Either Side of Midnight : A Novel (2020)

by Stevenson, Benjamin

  It felt strange to be sitting in this man’s chair, watching his final moments from only two weeks ago. Jack imagined the scene with the lights on, audience packed in, the hum of activity. He tried to see it through Sam’s eyes. A man about to do the unthinkable in front of not only the world, but his partner and possibly his child. Yet, on tape, Sam didn’t seem nervous at all. He seemed calm, professional. He suffered a small stutter as he repeated a word in the intro to the monologue, but he glossed over it with skill. I may have already said that. Just a small technical error there. A small squint at the teleprompter to correct himself, the only sign of nerves the tapping of his left hand, and then back into the rat-a-tat jokes of the opening.

  The crowd laughed as directed. Even if the writing wasn’t great, each joke had the cadence of comedy – an upward inflection on the end of a bit, a surprise reveal – and in a room like this, the communal energy of the crowd chipped in. No one wants to ruin the show, so they laugh along and eventually get into the rhythm of having a good time. It’s how people get hypnotised. It’s why people lose their minds on The Ellen Degeneres Show. Jack noticed that Sam stuttered again near the end of a topical joke, and this time he dropped his shoulder, paused just a millisecond too long. Fiddling with something. A ring in his pocket.

  Jack leaned in closer, trying to see behind Sam’s act. Because this was an important moment. This was the exact moment Sam put his hand on the gun.

  Sam covered up this next slip too, but now Jack could see his confidence was faltering. Was he sweating more? His right hand kept drifting under the table as if magnetised. He worked his way through a sketch and some more spoken material, and Jack wondered if he would have noticed anything was wrong without the benefit of hindsight. But now, re-watching the scene, Sam’s discomfort was obvious.

  As the little bar progressed along the bottom of the video, Jack began to feel uneasy. In anticipation of what he was about to see, he thought, but maybe something more. The whole scene felt different to how he had been replaying it in his head. It had taken on the perception of this grandiose, front-page story – Disgraced host shoots himself on live TV over child pornography possession! – in Jack’s mind. But the truth on the replay was much sadder. Sam looked . . . scared.

  As the episode progressed Sam became more and more agitated, though still subtly. He rushed a joke about Star Wars, but the cultural reference got a clap anyway. Now was when the warm-up guy would step forward, off camera, and summon more applause, and Mr Midnight would read out the names of their guests over the noise, spinning the enthusiasm into the first ad break. Or, at least, he was supposed to. Instead, he veered off script.

  ‘Before I throw to a break here, I just wanted to say something.’

  In the present, hunched over the screen, no one dared breathe. Jack resisted the urge to glance at Harry, to see if that mask was dropping, but, even though recorded and rewatchable, he felt he couldn’t stop watching the video. The moment felt intimate. Like the energy of this viewing was crucial in some way. By this point, Sam was ready to die. Could you tell? Jack wondered. Could you see it, when a spirit leaves the body before the last breath is taken? Eyes taped shut, you had no way of knowing. But what about when it’s all decided even though you’re still breathing? Are you dead before you die?

  ‘Celia.’ Sam said it twice. ‘I love you. Forgive me. Change the channel.’

  The events in the video kicked up a notch from there. Everything started moving. Fast. The gun was up. It was small. Not a chunky black one, like the police guns Jack was most familiar with. Sam’s gun was smaller: a revolver, silver. Jack only caught a glimpse, because then it was in Sam’s mouth. Someone bumped the camera; the frame shuddered. Sam squeezed his eyes shut. His cheeks blew out a second before the sound travelled. A sharp pop. One eye flew open. The horrific death mask that had lingered on Jack’s television screen whisked past in a millisecond. Sam was already flinging backwards. An arc of blood sputtered from his crown. The plasma behind him caught the bullet in the corner, cutting to black and splintering down one side. Sam’s chair, on wheels, slid back with his recoil, before it tipped, and he dropped out of sight behind the desk with a thud. The plasma wobbled and fell after him with another crash.

