Either Side of Midnight : A Novel (2020)

by Stevenson, Benjamin

  ‘You know, before we met, I was wondering the same thing.’ If it was possible to audibly shrug, Harry would have just done it. His tone flattened. He clicked his tongue. ‘It’s not really to do with your podcasts. It’s not really even to do with the network. I needed someone who’ll believe something weird. You’ve got the head for it. You can follow a story in a way that others don’t. Why? Because you’re hoping it goes somewhere wild. Somewhere entertaining. You’ve got an eye for narrative over truth, so that means nothing is off the table. I need a mind like that to solve a problem like mine. But I’d sussed that much before I came to see you.’

  ‘What sold you?’

  ‘Those scars on your knuckles. Figured you’d be good in a fight.’

  Jack looked at his hand, resting in Liam’s. Harry thought he’d been in punch-ups in prison. He was wrong. Torn by teeth and re-healed.

  ‘Mate, I’m always fighting. Nine a.m.’

  He hung up.

  CHAPTER 6

  Nine o’clock was late enough that The Breakfasters, Channel 14’s flagship morning program, was finishing. For broadcast the hosts sat with their backs to a concave window looking out on the street, around which crowds could gather and wave incessantly. Viewers at home could see them through the glass. Actual adults braved a biting Sydney morning to stare at the back of someone’s famous-but-not-that-famous head. Actual adults made cardboard signs. Shit, thought Jack, sitting on a low concrete wall and watching them disperse, assumedly to spend the day phoning radio stations. These people can breed.

  The sun was up in a clear sky but battling with a crisp breeze. Neither heat nor chill was winning. Jack was in jeans and a plain blue t-shirt (he’d deliberately chosen something not prison-green). He’d brought a light jumper but was too hot with it on, too cold with it off. He settled for off, drumming his hands on his thighs to fight the chill.

  Just as Jack was chalking up tardiness as a character flaw with some satisfaction, Harry had materialised, punctual to the second.

  Harry was, as before, clean cut and commanding in presence. He wore a brown leather jacket. Strode with purpose. He could have walked right on set for The Breakfasters and looked perfectly at home. Jack resented Harry’s TV sheen, rubbing his unshaven jaw in quiet inadequacy. He had slept too well in his own bed and, after making a conscious effort to eat two slices of toast, one even buttered, had chosen to skip a shave to get there on time. He figured seventy thousand dollars bought a little bit of professionalism. Jack had no qualms taking Harry’s money, but he wasn’t going to swindle him. Although the money hadn’t cleared yet. Jack had checked.

  ‘Morning,’ Jack said, standing. They shook hands because they felt like they should. This was business, after all.

  Jack looked over to the station. It was an older building, seven storeys tall, with thick stone abutments between floors. The ground floor had more showbiz pizzazz with floor-to-ceiling glass. Neatly trimmed hedges lined the walkway at hip height. Jack’s stomach gurgled with unease. It felt strange to be back at the place that had both built him up and cut him down. He was glad he’d had breakfast. His internal soldiers were unalarmed but wary, shields laid down nearby.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Jack said.

  Harry skimmed his hand across the hedge tops as they walked. He didn’t seem particularly interested in where they were, but Jack reminded himself not to take Harry’s casual nature as ambivalence. He’d played Jack with the empty envelope – he was sharper than he let on. Jack reckoned he was waiting to see what Jack would do. Get his money’s worth. The doors slid open.

  The foyer was chilled by the combination of glass and tile. There was a reception counter, and then a series of plastic barriers that swung in when you scanned a pass. The ground floor was the news floor, felt-walled cubicles in a grid. The network liked to show off their productivity, just like the windows into the street for the breakfast show, and putting the news floor in public view of the foyer kept up appearances: Look how busy we are. Jack could hear the hive murmuring through the foyer, see people jogging back and forth. People walk quickly on news floors. Good cardio. In this studio, the speed at which people moved decreased the higher up the building you were. First floor was marketing, still hurried. Second floor was sales, similarly urgent but they walked less and talked more. You could take a breather on Third with the editors (unless there was a deadline), and keep decelerating all the way up to the leisurely board rooms.

