He sits on the couch, swathed in a blanket. He phones Max, wondering why his old boss needed to see him so urgently; he must know something about Molloy. But the call rings out. He gives it away and Facetimes Vern and Liam instead. The boy’s face comes streaming through the ether onto his screen, bright and full of cheer, bringing warmth into the frigid flat. They talk, Liam initially excited and cheerful before, for no apparent reason, he starts to cry. Vern takes the phone back, says the boy will be fine, that he’s just tired. Martin feels guilty for upsetting his stepson’s equilibrium, for reminding him of his absence, of Mandy’s. He tells Vern there is no news of Mandy: he’ll make some calls tonight, start searching tomorrow. The life flows back out of the apartment as he says his goodbyes and cuts the connection.
He tries Max again. Still no answer. What is he up to? What does he know about Tarquin Molloy? Martin closes his eyes, starts to drift, growing warm at last, his mind returning to those early days at the Herald, to the night of his humiliation, the night he started to become a real journalist. Throughout that first year as a cadet he’d been intimidated by Max, the chief of staff; been so eager to please him, or at least appease him. He’d been so full of himself, with his honours degree in history, wanting to tell great stories, like Livy, A.J.P. Taylor and Manning Clark. Max had been scathing. ‘Cadets don’t tell stories; cadets report facts.’ And, ‘It’s a news story, Scarsden, not the rise and fall of the Roman fucking Empire.’ That particular quip had stuck; for a time his fellow cadets nicknamed him Gibbon.
So Martin had buckled under, tried to stick to the facts, keeping his writing as simple as possible, even while D’Arcy Defoe won praise for his eloquence. That hurt. One time, D’Arcy was sent to cover a council meeting but had found it so boring, he’d filed a sketch, a satirical piece. Max praised his initiative and the piece was published online.
When Martin was revolved through the same round, he’d encountered the same problem: council proceedings were mundane, not significant enough to warrant space in a paper distributed statewide. So he’d tried a different tack, tried digging, tried to substantiate rumours of corruption, of illegal rezoning to benefit property developers. Even now he cringes at the memory. A councillor had gone out of business, was unable to pay his debts. Martin had replaced a sentence with a word, labelled the man a ‘bankrupt’. It wasn’t accurate, the man threatened to sue, and was only persuaded out of it by a fellow councillor keen to curry favour with the Herald. Max’s silence was more scathing than any words could ever be.
Three weeks later, promotions were announced, cadets graduating into rounds. D’Arcy got the plum: state parliament. Not Martin. Max gruffly told him he’d make the cut next time, maybe in three months, maybe in six. Martin considered quitting.
That night at the pub, upstairs in the roof garden, while everyone else was celebrating around him, or pretending to, Max found Martin nursing a beer and tending his ego. The chief of staff sat with him, put his imposing persona to one side, and spoke with sincerity.
‘Listen, Martin. Local government is a backwater. Everyone knows it. Reporting the facts isn’t enough; the stories will almost never be important enough for a paper like ours. The only two in your whole intake who realised that were you and D’Arcy. Everyone else just obeyed the rules, followed the formula and had their efforts spiked. You would have been promoted as well, if you hadn’t fucked up. But trust me, that fuck-up will serve you in just as good a stead as D’Arcy getting his story published. Always check your facts; double-check them. Never rely on one source when you can use two.’
After that, Max bought him a beer and they sat talking into the night, like equals, his colleagues looking on with jealousy until a couple joined them, and then more. By the end of the night, the table was packed, full of drunken camaraderie. That was the night Martin had found his new family, after the trauma of his Port Silver childhood and the cut-price fellowship of university.
He opens his eyes, looks around him at the apartment’s walls, decorated with trophies of his career as a correspondent: a poster of Lenin purchased from a market in the outskirts of Moscow, a woven palm hat from the Pacific, a carving of Christ from deep in the Amazon. A declaration of rebellion from the Arab Spring, a bullet-holed road sign from Africa, a Hamas flag from the Gaza Strip. He’d once been proud of them, impressed by his own achievements, curating an exhibition in his own honour, but now they seem try-hard and sad. Who else decorates the walls of their living room with work-related memorabilia? Dentists with X-rays of recalcitrant mandibles, accountants with challenging spreadsheets, politicians with high-denomination brown paper bags? He shakes his head. The museum of Martin had been useful enough back in the day, projecting his man-of-the-world persona, impressing his intermittent lovers. He looks around him and wonders how he ever managed to live here, in this small world, his personal diorama. He decides he needs to redecorate, clear most of it out, although the hand-woven rug shipped back from Afghanistan, spreading warmth across the floorboards, can stay.
He tries Max again. Again, the call rings out. Jesus, where is he? What’s so important that he doesn’t answer?
Martin stands, starts pacing. Driven by some old habit, he absent-mindedly opens the refrigerator. There is nothing edible: jars of condiments, a bottle of beer left over from autumn, a crisper with a slowly decaying vegetable. He needs to scrub it
