To Know My Crime

by Fiona Capp

  As the gardener helps the two men onto the landing, the plane putters away across the water and lifts into the air. The second man, Ned realises, is the state politician who bought the house from the Wainwrights. The politician turns to the big man – a property developer who also happens to own half the coal mines in the country and whose name is Ralph Stone – and waves his hand at the house up on the cliff. From the water, it is the most striking house on Millionaires Walk. Ned remembers that it was the place that everyone pointed to from the ferry, the one that everyone admired and coveted, its locally quarried limestone and wrought-iron verandas glowing in the sunshine like a Victorian lady in lacy skirts.

  The politician bends to speak to the gardener who freezes for a moment and then slaps his forehead and gesticulates as if to say he will sort everything out quick smart before dashing away down the jetty. The politician gazes after him then turns back to Ralph Stone as he ushers him towards the walkway up the cliff.

  Ned smiles as Stone makes his ascent. At the end of every zig and zag there is a wooden bench onto which he lowers his considerable bulk to catch his breath. The politician sits down next to him, as if to reassure him that they have all the time in the world and that he, too, is taxed by the climb. He points to features of interest around the bay and in the nearby coves and then, when the big man is ready, they continue up the cliff.

  Once they have reached the top and disappeared from view into the politician’s mansion, Ned pulls up the anchor and rows back to shore. This time, he is barely conscious of his arms and legs moving. His mind is too busy churning over what he has seen. Why would they come here in the middle of the week when they could meet in town? Is it for business or pleasure? If business, is it official? And if not? The politician, Richard Morrow, is the state minister for planning and development. In the past few years, his government has put on the market every utility still in public hands; has made a business, you might say, of selling itself.

  He pulls the boat up onto the sand, hides the tackle and oars under the walkway and bounds up the public stairs, propelled by something urgent, almost primal. He has to know. Taking the beach access road to the highway, he enters the Anchorage from the front. The garden is deep, with plenty of overgrown foliage for cover. Ned makes a quick dash from bush to tree, and when he reaches the house he hears their voices coming from the upstairs veranda overlooking the bay. He hugs the limestone walls, moving as silently as possible over the gravel driveway until he is directly beneath the two men. There is the shuffling of feet above and a door opening and then someone walking around inside the house. The feet return to the veranda.

  ‘Lunch,’ Richard Morrow announces, placing something down on the table.

  ‘Who fixed it?’ Ralph Stone barks.

  ‘A caterer.’

  ‘Still around?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And that chief advisor of yours, what’s his name?’

  ‘Howard?’ Morrow sounds surprised. ‘He’s in Melbourne.’

  ‘Don’t trust him. He’s thick with McCarthy.’

  ‘McCarthy? Hardly. Howard’s loyal, there’s no question of that.’

  ‘I saw them together at the party conference.’

  ‘Even I talk to McCarthy sometimes.’

  ‘So your loyal advisor knows nothing about this meeting?’

  ‘This meeting never happened.’

  Stone lets out a belly laugh. His chair creaks as his body heaves.

  Ned racks his brain. McCarthy? Then it comes to him – a backbencher in the running for a ministry who was passed over for Morrow. Obviously no love lost there.

  There is the gunshot pop of a champagne bottle being opened and a faint glug as it is poured. The two men touch glasses.

  Ned waits, thinking how it is weeks since he had a drop of alcohol and that he could do with a drink. Nothing is said as the men eat and drink. The conversation takes off slowly after some desultory chat about Morrow’s plans to restore the house and garden. The house, he explains, was built by his great-great-grandfather and was in the family until his parents divorced in the seventies and the house had to be sold. Ever since, it has been Morrow’s ambition to buy it back. He finally got the chance three months ago.

  ‘Fire sale after the crash,’ Stone says, through a mouth that sounds half full. It’s not even a question.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘To restore a place like this you need money. And I’ve got it.’

  The politician gives a pained sigh. ‘The previous owners didn’t appreciate what they had.’