  In front of the entry gates were tall, rectangular arches. Metal detectors. Jack made a note; Sam hadn’t got his gun in through the front door. Jack didn’t recognise the man at the reception desk. He walked over. ‘I’m Jack Quick. I used to work here.’

  The guy looked unimpressed and waited for Jack to continue. His stance wasn’t quite rudeness, but it was designed to assert disinterest. He probably thought Jack was a sign-holding window-watcher. ‘I used to work here’ didn’t hold much sway. The speed gradient carried right through from the news floor to terminal velocity in the foyer. The fastest you’ll walk in television is when you’re leaving it, Jack knew.

  ‘The two of us are here to see Gareth Bowman.’ Jack gestured at Harry, who was inspecting a pot plant.

  The receptionist started a rebuttal, along the lines of how people just can’t come in and demand to see the CEO, when Harry noticed he was being talked about and started walking over. Mid-spiel, the receptionist stopped. Pointed at Harry. ‘You look familiar,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t I just,’ Harry boomed, arriving next to Jack. He stooped to the counter, melted both arms across it and smiled. ‘Blew my damn head off two weeks ago. Never felt better! Now, let’s see about this Bowman fella.’

  Two minutes later, in the lift on the way up to meet Gareth Bowman, Jack felt very small indeed.

  Gareth insisted they meet in the boardroom, on the sixth floor and with a view of Sydney Harbour. The water was choppy, tufts of white foam cresting the blue surface. The boardroom table was hulking, red oak, and had sixteen places. Jack and Harry marooned themselves in two on the far end, curling around a corner. Harry grew impatient quickly and stood. Gripped the back of a chair and rocked it.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ he asked.

  ‘Talk to Gareth.’

  ‘Any more detail?’

  ‘Sure. Wait for Gareth to show up. Then talk to Gareth.’

  Harry pursed his lips, nodded. Jack wondered if he was, for the first time, seeing a real emotion: Harry was annoyed.

  Jack didn’t really have a plan, but he figured if he bought into Harry’s ‘one thing’, then at the very least they needed access to the ‘crime scene’ (for what? Blackmail? Corporate espionage? Certainly not murder). That was the studio, including the staff, and ideally Sam’s laptop. The problem was that Jack was not only an ex-employee, but now a former jailbird. They needed the CEO to get them in. But seeing as it had been Harry who’d talked their way in, Jack figured it was in his interest to try to make it seem like it was his influence that carried weight. The less Harry knew, the more valuable Jack was. He planned to keep it that way.

  Jack looked around. A muted TV on the back wall played the pitch-package for the new ratings season line-up on a loop. All different shows of all different genres. The imagery was erratic. A slap. Tears rolling down cheeks. A gun. A hospital bed. A car down a dirt road. Someone saying something serious that you didn’t need lip-reading skills to be able to guess was some derivative of ‘this isn’t over yet’. A plate of food. Someone lifting a trophy above their head. The gun again, this time close up and firing. People running outside what looked like a movie theatre on fire. A now-dead man smiling behind a desk. A rose on a silver platter. A woman walking out of a pool in a bikini. Because under the TV sheen, people always walked out of pools, Jack mused, instead of scrambling out the side on their bellies. Logos and titles slid in diagonally. There’d be a pumping summer hit behind it all, Jack knew. Something with the word ‘happy’ or ‘love’ in the chorus so everyone could pretend that sitt
ing in front of the screen is living life to the fullest. That’s how you make Must See Television: everything thrown into a blender of colour and fury. Pour ingredients into the mix and hope it’s exciting. TV was no different from Liam: pump enough into it, pretend it’s alive.

  Gareth Bowman strolled in. Strolling was a sixth-floor luxury. He was holding a KeepCup of coffee. Lean. Played squash. That was all Jack really needed to sum up the CEO of Channel 14. If it was a casting brief he’d scrawl keepcup, plays squash on it and let the casting director fill in the blanks of some rich, fit, middle-aged bloke who cares about the environment to the extent of saving fifty cents a cup on coffee and plays a land sport with goggles on.

  ‘Jack,’ Gareth said in greeting, setting his coffee down. Then he nodded at Harry, ‘Good to see you again.’ Again? Jack looked at Harry, who was clearly displeased with the reunion. Gareth walked over and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Of course, we would have both hoped for different circumstances. Must be so hard. Especially today.’

