The Ambulance Chaser Read online

  Marrying someone of ethnicity seemed a big call for Nic. But John was well-mannered, well-dressed, well-paid, professional and, if not handsome, at least groovy looking. Someone who undoubtedly received e-mails from Europe and New York containing attachments that identified the new city professional look the moment it had been christened. It’s possible he jumped on the metrosexual bandwagon before Beckham. Every new style reached him instantly from the soundless rays of some passing satellite.

  I smiled at Nicole. Out of pity. She could only achieve anything approaching tranquillity and happiness if she had a lot to complain about, a lot of the time. She smiled back. Out of contempt. I knew what she was thinking. Loser. Criminal.

  Dinner started just before ten, not long after the first fireworks display, watched by all on the windswept balcony. Now buoyed by the steady flow of wine, the next few hours slid by almost imperceptibly, until I found myself, for the thirty-fifth time, on the cusp of greeting another New Year. And in that faint tremor of time between dinner and midnight, I had journeyed on the road from tipsy to a state I would describe as grimly drunk. My powers of observation were just intact enough to see that Sam had made this pilgrimage with me. On this well-trodden path she had most effectively demonstrated her physical condition by spilling nearly an entire glass of red wine on an Alexander McQueen making its debut. Sam merely looked at its distressed occupier, shrugged, mumbled something that could have been ‘sorry’, refilled her glass, and walked away.

  I had borne witness to this total absence of mens rea before, and knew that neither intervention nor chastisement were advisable. Give her a wide berth, don’t make a fuss, that’s the key.

  I certainly gave Sam a wide birth when I saw her talking tearfully in a corner to Phillipa Woodman, a colleague and member of her inner circle. I knew what they were talking about. The imminent end of our relationship.

  Pip Woodman had experience in breakups. At thirty-three she had already been through two marriages and was apparently in the early stages of contemplating a third. To her, breakups were inconveniences that had to be intermittently endured rather than scarring emotional traumas. I knew what Sam was saying to her. I could have written the script. He just won’t talk, I was sure she was saying. If it’s not something he’s interested in – I get nothing. And he certainly won’t talk about ‘it’. Not about how he feels, anyway. Or about what his plans are now. That’s why he’s in the mess he is. That’s the whole fucking problem.

  Enough about Chris, I am sure Pip replied. Chris is history.

  I could see Sam had started to tear up again at this point. Right when I became history. She no longer loved me, and it was well past the hour for moving on, but three years is three years. She had stayed beyond the point of duty. I am sure she emphasised this to Pip. And having to listen to all that bloody music, I know she’d say that. Fuck. Do you know what he listens to? Bob Dylan. Frank Sinatra. Dusty Fucking Springfield. Something called The Waifs. Work out the fucking theme in that lot. He’s not even forty.

  From the look on her face Pip was counselling immediate separation. You need to end it. Tomorrow. Now.

  I intend to, I am sure Sam said then. It’s always hard to find the right moment. You can’t if he’s listening to Dusty Springfield or Bob Dylan. Not if he’s watching some documentary on SBS about the CIA, or reading some biography of Che Guevara or Engels or some other clichéd leftie claptrap. And not if he’s focusing on the depressed, negative vision he has of his unhappy life.

  Pip said nothing.

  Sam wiped her eyes.

  I knew just what Pip Woodman was thinking. Dusty Springfield? Che Guevara?

  ‘Get rid of him,’ she said, this time loud enough for me to hear with my ears.

  11.55 pm. I couldn’t find her. All the other couples were outside, champagne in hand, arm in arm.

  I wondered whether she had got so drunk that she was sick. I’d certainly seen that after a few 21st Century PR parties. How many of those had ended with her on all fours in the bathroom, head over the toilet bowl? So I checked both bathrooms, but still no Sam. After all her insistence that this was where we would be spending New Year’s Eve, here it was, five minutes to New Year, and she was nowhere to be found.

