The Fix (24 page)

‘Okay, I don't love them that much,' she said. ‘I love them the
normal
amount.' She said ‘normal' slowly and with great emphasis, as though I was very ab. She laughed and put her hand on my arm. ‘Don't worry. It's endearing. While at the same time deeply dysfunctional.'

It was Ben's turn to laugh now. ‘She's onto you,' he said. ‘And she hasn't fled yet.'

We cracked our cookies, and Hayley pulled out her fortune. ‘Never wrestle with a pig,' she read. ‘You both get all dirty, and the pig likes it.'

‘Hey, I get that one a bit,' I said, before I could stop myself. I was looking like a complete fortune-cookie gimp.

‘I expect you get all of them a bit,' Ben said. He was holding his fortune in both hands, as if it was something
that needed to be proclaimed rather than read. ‘Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.' Hayley went ‘Oooh' and he said, ‘I bet Josh gets that one all the time.'

He put the fortune down on the table. All around him there had been eyes that hadn't seen, people who hadn't worked out that his story wasn't right. I pulled the fortune out of my cookie and read it.

‘A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.' I'd had it a few days before. It was on the table at home, piled up with all the others like pickup-sticks.

‘Well, that's not you, is it?' he said to me. ‘You'd never stop thinking.'

It was not exactly the in-joke that it must have sounded to Hayley. It was not about a long friendship marked by hapless rumination on my part.

‘That's my job,' I said. ‘Always thinking. You'd be surprised what turns up.'

Our bill arrived, folded on a white saucer. Ben picked it up and started to read it.

Hayley and I reached for our money and he held up his hand and said, ‘Please, it's all work. I should have got that pizza earlier. You're my official friends for tomorrow's Who Weekly photoshoot, aren't you?' He looked over to Hayley. ‘I hope Josh told you that. Anyway, Randalls still owes you from last week. Mister Park went home happy and Vince Duffy's deal's gone through smoothly.'

‘Nothing to do with me,' she said. She still had her purse in her hand. ‘I didn't play nudie pool with him.'

She pushed to try to pay her third, but he waved her attempt away and handed the bill back to the waiter with his credit card.

I pocketed my cookie fortune when we left, out of habit. Mini-Golf in Surfers was only a few blocks away, in the direction of Focus. We passed the mall and some restaurants that weren't busy, and shops piled high with a million toy koalas and racks of boomerangs.

‘It's quiet,' Ben said, looking around. ‘Even for out of season.'

I had forgotten how much time he must have spent at the Gold Coast when he was young, in his father's heyday. We were probably walking past buildings that his father had built, or financed in some precarious way. Kerry Harkin had made and lost fortunes on these streets. Ben's view of them could be like no one else's.

From a distance, it looked as though the Slingshot was firing right above the mini-golf, though it was in fact in the fun park behind it. A rider took off skyward in the seat, tethered by two elastic cables to towers at the sides. He flew up until the cables tightened and pulled him down again, and then he oscillated with ever decreasing amplitude until the ride was over and he was lowered to the ground. It was one of several carnival-style rides operating, though not with a big enough crowd to seem like a carnival.

Mini-Golf in Surfers had a small red-roofed ‘club-house' that sold drinks and hired putters and balls. There were red plastic chairs and tables out the front, with the chairs arranged haphazardly as if they had just been vacated by people in a rush to putt. There was
no sign of quirky themeing here, no gimmicks, but the course looked well-groomed, with its eighteen holes – blue fairways, green greens, burgundy trouble spots – laid out among wood chips, geometric topiary and water features.

‘It's not as nutty,' Ben said, looking around. ‘I think this is for your classy mini-golfer.'

Hayley took to it with less vigour this time, but still showed an admirable lack of purpose when it came to getting the ball in the hole.

‘Hey, it's like a sock,' she said when we got to the third hole. ‘It's laid out in the shape of a sock, with the hole down at the toe.'

Unfortunately there was a bonus slip of concrete in the middle of the foot part. My overambitious first shot hit it end-on and bounced back up the ankle.

