To Know My Crime

by Fiona Capp

  Mai turns off the TV and goes to the kitchen, returning with a wok of fried rice. As they raise their glasses, Angela’s right hand starts to tremble. They talk about what’s in the news and Ned does his best to steer the conversation clear of anything to do with the crash. Ned and Mai pretend not to notice when Angela loses control of her fork and rice falls to her plate like snow. What was Mai thinking, Ned wonders, making a dish like this? It is agonising to watch his sister even trying to get the stuff onto her fork. He has to stop himself from reaching over to help her.

  Angela keeps talking as if nothing is wrong. Ned asks how work is going. She tells him she has a patient who reminds her too much of Matthew. She is thinking of referring him to someone else.

  Ned is suddenly alert. ‘Matthew hasn’t turned up again?’

  ‘Oh no. He’s given up.’

  While he finds that hard to believe, he keeps his doubts to himself. Ned had never cared much for sporting types, but when they were growing up, he, like most people in the town, had a lot of time for Matthew. He was no jock. He was quiet and considerate and seemed to adore Angela. Ned was overseas when things started going sour. Although he and Angela talked every month on the phone or on Skype, and although he sensed, over time, that there was a strain between Angela and her husband, he never asked. It was their problem. You didn’t interfere. They would have to sort it out for themselves. And anyway, what could he do? He was too far away.

  Angela stares at him. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Me? No. Why?’

  ‘You were frowning.’

  ‘Just thinking about Matthew . . .’

  ‘Leave it, Ned. There’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Sure. Okay.’ He suddenly remembers the gift he bought for her. When he saw it in the bookshop – of all places – he couldn’t resist, even though it used up the last of his credit. He fishes it out of his pack. Grins at her. ‘For you.’

  Angela sits the soft toy on her lap. It is the size of a newborn baby, a baby with horn-rimmed glasses and a distinctive moustache. A cartoon likeness, but recognisable. She gives it a crooked smile.

  ‘Squeeze its foot!’ Ned urges her, then curses himself. He still forgets. ‘Shit, sorry. Here, give it to me.’ He takes the little man and presses the foot. A great cackle – half mad professor, half giggling child – erupts from the soft body and sends shudders through his hand. The cackle goes on and on. He gives the vibrating little man back to her.

  Mai looks from brother to sister, shaking her head.

  Angela cradles the cackling Freud. ‘He must’ve got a windfall.’

  ‘Didn’t he say money was shit?’

  ‘I wouldn’t get too literal. He also said money was laughing gas – at least to him.’

  ‘What a gas!’ Mai laughs.

  ‘Yeah.’ There’s a sad lustre in Angela’s hazel eyes. She belatedly returns her brother’s grin. ‘You’ve surpassed yourself, Ned. He’s a beauty. Now, talking of money . . .’

  Aware that Angela has things to discuss with her brother, Mai collects the plates and makes a swift exit.

  Angela watches her go. ‘I got lucky, eh? Remember how Nanna used to call us her “treasures”?’

  She has three carers – Imelda, Luisa and Mai – who work in shifts. The evening shift puts her to bed, the morning shift gets her up. During the night she is on her own. But none have been with her as long, or have been as devoted, as Mai. She regards her brother across the table. ‘I can tell she likes you, Ned. Try not to hurt her.’

  He answers with a feeble smile.

  ‘I know it’s none of my business. Except that she works for me. And the care goes both ways.’

  ‘Got the message, Ange.’

  ‘Now, the money.’ She lifts her right arm, as if it’s an exhibit, trying not to wince. ‘You saw what happened tonight with the rice.’

  Ned nods.

  ‘Torn the muscle. The pain’s getting so bad I can hardly use it. I might still be able to shrug the shoulder but fat lot of good that would do me.’

  ‘Come on, Angie,’ Ned says in his driest voice. ‘Didn’t you see that quad on the news who tweets using his shoulder and tongue? Who needs their hands?’

  ‘Thanks Ned.’ Her smile quickly dies. She tells him she wants to talk business. She needs to know if she can draw on the investment. Or whether she can dip into the mortgage, extend the loan another five years to pay for a shoulder operation.