  Next I checked the two main bedrooms, thinking that maybe she had put her head down for a while and fallen sleep. The door of the third bedroom was closed, but I didn’t need to check. She was in there. There was no one else it could have been. That little yelp. Unmistakably her. When was the last time I had heard that? And the first? Hell, that was long ago. When I was still on the way up, still a success. We met at a party. It was autumn, one night after the racing carnival, and we talked about travel and some drink called Caipiroska. Just the sort of thing she would talk about. A few hours later I heard that yelp for the first time.

  And there it was again. Penetrating the door like an x-ray, exploding white light in my eyes. Next thing I knew the door was wide open, the lock swinging limply on one screw. It was her, all right. Perched on the bed, looking up at me, animal in a trap. And she was on all fours, like I thought I might find her, but not over the toilet bowl. Just on her hands and knees, skirt hitched up. And Scott the accountant was there, behind her, also on his knees. So, this was why she was so keen to come here tonight?

  I couldn’t think of anything to say at first. No one could. I looked at Sam, and then Scott. Scott and Sam looked at me. I figured that they had been at it for a while, but were both drunk and had got their timing wrong, straying too close to midnight. These things happen. I knew, at least, what Sarah Byrne would say if she was standing where I was. Merde.

  Scott finally broke the silence. ‘It’s not how it looks,’ he said. Not exactly quick on his feet. No trial lawyer, this one. Definitely an accountant. For Enron.

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘It looks like you’re having sex with my girlfriend. How should it look?’

  Neither of them answered. A few years ago, I might have hit someone. Probably Scott. I would have yelled out something, some obscenity, at least. Several. I shrugged instead. ‘Happy New Year,’ I said, and walked off.

  I would not hit anyone. What homicidal rages I had left were fully extinguished on the door. I felt more ill than angry. I’d grown to despise Sam in the same way I despised myself. She had limped along with me as far as she could, and now here we were. At the end. Somehow this was as perfect as it was fucking awful.

  Sam was good looking and funny. She was the life of a party. She sure as hell was the life of this party. It took me by surprise one day when I realised we didn’t really have much to say to each other. Whenever I raised something with her that mattered to me, something about the state of the world, one of the things that I was bound to raise sooner or later after discussing Caipiroska or any other drink of the moment, she would spend far too long expressing no opinion at all. She was politically neutral. This was all the excuse I needed to become emotionally neutral. To that extent our relationship was in perfect harmony. It was also already in free-fall when my professional and financial collapse sent it into its final kamikaze dive.

  I’m sure I’m being unfair somehow. I must be more to blame than this. It’s just that after a certain point in time, which I can no longer precisely recall, everything she said was like an anaesthetic. I was never quite asleep, but I was not fully conscious either. I probably had the same effect on her. Finding her having sex with an accountant on New Year’s Eve was simply a glorious way to end this relationship.

  I should have left immediately but, for no reason I can think of now, went back out to the balcony, passing a flustered-looking Sarah Byrne in the process.

  ‘Have you seen Scott?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘He’s back there,’ I said. ‘Auditing Sam.’

  A big ball of colour exploded silently in the sky in front of me, shooting white, then green and red, reaching towards us. Midnight. The next year. More light followed, s
plintering the night, arcing over the water, revealing boats in the distance with silver light. Everyone around me started kissing, and a vein in my heart contracted, squeezed hard. 12.01 am. Someone kissed me, someone shook my hand. It was hard to smile. This was stupid. So fucking stupid.

  12.02 am. I saw Sam sobbing at the balcony door. Sarah Byrne was screaming somewhere, I could just hear that cultured shrill. Sam started yelling. ‘You think it’s all about you,’ she said. ‘It’s been hard for me too, Chris. Fucking hard. I can’t stand it anymore.’ She turned and ran inside, then disappeared out the front door.

  The next thing I remember I was on a bed, not the bed, another one, and I was crying. Sometime after that, a few minutes or many hours, someone was sitting on the bed next to me, stroking my head. ‘You okay?’ I heard her whisper.

  ‘No,’ I said. Then I fell back to sleep.

  I woke up not long before dawn. I got up, walked out to the living room. A couple was asleep on a couch, someone else in a chair. A few people were sitting outside on the balcony, still talking, still drinking. When I tumbled out of the building and down to William Street, the sky was starting to get light. I walked all the way home. With each step of my journey I imagined a new way how the evening should have turned out.

