Jacko

by Keneally, Thomas

  —Jesus, Jacko. You’re sounding a bit like a missionary.

  —No. Not at all. Listen, I’m not saying I’m doing this because I’m noble, and television is such a noble, stick-up-the-arse sort of medium. I’m doing this because I can. And because, honest to God, I found old Sondquist very poignant. With his Donald-bloody-Duck voice.

  Durkin finished his beer. The barman who’d been employed mainly to look after the Live Wire crowd in the mornings was along with another bottle and refilled Durkin’s glass.

  —What if you find her and all that’s happening is she’s hiding from her old man?

  At this stage Jacko stood back from the bar – or at least I presume he did – with his customary hold-things-till-I’ve-spoken gesture, his enormous palm out towards Durkin.

  —Worst case, mate, worst case, I admit. But then, it’d seem that if she’s just hiding from him, how come people like PAW and the police can’t find her? And besides, I reckon she’s not hiding from him. He’s a straight shooter. A battler.

  A battler. Ultimate Australian praise. A battler is one who is buffeted by life and left with a squawk for a voice, but still has energy to greet camera crews at dawn.

  The way Durkin and Emptor spoke to each other, the frank confession of opportunistic sentiment, even of pride in venal motives, was in a sense part of Basil Sutherland’s policy. Or at least it was what Sutherland’s organization had employed them for. No nonsense about the First Amendment and the holiness of information. The Trinity spoke nobly and delivered sludge. Vixen Six delivered sludge and exulted in it, confessing to it on and off screen. That was why Vixen was occasionally sombrely referred to as a new voice, a new style. Television was the most disreputable, unworthy, sluttish muse of anyone’s national soul, and only Vixen came clean about that fact.

  Being Australian and being, therefore, able to imagine a time before television – Jacko’s first billion heartbeats had occurred thousands of miles from its lurid eye – Durkin and Jacko knew that it was a non-essential, frivolous and captious. Not history, but a parasite on history’s arse. Basil Sutherland villainously, some said, seemed to wish to undermine the magisterial poses which characterized the major networks. The mission of Morning Oz had been, as now the mission of Morning Manhattan and Live Wire was: to demonstrate the crooked, gap-toothed, unbuttoned, leering fatuity of the medium.

  And Durkin and Emptor … never happier than here at the Perugia planning the gipsy antics. The world of women which allured and bemused them in that peculiar Australian way safely relegated to the other end of the telephone. Lucy at home in Thomas Street, her Norman splendour frowsed and smudged by sleep. And they with tricks up their sleeves, viewers to be beguiled and caused to scratch themselves absently in sudden conviction of the world’s stunning ghastliness.

  So, for the sake of casual mischief and fraternity with Bob Sondquist, and in the belief that certain things shouldn’t befall women – although perhaps it was good for Vixen Six that occasionally they did – Jacko got permission from Durkin to put on hold a segment about a talcum powder heiress’s decision to endow an institute which researched the paranormal in pets, particularly the capacity of cats to see ghosts. Instead, he would spend Saturday interviewing the callers. He would fly to California with Dannie and a camera crew early Sunday morning and, with the aged sighter in tow, hit the caravan park off the Riverside Freeway later that day.

  The world was his circus.

  3

  Even before the Sondquist business, a pattern had been set between Jacko and me. It seemed to be one lacking in potential danger. We would meet at mid-to-late afternoon in a bar in West Broadway called the Odeon. The Odeon was a fashionable restaurant for young people, but at mid-afternoon it was nearly empty. The bar itself, the actual altar of wood and chrome, had been bought at auction from some older, harder establishment and re-assembled here. It was less hard-edged and shining-white than the rest of the place, and I was comfortable with it. We sat there facing the bottles – not at a table – like two old Sydney proles: wharfies or truck drivers.

  Here we exchanged our unlikely confidences, and I would hear much of the thorns and exaltations of Jacko’s life. Jacko delivered his secrets readily to me, on the old and perhaps tired grounds that we were mates and could rely on each other.