  There was a second of silence. The desk was empty. The only movement was the dripping of blood from the wooden set panelling. Then someone in the audience screamed, and the studio exploded into chaos. There was a thunder of footsteps. People ran past the camera’s sight-line indiscriminately. A stagehand practically dove over the desk to get to Sam. Beth had also run onstage, and was talking animatedly into her headset. She looked behind the desk, flinched, and bent over, both hands on her knees, retching.

  And then there was someone else, closer in frame, but they were heading neither to the door nor the stage. This person was walking towards the camera, yelling, pointing wildly, down the barrel. Their head was above the frame. A split second before the video ended, the camera tilted upwards and Jack caught a glimpse.

  It was Gareth Bowman.

  ‘Turn that fucking camera off!’

  CHAPTER 10

  The footage of the end of Mr Midnight’s life lasted eight minutes and twenty seconds. Harry dragged a finger along the bar at the bottom of the video, replaying the fatal shot. Sam was thrown back out of his chair and dropped off screen in less than three of those seconds. Jack turned his gaze. Harry played it again. The sound followed Jack. That tiny pop. The thud of a body. The crash of the television falling after. Harry played it again.

  Jack watched Harry’s expression; it was focused and intent. His jaw was set. Analytical. His eyes flashed with the movements on the screen, his brother’s death reflected in them, as he watched it again and again.

  Turn that fucking camera off!

  ‘Is Gareth often in the room for the recordings?’ Jack asked Beth, if only because he felt talking might mask that pop from the tinny speakers. It seemed strange to him that the CEO would bother with the personal touch on a nightly program.

  She thought for a second. ‘Up to him. We see him around but he’s not a part of the production. Depends if he wants to keep his eye on things.’

  ‘How often?’

  ‘Twice a season. Maybe three.’

  ‘Does it strike you as interesting that he was in the room that night?’

  ‘You’re saying he knew something was . . .’ Her words ran out of gas midway through her throat. Sam Midford could be heard in the background: ‘Change the channel’. She ended up just shaking her head, disbelief and rebuttal all in one.

  ‘I’m not saying anything. I’m asking if you find it interesting,’ Jack said.

  ‘I find it unremarkable,’ she huffed.

  ‘And he wanted the footage cut,’ Harry contributed, looking up. ‘Seems like arse-covering to me.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Jack said. Seeing Beth about to defend Gareth he added, ‘But arse-covering on instinct. Someone’s just died and he’s broadcast it to a million people. That’s his job on the line. And Gareth is a man of self-preservation if anything. He’s got to get it off the air, quick. I probably would have done the same.’

  Gareth was on autopilot, that much Jack was sure of. In the footage he looked stressed, unsure of what to do and his synapses had landed on one simple action – getting the camera off. It definitely seemed uncalculated. But so did everyone in the video. Beth leaning over and retching. The frantic run for the door by the live audience. The stage manager who lunged over the desk. The only person showing signs of what was coming was Sam.

  ‘If Gareth had some sinister plan, the worst thing he could do is reveal himself on camera,’ Beth agreed. The CEO looked mad, but he also looked innocent.

  ‘Once the cameras were off, what else happened?’ Jack asked.

  ‘We knew we had to clear the room,’ said Beth. ‘That seemed like the logical thing. I’d seen him, tipped off his chair, and the blood was just starting to spread, and I wanted to be as far from that as possible, so I
started shepherding. It was manic. The shooting had all happened so quickly, of course, so some people saw him do it, but others just heard a gunshot and screams. And if you hear that, these days . . .’ She chewed a lip. ‘You run. Right?’

  It was obvious to Jack she was defending her actions. In the moment, she had taken the same approach as Gareth, grabbing onto anything practical. Later on – maybe when the first policeman had sat her down, maybe when she’d seen the footage replayed – that’s when the regret nuzzled up.

  Harry, who spelled subtlety with two ‘t’s, either didn’t notice or didn’t care. ‘You didn’t try to help him?’ he asked. It was calm, not cold, but an accusation all the same.

  Beth blinked twice at him.

