Acid Song

by Bernard Beckett

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘To make a long story simple and slightly inaccurate, IQ testing has a shabby and embarrassing history. The early claims of race difference were almost certainly attributable to the unsophisticated and prejudicial nature of the testing procedures. Given the dubious launch, most people jumped overboard before the craft left the harbour. The mind, it seemed, was too complex to have adjusted during our evolutionary isolation. We are all Africans in the end. More recently, it has become fashionable to claim race doesn’t even exist, that it is a social rather than a biological phenomenon.

  ‘Professor Harding, though, stayed with the boat. Modern IQ tests have changed tremendously over the years. While the cynic can still claim that all they measure is the ability to complete IQ tests – and that’s not an unreasonable view – that in itself can be of considerable interest. What Professor Harding was claiming was that racial profile remains a significant predictor of outcomes in IQ tests – and that the variable has explanatory power after obvious cultural markers like country of birth, income, education level and the like are removed.

  ‘I don’t claim to be an expert in his work, it’s not my field at all, but I know enough to understand it is nearly impossible to get any sort of precision into this sort of testing. So critics will always have a foothold. But I must say I trusted the professor’s rigour. If he believed he had found something, then, well,’ Richard paused, for abruptly the words had dried up. Whatever closing for the sentence he’d had in mind, his mind was now refusing to reveal it. ‘Well, I know he didn’t take this stance lightly.’

  ‘So people thought he was a racist?’

  ‘Well yes and no.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘People labelled him as a racist, but I would question your implication that there was thinking involved.’

  ‘Are you trying to be clever now?’

  ‘It’s no effort at all.’

  ‘It’d be rather sad if it was.’

  Maybe he had her wrong. She wasn’t stupid. Where had he got that from, that the police were always stupid?

  ‘I was attempting to clarify.’

  She shrugged and closed her notebook. Richard took it for a dismissal and stood. The line of narrow windows on the far wall caused him to squint, turning to black the metal rafter running across the room and out into the corridor. That must have been what he used. Stood on the desk, stepped out. Jumped. Was there a moment of regret? Did he struggle? Or did he have the discipline to remove his mind from the equation? Was such a thing possible?

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I thought we had finished.’

  ‘We haven’t. Sit back down.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to.’

  ‘I’m not sure you have a choice.’

  ‘What more is there to tell you?’ Richard shrugged; but he sat, as instructed.

  The detective waited long enough for the tension to take hold. She brought her fingertips together at her lips, and paused until she was sure she had his full attention before asking her question.

  ‘So why didn’t you stand up for him?’

  ‘I, in what way?’

  ‘You’re right. It’s very hard to find somebody who wasn’t incensed by what he was doing. You’re the first person I’ve spoken to who seems to have any respect for his work. So why then, did you let him carry this alone? Why not speak out in his support?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re accusing me of.’

  ‘Nothing. I’m just interested.’

  ‘As part of the investigation of course.’

  ‘Partly.’

  ‘William was my friend.’ Again the throat tightened. ‘But it’s important to keep those things separate. The personal and the professional. I wasn’t sure he was wrong, not in the way other people seem to have been, but I wasn’t sure he was right either. So, in the circumstances … What good would it do? That’s what I wanted to ask him. What good would it do, anyone knowing this? And look what it’s done to him.’ The tears came, threatening to dissolve the words before they could leave his mouth. ‘It, this area, it’s tremendously complicated, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound … I’m sorry.’

  He let his head drop, planting his face on his thick hand, attempting to rub this nonsense out, feeling his shoulders heave in defiance.

  ‘Excuse me, what are you doing here? Turn that off immediately!’

  Detective Olliver sprang to her feet and Richard swivelled to see the familiar camera, the recording indicator on, Greg’s hand on the focus ring as the detective approached, her hand out. Amanda stood at her cameraman’s shoulder. She stepped through the doorway, blocking the detective’s way forward. The two women stared each other down, immovable objects intent on doing their jobs.

  ‘I asked you to leave.’

  Amanda didn’t flinch. She offered her hand and smiled.

  ‘Amanda Hume, Artery Film. We’re shooting a documentary on Mr Bradley. I’ve been trying to track him down, ever since I heard. We’re involved you see, perhaps you heard. We were filming, yesterday, during the protest, and we’re covering tonight’s address. I’m sorry, if we’re interrupting, I’m happy to wait outside. Or perhaps you’d care to offer a comment.’

  Like a scavenging seagull, she could be chased away, but only momentarily. Once Richard had liked her for it. But what had once seemed tenacious now was only ruthless. He had allowed her to flatter him, he had accepted her invitation to like her, to believe she liked him too. And all for this, the chance to film his tears in closeup, to once again frame his downfall.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to hand over the tape,’ the detective said, turning her attention to Greg, who kept his eye to the viewfinder.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ Amanda told her. ‘Don’t think I haven’t been in this situation before. I know my rights.’

  ‘Hand it over or I’ll arrest you both.’

  Both bluffing, probably. Richard stood, tired of this now.

  ‘Mr Bradley, I’m going to have to ask you to remain seated.’

  ‘Fuck off, I’m sick of this fiasco.’