  We are at Harry’s, in his backyard. Drinking beer. Drinking red wine. The barbecue smoking. The children watching the fireworks on TV before bed. Laughing, hugging at midnight. Drunk and happy.

  But this is not what happened. Sam is gone. Gone for good, like everything else I once had in my life. Happy New Year.

  Three

  Spend twelve years as a litigation lawyer, get yourself disbarred, and you quickly find out that you don’t have much to offer to the world.

  I had been a mouthpiece. A servant of all and yet of none. And now that I was no longer allowed to serve all, or none, here’s what I could do. Nothing. I had no trade, no indentures of apprenticeship. I had no skills in PR, personnel, risk management, accounting and certainly not finance. I couldn’t fly a plane or operate a forklift, design a building or mix cement. I couldn’t sell anything except an argument. I couldn’t make or repair, except occasionally in re-examination. I could not solve problems, only advance a case. I did not create anything. Except a mess of my life.

  I only hesitated to put my head in the oven on January 1 because I was sure to fuck it up somehow, and emerge alive and kicking, singed around the ears, medium rare around the cheeks. Harry came to my rescue on January 2. At a time when my list of New Year’s resolutions remained strictly limited to ‘put head in oven’.

  ‘Ring Bill Doyle,’ he said when he phoned. ‘I’ve fixed it up with him. Well, to be honest, he rang me. And don’t panic, he’ll show you what to do. I think it’s a great idea. You need to get out and stop vegetating.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘And it’s cash money. You won’t be on the books, so the trustee won’t know. Not that I know anything about that. I’d prefer him not to do it that way, for obvious reasons, but Bill is Bill, and that’s how he wants it.’

  Cash money. Undisclosed to my trustee in bankruptcy. Or to the tax office. It sounded just like old times.

  Bill Doyle owned Doyle’s Mowing and Gardening. It doesn’t sound like much, but what had started as a one-man-and-trailer operation in the mid seventies was now a massive enterprise. Bill Doyle was so successful that he had gradually been able to franchise off parts of his business, while retaining the wealthiest suburbs – or at least the most expensive houses and richest clients – within his own dominion. He had numerous employees and subcontractors under his control, and ‘mowing’ and ‘gardening’ weren’t half of the services they offered. Doyle’s weeded, pruned, sprayed, fertilised, landscaped, planted, trimmed, installed sprinkler and fountain systems, sculpted hedges, planned and executed annual clean-ups, maintained pools and even fixed fuses and changed washers. Bill Doyle didn’t sow a lawn, he renovated it. No worthwhile home with a square millimetre of grass would be complete without him.

  I first saw Bill when I was about ten. I had two best friends then. Harry, and a deaf boy called Edward. It was hard not to notice Bill if he was mowing a lawn or clipping a hedge somewhere near us in summer. He looked like Charlton Heston, and could shift a petrol lawnmower around like it was a child’s toy. He was a Vietnam vet, and the gossip in our street was that he was slightly mad. The three of us were always inclined to believe anything like that, then run with it further, until I’m sure each of us had it in his own mind that we were dealing with some more dashing version of Boo Radley. Unlike Boo, though, Bill wasn’t mute. When we rode past him on our bikes, he always said hello. The deepest sound any of us had ever heard. A voice from the Old Testament, from a Cecil B. De Mille set.

  We sometimes crossed paths with the voice of God when we were playing on Mrs Green’s lawn. Laura Green was the first person to give Bill Doyle a job when he came back from the war and opened his business. She lived on the city side of Centennial Park, which was the edge of the world for us Randwick boys back then. The main attraction of the Greens’ house was their daughter, Heather, who we were all in love with. We played our twilight summer games in the Greens’ large garden, partly because of Heather, and partly because after six we weren’t allowed into the vast, darkening expanses of the park. It was in that garden one day that we saw Bill hit a man so hard he seemed to take the life from him. The man had it coming, and we were all in awe of Bill Doyle after that.

