The Fix (16 page)

Francesca stood there waiting for me to move on, her salad servers still in her hands like praying-mantis arm extensions. Below us, through the windows, I could see fat men standing nursing beers, and the blue-grey smoke of meat drifting up from the barbecue, even though it wasn't yet dark.

‘The curtains look great,' I said. They were beige, though they didn't look particularly new.

‘This isn't the family room,' Francesca said, sounding resigned to my unsalvageable crapness. ‘The family room's downstairs.' She looked at Brett, and shook her head.

‘I think the meat'll get overdone if someone doesn't pick up the tongs soon.' Brett was peering out the window, looking for any change of topic going. ‘We're eating early. There's quite a kids' contingent. Let's get down there, Josh. Frannie, I'd say you've timed that salad perfectly.'

He led me down the stairs and, as we walked outside onto the pavers, he said, ‘Sorry, my fault. Frannie's yet to find a beige she doesn't love. We're pretty big on beige curtains.'

‘What kills me is how hard you tried. You primed me about the curtains, you managed not to shit on my classic dry white, and . . .'

A door crashed open behind us, at the foot of the steps. Darius and Aphrodite cannoned into me shouting, ‘Uncle Josh, Uncle Josh.' They each grabbed a thigh and I tried unsuccessfully to wade forward. I reached down and picked up Aphrodite, her blonde hair spraying in a mess, ribbons detaching, purple texta on her face. I
turned to prise Darius from my leg and he shouted, ‘No, monster, no. You're going down.'

I tumbled in slow motion, and they climbed onto me, wrestling and throwing tiny-fisted punches. Big growly monster noises came out of me before I realised that I was lying on my back being pummelled while looking up at the stubbie-holding men who were the clients I was supposed to impress.

‘Not monster time,' I growled in my monster voice, as quietly as possible. ‘Must have meat.'

Aphrodite shrieked. ‘Not me. Don't eat me, monster.'

‘Monster has presents.'

They jumped off me. ‘Yes,' Darius said, and punched the air.

When I stood up, I happened to be facing the house. I could see the room they had come from. There were other kids standing in the doorway, and beige curtains bunched at the end of the windows on the far side. It was the family room, and the curtains looked identical to the ones upstairs.

I reached into my pockets, and pulled out two plastic eggs. Darius and Aphrodite tore through the labels and opened them, pulling out the goopy, squishy fluoro-green men inside.

‘Yuk,' they said in unison, loving the vile clammy cool feel and mucoid texture.

‘Now throw them at the wall,' I said.

They threw and the men hit with a splat, spreading out across the wall. One slowly released his arms and flopped over backwards, re-sticking further down. They ran over, pulled the men off, threw them again, threw
them at the pavers, threw them into the pebbles and picked them up with pebbles stuck all over them.

Francesca came out with the bowl of salad as Aphrodite was pulling garden debris from her sticky man.

‘Is that toxic?' she said, holding the salad out for Brett to take. ‘Aphrodite still puts a lot in her mouth.'

‘Yes, I particularly search out toxic gifts for your children,' I told her. ‘And they sell poisons over the counter now in toy stores. It's part of dealing with an overpopulated planet.' I showed her an egg, and its label guaranteeing that the contents were child-friendly. ‘So safe it's practically a food group.'

She gave me her look that said: I don't get you and I never have, and it's quite likely that the main poison here is you.

‘Aphrodite, Darius, come and wash your hands before dinner,' she said instead.

She led them away, Aphrodite demanding that her green man sit with her and have his own plate.

I watched Francesca for longer than I should have as she left. I had that back view locked away in my head. It was one of the finer moments of her Bras 'n' Things catalogue. She was kneeling on the bed, with her back to the camera, in a white G-string and white lace camisole. She had spray-tanned flawless buttocks and was looking over her shoulder in a way that told me she was open-minded and ready for adventure. She was holding a long pink feather in one hand, with nothing to explain it. There was no doubt, though, that the picture was full of illicit promise.

Sure, it was a lie – it was advertising – but I had plenty of imagination and it didn't call for much. And a picture
that promised ‘One day I will be the sister-in-law who hates you' wasn't going to sell a lot of lingerie.