  ‘You’re one of the first up there on the video.’ Harry jabbed a finger at the tablet. ‘And you chose crowd control?’

  ‘He was missing . . .’ She shook her head, pivoted the tablet away from Harry and closed the video. When she spun it back so Jack could see, the video had been replaced with a photo album. In the first picture, Sam was lying on his back, his chair tipped over. The fallen television lay face down behind him. A glistening red puddle flowed from his shoulders, encasing his head like some kind of Aztec headdress. What caught Jack’s eye first, though – and there was a lot of mess to catch the eye – was that Sam was wearing shorts. Bright pink boardies with green pineapples on them. He had one thong on his left foot. The other had, assumedly, been flung off.

  Jack knew this wasn’t unusual in television. TV hosts who had the luxury of sitting behind a desk often dressed formally from the waist up because it only mattered what was on camera. Studio audiences don’t mind; they find it quirky and fun. It doesn’t matter to the audience at home, because what you can edit out, or edit around, doesn’t exist. Sam’s body summed up that very discordance: crisp white cufflinks and a pressed blazer; bright pink shorts and bare legs. There was something wrong with the image. A dead man in half a suit.

  Jack could also see what Beth had trailed off without saying, why she hadn’t dived over the desk to help: Sam was missing the top half of his head. The damage was so bad it looked like it had been bashed in rather than blown out. His jaw hung slack, one side surely dislocated, exposing a mouth full of broken picket-fence teeth. The roof of his mouth was pulverised, a black entrance to a ragged cave. Harry, for once, swallowed his words.

  Jack swiped through a few more photos. Most were similar, though time was passing between them. Sam’s headdress bloomed. In the photos, everything looked wet. Chunks of bone in the blood like the white tufts on Sydney Harbour he’d seen from the boardroom.

  In one photo the gun was clear, lying near the desk where Sam must have dropped it before he fell. It was indeed a small silver revolver, the type where you could load the bullets and spin the chamber, which Jack had seen in movies about Russian roulette. It looked like it had a short barrel so Sam could jam it right up the back of his mouth. Looked like it took six bullets.

  ‘Cops take the gun?’ Jack asked. Beth nodded.

  ‘They took a whole bunch of stuff. Clothes, all the stuff in his pockets. For evidence, even though it was pretty clear what had happened.’ She shrugged at Harry, but more ‘sorry-you-have-to-hear-the-truth’ rather than ‘sorry-I-said-that’. ‘But, you know, I assume they were being careful because of the high profile. They gave the rest back pretty quickly, but they kept the gun.’

  ‘The rest of his stuff?’

  ‘We gave it back to Celia, Sam’s partner.’

  Jack stood, gesturing at Harry and Beth to stay where they were. He needed a moment to think on his own. He looked down at the empty stage and had a strange fluttering in his stomach at the fact that someone had had to mop Sam up. He closed his eyes. Sam’s prone, half-dressed, half-headed corpse overlaid the real stage on his eyelids.

  Jack walked around the side of the set and across the backstage area. It was less adorned, of course, than the front, like the inside of a wall – wooden frames and struts, some of it gaffa-taped together. You only film from the front, after all. Just like Sam’s shorts. The set had about a two-metre gap between the back wall. Large black road cases with silver cornices sat intermittently on either side of the walkway. Half-a-dozen plush red cinema seats lined one side about halfway down. Propped upright, against one of the cases, was a sleek plasma television. Jack walked over to it. He could see his blurry reflection in the dead screen. A small neat bullet-hole was punched in the top right corner. Concentric fractures radiated out another half an inch, and one long crack reached out and bisected the entire screen. Something in the cracks looked dark. Wet. Jack shook the thought.

  At least think like it’s a murder, Jack reminded himself. He didn’t have to solve the whole thing; that wasn’t what Harry was paying him for, anyway. He just wanted him to believe one thing. Jack just had to latch on to the one thing that made him uncomfortable and solve that. Then do it again with what he’d found from the first answer.

