‘That’s right.’
‘Like what, Sir?’
‘I don’t know. An accident? A … something. I don’t know.’
There was a considerable pause before the voice resumed.
‘Could you please hold the line, Sir? I’ll get someone to speak with you.’
Walter waited. He swapped the phone to his other ear and gave a quick look around the office. No-one close enough to overhear.
Soon a new voice was on the phone. A man this time.
‘Hello, Sir. Is there something I can help you with?’
‘I just wanted to know if anything happened to the Wintergardens train this morning.’
‘Could I have your name, please, Sir?’
Walter hesitated. He blinked a couple of times. Oh crap!
He hung up quickly, slamming the phone down with such violence that a conversation a couple of cubicles away stopped dead. He sat hunched and still until the conversation started up again.
His hand was still on the phone when it rang. He jumped and withdrew his hand to his chest as if it was burnt. Then, after a moment and a breath or two, he picked it up again. It was Ros-at-Reception (he thought of her like that, not Ros, but Ros-at-Reception), a middle-aged woman who had obviously once been told, possibly on some professional development course, that she should always answer the phone with a smile because the person on the other end could hear it. Having done the job perhaps a little too long, the smile had gradually become a grimace, and her voice, when she answered the phone, ‘Equity-Insurance-good-afternoon’, sounded lilting, arch and incredibly insincere.
‘Man here to see you,’ she said shortly. She didn’t smile for internal calls.
‘Really?’ Walter didn’t usually get visitors to the office. ‘Who is it?’
There was a pause as Ros-at-Reception presumably asked the visitor for a name.
‘A Mr Michael Everaardt,’ she said.
Walter had never heard the name before. Didn’t have a clue who it was.
‘I’ll come round.’
The man waiting in Reception was young, dressed in denim jeans and an untucked button shirt, with a sports jacket over it. He had brown hair and a triangular tuft of facial hair under his bottom lip. He was slightly crumpled and gave Walter the impression of being a slacker. He extended his hand as Walter approached, and Walter, still not knowing who he was or what this was about, extended his own hand. They shook hands, three pumps, up and down, of medium firmness—entirely appropriate for a greeting in a business setting.
‘Mr Kovak?’ the young man asked.
‘That’s right. And you’re Michael … Everaardt was it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I wonder if I can have a minute or two of your time?’ he said, not really explaining anything.
Selling something, Walter wondered? Although that didn’t seem right.
‘I suppose so,’ he said. He checked with Ros-at-Reception that the smaller of the meeting rooms just off Reception was free and they went in there. He indicated a seat and the young man sat down, folded his hands on the table and leaned toward Walter.
Not selling something, Walter decided. The body language was wrong. He had recently done some reading on body language. This man was trying to ingratiate himself, certainly, but not in a sales kind of way. This was something else.
Walter’s mind flashed back to the phone call he had made to the train company just moments ago, and flushed with embarrassment and guilt. How stupid to ring a transport company and ask if anything had happened to one of their services. He remembered how the person who he had been transferred to, the one who kept calling him Sir, had asked him for his name, and how he had then hung up. He couldn’t have sounded any more like a terrorist if he tried.
He looked at the young man sitting with his hands folded on the table. Surely they couldn’t have traced him so quickly.
‘I want to talk to you about the accident,’ the young man said.
*
‘Tell me about the accident,’ Dr Feldman had said.
‘Why?’ Walter had responded in a surly manner.
This was in the early days, soon after coming out of hospital, before he had got into his groove with Dr Feldman.
‘I want you to.’
‘Why? I don’t understand why.’
‘I’m asking you to, that’s why.’
‘You know what happened.’
‘Correct.’
‘So why do you want me to tell you? It’s stupid. It’s irrelevant. It’s unnecessary.’
‘All of those things, yes. But Walter, that’s why you’re here.’
Yeah yeah. He was there to talk about the accident. The Australian Centre for Post Traumatic Mental Health had referred him to Dr Feldman. That’s where all this psychiatrist stuff had started. But he didn’t want to talk about the accident—he didn’t even want to think about it.
*
Michael Everaardt sat watching Walter who seemed a million miles away, his eyes blank and staring straight ahead.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked after a while.
He touched Walter on the elbow.
At the touch Walter’s eyes slowly focussed.
‘Can I get you something? Some water?’ Michael asked.
‘No …’ Walter said. ‘No thanks. Who are you?’
Michael wriggled in his chair. This, he knew, was where things were going to get sticky—stickier.
‘I’m a writer.’
‘Oh,’ Walter said with considerable dislike. ‘You mean a journalist, don’t you?’
‘I know you feel you were hounded by the press, but if you could just give me just a few minutes … I can assure you, you’ll have final say on what’s in and what’s …’
Walter didn’t appear to be listening. He got up slowly from his chair and stood with his feet firmly planted. Michael didn’t know this about Walter, of course, having never met him, but the stolid, sturdy stance was very much a Walter thing.
‘No,’ he said simply.