It wasn't the treacherous promise that disappointed me now, though, even if it had crushed me once. And it was nothing to do with lingerie. I felt let down by her lack of scope, of imagination, of spirit. Vinyl billboard skins had more of those, and were more fun. There was no adventure in her.

Brett introduced me to the group, and one of the other guests said, ‘Ah, the famous Uncle Josh. We've been waiting for you to arrive. There were high hopes for toys and it looks like you delivered.'

He shook my hand. His name was Ken and he told me he was in hotels. He asked about London. He'd been briefed, and not just about toys. Brett was refereeing me hard for a career I didn't want. Ken introduced me to his wife, Christine, and told me their daughter Alaska was with the rest of the kids in the family room.

‘Probably drawing something,' he said. ‘She's a big draw-er.' Purple pen on beige curtains, I hoped.

He mentioned London again, and I outlined what I'd done there, in a way that made it sound like a sensible linear success story.

‘I hear things are pretty awful there at the moment in a lot of sectors,' he said. ‘I wasn't sure if that'd make them call on you more, or less.'

‘What we found was that a lot of people were trying to manage things in house, whether they had the expertise or not.' Behind Ken, I could see Brett at the barbecue, loading sausages onto a plate, not listening. ‘It seemed like a good time to come home.'

Francesca arrived with a second salad and some freshly-baked bread, and told us we should take a seat
wherever we liked. I ended up with Darius on one side of me and Aphrodite on the other, each of them competing for my attention and trying to stick their green goopy men to my legs under the table.

‘Give Uncle Josh a chance to eat his dinner,' Brett said about five times, just managing to keep the more outrageous behaviour in check.

Once we'd finished eating I gave him a hand to take the dishes to the kitchen.

I was most of the way through stacking the plates in the dishwasher when he asked me how things were going at Randall Hood Beckett. I could hear people laughing outside. The CD was playing Chris Isaak.

‘What makes you ask?' I took two more plates from him and fitted them in the rack. ‘What have you been hearing?'

‘Nothing to justify that paranoia.' He smiled, and picked up a handful of knives. ‘Nothing at all actually. I expect it's going well.'

‘Sorry. It's going well.' I reached up for the knives. ‘Up or down with the blades?'

‘Down. Down with steak knives, I think. Fran has a system.' He was sorting through the rest of the cutlery on the bench.

‘You only took Randall Hood Beckett on as a client recently, yeah?'

‘Yeah, maybe a couple of months ago. Why?'

‘There's a story I found when I googled them.' I stood up. I'd been crouching long enough. ‘It's from about two years ago, a newspaper story. About Frank Ainsworth using abusive language, and something about billing practices.'

‘What are you doing, Nancy Drew?' He had separated the forks and the long barbecue tools, and bunched the forks in his hand. ‘What are you saying?'

‘I don't know what I'm saying. I just wondered how long you go back with them. What you know from the time before you took them on as a client, what you've picked up since.'

‘Not a lot. Evidently. I can't say I've rushed to have Frank round for a barbecue.' Down below, Ken the hotelier picked up and started piggybacking the small girl who must have been his daughter. ‘Nice work, though. One of us should have dug that up for you before now. What happened with it, in the end?'

‘It seemed to go away. I think he handed over some money. It was just that one story, really.'

‘So, not something that'll be an issue for you next week?'

‘I don't think so. I'll deal with it if I have to. But I've done this enough times to know when something's not right. When there's a big ugly piece missing from the story. And that's how this job feels.'

He moved the forks to his other hand. ‘I hope I haven't landed you in something.'

‘I'm sure it'll be fine. I've been landed in things before. Just let me know if you come across anything.'

‘And you let me know if there's anything you need.' He was about to bend down to load the forks, but he stopped. ‘The suit. You wanted to borrow a suit, didn't you? For Monday? Make sure you don't leave without it.'

* * *

SO I WENT HOME
with a suit that would do the job if I pulled the belt in and bunched the pants around the back. I'd had two suits in London, but gave them away as part of coming home, part of escaping a life in which suits had been obligatory.