  Although, being here, running his finger down the crack in the television screen, Jack felt as if the studio was flooded with sadness, as if Harry really was the ghost of Mr Midnight taking them through his final moments. Because Sam did linger here – not just through Harry’s face and style and voice and jokes, but through this broken plasma screen, through the host’s chair now upright again, through the sign on the desk that flashed neon with his name. Through the section of floor that was just slightly cleaner than the rest. Bleached. Tragedy normally left marks – bloodstains, ash, tyre-tracks on roads – but sometimes you could see where something awful had happened by absence. This floor is too clean: someone bled here.

  And if Jack’s previous criteria was that something needed to make him uncomfortable to be worth pursuing, being in this studio haunted by videos and relics of a man he barely knew certainly qualified. Everything on the surface looked like it should be a cut-and-dried, gun-in-mouth suicide. But that’s because he was only seeing it from the front. Everything here felt half-suited. Damn it, he thought. Harry was getting to him.

  As he was walking up the stepladder for the guest entrance, having finished his backstage lap, Beth was complimenting Harry on his dress sense, saying it had improved. She had one arm on his leather sleeve, saying ‘. . . even dress like him these days’ with a laugh before stopping and looking up. Jack felt like he’d walked in on something private. They were trading memories.

  ‘What else do you film in here?’ Jack asked.

  ‘This was a headline program, so just this one. We don’t have the manpower to dismantle the set every day.’

  ‘And why’s it still up? Surely you have shows clamouring for space?’

  ‘Gareth would tell you it’s because he wants to save it for re-creations. A telemovie. I say it’s because he’s waiting until all this blows over and they find another man who looks good in a tie and a suit. Swap the sign out, change the name. Hell, if there’s not too much blood on it he can probably wear the same tie.’ She meant it as a joke, but there was more than a glimmer of bitterness there. She noticed that Jack noticed. ‘Sorry, I’ve been EP on a lot of these shows. It can feel like a bit of a carousel sometimes. New talent same as the old talent.’

  ‘And we think that the gun was already here before this episode?’ Jack posed it as a question. Harry and Beth nodded. ‘And the security cameras were off, from . . .’

  ‘About a week prior.’ Beth sighed, reminded of this fault.

  ‘So it’s possible that he could have walked through the set door with a gun on a day when it was open? Hidden it up to a week prior?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘You said he looked nervous because you thought he was going to propose to his partner. But now we know his nerves were caused by the gun under the table,’ Jack summarised. Then, the old trick, to help the deductions feel more collaborative, he added, ‘Am I getting this right?’

  A communal nod.

  Jack spun the tablet around, loaded the video and slid to th
e start, where Sam was smiling and calm. Tracked it forward to where he fluffed the line, drummed his fingers on the desk. One shorter than the other. A nervous tic, Jack had been told repeatedly.

  ‘This moment here seems quite significant?’ Jack said. ‘Do we think this is when the nerves kick in?’

  ‘He does that every episode,’ said Harry.

  ‘Literally,’ Beth said.

  ‘Sure. But how often does he stuff up a line?’

  ‘It’s TV, so plenty,’ Beth said. ‘I agree though, there’s something off about how he does it here.’

  ‘Who’s in his ear?’ Jack kept the screen paused, pointed at the little curl of translucent plastic running from Sam’s ear down his collar. An earpiece. ‘I assume he’s got you somewhere?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Beth. ‘I’ve got a headset, I can talk to him if I need to. Mostly I’m on the floor, so I don’t use it much, but if we’re getting a guest ready backstage, or if we need to pad, I can chime in.’

  Jack remembered her headset, a thick fuzzy microphone curled around her jaw. Not the discreet, skin-colour microphones used in theatre, but a proper headset as if she were in a 90s boy band.

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘The director, Wyatt Lloyd. He handles the live edit, so he’s normally bunkered down backstage behind a set of screens. He can come in to all of us.’

  Jack held two fingers up, counting the number of people in Sam’s ear. Raised a third expectantly.

  Beth clicked her tongue. ‘There are like three other producers. They could come in on walkies. But we’re old school. We mainly talk to each other – we trust Sam to keep it going.’