‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I wanted to introduce myself.’
He scans me up and down.
‘How long have you been sitting out here for?’ he grumbles.
‘Six hours, sir.’
‘That was foolish.’
He turns and walks on towards the building’s car park.
I skip two paces to catch up with him.
‘I’ve read your newspaper since I was eight years old,’ I say.
‘So since last year?’ he replies, eyes ahead.
‘Ha!’ I laugh, pacing sideways to capture his gaze. ‘That’s funny. Umm, I wanted to see if you would . . .’
‘Where did you get that tie from?’ he asks, eyes still ahead.
He looked at me for maybe half a second and he caught the detail of my tie. The guy sees details. Journalists see details.
‘My Dad got it from St Vinnies.’
He nods.
‘You ever hear about the Narela Street Massacre?’ he asks.
I shake my head. He walks hard as he tells his story.
‘Cannon Hill, eastern Brisbane, 1957, bloke named Marian Majka, Polish immigrant, mid-thirties, kills his wife and his five-year-old daughter with a knife and a hammer. He sets fire to his house then walks on over to the house opposite his. Kills the mum in that house too, along with her two daughters. Then he starts piling all the dead bodies up because he’s gonna set them all alight and this little girl from the neighbourhood – ten-year-old girl named Lynette Karger – knocks on the door. She’s come to pick up her friends to go to school like she does every other day. And Majka kills her too and adds her body to the pile and sets it alight. He then shoots himself and the cops arrive to see the horror show. Little Lynette still had her school lunch money clutched in her hand.’
‘Jesus,’ I gasp.
‘I turned up to the house that morning to report on it all,’ he says. ‘I saw that whole sick mess up close.’
‘You did?’
‘Yep,’ he says, walking hard. ‘And still I haven’t seen anything more disturbing than that tie you’re wearing.’
He walks on.
‘It’s all the letters of the alphabet,’ I say. ‘I was hoping it would appeal to your love of words.’
‘Love of words?’ he echoes. He stops on the spot. ‘What makes you think I love words? I hate words. I despise them. Words are all I ever see. Words haunt me in my sleep. Words get beneath my skin and they creep into my mind when I’m having a warm bath and they infest my nervous system when I’m at my granddaughter’s christening when I should be thinking about her precious face but I’m thinking about the fucking words in tomorrow’s page-one headline.’
He’s clenching his fist and he doesn’t realise it until he walks on further to the car park. I lay my cards down.
‘I was hoping you would consider me for one of your cadetships?’
‘Not possible,’ he barks, cutting me off. ‘We’ve picked our cadets for the foreseeable future.’
‘I know, but I think I have something to offer you that others can’t.’
‘Oh, yeah, such as?’
‘A page-one story,’ I say.
He stops.
‘A page-one story?’ he smiles. ‘Okay, let’s hear it.’
‘Well, it’s complicated,’ I say.
He walks away immediately.
‘Too bad,’ he says.
I catch up with him again.
‘Well, it’s a little hard to explain it all to you right here as you’re walking to your car.’
‘Bullshit,’ he says. ‘Cook Finds Australia. Hitler Invades Poland. Oswald Kills Kennedy. Man Conquers Moon. They were complicated stories too. You’ve already wasted too many of your beloved words kissing my arse so I’ll let you have just three more. Tell me your story in three words.’
Think Eli. Three words. Think. But my mind is blank. I see only his sour face and nothing else in my mind. My story in three words. Just three words.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
‘I can’t,’ I say.
‘That’s two,’ he says.
‘But . . .’
‘That’s three,’ he says. ‘Sorry, kid. You’re welcome to apply next year.’
And he walks away, up the driveway into a shed filled with expensive automobiles.
*
I will remember this sinking feeling through the colour of the moon tonight. It’s orange, a crescent sliver up there like a wedge of rockmelon. I will remember these failures and letdowns and hopeless cases through the graffiti on the concrete wall opposite platform 4 of Bowen Hills train station. Someone has spray-painted an image of a large throbbing penis but the penis’s knob end is an impressive image of earth spinning beneath the words: Don’t fuck the world! On a long maroon platform seat I loosen