Coming Home

by Max Bolt

  The shop attendant freezes when the gun is shoved in his face and Fitch thinks he sees a Greatest American Hero moment coming, but thankfully the kid does as he is told and starts emptying the register. The attackers fit the stereotype; all jumpy and fidgety and iced up. Of course it is the drugs that made them do this. Or is it the poverty and lack of opportunities? What comes first, the drugs then the poverty or the poverty then the drugs? Chicken and egg anyone?

  Fitch is not interested in the attackers, they’ve done the crime, they’ll do the time (and come out of prison worse than they went in), but Fitch is very interested in the civilian forced to lie on the floor. He has a gut feel about this one, and when his gut aches he rubs it. Fitch leans left and right in his chair, frustrated by the camera failing to reveal the man’s features.

  Then comes the sequence that has already gone viral around the station. The real hero emerges from the shadows carrying the now famous steel pipe and drops one of the offenders and chases the other out of the store.

  Fitch backs the tape up. He watches the big hit, the mighty home run, the thief falling and his gun (the infamous vanishing gun) spinning out of picture in the direction of the customer lying on the ground. Fitch fast forwards until – pause – the customer is standing again and passes in front of the camera.

  Fitch backs the tape up and freezes it. He leans very close to the screen and zooms and pixilates the footage, pushing the system’s high tech features to the limit, edging things forward frame by frame, until the light falls on the man’s face. Fitch is sitting so close to the monitor that his breath mists the screen. But out of the grain and fog a face emerges.

  Mason Turner.

  And Fitch knows his brother has a gun.

  Chapter 6

  Craig’s office. A confessional with a view. The place where his Heads Of – the leasders of the Company – come to confess their sins and seek repentance. Missed targets, accounting errors, contractual oversights, lost customers, product recalls, internal control breaches, reporting omissions, reporting admissions, reporting contradictions, reporting exorcisms, reporting WTFisms. A complete inventory of all things screwed.

  Craig tunes out from the latest tale of woe from his Head of Marketing. A million unfortunate events that this man receives a million dollars a year to avoid. Tough market. Tough competitors. Tough suppliers. Tough this and that.

  Well tough shit.

  “You finished?” Craig snaps.

  Craig is terminating a hundred people a week in the outer offices. Good people. Hard working people. People that would give anything to earn a tenth of what this man earns. The irony, or the reality rather, of the corporate hierarchy strikes Craig; the more you get, the more you get.

  Mr Marketing falls silent. Where did that comforting shoulder to cry on go? What happened to a problem shared is a problem halved?

  “Anything else?” Craig raises his eyebrows.

  The man shakes his head. “No, that’s it.”

  “Ok. Now please leave your office access pass on my desk on your way out. It has been a pleasure working with you.”

  Mr Marketing is too shocked to move. Craig might be losing it but firing him on the spot? Really? He has been with the company 15 years. He has been a great contributor. He has more to give… and take. He… knows Craig’s father.

  “A marketing strategy takes time,” his voice is a high pitched whine, “we can turn it around. We can…”

  “I thought you had finished,” Craig cuts in, “that’s what you said.”

  “Well yes. But…”

  “Well what?”

  The man doesn’t know what to say. Craig clarifies things.

  “We let go a hundred and fifty eight employees this morning. All of them good hard working people. All of them returning to their wives and partners and kids to tell them the news. They’ve got mortgages and bills to pay. Kids school fees and medical expenses. Tell me, where do you live?”

  “Bellevue Hill.”

  “Got a mortgage?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll survive then.”

  Mr Marketing is in a tizz. There’s rules against this isn’t there? Due process and notice? And redundancies and downsizing only happen out there where you can’t see.

  “We sat in that meeting today all nodding and patting each other on the back,” Craig continues, “assuring each other that terminating those employees was the right decision. But those employees are gone because we screwed up. We made the decisions that have lost this company a $100 million per year for the last three years. We destroyed the livelihoods of those hundred and fifty-eight people.”

  “So that’s it?” Mr Head of Nothing Now asks.

  “That’s it,” Craig says, “what do you want, a guard of honour on your way out?”

  Head of Nothing Now stands.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Maybe I am,” Craig says.

  The man tosses his office security pass at Craig. It strikes him in the chest and falls on the floor.

  “This company is where it is,” Head of Nothing Now says at the door, “because you screwed it up.”

  That, Craig thinks, is the most accurate thing this man has said in the last five years.

  *

  The report of an abandoned car comes in midmorning. An unremarkable piece of news; cars go walking, or driving rather, by themselves every other day out here. You need to get from A to B, can’t afford public transport, you borrow a car. But the make and number plate check out with the details Fitch lodged earlier.

  “I’ll do it,” Fitch said.

  “On your birthday? In this heat? Send one of the lowies,” Nate offers, forgetting, like all good lowies, that he is one of the lowies.

  But Fitch has his keys and cap and Nate chases him out the door.

  *

  The car has been dumped in the run down fringe of town. The concrete lunar landscape is eerily silent. The car is unlocked with the keys still in the ignition.

  “Crappy place to ditch a car,” Nate says.

  “You know a better place?”