When I left after dinner, Aphrodite was asleep in a beanbag, her sticky green man in her hand, and Darius was busy giving a new friend a pounding at Wii Tennis. ‘Uncle Josh, no, you have to play next,' he said vainly, his eyes not leaving the screen as he swiped another clean winner down the line.

I hung the suit in my wardrobe, picked up my box of fortune cookies and slumped in front of the TV.

About a minute later, or in fact three hours, my phone rang cacophonously on my chest somewhere near the start of a dream about Britney Spears giving me a massage while I was lying face-up on a skateboard. The TV was playing a TeleCafe ad, offering the conversation of lingerie-clad women to lonely singles, and I was surrounded by fortune-cookie crumbs. There was a fortune tucked into my phone. It read: ‘A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.'

I flipped the phone open and made a noise that was supposed to sound like hello. I didn't recognise the number.

‘Well, hello,' a female voice said. My first thought was Britney Spears. I still wasn't awake. ‘I know it's late in the regular world, but I figured all you freelance journos are up doing Quaaludes or coked to the eyeballs.'

It was Hayley. I needed consciousness, wit, charm. Maybe a Quaalude, though I didn't think I'd ever seen one outside the works of Hunter S Thompson. I still had Britney in my head, Britney as a cowgirl now, with very supple hands. Long thumbs. Tom Robbins.

‘Yep, that'd be me,' I managed to say, brain still trundling along a track to nowhere. Hayley had not deleted my number. She had called it, and apparently deliberately. ‘Living the gonzo life. Hang on a second while I wipe some honey off these hookers.'

She laughed. I muted the TV, but kept it on so that I had some light. There were now two women in lingerie on screen, writhing on a chintzy bed together and yet inexplicably needing my call to make their evening whole.

‘Well, I'm done for the week,' Hayley said. ‘This is five pm Friday for me. Five pm Friday and mid-semester break from uni. So do you want to . . . have a drink or something? Once the hookers are sorted?'

I stood up, flushed with the thought of a gonzo life involving a fabulous stripper girlfriend – hold the hookers, hold the honey – with non-ridiculous breasts and a sharp mind. Fortune-cookie crumbs cascaded to the carpet.

‘Definitely,' I said. ‘Yes.' I pressed my shirt flat, and it looked okay.

‘Good,' she said. ‘Well, maybe if you just come to the Spur? I'll get changed and we can go somewhere . . . regular.'

My shirt was terrible. Fine for a barbecue at Brett's, where the standard male wardrobe was an XXL Hawaiian shirt corseted around an XXXXL frame, but
wrong now. I went to my wardrobe and threw my shirts onto the bed, one after another. In movies only girls did that. I needed a cool shirt, and all these were the shirts of someone who had partially given up on life, who didn't rate his prospects.

I settled on the least bad option and I cleaned my teeth. I told myself it would be presumptuous and wrong and would damn my night to hell if I stopped on the way to buy a condom for my wallet.

I drove into the Valley wishing I had a slightly better car, but not showy, not a pimp car. This was the gonzo life, driving late at night to the Valley to meet my fabulous stripper not-yet girlfriend, but stone-cold sober and in my mother's hand-me-down metallic blue Toyota Echo. She always bought two-door cars so that she could put her handbag behind the driver's seat with ease.

I fluked a park only two blocks and about two minutes fast walk from the Silver Spur. Number forty-three was on the door again, in a black shirt and black pants and with his rings glinting like knuckledusters. He nodded to let me know that he'd seen me.

‘Uh, hi,' I said, making it sound tentative and wrong. ‘I'm here to see . . .' Hayley? Jett? Hayley? ‘Jett.'

‘A lot of fellas pay money for that,' he said, electing not to crack a smile. ‘And your name would be . . .?'

‘Josh Lang.'

There was a burst of static. ‘That's the one,' the woman in the ticket booth said to him over the intercom.

‘I'm onto it, Colleen,' he said, in his calm bass voice. ‘You said the magic word, bro. That'd be Josh. Didn't know the Lang. If you want to duck back out onto the
street and take a left and head down the lane, I'll give her a call and she'll meet you at the back door.'

‘Thanks.'

‘Wayne,' he said, and thrust out his substantial hand, which wrapped around mine and gave it a firm squeeze.