Читать книгу The Paradise Stain - Nick Glade-Wright - Страница 11

A gleaming, sizzling sun bathed the morning city in radiant warmth. Local radio stations sent out panicky alarms about melanomas and Tasmania’s depleted ozone layer, forewarning listeners that it would most likely hit the high twenties by midday.

Porridge and sliced banana breakfast was being prepared, eaten, and put away at Four Luck Avenue in Lutana. Rosie was skittish with anticipation because it was the homecare lady Yetta Gorski’s day to look after her, a workday for both Melinda and Mungo.

Harbourside on the other side of town, Kant had already showered. He was anticipating his first day back at work with a modicum of joy and a second coffee.

Breakfast had been guava juice and a croissant with leatherwood honey. He’d stopped buying newspapers, getting most of his news from canteen griping at the station. It had been too much to expect that the reporting in the local rag might contain something close to intellectual rigour. Besides, every other page was bloated with advertisements from prime sausages to pimple cream, and he’d stopped buying the weighty Age because his new home had no garden to be weed suppressed.

The Audi purred like an adoring feline as it sashayed out into the Monday morning traffic, his car a bubble of calm reflection, floating through the torrent of busyness and self obsessed humanity as he made his way north through the city centre and out the other side. The Frank Sinatra Greatest Hits CD was up loud enough to hold at bay the rest of the world’s clamour until he arrived at Nerve Two.

After many consultations over the years with Vince MacLean about the walking wounded he’d observed around the city in his searches for contestants, Kant began to imagine that he too could detect subtle behavioural disparities amongst the congestion in the streets.

‘It’s a particular unhurried, aimless step you notice after a while, eyes fixed on a vague middle distance, no apparent objective other than the next tread on an endless pavement. Eye contact with the rest of humanity almost non existent, protected within the confines of their own debilitating solitude,’ MacLean had told Kant after his first year of scouring the city.

As the car left the city centre behind, Kant gave Sinatra’s song more volume. “ … As free as the wind blows … ”

‘Unlike the damn traffic,’ he complained to Frank. ‘Flowing like tepid trea … cle,’ he sang.

Kant was feeling lightheaded when he arrived and parked at Nerve Two, allowing Old Blue Eyes to crescendo the final words of his rousing anthem, “ … And I did it … myyyyyy way” before stepping tentatively out into the car park.

Kant passed through the automatic doors into reception, gave a nod to the new face at the front desk, a Kiwi, Vince had informed him yesterday.

‘Good morning. Janine, I believe?’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ the young, tightly clothed receptionist replied.

Janine twisted in her seat to check out the new arrival, her blatant cleavage a revelation to anybody who approached her for assistance. Kant nodded awkwardly, trying to keep his eyes on her face. The girl swivelled back to her task of buffing her nails to a shiny opaline finish. Her auburn hair was firmly pulled back into a ponytail, leaving just enough short strands for a spray stiff cockatoo fringe at the front.

The formal reception area of Nerve Two, with its sound muting carpet, burnt orange with blue squiggly pattern repeat prints of the docks and Mount Wellington by local watercolourists dotting the wall spaces, was more a deception area. Once through the swing doors that led to the studios, sound booths and offices, the buzz of anarchy prevailed. It appeared to be partially a warehouse for innumerable boxes of stuff, which were everywhere. Kant had often wondered if there was anyone who actually knew what was in them. Lounge suites seemed to have been randomly air dropped around. There was seldom relief from hectic schedules so no one ever reclined in them. They were habitually congested with discarded bits and pieces anyway. Struggling big leafed pot plants, mulched with paper scraps, rubber bands, screwed up gaffertape and anything that needed a quick ‘filing’ seemed to be more in the way than giving any aesthetic relief. The high walls containing this plangent momentum had never quite received their final top coat. Every deadline was overlapped by the next. Nothing had changed in the week Kant had been away.

‘Morning Damon.’

One of the cameramen scurried towards Kant, a coil of heavy, black cable slung over his shoulder. He could have been going rock climbing.

‘G’day Barry. Bet you’re glad to be back,’ he snorted through a sardonic smirk.

‘I didn’t realise I’d been away.’

‘Huh, you tell that to bloody Mackerel.’

