The Fix (23 page)

Ben laughed. ‘I knew I'd been too wordy over the past week when anyone asked me what Josh's role was. He's our driver.'

‘Well, your limo awaits,' I said. I picked up the keys from the counter, and told myself he would be gone from my life in three days.

In the basement, Ben squeezed into the back seat of the Echo, with his knees splayed around the passenger seat, and we drove to the hinterland to pick up the doves. Hayley took a sheet of paper from her bag and unfolded it. I thought the directions were on it, but she gave me those from memory. It was an email she had been sent,
outlining the details of the job. The birds would be waiting in a cage on the owners' front verandah.

I had imagined something nice, somewhere well-maintained and lush, a restored old timber homestead with a tin roof, but the bird people lived in a two-storey brick house set back from the road and up a gravel driveway from which tufts of weeds had started to sprout. I parked in front of the double roll-a-doors of the garage, next to a planter box in which a shrub had recently died. Hayley walked up the front steps to a balcony, which had been enclosed and now had windows of patterned yellow glass. The cage was just inside the unlocked screen door, and she brought it down to the car. The birds cooed at each other and looked twitchily around, like two old ladies on a church excursion who might have just got on the wrong bus.

She pushed the passenger seat forward and passed the cage to Ben in the back. It was gilded, or at least sprayed with gold paint, and higher than it was wide, and the birds flapped their wings madly as it made its way through. A single small white underfeather was still in the air by the time Ben had them settled on the seat next to him.

He was inspecting them closely. ‘They're not even doves, are they?'

‘No, they're white pigeons,' Hayley said as she pushed the passenger seat back into his knees and got into the car. ‘That way they always fly home.'

‘But how can you call them doves then? They're just . . . albino vermin.'

I could see him in the rear-view mirror, a decorated man in a suit, suddenly aware that he was sharing the back seat of his non-limo with two rats with wings.

‘Hey, enough of your lip, nation's hero,' Hayley told him. ‘Don't diss the birds.'

The birds settled and cooed to each other as they took in their new surroundings in their twitchy-headed way. I turned the car around on the gravel.

‘You'll have to keep giving me directions,' I said to Hayley when we reached the end of the driveway. ‘Starting about now. Left or right?'

We drove right, down the hill and through acreage that had once been farms and would be suburbs soon enough. There were still a few lush green fields with well-fed black cattle in the dark shade of corrugated iron shelters, motionless but for their flicking tails. We passed a tavern and some shops, crossed the highway on an overpass and skirted the edge of a salmon-pink faux-Tuscan suburb from the early nineties.

We took Robina Parkway and the road dipped down to more low-lying land that was being reclaimed for golf courses and canal developments. In some parts it was swamp, with nothing but tall-legged birds stepping around behind the temporary fencing. In others the work was already done and three-storey show-off houses in navy and grey had risen out of the water shoulder-to-shoulder like some new Venice.

‘So, give me an insider's view of the job,' I said to Hayley. I was thinking of the blog or article that I might write. ‘What sort of skills do you need?'

‘To wrangle homing pigeons?' She laughed. ‘None. None that I'm aware of. You probably need skills to keep them, but for this you only need to be presentable and turn up on time. I do try to be nice to the birds. Other than that, you just have to remember that
everyone else is taking it really seriously. The birds are a big moment.'

‘So you're sure it'll be all right for me to take photos?'

‘It's a Japanese wedding.' That was her whole answer. There would be photos in their thousands. ‘We used to do lots more of them. I don't know where they go now. Maybe Hawaii. But maybe it's GFC'd out as well. I've had afternoons when I've had two cages on the back seat and one in the front. Six pigeons. If one gets stirred up, they all do. I tried playing music, but that only seemed to make it worse. Maybe it was the type of music.'

I wondered what music she liked. There was a lot I didn't know. Was there any music that would be a deal-breaker? I thought I would still want her even if she told me she had just bought us tickets to André Rieu.