  Here I heard for example how he had fallen for the younger of two exquisite sister-astrologers called the Logans, who did the stars together on his morning show in Australia. She had responded to him because, she told him, he was in her stars, and her sister had found him there too, so that confirmed his suitability. For a time he was enchanted by the way the elder sister lunched and dined with the younger and himself, attended galas, travelled – a senior white witch authorizing his passion for the junior.

  But the stars which bless can also burn. Some nights the younger Logan, authorized by astral signs, would avoid him, the two sisters sitting indoors together, not answering his ringing, his calls. Then, all at once, he no longer appeared in what they saw of the heavens.

  An extraordinary tale of sister love or malice.

  —I’ll write a book about it one day, he told me, giving up his attempt to explain the complexities.

  By the time I heard these things in the Odeon, the Logan sisters, against whom Chloe used to rail, were married and leading sober lives amongst the eucalyptus trees in Sydney’s northern suburbs. Between them they ran a public relations company which took no account – in its advice to clients – of the position of the constellations.

  After the sisters had locked him out of their apartment, leaving him weeping in the street for the younger sister, after (to use Jacko’s unlikely term) a period of purgation in which the sisters continued to enter the set and effervescently reduce the unknowable to a few flippant items, and after a period in which he did not drink or eat red meat or go to parties, he encountered Lucy, who was promoting an art show on his morning program – tall, pleasant, intelligent and full of good will. Of course he had found since marriage what he sometimes tentatively described as ill will. But no one in New York had any sympathy for his claims. He had pursued her, sensing salvation in her equability and sensuality. He had gone to tremendous trouble to soothe her just suspicions of him, and had made a set of exuberant gestures: a limo so full of roses that they tumbled out on the footpath when the back door was opened; a plane which towed her name across the sky in the day’s last light above an open air performance of Così Fan Tutte at the Sydney Domain.

  —LUCYLUCYLUCYLUCY, said the banner, but, sensible girl that she is, she resisted the apparent imperative of her name scrawled upon the dusk. Until, after every assurance he could think to utter, at last she consented.

  For the sake of making more sense of our conversations in the Odeon, I began to watch Morning Manhattan as often as I could. I had noticed that the public are often more interested in anecdotes behind the novel than they are in the finished work itself. In the same spirit I watched Morning Manhattan for the tales behind those segments Durkin and Jacko called doorknocks, and I listened too for anecdotes about the notorious Live Wire.

  In this way I came to hear of the significant weekend, the one after Jacko invaded Bob Sondquist’s apartment and publicly devoted himself to finding the girl, or else to finding out what befell her.

  Jacko had first revisited the scene of the revelation for Live Wire’s purposes, doing another interview with Bob Sondquist. The reminiscences of a banal parenthood spent on sundry dismal military bases from California to Utah to Florida, where Bob had done his service for the nation and raised Sunny. In the end Durkin told Jacko all this would have to be edited down, since people could only put up with so much of that squawking; you could more or less hear the surgical knife in it.

  Then, for hours throughout the Saturday morning of that weekend, Dannie worked with Bob and an identikit man. Dannie, said Jacko, was remarkable to watch at these moments. Normally frantic for the world to fall into her lap, Dannie worked on Bob and the picture with
a weird patience, easing forth a line here and there, like a long-suffering nurse. A thin, be-spectacled but unremarkable face emerged as that of the man who had come with Sunny to Bob’s mute bedside.

  But at least, said Dannie, who knew how to use a visual resource, it was something graphic to top and tail the interview with.

  A little after noon, Dannie, the cameraman Clayton and Jacko travelled by car to New Haven to see Sunny Sondquist’s former boyfriend. They spent a dismal late afternoon in a poor white suburb in New Haven, far from the graces of Yale, interviewing the young man. On television he appeared to be a cocksure stocky boy, a student of accountancy who lived with an anxious mother. A good talker, he knew the sort of mixture of small talk and particularity the medium favoured. He explained that he had met Sunny in New York when she was sixteen. She had lived there with her parents – Mr Sondquist had taken a job with a security company. Sunny disliked New York, since it was so hugely different from most of the other places where she had lived. She wanted to go to one of the University of California campuses. He had asked her how she would pay for it, especially the first, expensive year when she would not be a California resident and would need to pay out-of-state tuition fees. She said that her father had put aside money for that. She spoke glowingly of her father.