Kant began to feel assailed by the hyperactivity and pervasive urgency. It was like everyone was on speed.

Not so when he entered his own office. Even the size of his name on the door became calmly diminished to BK. Kant’s office was one area of the station that had been completed, the final coat of paint being a warm, light tone of sun soaked Tuscan orange. Barry had personalised the space. It could have been one of the rooms in the old cottage. Objects collected with Sarah on various adventures abroad, discouraged by Gaye Salmon from congesting the rigorous minimalism of his apartment, were casually cluttered around. Ms Design Fascist Salmon had no authority here.

In fact, clogging up the spatial clarity was exactly the theme Kant had aimed for in his office. Books on fishing and travel, magazines and journals were intentionally sprawled on a bench. Two wicker baskets housing collections of shells, seed pods and other random items collected on walks with Sarah were strategically placed so he could feel the memories at a glance, and a series of small woven tapestries of the Kimberley in Western Australia hung in a row above his desk. And on the opposite wall a large traditional dot painting he had been given by an Aboriginal friend in Alice Springs, and two cherished Cretan embroideries he’d bought with Sarah in Knossos over thirty years ago, were transfusions of joy each time he rested his eyes on them.

Indoor plants, well fertilised and watered, softened one corner of the room where a circle of four old armchairs were set up for interviewing prospective contestants for the show. A claret coloured Afghan rug on the floor, faded Balinese throws draped over the chairs all added to the ethnic ambience. And with resplendent disrespect, on a Queen Anne English oak side table sat the most important item in the room, the coffee machine, which, for some reason, was not working. Kant suspected overuse by the caffeine addicted camera crew in his absence. No wonder his interviewees felt comfortable with him; it was a comfy refuge away from home.

James Mackelroy burst in with his director’s urgency.

‘Ah, BK, you’re back,’ and without taking breath, ‘African lad, coming in at two. Vince is bringing him in. Okay?’

Kant smiled at his director. ‘Coffee?’ but omitted to say what he was thinking: that Vince was highly organised and the arrangements had already been firmly set in place the day before.

‘What a week! I’m glad your damn holiday’s over.’ Then slip ping smoothly into well crafted and charming clumsiness he added, ‘You know what I mean, Baz, my man. I’m delighted you’ve had your well earned breather and all that, and are now back amongst the fold. Right, where was I?’

Barry was still smiling. ‘Was that a yes, James?’

‘Yes? Oh yes, of course, only way to start the day. And you’ll be impressed I’ve dropped my caffeine intake to five a day.’

‘Mm, noteworthy.’

Kant pressed two numbers on the in house intercom to the front desk.

‘Yis?’

‘Hello Janine, Mister Kant here. Could you possibly bring Mister Mackelroy and me a couple of strong blacks? And Janine, that’s coffee, not rugby players.’

The girl giggled. ‘You wanna coupla buscuts too, Muster Kant?’

Kant looked at Mackelroy, who smiled back and put both his hands in the air, palms up like an Italian chef maintaining tight lips about a secret ingredient.

‘That would be lovely. We’ll be in my office.’

Kant looked back at Mackelroy, shaking his head as a father might when told by his fourteen year old daughter that she is in love, wants to go on the pill and is moving out of home to marry the local butcher’s apprentice on Bruny Island.

‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking,’ Mackelroy said.

‘No, you don’t.’

‘She turned up when you were lounging around sipping camparis and nibbling nuts in the noonday sun, while the rest of us beavers were busting our balls trying to restore some decorum around here so the bloody dam didn’t burst.’

‘I did notice that the floors are still dry, so you must have done something right. Anyway, young Janine comes across as a bit … inexperienced.’

‘Let’s just call her a work in progress. Her old man was a cleaner here but had a bad stroke. Poor sod was only fifty and now he sits around at her flat most days struggling to even open cans of beer with his one good hand. The other half of him went all paralysed or something. I put in a good word for her, that’s all.’

‘Never known anyone with such a big heart, James,’ Kant replied.

‘Look, I know she seems a pixel short in the computer room but … ’

‘I’m sure she’s not, I’m just thinking it might be a good idea to get Dorothy to have a quiet word in her ear about dress codes for receptionists. Kid looks as if her … attributes could burst through her shirt at any time. I’m sure she’s got a heart of gold, but … you know … first impressions.’