‘This is way better than last night,' Hayley said as I lined up my second. ‘I went out with some girls from work on Sunday, so that started late and went later and they were buying rounds of cocktails. I don't usually drink cocktails. So I didn't feel like breakfast yesterday, or lunch, and then I had to take my nanna to bingo in the evening.' She watched the ball as it ran down the fairway, hitting the side first this time before glancing off the mid-foot concrete and finishing quite close to the hole. ‘That was the family commitment I had and, trust me, it's a commitment. I do it every week. She waits at the front window with the blind open just a crack, and she calls me if I'm a minute late, in case I'm dead. Anyway, I must have been looking like crap – I was
feeling
like crap – because halfway through the bingo she snuck a bacon
sandwich out of her handbag and passed it to me under the table.'

I walked over to the ball and tapped in. Ben played the hole in a neat two shots.

‘Is that part of the deal every week? The emergency bacon sandwich?' I was two shots down to him already.

Hayley drove the ball to the heel of the sock, and it hit the concrete border at close to the perfect angle. It rattled around on its way into the foot and stopped a makeable distance from the hole.

‘There's usually a sandwich,' she said. ‘It's not always bacon.' She hit the putt too hard, but so straight that it dropped anyway. ‘She grew up in the Depression. No way would she pay for a sandwich when you can make one at home from leftovers. The sandwich is normally for her. My crapness was the emergency. It was a one-off. In fact, I've got the job of taking her because I'm the only family member she could rely on to turn up every week. My mother went off on a bit of a tangent after she and my dad divorced. I think she decided she'd been missing out on something. I know I'm the one with the hair, but she wanted to be some kind of rock chick.'

‘Which is a lot more interesting than some parents.' I was thinking of mine, and also realising that, if Hayley read from the back of a cereal box, I would probably pull up a seat.

‘And I didn't mind it,' she said as Ben paced out the fourth, looking for tricks, ‘but the awful bit to watch was the way she had to keep downgrading her expectations. She took friends along to hang out with bands. She wanted me to go, but there are limits. Plus I have
the thing that we refer to in my family as my “bar job”, so I don't get to go to a lot of bands, even without the tempting offer of hanging out with the oldest groupies in the room. She ended up for a while with a guy in his fifties who filled in sometimes playing covers in a pub at Stones Corner.'

Ben teed off, stroking the ball through a patch of dark blue rough and setting up an easy second. He continued to look good every time he played a shot. As he sank the putt, Hayley put her ball down near the start of the hole.

‘One time she looked after his marijuana seedling,' she said, as she lined up her shot in a perfunctory way. ‘He thought the cops might be onto him. That's a quote. She actually said “cops”, and I'm sure she'd never said it in her life before then. Always police.' Her ball clipped a barrier and came off at a bad angle. ‘She showed me the seedling, as if it was wildly exciting.'

‘My parents split up a while back,' Ben said. He was leaning on a palm tree next to the green. ‘My father was such a shit. I used to stay there weekends and every second Tuesday when I was still at school. He wasn't there most of the time. And then Wife Number Two wasn't there much of the time either.' He waited while Hayley played her second shot. ‘So it was just me, feeding the tropical fish, drinking his gin and topping the bottles up with water, pissing on his bonsai plants. They've got these tiny leaves, but they're pretty bloody hardy, I can tell you.'

Hayley laughed. Ben looked happy with himself, pleased with his rebel pissing, and with eliciting the laugh.

I had heard it before, of course, the boast about the bonsai plants, and I knew it was a fragment of the story. Ben had listened from another room to the exit conversations of his father's relationship with his mother. He had always avoided using the name of his father's second wife and, I realised, third, referring to them both only by number. I tried to recall the third wife's name from the newspaper article two months before, but I couldn't.