  Nate searches the back while Fitch does the front. He tries the keys in the ignition, nothing. He checks under both seats, nothing. He rifles through the glove box then the cardboard box on the front passenger seat. The box is filled with office style belongings. Headphones, paperwork, mobile phone recharger. A framed photo distracts him; Linda and Mason standing with their son, the ocean in the background. All smiles in a happier, pre-Afghanistan time. But nothing speaks to Mason’s intentions or whereabouts.

  Fitch steps into the middle of the street. He has the notion that if they left the car here it would just age and decay like the surrounds. Becoming an ugly urban fossil.

  The rattle of a train distracts him. He glances toward the sound.

  He’s using the train.

  *

  Mason is indeed using the train. Sitting alone he stares at the grim landscape rushing by outside. It reminds him of Afghanistan; an urban wasteland versus a desert wasteland. A poor zone versus a war zone.

  The irony of military protection is that everybody wants it but very few (once they realise the reality of it) want to do it. The answer, seduce the vulnerable with money and patriotism. The world is awash with supposed reality T.V. but when did a military advertisement last depict a real life gun battle. False advertising? Or fine marketing? Whatever. But don’t the employers, that is the Australian population, have a responsibility to at least be there to help when the covers come off and the truth is exposed.

  That is, war can be very dangerous and it can really mess people up.

  Suicide has claimed more Australian soldier’s lives than any war in recent times. It is an alarming statistic and speaks to the plight and sacrifice of Australia’s military personnel and their families. Because for every serviceman that dies, a part of Australia’s psyche dies with them.

  Mason sees it happening when he returns from the war. He attends the funerals. He places his h
ands on the caskets of former friends. He wraps his arms around the wives and children left behind and reminds them that the man they have lost was a good and loyal friend. These men and their families have scarified everything. And rightfully Mason starts to wonder: Who is responsible for this?”

  “Yes,” he says aloud to the empty train carriage, “someone is responsible for it.”

  Chapter 7

  Craig King Senior is on his mobile when Craig King Junior arrives at Cafe Sydney for lunch. Yes, Craig’s father passed on more than just his genes. A kind of weird high society kitsch thing to do, handing down your first name and surname. Craig Junior has researched lawfully changing his name but does not envy the feedback from his father. He’ll wait until his old man kicks the bucket, deliver the eulogy, then submit the deed poll.

  Senior is a big man and he stands awkwardly to shake Junior’s hand, all the while remonstrating with someone on his mobile phone.

  “A year. We don’t have a year. I want that company in two months. Political hurdles, legal concerns. Just corner the right politicians, feed some more lawyers. Look I don’t pay you to…”

  Craig sits down opposite his father and looks out over the harbour. Lunch with his father is always at Cafe Sydney and always at this table. Why? Because it is the best. Best restaurant, best table, best view. The staff know Craig Senior by name. Fellow diners know him too, and they stop by, hand on shoulder shaking hands. You see Craig King Senior is a big time businessman. He controls a lot of assets. Which means he controls a lot of people. Which means he can influence a lot of lives. And that means he gets a lot of shoulder patting and hand shaking.

  Craig Senior orders the same meal every time they meet for lunch; crispy skinned salmon with horseradish mash and snow peas. Business for Craig Senior is inherently unpredictable, so lunch, at least within the celebrity-esq. setting of Café Sydney, can be consistent.

  Craig glances at his father. Craig Senior’s suit jacket stretches tight across his broad shoulders. His face is bright red in the heat. Craig Junior looks around at the fellow diners; businessmen eating with businessmen, interspersed with some random fitly dressed women who don’t work but come to eat expensively without hubby, on hubby’s money. The same scene is playing out all over Sydney, people eating from the hands of celebrity chefs on other people’s money. All chowing down on smoked salmon and caviar and twice roasted spatchcock and caramelised onion and ocean trout and 45 day aged grain fed beef. The notion appalls Craig.

  Senior hangs up and tucks his mobile inside his jacket.

  “Well stuff me son. I clearly hired a kid to do a man’s job. Bentley and Co...”

  Craig knows the company. His father has been seeking to acquire the smaller construction products company for some time. Senior leans in conspiratorially.

  “The pricks won’t sell. We’ve been courting them, sending them love letters and blowing sweet nothings in their ear for the last six months, but they keep playing hard to get. Their business is cash flow negative but they’ll bleed it dry before they sell. But that’s ok. That’s life – or death,” Craig Senior smiles, a wily veteran he has seen it all before, “we’ll pounce when they’re on life support, begging to be bought out. But hey,” Senior straightens up, “that’s business. Now how about this heat? Bloody nasty those fires in the mountains.”

  Craig nods and endures the obligatory sequence of questions his father asks.

  “You good son?”

  Nup. Bloody shitty really. “Fine.”

  “You eating well?”

  No. “Of course.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  She’s your wife – you ask her. “She’s good.”

  “She seeing anybody?”

  Craig shrugs. He does not know if his mother is seeing anyone. It is a strange thing to consider about your own mother; seeing someone, sleeping around, shagging, getting down and dirty, shacking up, getting cosy. And Craig does not care about his mother’s love life. He sees her only slightly more than he sees his father. She was a good mother. When he was young and in need of loving, she had been present and attentive. But Craig Senior had intervened believing the softly softly approach was ruining his son. Love, you see, has no place in the Boardroom.