Dorothy West was the technical wizard at Nerve Two with anything to do with digital equipment. Her placement had initially got up the noses of a few of the younger breed of male techies, more than likely because she was old enough to be their mother, and old people, female at that, weren’t supposed to be clued up about all that technical stuff, let alone your mum.

Kant was quietly pleased for another reason that Dorothy was still on the staff. It was because she was two years older than he. But her main attribute, amongst her multitasking abilities, as far as he and Mackelroy were concerned, was the monthly management of the younger female staff, pacifying them when fractious and mothering them when they became emotional.

‘So, how was your break?’

Kant puffed air. ‘Oh, I could have done more with my time. Seeing my granddaughter was what I enjoyed most. It restores my faith in the future of this crumbling planet knowing she’ll be in charge one day. And by the way she rules the roost at home it won’t be that far away.’ Kant paused, lifted an eyebrow. ‘Did I just have a holiday?’

But Mackelroy’s perfunctory curiosity had been satisfied after Kant’s first sentence and his thoughts were already speeding down the programming fast lane . He rushed back to his own office to fetch a file he’d forgotten.

As Kant settled in his chair, a wave of melancholy washed over him as he looked around at the accumulated belongings in his office, all overflowing with nostalgia.

‘Muster Kant … Muster Kant.’

Kant looked up. ‘Oh thanks, Janine.’

‘Couldn’t find any buscuts though. I’ll get some in.’

‘Thanks.’

The girl pirouetted self importantly and left.

‘Okay, moving on,’ Mackelroy said as he scurried back in, settling himself next to Kant in an armchair. ‘Format the same as before. Except now I want to present to you my little piece of resistance, namely … ’ he paused theatrically, ‘the prize money has doubled to one hundred thou.’

Mackelroy waited with a self gratulatory smirk, knowing Kant would be surprised, shocked even. So now he would linger patiently for Kant’s reaction so that he could revel in the triumphant coup that he had pulled off whilst Kant was off having a good time. Mackelroy watched his main man even as he sipped at his coffee, eyes peering out of the top of the rim of his mug. He didn’t want to miss a second. Kant sipped too, looked up and held Mackelroy’s gaze.

Mackelroy could restrain himself no more. ‘Well?’ he burst out.

‘Oh, you want me to comment on the deal you made with that pommy Network to broadcast BKS up over? Sorry, Vince filled me in on Sunday morning. We really need to get him a desk job; poor fellow never seems to sleep.’

Inside, Kant chided himself for not pretending ignorance and giving Mackelroy his moment of glory. He suspected he sometimes used his feelings of grief over his wife’s death as an excuse to be ungracious to others.

Mackelroy began to hiss. ‘You’re a canny bastard.’

Kant shrugged, looked down at the floor, imitating a forlorn spaniel.

‘What’s up? Am I detecting a little reticence about being back?’

Kant looked at his director, unable to shift the hang dog expression. ‘Probably. No, it’s not that. And sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. Let’s just get on. It’s nothing.’

‘No, go on. We can easily postpone interviews for a day if you like. Ease back in.’

‘It’s nothing, really.’

Mackelroy waited.

‘Okay, well, it’s just that when I came in just now I felt all the old … heartache, around Sarah, just bubble up again. It’ll go. I just have to get stuck into these other people’s lives again. They’ve got far more to complain about than me.’

His colleague’s use of the word heartache had come out as if it was a profanity. Mackelroy grinned, but to Kant’s surprise not reassuringly; it was more a lascivious leer.

‘Jesus, mate, I know what’s wrong with you,’ Mackelroy laughed, tapping his forehead with the palm of his hand as if he’d just had a Dr Julius Sumner Miller moment of scientific breakthrough.

‘I didn’t say there was anything wrong with me,’ Kant replied defensively.

‘You didn’t have to. I can see the signs.’

‘Signs? Look, let’s just get on with it. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Tell me about who we’ve got on the list.’

‘No, BK, you’re not going to get out of it that easily. Jesus, I’m good, I can read you like a book. Tolstoy’s War and Peace no less.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘A woman! That’s what you need. Put it this way, you’ve been at war with yourself too long, now you need a peace! A piece of the action.’

‘Is that what you think?’