  Bill was nearly sixty by the time I started work with him, and although still cut in the Charlton Heston mould, he was more Moses then than Ben Hur. The voice of God remained. ‘Show me your hands,’ he said when I turned up on my first hot January day. ‘Fuck me dead,’ he then added, massaging my palms with biblical strength, ‘Have you ever done a day’s work?’ It was an entirely rhetorical question. The only day’s work he thought I had ever done was the two occasions on which I turned up as his counsel at the Waverley Local Court chasing some of his recalcitrant debtors, both dot.com millionaires who had enjoyed brief spells as financial giants before, like me, unceremoniously biting the dust.

  Bill didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘You’ll mow lawns and clip edges, sweep, weed, spray and clean up. Try not to cut or kill anything I don’t tell you to. You’ll have some work stains on those hands in no time.’ He was right.

  Harry was also right about physical work. At first, just learning how to start the lawn clipper, ominously styled the Scorpion, took the employment of all of my mental resources. More important was the pride I took in seeing an untidy yard become a neat one, an unruly lawn become a manicured one. I didn’t just spray trees or prune bushes, I treated them. I formed relationships with plants. I became so involved, and so exhausted, that I stopped worrying so much about myself, about what had happened to me. I ceased, at least for a while, to focus constantly on my fall. The only side effects of my efforts were some blisters, some sunburn, and a slight rash each time I sprayed citrus trees to rid them of stinkbugs. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Bill told me, examining the red dots on my forearm. ‘It’s only Agent Orange.’ I assumed he was joking, but he was deadpan about everything.

  There were other benefits in working for Bill. Largely because of owner insistence, he looked after the gardens and yards of some of the most lavish houses in Sydney. Late nineteenth century Centennial Park mansions with night-soil alleys out the back, through to modern piles at Darling Point equipped with lifts and satellite-controlled home environment systems. Each day was a new lesson about the wealth in this city.

  Then there was the money. Fourteen dollars per hour, $560 per week, plus overtime. In cash. Tax-free. Not bad for a bankrupt. I’d lost my career, my house, my car, my credit cards, and my financial freedom. Why bother being entirely honest now? This job was a way back into the summer light of the world from a dark, dark place.

  I should have known it wouldn’t last.

  The big house opposite Centennial Park was one of Bill’s regular
s. Not that he did that much gardening there. Over the course of the summer it became clear that there were at least three homes where Bill offered more than just gardening and related services. Unless you used a very broad definition of related services. I did say, after all, that he was still cut in the Charlton Heston mould. It wasn’t just that Bill spent most of the time at these places inside the house, while I toiled outside, that tipped me off. Being instructed to call him on his mobile, let it ring twice, then hang up if anyone should arrive while we were there, turned the obvious into the bleeding obvious.

  Bill had a track record of this kind of thing. He had extensively landscaped some stockbroker’s backyard many years ago, including the installation of the then groundbreaking technology of an automatic watering system, all at great cost to the broker, while at the same time knocking off the broker’s wife. His diversions from the backyard to the bedroom ultimately led to a divorce, with the wife keeping the matrimonial home in the settlement. Eventually Bill moved in as husband number two, acquiring the wife, the house, and the landscaped garden and watering system the stockbroker had paid him a fortune for. Nice work if you can get it.

  Now Bill was divorced, amicably enough still to do the garden of his ex-wife and her third husband, and on good enough terms with a few of his female clientele that it could be said of him that, for a gardener, he had an excellent bedside manner.

  This particular visit began no differently to any other to the house opposite Centennial Park, except it was later than usual. Bill took a call on his mobile after we’d finished what should have been our last job, and within a few ‘yeps’ we were headed back towards the park. The exhausted look of protest on my face evoked no sympathy from my master. ‘It’s cash money, mate,’ he said. ‘Take it or fucking leave it.’

  The attractive forty-ish madam of the manor was called Adrianna, and she was there to greet us in the backyard after we walked around from the drive. Adrianna was dressed entirely in black, and her matching raven hair looked like it had just had a once-over by someone very expensive in a Double Bay salon. She was having people on Saturday night, she explained, so the backyard needed an emergency once-over too.