The Fix by Nick Earls Read Free Book Online Page B

prove I could, to prove that every morning didn’t start when it became too warm to sleep, that every day wouldn’t be spent in only boxer shorts until well into the afternoon. Convention dictated that a meal out required more than one item of clothing. It required shoes, interaction. Some days that was a lot to ask, but the upside was caffeine in quality form and a kickstart to the day, plus a chance to read the paper in the oldway, and every detail of it, rather than just staring at the screen at home, soaking up the pixels.
    The morning after the meeting at Randall Hood Beckett began like my other days, though, facedown in a messy forgettable dream. I missed the call from Selina that came through around nine and went to voicemail.
    â€˜Just checking to see that you’ve got the media file on the incident,’ her message said when I picked the phone up from the table an hour later. I had been about to charge it when I noticed someone had actually called. ‘I’m not sure if you’re aware that files don’t leave the office without high-level approval.’ There was a pause there, as though I might want to make excuses to her recorded voice. ‘I’ve marked it down as checked out to you. Not that I’m high-level or anything,’ she said, ‘but consider your arse covered, new boy.’
    My toast popped, half-done as always.
    I called Selina back right away, worried that my arse was even in play, and she said, ‘It’s probably my fault you didn’t know the score. Anyway, Max okayed it just now. And it’s not like it’s a legal file. So, enjoy.’
    I gave my toast its second go through, Vegemited it, and thought about having fortune cookies instead.
    I opened the file and took my first good look at the photocopy of Ben’s medal nomination. It had been submitted in Frank’s name, and he had signed the covering page. The form asked the nominator to attach photographs and statements from eyewitnesses, and Frank’s covering letter itemised a dozen or more. It was a lawyer’s letter, making a case and making it robustly. I couldn’t imagine him doing it any other way.
    I read through his own report of the incident and some of the material he had included to support it. Rob Mueller had appeared psychotic, deranged, crazy. Different people put it in different ways, and some said only that he was angry. He had been a client of the firm once, though in a minor way. Another lawyer who mentioned that made it seem like nothing, just routine business.
    It was Frank’s letter I kept coming back to. It had the story. ‘My head wound was bleeding profusely. By this time Mueller was even more agitated. It was clear he was going to shoot me. I was on the floor when Ben rushed him. In the struggle, the gun discharged.’
    Ben in his sharp suit and his neat hair, rushing, struggling, with a loaded gun as part of the fight.
    I could hardly imagine what it would be like to be tested that way. Perhaps none of us could know how we might respond. I wasn’t planning to flatter myself by thinking I would do the same.
    Ben was a hero and I was building a solid fraction of my next career on pieces that began with lines like, ‘Whoever invented shiny toilet paper anyway?’ He was owed a good investiture, and I would put the past aside to give him that.
    When I had left for London I had assumed that I would be home one day, but I had imagined arriving if not in triumph then at least in something – some state that said my time away had amounted to time well spent. Perhaps buying the flat was proof of that.
    I had big ideas about what my deposit would get me, but then I converted my hoarded sterling into dollars and saw what had happened to Brisbane real estate prices while I had been away. The Venn diagram of my firstweekend driving around open houses would have had one circle for places in which I would have liked to live, one for places I