  He watches her mouth moving and hears her words and wonders what on earth is going to come out of his mouth in reply. He had thought things couldn’t get any worse. He will have to stall, but he won’t have long. How long does it take to look up that kind of thing? He could do it on the spot. Extending the loan, in theory, would take a bit longer. But what hope is there of extending it, when the investment money is gone?

  Through the lounge room window he can see the rhomboid silhouettes of fruit bats sweeping across the sky like escapees from a bad dream. He will look into it, he says, keeping his voice relaxed and confident, as if it’s just a formality.

  ‘I know things are tight since the crash,’ Angela says. ‘But I’m not asking for much.’ She adds that there’s no rush. The surgeon is booked up for months. And she is going to do another retreat, like the one she did a few years ago. Ten days meditation in silence. It starts at the end of next week. ‘Mai has heroically agreed to come with me – although I don’t think she knows what she’s in for.’

  Thank God for that, Ned thinks. A little breathing space. He reassures her that the money will be found, that her arm will be fixed. That everything will be fine. ‘Can they make it bionic?’

  ‘Worried I’ll beat you?’

  He looks at her blankly. ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Arm-wrestling.’

  ‘Shit, yeah.’ Ned twitches a smile. ‘I better start training.’

  8.

  The balmy autumn night closes around them. Under the lawn and in the garden beds, the ring tones of the crickets fall silent as Ned and Mai pass. If he hadn’t forfeited the right to touch her, Ned would hold Mai’s hand and tell her what needs to be said through a Morse code of squeezes so that he doesn’t have to hear himself pronouncing – like some half-baked philosopher spouting hard-won wisdom – the folly of handing over your money to a man who doesn’t know the meaning of loss. How will she ever trust him once she hears what he has done?

  They walk in silence, Mai shooting him the occasional glance. She is waiting for his explanation but Ned can’t, not yet. Not until he has a fortifying whisky or two inside him. Up ahead, where the streetlights come to an end, sprawls the largest park in the city, the only pool of real darkness for miles around. It occurs to him that this is his chance. He suggests they take a shortcut and Mai hesitates, as he knew she would. He can tell what she’s thinking, that men don’t know how it feels to be prey. Emboldened, he takes her hand. Tells her he goes this way all the time. He will prove to her that she’s safe with him, that he is – despite all appearances – someone she can rely on, someone she can trust.

  At first, they are blind to everything except the pale gravel path at their feet. Slowly their eyes adjust and they can make out the ghostly silhouettes of eucalypts, native grasses and landscaped islands of bush. As the traffic noise fades behind them, percussive frequencies not normally heard reach their ears. High-pitched clicks and low grunts, throaty rasping and muted shrieks. They are just beginning to relax into this feral nocturne when a sudden scuffling in a large eucalypt towering over the path makes them freeze. A baby possum dashes to the wobbly end of a branch, its bulging yellow eyes fixed on something in the tree. It is about to leap to the ground when a massive creature swoops out of nowhere, seizes it by the scruff of the neck and carries it away into the night.

  Ned lets out an involuntary ‘Fuck!’, before adding, ‘What the hell was that?’

  There is rustling in the bushes by the path and a scratchy voice announces, ‘That was an owl.’

  ‘Fuck!’
Ned says again, turning in the direction of the voice. Mai points a small torch she keeps on her key ring. Behind a screen of foliage sits a man of indefinable age, wrapped in a grimy blanket.

  ‘It’ll rip that little possum’s head off,’ the man says. ‘In one bite.’

  Ned and Mai look at each other.

  Mai grins. ‘In one bite?’

  ‘It happens,’ the man says defensively. ‘I’ve seen it. I’ve seen things you wouldn’t dream of in this park.’

  As if on cue, they hear it, a sound straight from a children’s book: Whoo-hoo, whoo-hoo.

  ‘Like I said,’ the man says.

  They stand listening to the owl and the humming silence that follows. Then Ned wishes the man a good night, his voice too loud for the hushed surrounds, and they move off down the path.

  ‘He’s right,’ Mai says calmly.

  Ned looks at her, disconcerted that she’s more composed than he is. ‘About what?’