  Craig often wondered why his mother did not just leave his father. Just sign the papers and move on. But here, though, Craig’s mother is more shrewd than even her husband. Sticking with Craig Senior does not cramp her freedom (she rarely sees him) and it makes financial sense. She gets to stay in her own private mansion on the harbor and throw her dinner parties with like-minded and like situationed female other halves of Sydney’s business elite. Where they can bitch and moan and laugh about how juvenile their husbands, the leaders of some of Australia’s largest companies, really are. She could sign the papers and get out but that would kill the lifestyle. Instead she lets Craig Senior play around with his young blondes and brunettes, knowing eventually his pecker will give up the ghost. And she has done her sums. She is better off with the annuity stream than the one-off lump sum. Besides, the lump sum is always there for her, a free option if you like. It is sound business logic that even Craig Senior would be proud of if he gave it half a thought.

  A waitress arrives, a young woman that Craig Senior has no shame in assessing. She runs robotically through the specials and Craig Senior ignores them all and orders the crispy skin salmon with horseradish mash and snow peas. Craig orders a salad.

  “And how’s your girl,” Craig Senior asks, “the blonde – no brunette, what’s her…”

  Craig lets his father stumble over the irrelevant fact of his girlfriend’s name.

  “She’s adequate,” Craig eventually rescues him.

  His father laughs.

  “Adequate. I like that son.”

  Lunch comes and goes. There is the inevitable visits from other powerful Sydney businessmen. They focus on Craig Senior and spare an obligatory nod for Craig Junior, because, who knows, sometime in the future he might matter. Business good? Expansion in the States? Australian restructuring? Good, Good, Good. Nothing for Craig Senior is ever bad. Things might be bad but you never say. Then with wine finished and coffee done, Craig Senior leans forward

  “You making money in the Australian business now son?”

  Craig Senior cares about money. Not for what it can buy him but because it is the barometer of economic success. How much you paid for something or someone, how much you saved, how much you fleeced from someone, how much shareholders earn. Money is, for Craig Senior, the measure of everything.

  “Business is tough, yeah?” Senior asks.

  Craig knows what is coming. A cross examination and pep talk; chin up, toughen up, backbone, and all the rest.

  Craig shrugs. “No more than usual.”

  “I hear you recommended your Senior Management team just, and I quote, ‘get on and manage whatever the fuck it is they manage.’”

  News travels fast. Craig Senior chuckles and shakes his head.

  “And I hear you sacked Marcelles.”

  “He was giving me a headache,” Craig replies.

  Headache, Craig Senior likes that one too, he has a good laugh at that one, before getting serious again.

  “A few Panadol would have been a cheaper cure.”

  Craig Senior likes his son’s animal instinct, but firing Marcelles, a long-standing marketing executive, was short-sighted. His son could have benefited from the older employee’s experience.

  “But hey son, they’re choices. You make ‘em and you live by ‘em.”

  Listening to his father now reminds Craig of a time growing up. He was fourteen and had volunteered to deliver meals to the homeless around the city. He had found the exercise uplifting, completely missing the irony of a group of private schoolboys dressed in their Guess t-shirts and CK jeans and Old Skool Vans sneakers, dishing out ten dollar meals to the destitute. The boys had been swept away in the euphoria that comes with helping the less fortunate. Craig got an hour into the
three hour initiative before his father’s chauffeur driven sedan pulled up alongside them. Craig Senior wound down the back window and ordered his son to get in. Craig saw his father’s look and did. When the car got back on the road, Craig Senior glared at him.

  “Is this what I brought you up to be? A slave. You work for money. Someone wants something they pay you for it. And why you helping a bunch of derelicts? You give them one meal they’ll come looking for another. They made their choices and they carry the consequences.”

  Craig could have presented the counter argument of luck and opportunity and unequal education, but he was too afraid. He endured the ride home in silence.

  “We’ve injected another $100 million into the Australian division,” Craig Senior says presently.

  Craig nods. He has blown the last $100 million of his father’s play money. Appointing him Managing Director was proving an expensive hands-on lesson. Craig had secretly hoped that losing the last amount might have brought an end to the painful experiment.

  “You devise a strategy and you stick with it,” Senior says, “and next time one of your management team gives you a headache, call me first.”

  Craig Senior concludes with a smile and a fatherly pat on the shoulder.

  “Chin up son. It’s only money.”

  Craig Senior settles the bill and they leave. They shake hands outside and Senior holds his son’s hand a moment longer to impart a final pearl of wisdom.

  “Now son, don’t screw this up.”

  Chapter 8

  It was miserable the day they brought Ben, Mason’s only son, to Ridgeland school. The rain was coming down in sheets as they passed through the high bronze gates. Ridgeland School – developing students potential. The brochures spruiked a wonderful place with glossy photoshopped pictures of the normal students and facilities. Pictures of teachers helping students. Students helping other students. And, wait for it, students helping themselves. All staged to perfection. A culture of cooperation and high achievement.