  ‘But you do. And that’s why I’m here.’ Stone laughs roughly.

  Ned’s eyes widen.

  Almost as soon as the men start to talk business, the high-rev rumble of a mower starts up next door. Stone swears and says something about telling the fucking gardener to shut the thing up. Ned can only agree. Morrow protests that it’s not his gardener and there’s nothing much he can do. They could go inside. Stone, who has clearly settled into his chair and is not inclined to move, tells him to forget it. He’s used to the roar of diggers. A lawnmower is nothing.

  The men resume their conversation, but it is chopped into verbal confetti by the background noise as the mower moves close to the boundary between the houses. Ned strains to hear. In the lulls when the motor moves further away, scraps float down to him about a big money development, fucking Greenie objections, fucking meddlers. Morrow, whose voice is much softer than Stone’s, says something reassuring, to which Stone responds, ‘So, how much then? How much will it take?’

  Ned slumps against the rough chalky wall of the house. He was right, it’s funny business. So why is he shocked? You suspect this kind of thing goes on but you don’t realise until you hear it, the sheer banality of it. For them, it’s just another deal. What a gift for Morrow’s political enemies or the media, if they knew. Or, he realises in a heartbeat, for him. If he wants to use it.

  Ned sinks to his haunches, thinking fast. There are always blackmailers in Chandler, but they’re lowlife, the bad guys. The greedy, twisted and desperate ones. The ones you never identify with. Until, of course, you’re in their shoes. What was it Chandler said? Once outside the law you’re all the way outside. You can almost hear a cold wind blowing through his words. A wind across a parched landscape with rocky outcrops and tumbleweed and vultures circling, and the blue sky going up and up and this dizzying freedom you have never known before. Out there there’s no blind justice, no one to tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. You make your own laws and you face the consequences. No letting others do your thinking for you. Out there you think for yourself.

  And when you do think about it, it’s obvious that sometimes you have to go out there. Sometimes it’s the right thing to do. You just have to be brave enough to act and not capitulate to conscience, self-interest or fear. That’s the difference between an outlaw, Ned tells himself, and an ordinary crim. He’s the one who lost Angie’s money. Even if he doesn’t want to make use of what he’s just heard, there is a good argument that he must. That he is, in fact, obligated. That it’s a bit rich of him to get precious about it. Here’s his chance of undoing the damage he has done and the greater damage that will come of it if he does nothing. And he wouldn’t be harming anyone. In fact, he’d be punishing an act of bribery, punishing corruption, which has to be in the public good. He can’t quite believe where his logic is taking him.

  He can’t afford to think about Angie right now because there’s no doubt what she’d say about the crazy ideas scudding across his brain. You want to go against your nature and everything you’ve ever learned about what’s right and good, and break the law? You want to spend the best years of your life in a concrete cell? But he’ll only be holding Morrow to account, and why shouldn’t he? The law certainly won’t.

  Chairs scrape across the wooden veranda above him. The men are getting up. Ned lets out a long exhalation. All the confidence he’s managed to whip up is seeping out of him like the air
from a tyre. Much as Morrow might deserve to be punished, he knows there is only one reason for doing the thing he can scarcely believe he’s even contemplating: he has fucked up and he has to fix it – unless he wants to be summoned, sometime down the track, to Angie’s bedside in some wretched institution where people who can’t look after themselves are shunted away to die, to hear her say him to, Give me the thing that I want.

  Morrow’s voice makes him jump. ‘I could show you around now,’ he says.

  ‘Can’t be done, Dick. Got to get back.’

  There is a loud silence. Ned bets that no one has dared call Richard Morrow ‘Dick’ in his life. At the kind of school he would’ve gone to, he’d have been Morrow or maybe RM. Richard was the name of royalty, whereas Dick – well, it spoke for itself. He thinks of Fraser’s friend Sidney and how, to get a rise out of him, all you had to do was call him Sid, which was, as they all knew, shorthand for a murderous punk.