  Harry shrugged off the hand and sat down. Gareth slid his coffee to the seat across from Jack, but with an intervening chair between him and Harry. As if setting up that he was interviewing them, and not the other way around.

  ‘What’s today?’ whispered Jack.

  ‘Sam’s birthday,’ said Harry quietly.

  ‘Oh.’ That seemed a strange thing for Harry not to have mentioned. ‘Happy birthday, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s not my birthday.’

  ‘What?’ Jack didn’t hide his confusion very well.

  ‘It’s Sam’s. We’re born on different days. Christ. Midnight Twins ring a bell? Aren’t I paying you to investigate something?’ Harry hissed.

  Gareth cleared his throat, a bunny-hop of a noise that implied they were wasting his time. ‘I can guess why you’re here, Harry,’ he said. ‘Jack, you’re a little bit more of a mystery.’

  Jack fished his recorder from his pocket. If this turned into anything useful he’d need something better than the handheld. Directional mics. Wind muffs. But this was mainly to show Harry he was taking it seriously; Jack had no intention of using the recordings. It would do for now. Just like Harry’s empty envelope, or any good interview. You played the person across from you, not the cards in your hand.

  He turned it on and the screen glowed orange. He felt a little bit of his old self rattle inside him. ‘Here’s a clue,’ he said.

  ‘Last time we did this, Jack,’ Gareth eyed the recorder, ‘you cost me a lot of money.’

  ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t make it back covering my trial. And then some. I saw the ads. A TV show inside a TV show. What a concept.’

  ‘And you threw someone off a building.’

  ‘They fell,’ Jack said.

  ‘I don’t want to be recorded.’

  ‘How am I supposed to make a show if I don’t record you?’

  ‘Your new show’s not about me.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Gareth looked between Jack and Harry. It clicked. He took a sip of coffee, extended a finger and tapped it twice on the table in front of the recorder. Then he leaned back and took another sip. Waited. He was wearing a grey suit, no tie. Top two buttons undone. The type of corporate outfit that said hey, I’m a fun guy, I work in TV. Provided you ignored the two-thousand-dollar jacket. Jack took the hint and pocketed the device.

  Gareth put his coffee down. ‘I liked your show, Jack. Good ratings. So I’ll give you a few more minutes. But Sam Midford has made the last two weeks of my life very’ – he touched his mouth with a fingertip – ‘complicated.’

  ‘Complicated is interesting.’

  ‘And you do complicated very well. Investors . . .’ He knotted his hands, shrugged. Jack was out of touch with interviewing. Gareth had control here. His body language was closed off, disengaged. Leaned back from the table, arms folded. He wasn’t under any pressure. ‘Not so much.’

  ‘I think it’s a ripe story.’

  ‘Sure. Maybe it is. Guy kills himself on live television, and on my station too. Everyone who wants my footage has my watermark splayed across it. That’s great. You know what our highest rating show this year was?’

  Jack shook his head. It couldn’t be Sam’s final episode. That would be watched again and again online, but it had been over in a dramatic flash. Word couldn’t have built enough to grow the ratings during the episode itself. ‘The late news bulletin?’ Jack guessed. ‘After his death?’

  ‘Wrong.’ Gareth smiled. ‘One week later, in Sam’s usual spot, we had half an hour dark. A tribute of nothing but a black screen. A minute’s silence but longer, and televised.’

  ‘Smart move,’ Jack complimented. Hoping that maybe buttering him up was a better strategy than sparring.

  Gareth seemed unimpressed by the attempt. ‘I know,’ he said smugly, disinterested in Jack’s praise but taking it all the same.

  ‘You just had nothing to program over it,’ Harry contributed. ‘Cleverness has nothing to do with it. A repeat of Midnight Tonight would have been insensitive. Choosing the episode would have been a nightmare. You don’t want some inadvertent line, a monologue joke that was off-colour, or any action or sideways glance to be seen in a new light. You’ve pulled all his episodes from your streaming platform too, so you’re aware of that. And not to mention the scrutiny that somebody had done this in your studio. Your work environment, your security. Everyone’s watching. But you didn’t want it to seem like you didn’t care for him, or that you were in the process of putting up these shields, so you couldn’t cover the slot with a movie or something quick and commercial. So a blank screen it was.’