We turned into Palm Meadows Drive, and golf spread out into the distance on both sides – verdant fairways, clumps of trees, more wader birds picking their way through patches of softer ground in the lower-lying areas. We passed a driving range where a few solid men were belting buckets of balls in the direction of the road. A tractor drove among the distance markers, raking up the spent shots. It was another for Ben's list of suburban-oddity jobs, perhaps – golf-ball retriever. Another chance to get lost, if you needed to.

We hit a speedbump and I took a look at him in the rear-view mirror. His hand was on his Star of Courage, keeping it still, covering it.

Hayley had her piece of paper out again as we drove up to the entrance of the Radisson.

‘Nakajima-Toyama wedding,' she said to the guy who came over to the window. ‘We've got the birds.'

He had a clipboard, and he turned over a couple of pages. ‘Yeah, great.' He looked into the car, at the three of us, at Ben's Star of Courage. Ben pointed, helpfully, to the birds. ‘It's at the gazebo, so park underneath and head out through the exit under Sandpiper. You've been here before, haven't you? It's the usual place, down by the lake. You've just got the one lot of birds?'

‘Yeah.'

‘No worries,' he said. ‘Well, have a good one.'

He waved us on, and Hayley pointed to the car park entrance ahead.

‘That question about the one lot of birds . . .' She said it like someone with a story to tell. ‘Apparently there was one time, a few years ago, in the heyday of Japanese wedding dove releases, when someone had a bunch to do one day in the middle of summer and, at the second-last one, they parked in the sun. With the windows fully shut. And the wedding went longer than it should, or started later, and when they got back to their car? Two dead birds at the bottom of the cage. Apparently the doves had started to cook. It was sixty or seventy degrees in there. Or so the story goes. At the hotels now they always check if you're carrying extra birds and make sure you're parked in the shade, with the windows open a crack. Sometimes they even take the birds from you and look after them.'

‘So do I get to use that in the article?' I was looking for parks, but there were none in the first row.

‘You know you want to,' Ben said from the back. He put his hand on the top of my seat and leaned forward.
‘All his life he's been looking for a genuine ex-po-zay –' he said it theatrically – ‘and this could be it. Pigeongate. Welcome to the big time. The seedy side of the Gold Coast wedding dove-release scene. Bird substitution, death. And you can have that pun for free. Seedy side.'

‘Well in that case it's a no,' Hayley said. ‘And not just because of the pun, or because you thought you had to say it twice in case we missed it. It's an unsubstantiated rumour, and you didn't hear it from me.' She held both her hands up, disowning her slow-baked pigeon anecdote. ‘No birds harmed in the writing of this article. I want to see that in there somewhere.'

‘So ready to be a lawyer,' Ben said, as I got out of the car. He passed the cage to me. ‘Over to you, driver.'

He climbed out over the seat and Hayley checked the alignment of his medal again and pretended to polish it. She made it seem like a piece of a costume, an accessory. I wanted him to look at me, but he wouldn't. I wanted to tell her not to fall for him, not to fall for anything he had to offer. I wanted her to know that he had pressed himself into a corner and waited for Frank to be shot.

I wondered what Frank was thinking, back in Brisbane, and I wondered if there was a thread I could pull to make the real story unravel.

A car drove past us, its tyres squeaking on the concrete as it turned at the end of the row.

Hayley led us through a doorway and outside. The air was warm and smelt of cut grass. We followed a path that seemed to be familiar to her. It led us around the next building to a lakeside lawn on which the gazebo stood under palm trees. It was white, with iron lace-
work and a grey domed roof, and in front of it were about forty chairs with white covers and sashes, arranged either side of a red carpet aisle. The guests were standing with their backs to us, looking out across the lake, pointing to bunkers in the distance, talking about the golf they would play or had played. Or the space, the clean air. I had no idea.

The celebrant, a gym-toned blonde, was wearing a pink jacket and skirt, a white top and a scarf. She waved to Hayley and started walking our way. She had a tan the colour of nutmeg and, as she got closer, I could see that her face at least had had some work done. It anchored her in the frightened part of early middle-age, her cheeks and forehead a little too taut. She might have been fifty, but she looked like a fake version of younger, or a younger version of fake.

