The Ambulance Chaser Read online

  Precisely what needed to be done eluded me. The place was an entire edition of Architectural Digest, and the backyard looked pristine. It was mainly tiles, anyway, with rows of fir trees in terracotta boxes, and an aqua-blue and white tiled pool so clear and sparkling you’d expect to find Gatsby floating dead in it. At the far end of the garden was a stretch of lawn that looked like it had been cropped by the same coiffeur Adrianna had just seen. A child’s bike, lying flat on the ground, needed to be moved to its proper resting place. This was the only thing I could see that wasn’t entirely just so.

  We stood around for a few moments longer than was comfortable surveying the yard, seeing nothing that needed any form of attention. Bill scratched his beard and I looked at the ground, scuffing my boot over Italian tiles.

  ‘Drink, Bill?’ Ade – as Bill called her – finally said.

  Bill nodded slowly, looked at her, then smiled. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Would –’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Bill said, cutting her off quickly. Ade had just about reached the blonde wood of the cavernous back living area by the time I thought to ask what it was I was supposed to do, or why I was needed.

  ‘Bill,’ I half whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Exactly. What? What do I do?’

  He looked around the backyard, one eyebrow raised. ‘Clean up the leaves,’ he finally said.

  ‘What leaves?’

  ‘Those fucking leaves. Look around. Make yourself useful. She’s entertaining people tomorrow. You heard her.’

  I shrugged and was about to slink off towards the only fallen leaf in the backyard when Ade called out. ‘Oh, I know, that bloody fig,’ she said, looking at Bill as though the tree was often the subject of conversation between them. ‘There’s a football up in it. Right up the top. You can’t even reach it with the pool skimmer thing. Could you . . . ?’ She looked at me.

  ‘Sure, he’ll get it down,’ Bill answered for me. Ade smiled, nodded, and headed back inside.

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘I mean, if the pool rod won’t reach it.’

  Bill strode up to me. ‘How?’ he said, losing patience. ‘Use your brains. Take the pool stick, climb up high enough, and knock the thing down. Follow?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  Bill turned and headed back to the house. ‘Oh, Chris,’ he yelled just before walking inside. ‘Don’t forget. Two rings. If anyone comes. Thanks, mate.’ He then walked back to the door, shoved the cat outside with one of his enormous boots, and went in. The cat stretched, looked up at me with an irritated expression, meowed and moved on. No one was going to witness what was about to go on upstairs.

  Ever tried to climb a mature Moreton Bay fig? It’s not easy. Try doing it at dusk carrying part of a pole used for cleaning a pool.

  Spotting the football seemed simple enough. Even in the softening early evening light I thought I could make it out in the thick foliage somewhere near the top of the canopy. That’s where I was headed.

  My first thought was to drag over an outdoor table to stand on to get into the tree, because there was no way I could climb up from the ground. The table turned out to have a marble top, though, and it would have taken a crane and a Development Approval from the local council to shift it. I then took one of its ornate chairs – wrought iron and heavy enough as it was – and piled the cushions from every other chair I could see to give me a base to climb up.

  Once I was in the tree, my navigation was less than perfect, as was my balance. Each branch I moved to seemed to take me, very slightly, further away from my intended target. I had a firm footing in a fork of a large branch and was just making sure of my left-hand grip when I suddenly noticed the tree had started to come to life in a disturbingly Tolkien kind of way.

  A more astute person may have noticed the bats before this. Probably at the point where the ball started moving. Or multiplying. Anyone half familiar with Sydney knows that fruit bats and fig trees go together like vampires and blood. The sky is full of them most evenings, circling in from the north-west towards the Botanic Gardens or Centennial Park, eager for their nighttime meal of eastern suburbs figs. In my defence, I can only say that the sound from the pool filter had initially hushed the beginnings of their nocturnal ramblings. Once I spotted one, I did notice he had company. The branches and limbs were sagging with bats. Hanging upside down, teeth bared, eating figs. And, from the sound of things, starting to become disturbed by the unusual presence of a member of the species Homo sapiens in the middle of their dining room.