I could remember the house with the bonsai plants. It was a big place on acreage at Pullenvale, and it turned out to be leased by one of his companies. A few of us went there once when his father was away. ‘Away' turned out to be Kerry Harkin trying to do a runner on his creditors. There was art on the wall, but there were no photographs of people or events and the decor seemed almost deliberately impersonal. There were plastic reeds set in jars of pale stones, an expensive but empty wooden magazine rack, a round white clock the size of a plate. It was as if the place had been hired, as if it was a function centre or a film set. I had seen Ben's own flat much more recently, though, and perhaps it was a look he preferred. It gave away nothing, betrayed none of the owner's tastes, or secrets.

‘My mother got a new boyfriend not so long ago,' Hayley was saying. ‘She asked me if I let men watch me on the toilet. I thought she was onto me about work, not that that happens there unless the Koreans are in town – I'm kidding – but she actually meant in relationships.' She was on the green now, and her fifth shot fell in the hole. ‘There are some conversations you just don't want to have with your mother.' She lifted
her ball out. ‘Four or five?' she said to Ben, who had the scorecard.

‘Four.'

He marked it down. I wasn't sure if the mistake was deliberate, or if he hadn't been counting.

I dropped my ball onto the ground and rolled it into place for my first shot.

‘And
my
parents have a newsagency and a block of flats at the Sunshine Coast,' I said as I sized the shot up. ‘Yep, that was as dull as I thought it'd sound.' There was one trick to the hole. Its middle third was diamond-shaped, with only a small opening at the far end where the sides of the diamond encroached on the fairway. ‘Most Fridays they get to the surf club by six, and they don't mind claiming a senior's discount on the fish.'

Ben laughed. ‘Well, they rock, obviously.'

‘I'd kill for that kind of normality,' Hayley said, like someone who sensed it was a long way off. ‘Well, not kill, but wound maliciously, maybe.'

I hit the ball and it passed perfectly through the narrow gap and came to a stop next to the hole.

‘Nice one,' Ben said. He looked around, at the holes ahead of us, his putter swinging in his hand. ‘I miss the dinosaurs. This is good, but it's not the same.'

* * *

IN THE SPILL OF
LIGHT
from the apartment blocks, the broken waves were dimly visible from the balcony as they spread themselves across the sand and then withdrew. I heard Ben's bedroom door shut. He was
gone for the night. Hayley was fetching the wine from the fridge and my heart was clattering along like a train on a wooden bridge.

I tried to convince myself that the next ten minutes, or hour, or this night weren't the most important of my life. It was a feeling I'd had before – the feeling that a great and possibly critical moment was upon me – and it had usually not gone well. I looked out to sea and concentrated on the freighters making their slow progress up and down the coast. I pictured men with shovels hurling coal into furnaces. I think the image came from a movie, just before the U-boat's first torpedo hit them amidships. It was probably all done with one guy pushing a button now.

‘You're looking very serious,' Hayley said as she stepped outside.

‘Don't let me do that,' I told her. ‘It all goes wrong when I get serious.'

‘Is that an idea you got from Ben?'

Maybe it was. ‘I don't know. I seemed to manage to get it wrong often enough without him in England for a few years.'

‘Well, England's England,' she said. ‘This is here. And this is my last glass of wine.' She looked down as she poured, measuring it out. ‘I'm already having cold-bacon-sandwich flashbacks.'

She set the bottle on the table and took a sip from her glass. She looked out at the ocean, at the line of ships I'd been watching.

‘Ben's charming, don't you think?' I couldn't quite get him out of my head, even though he'd gone to his room.

‘I guess.' She sounded non-committal. ‘I guess people could find him that way. It was the most charming pissing-on-bonsai story that I've heard. But, you know, bonsai – I was never really into it.'

‘But he is our nation's hero . . .'

‘Hmmm.' She took a bigger mouthful of wine. She turned away from the slow transit of the ships to face me again. ‘I'm much more drawn to conflicted serious types. Heroism's so . . . unequivocal.'

For a line like that, I wanted her even more. I thought we would kiss then. I sensed we were about to, that we were both starting to move, but she stepped back. She dragged a plastic chair around, and sat in it.

‘I think I scare men away sometimes,' she said. ‘Sometimes it's my job, sometimes it's the speed I'm ready to move. If something's right, it's right. If it's all you think about . . .'