Читать книгу Choices - Jeff Edwards - Страница 14

Dan

I was eager to return to home as quickly as possible because I knew that Sandy and the kids would be worrying about me. My mobile phone was still turned off, and I wondered if I could bring myself to reconnect it. News of the worst kind I felt sure would spew forth as soon as I dared push the on button.

I drove without stopping, and pulled into my street to find several cars parked close to my driveway. The front gate had been left open which was unusual, but I was glad that Sandy had done so, when a group of men, some with cameras, came rushing toward me. I accelerated up the driveway leaving them floundering at the gate, and parked out of sight behind our house.

Also parked here was a work van with both a handyman’s ladder and a surf board strapped to its roof. Emblazoned on the van’s side was the company name of Bowats Plumbing and Electrical and I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that Sandy was being guarded by my best friends Rick Bonham and Sam Watson.

I found the trio seated around the kitchen table, and as I entered, Sandy jumped to her feet and threw herself into my arms. The feeling of her arms around me, and her face pressed tightly into my neck was what I had been craving ever since my fall from grace. All the tension of the past days flowed out of me for the first time, and my knees began to feel like jelly. I luxuriated in the feeling of release that our embrace afforded me and totally ignored my two friends who remained seated with a beer close at hand and seemingly completely relaxed.

‘Where have you been? What have you been doing?’ asked Sandy worriedly as she finally released me.

‘Leave him be Sandy,’ smiled Rick. ‘He’s only just in the door. Get him a beer will you Sammy,’ he added quietly to his friend.

Sam leaned back precariously on his chair and opened the fridge door behind him. He extracted a bottle and twisted off the cap before handing it to me.

I took the bottle with one arm still around Sandy’s waist, and stood in the middle of the kitchen floor while I drank the contents in a couple of long gulps.

‘Who are those blokes outside?’ I asked as I placed the empty bottle on the table.

‘They’re the press boyo,’ replied Sam. ‘You’re famous.’

‘Shit!’ I responded.

‘You might very well say that,’ nodded the bearded Rick.

‘You haven’t seen the papers or the television?’ asked Sandy.

‘I’ve been doing other things. I didn’t have time to worry about the news, and I’ve been playing music in the car.’

‘Well it looks like we all have a lot to talk about,’ said Rick.

‘Do you mind if I have a shower first? I need to get my wits about me after that long trip.’

‘What long trip?’ asked Sandy. ‘Where have you been all this time?’

I gave her a quick kiss. ‘I’ll tell you everything as soon as I get showered,’ I promised.

I turned to Sam. ‘How much beer is in the fridge?’

‘Plenty.’

‘Put in some more. Plenty won’t be enough.’

* * *

As I showered I reflected on the pair of men seated in my kitchen. Sam and Rick had grown up together in Seashell Cove, a tiny dot on the eastern coast of northern New South Wales. After completing high school they had both chosen to do apprenticeships with the Australian Army, Rick as a plumber and Sam as an electrician. When I asked them why they hadn’t done their apprenticeships at home they had explained that Seashell Cove was so small that after the town had one of everything there was no room for a second. As the town already had a plumber and an electrician they had been forced to look elsewhere for employment and the army seemed to offer them the best choice of a future.

We had first met when I received an overseas secondment from the Joint Communications Centre to the signal centre operated by the Australian forces in East Timor. Rick and Sam’s unit had been helping the locals with the reconstruction of basic infrastructure and we had met in the army’s mess tent.

I had been reading a surfing magazine and sipping at a cold beer when a large shadow fell over me. ‘Surfing magazine?’ had asked the giant of a man that was looking down on me.

‘Yeah.’

‘Where do you get them around here?’

‘A mate in my unit in Canberra posts them to me,’ I explained.

The big man nodded to a nearby table where he had been seated with a much smaller man. ‘Can we borrow it when you’re finished?’

‘You surf?’ I asked casually.

‘Yeah. We come from a place where the waves are the most consistent and best formed in the world.’

‘Oh yeah,’ I scoffed, ‘and where would that be?’

‘Seashell Cove, just north of Taree.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Of course not. We don’t want every bastard to know about it.’

I nodded. It was exactly the answer I would have expected from a dedicated surfer. ‘And now you’re going to tell a complete stranger about your secret?’

He grinned. ‘Only because you’re going to lend us your magazines.’

We had become close friends after that, and people began to refer to us as the Three Amigos, or the Three Musketeers. However it was not quite like that at all.

I became the extra add-on to an already unshakable friendship. Having known one another all their lives Rick and Sam were more like twin brothers than mates. Sometimes they seemed to know instinctively what the other one was thinking.

Not that they were alike in any physical way. Rick was a bull of a man who nowadays sported a wild beard and long hair, while Sam was short and slim, clean-shaven as we had been in the army with close cropped hair. I tended to be somewhere in the middle in all respects.