  It doesn’t take much to send bats into a flurry of activity. Dropping the pole did the trick. They have quite a high-pitched shriek, and although their bodies are only about the size of harbour rats, their wingspan, once they start flapping about, is quite impressive. More impressive than their table manners. Figs were being sucked like cocktails on Dunk Island.

  I like watching wildlife – say, with David Attenborough and a glass of red on a Sunday evening – but I’ve never had the desire to be close enough to shake hands with anything wild unless my instructing solicitor confirmed there was money in trust. I willed my right hand to move, carefully took my mobile from my back pocket, punched a few keys, and let it ring twice. Time stood still. I occupied myself in lawyerly fashion by nearly shitting myself each time a bat shrieked, trying to pretend that the symphony of slurping sounds surrounding me was merely bat table etiquette, not the ritual precursor to scooping my eyes out.

  Bill emerged at the back door about sixty seconds later in his own agitated flurry of activity. Shoelaces undone, shirt not quite tucked in, hair less than ruly. His head scouted around like he was back in a South East Asian jungle.

  ‘Up here,’ I hissed. Bill squinted at the tree. ‘Up here, Bill,’ I said. ‘I need help.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t get down. There are bats up here.’

  Even from a distance I could see Bill’s eyes widen before he marched over to the trunk of the tree next to the chair. ‘There’s what?’

  ‘There are bats up here. Thousands. Millions. They’ve got the shits. I can’t get down.’

  Bill looked up at me and spat air from his lungs. ‘They’ve got the shits?’ he huffed. ‘This isn’t exactly a great time to interrupt me, you know? You gave me a fucking heart attack. I thought Stuart had come back home.’

  ‘I can’t move, Bill,’ I said. ‘Listen. They’re having a fucking council of war.’ The cacophony was growing by the minute. Bats were taking off and landing with a thud like it was Mascot International.

  ‘And what do you want me to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Help me.’

  ‘Call the bat police? Get the fire brigade? Poor little pussy stuck up in the tree?’

  At the mention of poor little pussy, Ade emerged from inside. ‘Everything okay?’ she yelled out.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Bill shouted. ‘This idiot’s got himself stuck in the tree with the bats.’

  ‘I told you I wanted that tree taken down, Bill. The figs it drops!’

  Bill grunted. He looked at me and sighed. Maybe even in the rapidly diminishing light he was able to see that I was white with terror. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘can you move your feet?’

  I gave my brain the order to lift my right foot. The brain, consistent with the usual chain of command, gave its order and the left foot shifted forwards slightly. We obviously had to improve our channels of communication. ‘Maybe,’ I said optimistically.

  ‘Put your hands and your feet where I tell you to, bit by bit, and you’ll be down in no time.’ I wasn’t sure if Bill had just picked up some South African heritage. Was he telling me to come down bat by bat? I stood still, confused. ‘Turn left,’ he then said, ‘and step down.’

  There’s no doubt he said that.

  ‘I said left,’ Bill sighed as I stepped down.

  My face was ten inches, if that, from a bat. I looked deeply into its dark eyes. The saying ‘as blind as a bat’ is a myth. They see very well. B
ut rarely land gracefully.

  He didn’t have far to glide. It was more of a lunge, preceded by what I thought was a vomit. Bill told me later, though, on the way to hospital, that fruit bats are notorious spitters. Obviously that’s what happened up in the tree. The little shit spat straight at me, like he’d spent a past life or two on the Yankees’ pitching roster or the Chinese Politburo. An electric strand of bat saliva went directly into my eyes as the cloak of Dracula opened. Then the fucker was on my head.

  A single misjudged bat landing can send an entire tree into a heightened state of agitation. They have a zero tolerance policy for bad gliders. The canopy exploded with shrieking bats as I fell to the ground, wearing my furry friend as a hairpiece.

  Cats eat bats. Another thing I learnt that evening. The cat’s name was Bushy. I knew that from Adrianna’s cries of ‘Bushy, get off! Bushy, Bushy!’ These cries were uttered as I rolled around the ground in agony, bat gripping head as cat ate bat.