  The young man (perhaps to please his mother) repeatedly said what a nice girl she was. But far too shy for him, he said with a false Jacko-esque confidence, as if since he had last seen Sunny he had concentrated purely on robust, rowdy women.

  Yet at last a softness entered his face and he said, She used to spell all the time.

  —Spell? asked Jacko.

  —Yes. We’d be waiting for the train to New York, and you know how conversation dies out between people. Well, she’d start spelling. It was a nervous habit, like biting her nails.

  —What would she spell?

  —Any difficult word that came into her head. Mischievous and aggregation and ligature – any word like that. It was a habit of hers.

  —Aggregation. Her father didn’t tell us that, said Jacko.

  —I think her father saw it as a bad habit.

  The Live Wire crew did not finish until early evening. Dannie had arranged that they would stay in a hotel in New Haven overnight. Then at dawn they would fly in a small chartered plane to Newark, collect the elderly man who claimed to have sighted the Sondquist woman, fly with him to Los Angeles, and drive him south-west on the dreary freeways to the mobile-home park near San Bernardino where he could give his version of his sighting of Bob Sondquist’s daughter.

  My wife Maureen always presumed – perhaps on the basis of suspicions Lucy confessed to her – that Jacko had probably already been unfaithful to Lucy. His infamous record with the astral sisters fed that idea. But during an Odeon meeting in the week following the San Bernardino expedition, Jacko unburdened himself to me about Dannie in the manner of a man marginally holding to his line.

  Dannie had a drink with him that night in New Haven, that most un-erotic of cities, and told him that she felt an emotional and professional attachment to him, a rugged devotion of the profoundest nature. She told him she intended to have him. She intended to continue to be his producer in both the morning and the Live Wire segments, and he would be her lover. She would wait until he had come to terms with the idea, but he should know that everywhere they went to film a Live Wire segment, she would wait after dinner for two hours in her room. After that, to hell with him! She would sleep. He wasn’t to think she couldn’t sleep under those circumstances. She damn-well could. She wasn’t a trembling child any more, said twenty-five-year-old Dannie.

  Jacko did not come from a tradition where women proposed the terms so directly or applied the leverage so vigorously. In the Odeon he drank his vodka and blinked.

  —I said I’ve got this wife Lucy, and I want to be loyal. And she said, You won’t last with Lucy. You and I are television people. And then she said something that really scared me. She said that she was going to write a journal of our relationship, and that when it was finished, she would give it to me, and I could learn about myself from it. That’s what these American women are like. It’s not enough just to go for a mindless bloody tumble. You have to learn something from it. But she’s a great little woman though eh. And smart as buggery.

  That Saturday night, by his own account, Jacko had not slept till perhaps three in the morning.

  —I locked myself in my room with my bloody channel-changer. Even after the two hours had gone, I couldn’t sleep for thinking. I’m sure she was asleep right enough. She would have looked at her watch and said, Okay, he isn’t showing. Time to get some brain sleep. She’s like that. People like her run the Israeli Air Force.

  He had risen haggard, meeting bright-eyed Dannie in the lobby. She behaved not a whit like a rejected woman. She did not seem to read his non-compliance as rejection. It was morning now, and they were to go about their jobs.

  —Then we picked up this old bloke at Newark, and he was so excited about going out to see his daughter again – we’d given him this open return-ticket – and he was so well-mannered and grateful to Dannie. And I thought, you don’t know what sort of fire-eater you’re talking to, mate.

  The image of her sitting up with her watch hurt, said Jacko, like a stone bruise. And the old man was a distraction. He said something which made them certain he was genuine. He said this girl he’d seen jogging had muttered as she ran. She’d run past him and he’d heard her.

  —When I asked him what she had been muttering, he said it was something like the alphabet.

