
‘Nah,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a permit,’ and he pointed to the blue card on the dash.
Like a fool, I said, ‘Is that fake?’
Roger took umbrage.
‘Of course it’s not fake,’ he said, ‘it’s legit! Fake! What are you talking about, fake?’
I said, ‘Forgive me. That was rude. What’s the nature of your disability?’
Roger grinned and said, ‘Nah, you’re right, Father. It’s not one you can see. I get anxiety.’ As if to prove it, he took a transparent orange pill bottle from his inside lapel, popped a few of whatever white pills he kept in there, and downed them without water.
I sat down and Roger pulled up another chair. Like the table, the chairs were cold aluminium – weather resistant on that salty strip, and easy to wipe down. I noticed straight away that Roger was the kind of bloke who has to sit right back in his chair, legs wide apart, knees jiggling.
He put two fingers in the air, signalling the waiter. She was young and pretty, wearing three-quarter leggings, a short apron and a pair of ballet slippers, and she was wearing her hair like waitresses do, scraped back, and tied into a loose bun, a few tendrils escaping.
‘What can I get you?’ she said, and Roger, grinning like a loon and his jaw going like the clappers around his chewing gum, said, ‘That depends . . . are you on the menu?’
It’s the kind of line that no man should get away with – but the waitress seemed to love it. She blushed, and put her order pad up to her eyelids to try to hide the fact that she was giggling.
No Place Like Home Page 21