  Bill broke it up. I think he hit the cat with the pole that was lying on the ground. After what seemed like hours, I was eventually both bat and cat free. Blood was streaming into my eyes, although when I felt around my head I couldn’t find any wound that might have produced the amount of blood that seemed to be flowing down. A few bat and cat scratches, but nothing more serious. While I checked my neck in the vicinity of the jugular for teeth marks, I noticed that my right ankle was at an unusual angle to my right leg. It hadn’t really hurt until I saw it.

  ‘Shit,’ Bill said, looking at my foot and taking the words out of my mouth. He touched it, gently, before looking back up at me. ‘Dislocated,’ he said. ‘Better take you to the hospital.’

  I yelped as Bill helped me up, and again with each hop I took towards the car. Every time I let out the merest whimper, he told me to pull myself together, that he’d seen blokes with their legs blown off and this was, comparatively, a scratch. I got no sympathy from Adrianna either. As we left she was too busy comforting Bushy, who had the look of a cat who would at least call for back-up before attacking a bat again.

  Bill offered to wait around in emergency with me after we arrived at the hospital, but I told him to go home. It could be hours before I was x-rayed and given more than a few Panadols. Naturally, I wanted a rabies shot laced with morphine, but the nurse wouldn’t be in it, even when I told her I would be sucking her blood at midnight and dead at dawn.

  I took another look at my puffy, awkwardly angled foot. Joining a Riverdance company now also had to be scratched off the list of potential career paths. It had been a long day. It had been a long twelve months. Bill left me to reflect on this. He at least gave me one thing to be happy about.

  ‘The bat,’ he said just as he left. ‘I don’t think you noticed, but he didn’t make it.’

  Four

  ‘Everything all right, my darling?’

  Mrs Zanetta, who was enquiring about my wellbeing, was one of the owners – with Mr Zanetta – of Zanetta’s Café. She had been calling me her ‘darling’, or her ‘beautiful man’, or ‘my handsome one’ for a month now, every morning just before nine. This was the entire time, less one week (it takes Mrs Zanetta a week to get to know someone on a ‘darling’ basis), that I’d been back in the workforce. I had begun my new job at the end of April, after my ankle had recovered sufficiently, and now Mrs Zanetta sometimes used all three endearments in the course of one sentence. ‘Hello, my beautiful man, what can I do for you this morning, my darling, same as usual, my handsome one?’

  Mrs Zanetta’s regulars were the recipients of similar acclaim. Looks had nothing to do with it. You could have a face like a dropped pie, but if you fronted up for a week of 8.50 am takeaway cappuccinos, by the next Monday you were sure to be a gorgeous thing, in her eyes at least.

  I contemplated Mrs Zanetta’s enquiry about whether everything was all right with her darling, giving the faintest of smiles as I considered my response.

  ‘I’ve lost all motivation for work, love and living, Mrs Z,’ I could have said, and this would have neatly encapsulated my state. ‘A trustee regulates my financial affairs. I was going to be a gardener, but even the wildlife started attacking me. My GP has put me on Zoloft. Two hundred milligrams a day. Nowhere near enough to cope with my current job. I’m working as a claims officer at an insurance company, in case you’re wondering. I used to be a human rights lawyer, for God’s sake.’

  Yes, a human rights lawyer. Or, if you’re a politician, an ambulance chaser. But not anymore. How had this happened to me? I posed this question at intervals of about eight seconds. So, at least my life had a sort of symmetry. From ages thirteen to seventeen there were eight-second intervals between thinking about sex; from seventeen to twenty-three these were briefly interrupted by occasional thoughts like ‘what will I do with my life?’; from twenty-three to thirty they were briefly interrupted by thoughts of ‘how do I right the wrongs of the world and become hugely successful by thirty?’; from thirty to thirty-four they were interrupted by thoughts about life not quite working out how I had hoped; and now at thirty-five I was back to straight eight-second breaks, that would repeat and repeat until I died, about how this had happened to me. ‘I’m kind of a mental lighthouse,’ I could have told Mrs Z, and have been all my life, flashing almost the same thoughts at almost the same intervals.

  All of this I contemplated in the period of time between Mrs Z’s question, my faint smile and finally responding, just before my silence became rude, with the words, ‘Fine, Mrs Z. Couldn’t be better.’