The other major factor that defined their relationship were their constant arguments. If a topic of conversation were to crop up that did not directly relate to their own or their family’s wellbeing then a heated debate would ensue.

Polite discussion of general events would always lead to polarisation, with Sam adopting one viewpoint and Rick the diametrically opposing one, no matter what the topic. I was always left trying vainly to defend the middle ground with both my friends demanding that I adopt their viewpoint.

Once, I thought I had made a breakthrough and convinced one of them that their friend’s argument was correct on this particular occasion, only to have the other immediately reverse his attitude and argue from the opposite standpoint. I realised at that moment then that I could never win, and ever since had allowed them to espouse whatever side of an argument they wished, joining in only when specifically invited.

* * *

After a long hot shower I felt much better and returned to the kitchen.

‘When did you arrive?’ I asked.

‘Sandy rang us up as soon as you left,’ replied Rick.

‘And we started to hear about you on the radio on the way down,’ added Sam.

‘What were they saying?’ I asked.

Sandy was standing at the sink preparing a meal. She disappeared into the lounge room and returned with a paper which she placed before me. It was opened to the third page where an article appeared beneath a headline blaring the words ‘SPIES IN THE RANKS’, and going on to state that a certain Daniel Travers had been uncovered as a suspected ASIO agent by the ICAC, and that he had been working in the New South Wales Police Force. I had supposedly been supplying the spy organisation with confidential information from the police’s computer. It went on to add that the spy’s conduit appeared to be a well-known private investigator by the name of Liam Ryan, and that Ryan had confirmed under oath that he had been dealing with me, but denying emphatically that he and his company had dealings with ASIO.

‘The media don’t know what to make of the whole thing,’ said Rick. ‘That’s why they’ve been sitting around waiting for you to get home.’

‘I’m surprised that they aren’t knocking on the door,’ I commented.

Sandy commented dryly, ‘They’ve been ringing the phone constantly. I’ve had to take it off the hook and leave it off. Sammy let me use his mobile to ring Mum and Dad, otherwise they would have been down here as well. Your message bank is probably full of calls as well.’

‘It was when I checked it.’

‘The only reason that they’re keeping their distance out there is because Rick “removed” a couple of them from the front porch by force.’

Sandy came over and stood behind my chair, placing her hands on my shoulders. ‘Now we have all that out of the way I think it’s time for you to tell us how you came to be in such a mess.’

I took a long swig at my beer before beginning. I didn’t know exactly where to start, so I began as far back as I could. ‘You know I was a bit tight with my money when I was in the army?’

‘Tight?’ laughed Rick. ‘You even tried to get us to contribute toward the cost of the surfing magazines you had sent over to you.’

‘Yeah, well anyway, with our overseas allowances and the rest, by the time we decided not to re-enlist I had a fair nest egg stashed away in the bank. It was the money I had set aside for our overseas surfing trips each year.’

‘I always knew you didn’t earn too much as a public servant. Rick and I always had our little cash jobs on the side that the tax-man didn’t know about so we were fine. We wondered how you managed to find your share of the expenses.’

‘Well that’s where, except running this place was getting to be more and more expensive over the years, and more and more often I was having to dip into my “cunning kick” to get the regular day-to-day bills paid.’

‘You should have told me!’ exclaimed Sandy. ‘I could have helped out. I could have gotten a job.’

‘At that time Brook was still a baby, and you were pregnant with Josh,’ I explained, ‘besides, it would only have meant that I couldn’t go on the trips anymore.’

‘So what happened?’ asked Rick.

‘My boss, Peter Clarke, decided to retire to the Gold Coast, and I applied for his job. I thought the increased pay might help, but the pay scale was so small that it barely made any difference at all.

‘Then when he had finished teaching me his job and was just about to leave for good, he invited me to the pub. “I have someone I think you’d like to meet,” he told me.

‘Over lunch that day, surrounded by I don’t know how many other people from the police, I was introduced to Liam Ryan.

‘Peter Clarke pointed him out to me when he walked in, and I saw him greet a few of the other officers in the room before he sat down at our table.

‘Over a steak and a beer, Peter explained that he and Liam Ryan had had a “working relationship” for some time, and asked me if I would be interested in continuing it. I was totally shocked when Peter explained what Liam wanted from me, and I wanted to get out of there and leave the two men to their dirty deeds.

‘Peter Clarke could see what I was thinking and asked, “Do you believe that everyone should be able to have a fair trial?”

‘“Of course,” I said.