  ‘The things we don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he mutters, not in the mood for mulling over what it’s like to sleep rough. He hasn’t figured out where he will sleep himself. The last bus to the peninsula left hours ago. If Mai didn’t have a stepfather who wouldn’t look kindly on him crashing on the couch, he would have held out hope of sleeping at her place.

  Ned can’t help feeling relieved when they reach the brightly lit road buzzing with restaurants and bars. They choose a pub with snugs where they can talk undisturbed. Ned goes to order their drinks while Mai finds a spot away from the crowd. Once they are settled in, she places her slender fingers around the stem of her wine glass and fixes him with her steady gaze.

  ‘Time to come clean.’

  Ned takes a few sips of his whisky, rattles the ice in his glass and plunges in. He starts with Fraser and how he met him, how they became friends. And how he’s been living in his old boathouse. It feels important to establish Fraser’s credentials so that Mai understands why Ned trusted him with the money. Sure, he was naïve, foolhardy even, but that doesn’t make him a fool. He’s got to make her see that he takes the responsibility of looking after Angela’s money seriously – that there are some things he is deadly serious about.

  Mai leans back in her seat, her expression unreadable in the dim light. ‘So it’s gone. All of it?’

  Ned nods.

  ‘Does Angela have any idea?’

  ‘I need another drink. You want one?’

  ‘No.’

  He stands at the bar, head bowed like a man saying his prayers. What a mess, he said to her on the phone the other day. Why on earth would she want to get messed up with him?

  He slides back on the bench opposite and plonks down his glass. ‘Angela has no idea. The mortgage payments happen automatically. What she earns goes on bills, food and the extras that the government won’t pay for. It’s been a balancing act. But we made it work. It was working so well.’

  Ned needs her to understand this. To understand that, at least for a time, he got it right.

  ‘She’ll lose the flat. Where will she go? She can’t live with you in a boathouse.’

  Ned puts his hand up. ‘I’m not going to let that happen. She won’t lose her flat.’ He wishes he was as certain as he sounds. Perhaps that’s the way to do it, talk himself into it. Make it feel inevitable. Should he go straight to the point or tell her how it all unfolded, put her in his shoes? He studies her face, trying to gauge which approach would get the best hearing and is struck by how stern she looks in this light: her dead-straight hair, the broad planes of her cheeks, the upward angle of her eyes. He knows that when she smiles, the dancing Mai comes out. But no one’s dancing right now.

  ‘Something happened the other day and it could make all the difference.’ He races on, afraid to think about what he’s saying. He tells her about the plane and the politician and the mining magnate and what he overheard. He pauses to let it all sink in. ‘What would you do?’

  ‘I’d want to make them pay.’

  ‘What do you mean by “make them pay”?’

  ‘Tell the media, I suppose.’

  ‘How’s that going to help Angela?’

  She stares at him. ‘Oh, shit. You want to make them pay you?’

  ‘I’d like to make both of them pay. But Morrow’s the one with the most to lose. I want him to believe someone in his office knows. And that they have proof.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I thought you wanted me to be serious.’

  Mai laughs for the first time that evening. A laugh of disbelief. ‘You really are serious?’

  ‘If I don’t use this, Angela’s homeless.’

  ‘Can’t you get a loan? Borrow from friends?’

  Ned shakes his head. The few good friends he has don’t have that kind of money. He has thought through every possibility a million times.

  ‘So, blackmail?’

  ‘Think of it as shadow banking.’

  ‘As what?’

  ‘Yeah, good question. What does the dark side of the moon look like? Most of us don’t have a clue.’

  During one of their late-night, alcohol-fuelled raves, Fraser – who was never so eloquent as when riffing on the market – told him all about it. As far as it could be explained. Only the ignorant, he said, saw it as a shonky get-rich-quick scheme. In Fraser’s hands, shadow banking became something esoteric, profound. That night he was in good form. They were drinking in a pub with tall tables you could stand at, Fraser so engrossed in his dissertation that he was treading on Ned’s toes. Investment banks, hedge funds, derivatives, low-doc lenders. This was shadow banking. It’s the creative side, he was saying. The market’s unconscious. Ned had had way too many whiskies and they’d dulled his wits. He remembers repeating certain phrases, trying to make them stick. Risk shifting. Financial dark matter. Creative destruction. It was what Fraser did with words, with metaphors; his way of making moral boundaries, laws even, completely dissolve that Ned found hard to resist. Sometimes you have to let your id off the leash, Fraser declared, dragging his floppy blond hair back from his eyes. In his alcoholic fug, Ned found the idea hilarious.