  Richard pushed forward, meaning to clear a path to the doorway, expecting them to both step aside. But life is messy.

  ‘Colin!’

  The officer came running. Greg turned, meaning perhaps to capture it on film, and he and the uniform collided. Greg was propelled backwards, his balance going as he kept his hands high, trying to protect the camera. Amanda attempted to step aside but collected Richard who struck out for the wall with his hand, hoping to arrest his fall. Detective Olliver, whose face was somehow between Richard and his support, took a blow across her nose and responded viciously.

  The resulting twisted pile had Richard on the floor, his face against the cheap abrasive carpet, and a shooting pain in his right shoulder, marking the point where the detective’s wrenching of his arm met arthritic resistance. There was a camera in there too, sharp and unyielding, and a polished boot, hard across his fingers; and Amanda’s warmth, and someone’s hair in his mouth, and everybody swearing. All he could think, as he gasped for breath and waited for the playground tangle to work itself out, was that this must be the place. This must be the place they put William to rest, after they cut him down.

  The handcuffs were surely an overreaction, but then overreacting was a perk of the job, Richard supposed. The cameraman, Greg, had been put in a second car, while he and Amanda shared the back seat of the first.

  ‘This is your fault,’ he informed her, as the patrol car pulled out of the car park. A student he thought he recognised pulled his skateboard to a stop at the end of the driveway and gave a small uncertain wave of recognition. Richard, unable to wave back, simply nodded his recognition in the Pacific manner. He felt blood from his nose run back down his throat, thick and warm.

  ‘It’s nobody’s fault, Richard. Things just happen sometimes.’ She was agitated too, but for different reasons. She was worrying about getting the camera
back, and them both being released in time for the speech tonight.

  ‘You had no bloody right being there,’ Richard said.

  ‘It’s my job, being places where I have no bloody right to be.’

  ‘That’s a trite response.’

  ‘There’s a bigger story here. You’re too involved to see that.’

  ‘You told me I was the bigger story.’

  ‘I don’t remember putting it exactly like that.’

  ‘You led me to believe.’

  ‘You don’t strike me as the sort to be led unwillingly.’

  ‘I don’t want you there tonight.’

  ‘I can live with your displeasure.’

  ‘You misunderstand me. I’m saying I’m withdrawing permission.’

  ‘You didn’t read the contract, did you?’

  ‘Then I won’t give my speech. You can’t make me speak.’

  ‘Then I’ll film the speaker who gives your apologies. It’ll make a fitting ending.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  The officer in the front passenger seat turned back, to make sure they were not about to come to blows. They must have looked ridiculous to him, the old battler drawn into combat with a woman half his age, an attractive woman half his age. A ridiculous time to remind himself of this, forced to sit touching close, cuffed like perverts.

  ‘I saw the footage you know, of your interview.’

  ‘What interview?’

  ‘Your election campaign.’

  ‘There were a lot of interviews.’

  ‘The last one.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘You refused to speak after that, too. The little symmetries make our job so much easier.’

  ‘Fuck you, Amanda.’

  She had a reply ready; he could see it loaded on her lips, but she swallowed it back, and when she spoke the tone was gentler.

  ‘You have to speak tonight.’

  ‘I’m not falling for your sweet talk. What do you think I am? Stupid?’

  ‘It’s not just about the documentary.’

  ‘Yes it is. That’s all it is to you.’

  ‘Will you speak, if I promise not to film?’

  That surprised him. He didn’t respond at first. He needed to turn the proposal over in his head, spot the trap in it.

  ‘You’re assuming they’re going to let us go.’

  ‘What are they going to charge us with?’

  ‘Trespass. Assaulting an officer.’

  Amanda shrugged. She could get what she wanted, with that smile. He wondered if she practised it in the mirror.

  ‘An academic and a journalist. More trouble than we’re worth, both of us. They’ll let us go with a warning.’

  She bumped her shoulder into his, like they were schoolyard friends in trouble again, off to see the principal. She was good at this. Or he was particularly bad at it. She smiled. Richard smiled back. Foolish old bastard, he told himself.

  THE WINDOW HAD steamed up from the inside, making an abstract painting of those who waited. The door opened. A parcel of smell (warm, greasy, thick with memory) unwrapped itself beneath Simon’s nose. He checked his watch. Dinner time. It would be a celebration. That was what Amanda had said when he’d called her. ‘Well done, love. Anything you want for dinner, you choose.’ For Simon though it would be a double celebration. Last night he had passed the point of conscious effort, like a juggler for whom an impossible trick becomes suddenly simple, natural. The dreaming would come easily now, and although he could never tell her, it excited him more than the prospect of a man with a lisp agreeing to reread his screenplay.

  Amanda hated fish ’n’ chips. A small snag, negotiable. After all, he hated most of the people she worked with. Small concessions were the hard currency of their relationship. Simon opened the door and walked out of the world of rain. The blackboard menu smiled down on him. A wall-mounted television played rugby highlights over lines of static and an electric blue fly zapper buzzed above a fading chart of Common New Zealand Fish. A customer looked up from his real estate giveaway. Simon smiled.