  When the politician fails to reply, Stone adds, ‘Next time, eh?’

  ‘Of course,’ Morrow says coolly. Ned can imagine the expression on his face.

  He quickly creeps up the driveway and slips out the front gate. When he gets back to Millionaires Walk, a group of elderly walkers is strung out along the cliff top, taking in the view. This gives him time to find a spot where he can hide in the bushes and wait for Morrow and Stone to leave. They won’t venture out while the group is there.

  He has just settled in among the foliage when he hears a voice from the path. ‘Are you bird-watching?’

  Ned drops his binoculars and swivels around to see a white-haired man in a Greek fisherman’s cap peering in at him through the branches.

  He smiles weakly and raises a finger to his lips.

  ‘Sorry!’ the man says in a cheery stage whisper. Three spritely elderly women go past on the path, talking and laughing. The man turns to look at them and then grins at Ned. ‘We’re the Wobbly Walkers. That’s the last of us. We’ll leave you in peace.’

  Ned gives a small wave and the man heads off after the women. He can hear the old guy telling them about the young man in the bushes with the binoculars. One of the women gives a raucous laugh. ‘Bird-watching, my foot!’

  Ned mutters under his breath. He seems to have stepped into an Ealing comedy.

  The politician and Stone have emerged from Morrow’s garden and are moving quickly to the gate marked Private. Now that the gauzy cloud has dispersed, Ned sees it before he hears it. A white glimmer against the blue. As the seaplane descends lazily, he wonders what on earth they were thinking. If they had wanted absolute privacy, this was hardly the way. And yet, for Stone, it would have been irresistible. Time is money wasted on the freeway when you can take the sky. The two men step onto the pontoon once again, but this time Morrow isn’t offering Stone a steadying hand.

  Ned can’t help smiling. It’s a shame he will have to sting Morrow rather than the mining tycoon. Sting? He feels like the would-be punk again, trying to play the tough guy – and he was never any good at that. But he’s going to have to get good at it whether he likes it or not. Stone is close to untouchable. He can cop claims of undue influence and he doesn’t care what the public thinks of him. But a politician’s reputation is everything. Ned is already feeling sorry for Morrow. He wouldn’t vote for him, but he knows whose company he’d rather keep.

  7.

  It is dark when Ned arrives at Angela’s place. He stops in the garden and studies the elegant brick building with its curved walls and balconies, its well-maintained, symmetrical flower beds and paved paths that converge at the door. Symmetrical except for the gigantic cactus by the wall outside Angela’s lounge room that looks like something out of a Road Runner cartoon, one arm curved skyward, the other perpendicular, as if to say, ‘He went that-a-way.’

  Finding this flat for Angie is one of the best things Ned has ever done. He feels proud just looking at it and remembering his first inspection, when he imagined his sister living here with the view of the garden, the spacious rooms, the ease of access to the street and shops. And, to top it off, the cactus and the art deco style of the building gave it a whiff of Chandler’s West Coast. On the cactus now are three large withered blooms. Each bud flowers once and only at night. Angela has been in the flat for about eighteen months but hasn’t managed to catch the moment when the cactus blooms. She tells him that next summer she is determined not to miss it. But will she still be here come summer?

  He can’t linger all night but he’s finding it hard to go in. There is no reason for his sister to have any suspicions – Mai would never say anything. But he’s afraid he’ll put his foot in it. Angela’s always had a sixth sense for Ned’s evasions. When they were kids, he almost burnt down the chook pen while experimenting with a magnifying glass. Angela knew as soon as she looked at him that something was up. Even before she made it her profession, she had a way of drawing things out of people, things they’d never told anyone else. It helped that she did a mean Chinese burn. He was a weedy kid, a pushover at anything physical. At thirty-two, he’s finally grown into his skin, filled out and developed muscles where there had been nothing but scrawn and bone. His pride in these muscles quickly withers, though, whenever he catches sight of Angie’s emaciated forearms. There was a time she could hold him in a headlock for what felt like hours.