  ‘Nice,’ Gareth said. He was now focused on Harry and ignoring Jack completely. Still under no pressure. Jack watched Harry talking about television with interest. There was skill there. Experience. These men knew each other, Jack reminded himself. ‘You missed one. We could have done a tribute concert.’

  ‘You’re too cheap for that,’ rebutted Harry.

  Gareth laughed. ‘Right you are. So what? Twenty-three minutes of a black screen. With ads, of course. Still put it in the guide, so two million people tuned in, convinced it was some kind of prank and Sam was going to suddenly appear. Reincarnated. Or that it might be the secret start to some exposé or documentary. We were prepared to add in a slide-show of pics if people turned off, but Twitter exploded. People wanted to watch, just in case. And once they’re in, you make them chase their losses – because if they turn it off and something does happen, who’s the one that wasted that invested time? Give ’em nothing, make ’em wait for something. It’s why cricket works.’ He shook his head, indulging in the memory. ‘Close as I’ll get to a Moon Landing.’ He paused. ‘This was, obviously, before people learned about who he really was.’

  ‘And who, exactly,’ said Jack, trying to steer the conversation back, ‘was the real Sam?’

  ‘He’s your new show idea, is he? Listen, I’m on Team Quick.’ A placating palm in the air. ‘I am. Short of a newsreader killing themselves next week, your triumphant return would be publicity domination. But I’ve got bad news. This isn’t it. This is a story that every network has told by now. Multiple times. Me included.’

  ‘Sam was—’

  ‘Sam was a man with a guilty conscience. He had child pornography on his laptop and a gun in his mouth. There’s a one-hour special in that. Not a series.’ Gareth checked his watch. That was a grim sign.

  Jack tried to remind himself of his former self. A producer who could talk his way into any office, home or even police station. A man for whom words were weapons. ‘I think the contents of his laptop were planted,’ Jack said. Believe one thing.

  ‘Planted?’ Gareth raised his eyebrows. But it was mocking, exaggerated. Jack hadn’t had the impact he’d hoped for. The bonanza of podcasts and television shows, like his original Curtis Wade documentary, had gifted planted evidence with a boy-who-cried-wolf quality. The default position of any criminal, these days, was conspiracy. It
had to be, in television, for anyone to watch. Sam Midford’s pornography had to be discounted, construed as artificial, because otherwise he was a criminal, not a victim. And if you have a criminal, you don’t have any empathy. And without empathy, you don’t have any viewers. If Jack was filming this, that would be step number one: make Sam a victim. Otherwise he was just a bad guy who did a bad thing. Only difference was, he did it in public. The line between ‘he will be missed’ and ‘good riddance’ was a thin one.

  ‘That’s your favourite word, Jack,’ Gareth continued. ‘Planted. You’ve got the greenest thumbs out of any journalist I know.’

  ‘I’m not a journalist.’

  ‘You’re not. And you don’t work here anymore. And Sam Midford’s suicide is my concern, not yours.’ Gareth stood.

  Jack looked at Harry, uncharacteristically quiet. Fuck him. Jack had been honest, said he couldn’t guarantee he’d be useful. It was Harry’s decision to pay him seventy grand, not his. He never believed the laptop was tampered with. He never believed it was anything but suicide. But the deposit money hadn’t yet come through, Jack hadn’t signed anything legally binding, and there was much Harry hadn’t told him – not least that he and Gareth Bowman already knew each other. Jack started to wonder: if he walked out of here without at least a starting point, would Harry renege? These thoughts swirled together like the highlight reel on the wall behind him, each jostling for space. He was failing here. He could feel the blood in his ears. It wasn’t about the seventy grand. It was about the one hundred and ninety-six days. He breathed in through his nose and all he could hear was a raspy mechanical wheeze. Liam’s machine.

  He wasn’t making a TV show. But he was making something. For an audience of one: Harry Midford. It didn’t matter what he believed. This wasn’t a documentary, this was a drama. He had to play a part for his payday. The producer in him rose up, blood in his neck and bile in his throat. How easily he slipped into his old skin. He’d spent a career creating killers. He could create victims too, if he wanted. He knew how to grab attention. He thought about the word Harry had used to distract him in prison.