  Mai’s eyebrows have acquired a cartoon severity. She is waiting for him to go on. So far, he’s not making any sense.

  As Ned tries to explain, it occurs to him that if you think like a broker or banker and call blackmail a fee or levy, things start to look a whole lot different. It’s not against the law to disclose what Morrow is up to. Or to withhold it. Or to receive money for what you are lawfully entitled to do. And it’s not as if he’d be committing extortion – threatening to beat up Morrow if he doesn’t pay him. God, when you think about it, the economy runs on transactions like this – the exchange of information for money. The more you know about your competition or your customers, the better your business advantage. Commerce is littered with hard bargains brokered like this. A kingpin in the food chain uses information to strong-arm his suppliers into giving him the best deal. What’s the difference, except for the name?

  He drains his glass. Since when does he think strong-arming anyone is okay?

  ‘He might call in the police,’ Mai says.

  ‘Might. But I doubt it. What have I got to lose?’

  She doesn’t answer. All he can see is reproach in her eyes. She must think he’s some kind of nutcase. Why on earth did he tell her? Why did he go on about shadow banking? What did he expect her to say?

  ‘Hey, it’s a stupid idea. Forget I said anything.’ He slides off the bench. ‘C’mon, I better walk you home.’

  Mai doesn’t move. She looks up at him with those unblinking eyes of hers. But they’re not rebuking him any more. He can see she’s as torn as he is.

  Ned sits down again. Stares at the mottled wooden table top. He could’ve found a million excuses for being booted from his flat. But he’s told her everything now and can’t retract it. All he can do is keep her out of it.

  Mai sucks in a sharp little breath. ‘You’re not joking, are you? Not
this time.’

  For what feels like hours, she forces him to thrash out the alternatives, all the legal ways of getting the dough. By the end, he can tell she is beginning to see how the world looks when you’re desperate. How being desperate leads to desperate measures. It doesn’t matter what she says because he’s made up his mind.

  To Ned’s surprise, the hard angles of her face have melted.

  ‘You’re going to need help,’ she says. ‘If you try to do it on your own, you’re going to get busted.’

  ‘No way. That’s not why I told you.’

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  At the end of the driveway is the garage and, off that, the tool shed. It is the best Mai can offer him. She gives him blankets and a pillow and tells him she is sorry. But if her stepfather were to find him in the house, he would throw them both out. For good. All her mother’s pleas would be useless. Houses look so solid and permanent, but Mai knows they can collapse around you when the wind changes and someone falls out of love.

  She was five years old and had just started school when her father made the announcement. He was moving out to live with his girlfriend. Unable to pay the rent on their house, her mother found a matchbox-sized flat in an ugly orange-brick block surrounded by concrete, and Mai was left wondering if she would ever feel at home again. She’s no more at home in this chunky modern pile her stepfather bought them and is counting down the weeks until she graduates and can start working longer hours for Angela and move into a place of her own.

  There is just enough space on the concrete floor next to the bench for Ned to stretch out. Mai hesitates, then sits down on the lawnmower.

  ‘We’ve got to figure this out,’ she says, resolute.

  Ned flashes a weary smile. ‘Not we.’

  Does he have any idea, she wonders, what that wolfish, Butch Cassidy smile does to her? She’s being rash. More than rash. Just plain reckless, there’s no question. Her mother’s always telling her she is impulsive. So if it’s her nature, why resist it? She knows how much Angela means to Ned. And he to her. If Mai is honest with herself, she has already started to think of them as a substitute family. The kind of family you choose rather than the one that is thrust upon you at birth or when things crack up and you find yourself with a new father you never wanted. Not that she doesn’t love her little brother and sisters, but they are so much younger than her and sometimes they feel like space invaders, ghost-munchers who have gobbled up all her mother’s attention and erased the world she once shared with her parents, before it all went wrong.