  Once they landed in California, Jacko put on a golf shirt and they all climbed into a helicopter and swung inland, the stained bowl of air between the Pacific coast and the San Bernardino Mountains crowded with skittering machines like their own.

  —In Southern California, said Jacko, even the bloody dentists own helicopters. Especially the bloody dentists!

  They stood in the sun on the outskirts of San Bernardino, within sound of the thunder of the freeway, and introduced on camera the old man from New Jersey, who stood in the entry way of the trailer park. And the old man, so transparently honest and so pleased with his place in history, said that he had seen the girl jogging, and that he’d been aware that she was muttering to herself. Like praying aloud, he told the camera.

  —Such a lovely old bloke, Jacko told me in the Odeon. And it’s bloody ridiculous, but my brain was full of images of Dannie waiting, and let me tell you, déshabillé played its bloody part.

  By noon, Jacko had a sense that the search was well-launched, and he confirmed that sense by making door-knocks among the trailer homes.

  —The trailer-home park! he expatiated in the Odeon. The world’s successful answer to the cost of conventional housing, but thank Christ I don’t live in one eh.

  As he went on his way down the avenues and laneways, Clayton filmed him from a distance, so that trailer householders would have few grounds for shyness or complaint. A number of people were very pleased to say they hadn’t seen Sunny, except at last one middle-aged man spoke with something like the same sort of certainty as the old man.

  —She runs here sometimes, he told Jacko, but she doesn’t live here.

  When Jacko asked him how did he know, he said he saw a man drop her off and wait for her. A nondescript vehicle, a nondescript man. No particular colour, the car. Dust-coloured.

  —I’m colour-blind anyhow, the man confessed. She wore a tanktop too. Was skinny. Had a birthmark on her shoulder.

  So sweetly did the universe seem to direct Jacko to Sunny Sondquist, such pleasant and self-validating witnesses emerging from the masses of the demented, that Jacko forgot Dannie’s tormenting proposition and surrendered himself to the exaltation of his trade. To be in California, with the smutty sun on your face, and making such discoveries on one’s own behalf and on behalf of the squawking battler Bob Sondquist.

  —Last time I saw her, the middle-aged man had told Jacko, she was jogging
along saying, A-N-O-D-Y-N-E.

  Anodyne.

  —Will we find the Anodyne Kid? Jacko asked his audience.

  He was confident in his own brotherly intentions and in assured success. Live Wire was seen in San Bernardino. Witnesses, some of them truthful, would emerge.

  And he would not be made a fool of by anyone other than Dannie.

  —But do you really care whether you find her or not? I asked Jacko over a post-Odeon dinner at the Grand Ticino, a cellar restaurant, closer to my place than Jacko’s, and one of our favourites. Fettucine Alfredo and Pinot Grigio were succulent in the Ticino’s little cellar, with stills from a movie it had starred in displayed on its walls.

  —Jesus mate, Jacko breathed to me there. I’m going to deliver her in triumph eh. To old Bob Sondquist’s window. By cherrypicker.

  Vixen Six always let him fly back Sunday night on Metro Grand, on a plane which was a cross between a hotel and a piano bar. In the stern of the aircraft there were two bedrooms. Jacko always booked one of these.

  Dannie stayed on in Los Angeles to research the Anodyne Kid story and others she was working on at Durkin’s orders.

  From a phone on board the plane, Jacko called Bob Sondquist.

  —Listen, Bob mate, why didn’t you tell us your daughter spelled things?

  Sondquist squawked in his pained monotone.

  —I didn’t know she still did that. I thought she’d grown out of it.

  —But a feller not much younger than you told me he saw someone like her spelling while she ran.

  Sondquist became so excited that Jacko could hear him struggling to achieve intonation.

  —Proves she’s still the same kid! The same exact poor little tyke.

  Now Jacko could hear Bob sobbing. Jacko wondered what was the freight of those tears? The weight of what remembered events had started them? On the cellular phone at great altitude, the tears sounded to Jacko like an exclusion, the turning of a shoulder.