  He pulled out his cellphone and called.

  ‘Amanda here.’

  ‘Hi. Me again.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Good and bad.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Good information, sort of wish it wasn’t. Hard to explain. I’ll tell you later. I thought you’d be home by now. You get the car?’

  ‘In the garage.’

  ‘You were meant to pick it up.’

  ‘They were meant to have fixed it.’

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘Didn’t say. But he did that doctor’s look, like he’s saving you from the messy details because you won’t understand, but basically you should walk more and eat a lot of vegetables.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Hey, my first car was a mini. I rebuilt it myself.’

  ‘You never told me that.’

  ‘No, well, it isn’t true. But I felt the need to lie. I think people are listening.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Fish ’n’ chip shop. I decided on fish ’n’ chips. What do you want?’

  ‘Not fish ’n’ chips.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll ask them if they do that.’

  ‘You know I hate it. I feel like a salad or something.’

  ‘I thought this was my choice.’

  ‘It’s not much of a celebration.’

  ‘It’s not like you’re staying in all evening.’

  ‘You know what it does to me. I’ll wake you to remind you of it, at regular dream shattering intervals.’

  ‘See, this is why I love you.’

  ‘It’s one of the reasons.’

  ‘Okay, tell you what,’ Simon proposed. ‘How about I get a scoop for the walk home and you start making us a salad. Actually, do you want to look in the fridge and … Fuck!’

  ‘What?’

  Simon stared blankly at the television screen. Rugby had given way to other news. Pictures of polling booths, people struggling through the rain.

  ‘What time does voting close?’

  A long silence. Plenty of time for Amanda to think of a new way to call him stupid and irresponsible. Nothing came.

  ‘Seven, I think.’ Pause. ‘I hope.’

  ‘You forgot?’ It delighted him, more than it should have.

  ‘I should have written a list,’ Amanda said.

  ‘Where’s the nearest polling station?’

  ‘The school.’

  ‘Okay, how long will it take you to run there?’

  ‘I don’t run. And it’s raining. I’m getting a taxi.’

  ‘See you there. If you don’t see me, get them to hold it open.’

  ‘They won’t do that.’

  ‘You know this for a fact?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Everybody knows that for a fact,’ Amanda told him.

  ‘You need to get out in the world more. There’s more of me than you realise.’

  ‘Can I hang up now? I’m in a hurry.’

  ‘Race you.’

  Simon looked around at the collection of strangers who to a person pretended to possess no knowledge of his civic irresponsibility. He stared longingly at the board and left the shop.

  The wind had eased but the rain was picking up the slack: a constant, depthless screen of wet. Simon huddled beneath the shop front and considered all those options which did not involve being soaked to the skin. He had twenty dollars in his wallet. He could call a taxi. Out here in the suburbs, it would take ten minutes for it to arrive, maybe longer. He would have no change left for chips, or getting home. Amanda would pay their way home. She would not pay for chips. He waited patiently for Plan B. It was a term that was popular amongst sports commentators at the moment. As an accusation. ‘The team doesn’t appear to have a Plan B.’ Simon had some sympathy for such teams. Plan Bs were hard.

  The door opened again. The s
mell almost cost the country a vote. Simon hadn’t decided who for yet. He’d told Amanda he had, of course. He couldn’t keep up, when she talked politics. It wasn’t lack of intellect, it was lack of interest.

  ‘Now, here looks like a man in need of divine intervention!’

  A customer he hadn’t noticed, dressed in black, stood before him, holding a small white dog in one arm, a parcel of fried temptation in the other. The man’s generous jowls made his head appear pointy, and the lines about his eyes had crinkled into a permanent smile. Although his sentence had finished he still appeared to be emitting a sound, a sort of hum of affirmation, although towards what Simon could not be sure. And the final detail, which Simon noticed only when the little dog shifted its head toward its master’s food, was the unmistakable white break in the collar line of the stranger’s shirt. A priest. Or a madman dressed as a priest. Maybe both.

  ‘Or failing help from above, a ride in a car perhaps, to a voting station.’ And the humming again. ‘Come along then. This is Tartar, he doesn’t bite, well – only heathens, and nuns!’

  Clearly mad, probably harmless, and apparently in possession of a car.

  ‘Um, just to the school, if you don’t mind. I mean, I don’t want your dinner to get cold.’

  ‘Oh, I can eat while I drive, that’s no problem. Now tell me, have you ever been in an Alfa Romeo?’

  ‘Um, no, I don’t think I have.’

  ‘The thing about these cars,’ the priest explained, as they rounded the first corner, ‘is that you have to put yourself in God’s hands. The Italians, you see, are very devout people. And it makes them a little careless.’

  Not as careless though, as whoever it was who was responsible for the old car’s upkeep. They accelerated through surface flooding and Simon felt the carpet swell beneath his feet.

  ‘Do you believe in life after death then?’ the madman continued. ‘No, don’t worry, this isn’t a test. I’m not all that certain of the answer myself.’

  Without warning the windscreen wipers, which had been threatening to schlap their way out of their sockets, stopped working, and the rivulets before them thickened, pushed outwards by the speed of the car, which showed no signs of slowing.