‘Leslie,' she said as she shook Hayley's hand. The scarf was Hermès, held in place by a brooch set with a green crystal the size of a baby's fist. She glanced at me and then looked properly at Ben and the Star of Courage. ‘I like that. Nice and medally, but not too showy. You look like you might speak Japanese too.'

‘Reckon I might,' he said. He waved his hand in front of his face, at a fly that I was certain wasn't there. ‘If this is the Nakajima-Toyama wedding.' He made himself sound like Crocodile Dundee, and it made me realise how accentless his regular voice was, as if he came from no place at all.

‘How thoughtful of them to send you,' Leslie said. ‘We might get you and the birds set up at the table next to the gazebo.' She took a look at her watch. ‘Akira and Yumi should be on their way.'

I placed the gold birdcage on the white tablecloth and the birds fussed around quietly, blinking in the brightness. ‘Home soon,' I told them.

Leslie rounded up the guests and showed them to their places. They sat formally, expectantly, talking quietly if at all. Against the background noise of distant golf, I could hear an electric hum becoming louder. One of the guests pointed behind us and to our right. I looked around and saw two golf buggies coming towards us along a path, the groom in the first and the bride in the second, her hand on her veil.

It was a stunning, perfect afternoon for a wedding. The clouds had cleared, the sky was vividly blue and there was a gentle breeze over the lake, which rippled the fringes on the canopies of the two golf buggies. The groom stepped out and adjusted his charcoal-grey tailcoat and grinned at the guests. The bride was assisted from her buggy by her driver. She looked down at the grass in front of the rows of seats and smiled self-consciously. Her dress was a classic meringue, but I didn't have it in me to be cynical. There was a rush of fake shutter noises as twenty slimline digital cameras recorded the moment.

Leslie got the ceremony underway, delivering most of it in English, but interspersed with some sentences that sounded to me like cautious Japanese. Across the water, a pair of golfers stopped to watch before playing their next shots and driving on.

The formalities were brief, and soon Leslie declared Akira and Yumi to be husband and wife, first in English, in which it passed without response, and then presumably in Japanese, which set the cameras off again. She
signalled for the bride and groom to kiss, and the shutter noises reached a crescendo.

‘And now, to celebrate this union,' she said, with the tone of an announcement, ‘and to let it take flight, Yumi and Akira will release a pair of doves.' Left alone in English, untranslated, the metaphor had to fend for itself.

Hayley reached into the cage, talking softly to the birds. She took one out, gave it to Ben and then took the other for herself. The guests left their chairs and stood in an arc, lining up their next shots, calling out to the bride and groom like paparazzi.

Hayley stepped forward and solemnly handed her dove to Yumi, who said, tentatively, ‘Thank you.' Ben matched the solemnity, and gave a small bow as he passed his bird to Akira. He said something in Japanese, and both Akira and Yumi beamed. They started talking back to him, both at the same time, then stopped, looked at each other, and laughed.

Leslie steered them around so that they faced their guests. She said a few words, then backed them up by miming bird release. Akira and Yumi copied her and the birds lifted from their hands and, with just a few beats of their wings, they were above us, bright white against the perfect sky, then wheeling across the lake and away, setting a course for the hills, chased on by the shutter-beats of cameras and the ooh-ing and aah-ing of the crowd.

Hayley was in front of me, her eyes following the birds, though perhaps not with the fascination of the others. I noticed something in her hair, the white corner of a label or a tag sticking out from her black scrunchie.
I took a step closer, reached forward, and delicately tucked it in. She gave a small smile without turning around. Below the clip that held Desley in place, she was wearing not a scrunchie but a twisted black G-string.

* * *

AS SOON AS THEY
had cleared our bowls at the Golden Fortune that night, one of the staff came through the servery doors with a plate of fortune cookies.

‘Oh, excellent,' Hayley said. ‘I love fortune cookies.'

‘Me too,' I said. ‘Sometimes I eat them as a meal.'

She looked at me as if I might retract it, but it just hovered there, a big glowing blimp above my head that read ‘run away, run away'.