  ‘Tony. Tony! Chris’s coffee, please,’ Mrs Z then cried at her already heavily cappuccino-, latte- and flat-white burdened husband, who stood as a permanent fixture by the frothing espresso machine.

  ‘How are you today, my friend?’ Mr Zanetta said, as usual.

  I’m kind of a mental lighthouse, was what I thought. ‘Good, thanks, and you?’ I replied, watching warily in case any of the sweat building on Mr Zanetta’s brow looked like making the long drip into his frothing jug of milk. No point in giving Mr Z the long story. He had enough to deal with at ten to nine in the morning. I took my coffee, exchanged ciaos with the Zanettas, agreed my leg was slowly getting better, and headed up to the offices of my new working home, South Pacific Group Insurance Limited.

  ‘Good morning, Christopher,’ Peter Gibbs said. ‘I’m so pleased you followed my instructions.’ I looked at him blankly as the lift doors shut. ‘The time, dear boy,’ he said, the crisp affectation in his voice clipping me across the ears and waking me up. I looked at the monitor above the doors. 8.59 am.

  ‘I’m a minute early, aren’t I?’

  ‘Nine by the time we sit down, Chris. Perfect.’

  Peter Gibbs was the ‘Team Leader’ of my claims group at South Pacific. Insurance companies are very military in their hierarchies. Claims Officer, Claims Manager, Team Leader, Division Head, Chief Claims Officer, etc. You can keep going up the chain to the CEO. When I say up, the natural order in most large Australian companies is like the Ascent of Man in reverse. The CEOs and Chief Financial Officers of some have trees in their offices and PAs just to groom their backs. Government operates along similar lines.

  Gibbs was at least ten years too young to call me ‘dear boy’, but I could see it working for him one day. On my first morning at South Pacific he had confessed a desire to take me under his wing, so to speak, so that I understood exactly what he expected of me, and, heaven forbid, in case I had notions of corrupting anybody in his claims team out of following the glorious sheltered workshop philosophy he laboured tirelessly to maintain at South Pacific. Tirelessly until 5 pm, that is.

  It was not a particularly large wing he took me under. Gibbs was half a foot shorter than me, thin, and neat. He had an aside about everyone at South Pacific. These discursions were mainly bile, spat from a pair of ludicrously thin lips. I heard some of these when he took me for a drink after my first Friday at South Pacific, along with Clare McDonald, another Team Leader. His mission behind the drink
was to ensure I forgot everything I’d been told about South Pacific Group Insurance and its culture during my three-day induction, and follow only his express instructions.

  Gibbs insisted on a bar in Darlinghurst because he refused to drink in any of the city bars. ‘A mauve cushion, a piece of bent stainless steel, a plasma TV and three waitresses slightly better looking than the Golden Girls and they think it’s the Moulin Rouge,’ was his explanation.

  In-house insurance rule number one was delivered by Gibbs with riesling number one. ‘You are always correct. All good ideas are yours. Any errors, blame the external panel lawyers. That’s what they’re there for. And be as rude to them as you like. Are you following?’

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m never wrong, I’m always rude, and I take all the glory.’

  ‘Correct. Now, work hours. It’s eight-thirty to five-thirty at the extremes where we live, Chris. Nine to five is better. The last thing we want is some disbarred lawyer trying to get his career in order by working hard and having better ideas than anyone else. The only thing I expect you to work hard at is being mediocre. Is that clear?’

  ‘I can do mediocrity with the best of them,’ I said.

  ‘Splendid,’ Gibbs said, smiling approvingly at me before turning to Clare. ‘Mediocrity is very important to us at South Pacific,’ he added, ‘isn’t it, dear?’

  ‘Very,’ Clare said deadpan. ‘We cherish it.’

  ‘Do you think you can abide by these rules?’

  I held up my glass. ‘To the unswerving pursuit of mediocrity,’ I said.

  I was then given the lowdown on the various personalities that made up the SPGI claims department. There were four kinds of people employed in claims, according to Gibbs. The first were those – like him – who wanted less stress than the rigours of private practice provided. ‘I want to enjoy my life, Chris,’ he told me. ‘And can you imagine me having me as a client!’