The Fix Read Free Page A

coming in but only in fits and starts, and Randall Hood Beckett was to be my oven job. The camp stove was a very temporary solution. It had to be. It was no more sophisticated than a Bunsen burner.
    â€˜I want to make the right choice with the new oven,’ I told him. ‘I don’t want to rush it. It might be smarter to do the rest of the kitchen at the same time. Renovate the lot.’ I had no plans for that, but it sounded like an adult thing to say. ‘The camp stove’ll be fine in the meantime.’
    â€˜Sure,’ he said. ‘And there’s always salads. Most of us don’t eat enough salads.’
    The job was charity. I was sure of it then.
    He checked that I didn’t want the takeaway coffee, took the last mouthful of his latte and led me out of the coffee shop in the direction of the nearby office towers, and Randall Hood Beckett.
    As we waited for the traffic lights to change, I realised that the news photo had been taken from exactly the spot where we were standing. I could see where the ambulance had parked. I could see the jacaranda trees that had framed Ben’s exit from the building.
    â€˜Does he know it’s me?’ It was the building diagonally across the intersection. He was up there now, somewhere, high up behind the gold glass, waiting.
    â€˜Who? Ben Harkin?’ Brett glanced at me just as the green walk sign came on. The woman to his right bumped his elbow as she stepped out onto the road. ‘Yeah. I guess so. I’m sure he does. I sent them that CV you emailed. They said he’d be glad to know it was someone with the right experience.’
    Like most respectable CVs, the facts – the dates and places – were true enough, but I read better than I was. Since my job was spin, though, there would have been a kind of negligence involved, surely, if I hadn’t applied just a little steady torque to my own story.
    We crossed the street and the granite forecourt, and cool air rode out of the open glass doors ahead of us as we approached the building. In the foyer, the granite floor was polished and people in dark suits – men and women – crisscrossed between the lift wells and the doors. It looked almost choreographed, like the opening ceremony of a lawyers’ Olympics. In two places, a pair of camel-coloured leather sofas had been arranged as if for conversation, in an L-shape with a potted rubber tree where they met. The Ls were mirror images of each other, and the rubber trees nearly identical. The sofas were empty.
    Mid-foyer, Brett stopped. ‘Ben wasn’t the one with Eloise, was he?’
    â€˜Yeah. He was the one with Eloise.’ It was the one question I had wanted him not to ask. ‘This has always been, and remains, a small town.’ A small town, and I had come back to it, come back and stuck myself to my past like a moth to a pantry moth trap. Eloise was in my head, vividly. I tried to force the image of her to pixelate, to erase. I had worked my way clear of all that, almost clear.
    Brett was looking at me, measuring up what this might do. I could tell he was expecting flight – gutless little-brotherly flight – and already planning for its consequences.
    â€˜That was then and this is now,’ I said. I realised I could live with the camp stove, pretty much indefinitely. It wasn’t the point after all. ‘I’m not walking away in the foyer of the building on the way to the meeting. You’ve pitched me. They’re expecting me. And you know I can do this job.’
    â€˜Okay.’ He had something big-brotherly that he wanted to tell me, some toxic platitude or perhaps an update on the benefits of salad, but he held it back. It’s a rare moment when a family member works out in time that every single thing they want to say would be wrong. ‘I think it’s on thirty-seven. Reception.’
    Half of the lifts, I noticed, went only to twenty, while the others