‘Don’t get all innocent on me. You’ve just had two weeks to dust off your … your heat seeking missile and put it to good use but you’re still faffing around in no man’s land.’

‘And that’s from someone who bombs a different erogenous zone every night.’

‘Malicious rumour,’ Mackelroy replied smugly. ‘Anyway, if you don’t put your scud to good use soon it’s going to fall off its launching pad. From boredom! So I’m going to arrange a little something to … turbocharge things a bit. I’m going to see what I can dig up for you. How’s that?’

‘Hell, James, I’m not a bloody dog.’

Mackelroy chuckled. ‘Oh, come on, I’m sure you’ve got a bit of the old dog left in you. You’re not that old!’

Kant felt a flutter in his stomach. Is that excited anticipation? ‘I never thought I was that old.’ Kant retorted. He thought for a moment. ‘I suppose it couldn’t do any harm, but I don’t want one of your … you know, leftovers.’

‘What do you take me for?’

‘I don’t want to answer that without my lawyer present.’

‘Besides, I can’t have my main man moping around like a frustrated adolescent. Leave it with me, Monsieur Kant,’ Mackelroy replied in a surprisingly chirpy French imitation. ‘I’m certain we can unearth somesing testy vith ze dirt screpped off.’

‘No cadavers! I want the flesh on, and lots of it.’ Kant shook his head. ‘I don’t believe I’m actually engaging in this conversation.’

But the two men began to snicker like a couple of prepubes cent choir boys at the broken window to the girls’ changing room. The front desk intercom buzzed.

‘What is it, Janine?’ Kant snapped, embarrassed by his silliness, as if she’d heard them.

‘Sorry, Muster Kant, but there’s a man here at the disk to see you. John Sturges. He says he was told to come here by V’nce. He has a tin o’clock appointment to see you.’

‘You should have informed me earlier. Get him a coffee. Tell him I’ll see him in ten minutes. I’m in an important meeting with the director at the moment, so no more interruptions please.’

Kant didn’t wait for her reply. He turned back to Mackelroy. ‘And you can lose the smirk.’

Mackelroy didn’t.

‘And this is between you and me, right? Right!’

‘Sure. I’ll arrange a little soirée soon, a get together with a couple of friends. Not too soon though. We need to be on top of things here before the start of filming next week!’

Kant suddenly felt the grip of anxiety in his stomach that was normally reserved for the dentist’s waiting room. ‘I don’t know about this, James.’

‘Oh, don’t start. Look, relax, I promise I won’t let you come to any harm. Now can we get on with the minor situation of the fourth BK fucking S series?’

Kant suddenly felt the reality of his life hit him like a medicine ball to the solar plexus. He breathed out heavily. He’d been holding his breath again.

*

While Kant was on his holiday Vince MacLean had come across John Sturges, a prospective contestant for the show, booking him in for a preliminary interview. He had observed the grey haired, unkempt man wearing an old greatcoat a size too big for him, with his right hand fixed deeply in the pocket, as if his fingers were gripped around the neck of a bottle of cheap sherry. There was nothing too remarkable about that, except that the man was attending an exhibition opening of contemporary furniture and large abstract oil paintings in an exclusive gallery in Salamanca Place.

From his high octane existence as a foreign correspondent MacLean had found solace in the quiet of art galleries, and surprisingly to him, an admiration of abstract paintings in particular.

The scruffy man was clearly out of place amongst the loudly effervescent company, fashionable outfits and glistening jewellery. And yet he sustained an intense scrutiny of the exhibits, oblivious to the cerebral and artsy persiflage and sequin crackle of wealth around him, avoiding all eye contact as he moved about the exhibits. MacLean waded through the stifling, perfumed air towards the man, whose concentration had fixed on four square metres of wildly intertwining streaks of mauves and blues. MacLean sipped his Pinot and reflected on the painting for a moment.

‘You like abstract painting?’ MacLean spoke cautiously, still studying the work as he stood side on to the man, who nodded.

‘Me friend’s over there,’ the man, in a low, gentle voice replied obliquely, his friend’s company apparently of far greater significance than the $25,000 painting ‘Flight of the Dryads’ on the wall before him.