“‘Well, what happens if you have a matter before the court and it takes a few years to be heard? That happens in a lot of both civil and criminal cases. By the time you’re ready half your witnesses have moved house and you don’t know where they went. Without the witnesses your case will fail, and you won’t get fair hearing that you should be entitled to, so your solicitor has to try to find the missing witnesses on your behalf, and hires Liam here to do that work. Now Liam can do a lot of legwork and run up a large bill to try and find your witnesses, or he can come to someone like me and spend a little bit to find out exactly the same thing.”

“‘But you can’t do it! It’s wrong!”

“‘If it were a criminal case and one of their witnesses went missing, the police would use their computer to find the necessary information so what’s the difference? We’re only trying to give people the chance to a fair hearing.”

If I hadn’t had an unpaid phone bill in my pocket at that very moment, I might have said no to his proposal, but I convinced myself that I only had to do it for a short time till our finances picked up again and then I would tell Liam to go away and find someone else to do his dirty work.’

‘But you never did,’ said my wife.

‘No. I never did. There was always another bill to pay or something else we needed to replace around here. Now it has all come out and I’m out of a job. I’ve completely stuffed our lives.’

There was silence around the table as my friends considered my confession.

‘And what have you been up to since you left?’ asked Sandy.

‘I don’t know what came over me, but I panicked when I was in the dock. I tried to deflect their questioning by saying that I couldn’t answer because of the Official Secrets Act, and intimated that what I had been doing came under the heading of national security.’

‘Which is where the story of spying for ASIO came from?’

‘Yeah. They added two and two and came up with six, and I let them.’

‘You still haven’t said where you’ve been.’

‘I thought that if they dug further and found out that I was spinning them a yarn it would be worse than if I had told them everything they wanted to know, so I tried to make it look like I really was working as a spy.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Sandy.

I took another drink of beer, and told them all that had happened to me from the time I left until the time I arrived back home.

The three of them sat in wrapt silence until the very end, not daring to interrupt my story. Even after I had finished they remained quiet, digesting all the information I had told them.

Finally, Rick downed a large mouthful of beer and exchanged a very strange look with Sam. He said quietly, ‘Danny boy, I don’t know if you’re the dumbest person I have ever met, or a bloody genius, but I think the first option is probably the one I’d go for.’

‘You’re probably right,’ I nodded, ‘but I was desperate.’

‘You must have been to try something like that,’ commented Sam.

‘I convinced myself that the more bulldust I spread around out there, the more likely it would be that they would start to believe some of it.’

‘What will happen now?’ asked Sandy.

The answer to that question was suddenly placed on hold, as the back door crashed open to whoops of joy from my children, Brook and Josh, as they arrived home from school to find that not only had their father returned, but that their two most favourite people in the world were also present.

Throwing their schoolbags into their rooms with complete disregard for their contents, my son and daughter then dragged their uncles outside to show them all that had been done since their last visit some months before, and it was not until Sandy called them all in for supper that some semblance of calm finally descended on our home.

* * *

Later that evening when Brook and Josh had finally been exiled to their rooms and told to go to sleep, we were at last able to return to our discussions.

‘The mortgage and the other bills still have to be paid, so I’m going to have to go out there and try to find someone who will be prepared to hire me.’

‘Can you hold off for a few weeks?’ asked Rick. ‘Our next trip to Bali is coming up.’

‘I was hoping to cash in my ticket. I can’t afford to waste that sort of money right now.’

‘The trip has already been paid for. I doubt that you’ll be able to get back anywhere near what you paid. Besides, you need to have a break after what you’ve been through.’

‘But I can’t afford it.’

‘You can’t afford to waste a last opportunity,’ said Sam.

Sandy nodded. ‘I agree with the boys. I think you should go. It will give you a chance to get your head together so that you can face whatever’s coming.’

‘What if they won’t let me leave the country?’

Rick shrugged. ‘That will be a sure sign that you’re in the shit.

It might be the only indication that you get to warn you that the axe is about to fall. I say that you give it a try, but don’t worry, Sammy and I will still have a good time over there even if they drag you off the plane.’

‘Thanks heaps!’

‘Not to worry mate, we’ll bring you back a nice postcard or something,’ he grinned.

‘So I’m expected to sit around here until the time comes for our flight with the press hanging around outside, am I?’

‘Nah,’ waved Sam. ‘We’ll stick you into the back of the van and drive straight past the bastards out there. You can come up to the cove and earn some beer money doing some labouring for us. We won’t let you miss out when it’s your turn to buy a round of drinks, will we Rick?’

‘You can count on it Sammy.’

I looked over at Sandy and she nodded. ‘I’ll stay here with the kids until the school holidays, and then we’ll head up to mum and dad’s. We’ll meet you at the airport when you get back which will be in time for the next school term, and you can start looking for a new job.’

Having my immediate future decided by my wife and friends was somehow very comforting to me. My own efforts at decision-making over the past few days had ended disastrously, so I was more than willing to pass the responsibility on to others. Now I would not be the one held to blame if something went wrong.