  A faint, gravelly, whooshing sound, like the waves moving under the boathouse, is seeping into his consciousness and he realises it’s the white noise of traffic on the freeway down in the valley, carried up by the wind. A voice calls out to him. For a moment he can’t tell where it’s coming from.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, Ned?’

  It is Angela in the darkened bedroom, which juts out into the garden like the prow of a ship.

  Ned peers in at her. He hadn’t noticed the window was open. At that moment, Mai appears at the front door. Their eyes meet and her frustration is clear. He kisses her cheek, his hand lingering on her shoulder. If they can just get through this dinner, he whispers, he will explain it all.

  When they are seated at the dinner table, Angela tilts her head and poses her question again. ‘Why were you lurking out in the garden?’

  She says it in the teasing tone they have always used with each other. Not sarcastic or knowing, but Ned is still on edge.

  ‘Waiting for the cactus to flower?’ he ventures, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘Could be quite a wait. So, Mai says you’re better now.’

  ‘Yeah, wasn’t quite human for a while.’

  Mai doesn’t dare look at him. Her eyes wander to the muted television screen playing in the corner of the lounge room. It shows one of the last remaining protest camps, somewhere in Europe. Spain, perhaps, or Greece. Somewhere things are really desperate. The next news item is full of abandoned car factories and half-built housing estates and people, whole families, living on the street somewhere in America. She wonders if there are still greater shocks to come. In this country, people seem to be living in a bubble or a time warp. They’ve found a way of not even mentioning the crisis by giving it an acronym that makes it sound like a fast food franchise. Not even Ned seems to want to talk about it.

  It was a mistake to fall for the brother of her boss, but she couldn’t help it. You weren’t in control of these things. The one night they went out together certainly looked like a disaster in the making. Ned was so desperate to make her laugh the air between them creaked with the strain of it. As the meal went on, he confessed to nerves and seemed to settle down. But then he kept batting away her questions with clever or self-deprecating remarks until she finally asked him, ‘Are you ever serious?’

  After an awkward silence he told her that as a boy seriousness had frightened him. And still does. Bad news always followed. Like the time his mother solemnly called him Edward and steered him into the dining room – a room they rarely used – one day after school and announced that his grandmother had just died of a stroke.

  Later that night, when Mai and Ned
found a little bar with seats at the window where they could watch the parade of hip people coming and going in the street outside, he told her things that confirmed her suspicions. That he’d always had plenty of friends, men with whom he could share a joke, but that he found relationships with women harder because they required a degree of seriousness that put him on edge.

  ‘It’s not the commitment thing,’ he added.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Hard to explain. And probably won’t sound good. Seriousness sort of feels like failure. Like when you’re doing a gig and you’ve just delivered the punchline to a cracker of a joke – and there’s dead silence. Nothing. Not even a groan. You just shrivel inside. When people get too serious with each other, too serious about life, it all goes wrong. Things fall apart.’

  ‘Why can’t you be serious and funny?’

  Furrows appeared in his forehead as he raked his hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up like horns. He pursed his lips as if to say you just couldn’t.

  ‘Hey, you should see your hair.’ Mai reached out and smoothed it down. Then, on impulse, she messed it up again. ‘Mad professor suits you better.’

  Ned studied her for so long she wondered if the silence and scrutiny were part of some extended gag or if she’d done the wrong thing by touching his hair. Then he broke into a slow-motion smile that kept growing until it consumed his face. He brushed a finger against her cheek.

  ‘Maybe we could be a duo. You serious, me hilarious. Together we’d be seriously hilarious. Or the other way round.’

  And that’s where they left the night, teetering on the brink of something. He promised her he’d call the next day, and he did, and they talked easily and for ages and planned to meet up the following weekend. The morning they were to go out to dinner, he rang and said he couldn’t make it. He wasn’t well. There was an odd note in his voice. She tried to tell herself it was because he was sick, but over the next few weeks he became so evasive, almost shifty, that she could only conclude he wasn’t that serious after all.