MacLean looked in the direction of the man’s gaze. The friend was younger, more dishevelled, intellectually impaired, standing alone in camouflage by a pillar, and self contained in a naïve sensibility. His fingers on one hand were playing with the tips of the fingers and on the other as if he was working out the answer to a complex mathematical problem, or checking that all his appendages were intact.

‘We come to galleries sometimes. Do you know Sebastian?’

MacLean peered over again. ‘No, pretty sure I don’t, pal.’

‘What’s your job?’

MacLean was momentarily thrown by the sudden change in tack and openness of the question. ‘Oh, er … I’ve been a journalist but I’m … ’

‘You wanna write about my story?’

‘Your story? Oh, er … well … ’

‘I bin in and out of State care … you know, real bad ’n’ that … ’n prison too … ’

The man’s stress of the word care sent a shiver down Vince’s spine; he sensed deep trauma. He’d seen it, felt it too many times. Images of obliterated villages, orphaned children and the smell of charred human flesh had impressed themselves into his psyche.

‘I’m not reporting at the moment. But, you know there is something else you might be interested in.’ But this wasn’t the right time or place. ‘Look, I’d like to listen to you; how about we make a time and have a yarn?’

‘I’m not queer or nothin’.’

‘Sir, I’m sure you’re not. Not that I’d give a toss if you were.’

‘I better get Sebastian; like ’e gets a bit jumpy if I leaves ’im on ’is own for too long.’

‘Sure. Do you have a phone number?’

MacLean wrote the mobile number and address on the back of his catalogue.

‘I’m Vince, by the way. What shall I call you?’

‘Oh … er … John. Yeah, John.’ He repeated it, as if, prior to the asking, having a name had been of no great importance for him.

As John turned and began meandering through the crowd, Sebastian lifted his hand surreptitiously and wiggled his fingers towards his friend, smiling brightly. The guileless face completely happy, waiting for his friend to reach him before following him to the entrance.

Later in the week MacLean drove into the heart of Bridge water, to his journalist’s eye a disregarded suburb, except possibly by the police Vince thought, as he drove through its streets. It felt even more isolated than the grimy northern disintegration of light industry and unremarkable suburban sprawl. The district, a collection of so called broad acre housing estates, had been dumped on treeless wastelands away from prying eyes decades ago, without a heart and totally inadequate infrastructure. Bridgewater’s only claim to fame, apart from the notorious tribes of Bogans, entrenched crime, high rates of teenage pregnancy, record levels of family breakdown, physical, mental and sexual abuse and homelessness was that the High School had been opened by one of the world’s wealthiest and most famous women, Queen Elizabeth the Second.

Regrettably Her Royal Highness missed out on her opportunity to return to see how the school was going because on the approximate thirty year anniversary of its opening the place was burned to the ground by arsonists unknown, more than likely disgruntled students with nothing better to do on that particular night.

As MacLean drove slowly, looking around for John’s house, teenage girls in obscenely tight track pants pushing prams wandered aimlessly along the barren streets with suspicious stares, puffing cigarettes. Bleak cul de sacs were decorated with skid marks and burnouts, furtive ten year old boys with shaved heads and scraggy mullets played truant in dusty gardens, smoking and chucking rocks at cans and road signs. Rows of young trees along the sides of the road, planted, no doubt, by an exasperated council to supposedly beautify, stood bare of branches, vandalised down to single dead stalks.

John Sturges’ fenceless house was at the end of one such cul de sac. The burnt out shell of a car sat outside the house next door like a well parked meteorite visiting from a remote astral galaxy. A dog was asleep where the driver’s seat had been in more sober days. Weeds grew in the gathered dust around clomps of molten vinyl and tyre rubber, and a rusting shopping trolley, one wheel missing, lay on its side gathering leaf litter and empty soft drink cans.

After he had been in Hobart for only a few months MacLean was staggered by how many staring, standing, lying, and wandering wounded there seemed to be around the city not so different from the broken souls he had written about in the aftermath of civil war. The sobering difference was, Tasmania was a free and beautiful island and yet it was as if these people had become invisible to the rest of the population in the more profligate suburbs.

MacLean squinted in the harsh light as he emerged from the house after an hour. He could hardly wait to report back to Kant. In the curtained depths of this man’s miserable life he’d stumbled upon gold.