sure we could come to some …’
‘No we couldn’t,’ Walter said, moving away slightly. ‘I think you should go.’
So he went. There was little else he could do. Coming as he had without making an appointment, without announcing his intentions or his profession, was stupid enough, without compounding the felony by making a complete arsehole of himself now.
Michael considered himself a pragmatic kind of guy and, with only the slightest head-nod of acknowledgement to Walter, he walked back out into the foyer and pressed the lift-call button.
As amazing as it was considering their shared circumstances, this had been his very first face-to-face meeting with Walter Kovak. He had seen the wife before, Maggie was it? But never Walter himself, well not properly. He’d seen photos of him in the papers and news footage of him leaving the hospital, but he’d never seen him in the flesh like this, back in his own life, in his own suit and tie, out of the news and back at work.
He had been, he admitted to himself, slightly excited by the prospect. In fact, wasn’t it this that had led him into acting so rashly? So easy, wasn’t it, to look him up on the net, find out where he worked, ask at Reception if he could see him? They’d sent him out just like that, as if he was just anybody. And so he’d got his first face-to-face look at Walter Kovak.
And yet … like someone meeting their favourite movie star and finding out that he or she was shorter than expected, or their skin wasn’t as perfect as it was up on screen, that they were annoying or tongue-tied or rude, or worse that they were old—that they were, in fact, ordinary, everyday people— Michael was aware of a feeling of acute disappointment. Here was a man who had survived a major accident, a man who had survived against the most alarming, the most stupendous odds, and yet face to face he was a totally ordinary bloke, kind of daggy, working in an insurance firm. There was nothing special about him at all.
3.
THE ODDS OF DYING
Walter was washing up his mug in a small, drab kitchenette when Mick walked in with another young man very much in the Mick mould, a face that Walter hadn’t noticed around Equity Insurance before. Mick was younger than Walter, perhaps in his mid to late twenties. He belonged to a group of young men, mostly Aussie, who all went to bars together after work on a Friday night, or out for lunchtime curries, or for a Red Bull and a smoke, or whatever it was they did when they disappeared from the office. He was pasty faced and flabby, and wore loose-fitting, slightly too-big trousers halfway down his arse, a half untucked shirt and loosened tie. He had a general air of not caring about the job (not that Walter would hold that against him particularly) and not being particularly intelligent, but he was, Walter thought with a sigh, the type who would get ahead.
Walter didn’t much like Mick. He didn’t like these sorts of young men. He didn’t understand them. The way they spoke for example.
Hey, mate.
Alright?
All good.
Much on?
Yeah. You?
Enough.
That’s the way.
How could they go on like that, with a whole string of non-sequiturs, and then move away from each other as if they’d had some sort of conversation? Walter didn’t get it. He just didn’t get it.
Mick spoke to him with a smirk on his face and in his voice.
‘Walter. This is David. He’s new. With me over in wealth management.’
‘Hey, mate.’ David said.
Here we go, Walter thought.
‘Hello,’ he said with a polite smile. ‘Good to meet you. I hope you settle in OK.’
With that Walter presumed it was all over, so he dropped his eyes and made a movement indicating he wanted to pass out of the kitchenette, but Mick did not move aside. He stood blocking Walter’s way out of the pokey little space, subtly menacing through merely being so stolidly in the way with no intention of moving. He was, Walter thought, just like a grown-up schoolyard bully and even though it was a long time since he’d been at school, he instantly remembered the prickle of being singled out.
‘So, Walt,’ Mick said. ‘Got time for a quick one?’
So that’s what it was about.
‘Well, not really. I’ve got to finish the …’ He again made as if to step between them, but again Mick didn’t stand aside and so he fell back.
‘Come on. A quickie. Come onnn, Walt. No good holding out on us.’
Mick eyed David and smirked.
‘Oh, OK. OK. A quick one. Why not,’ Walter said.
‘Right. Dave, pick a method of dying. Anything you like. Anything.’
‘A what?’
‘A method of dying. Walt’s a gun with odds. Knows them all. Don’t you Walter?’
‘Well, a lot of them, yes. It’s really not that unusual.’ It wasn’t unusual. He worked in life insurance in actuaries—of course it wasn’t unusual. Well, maybe a little.
Dying was, of course, a certainty, but Walter knew the precise odds of dying by different methods. The big killers were heart disease which killed one in five of the population, cancer one in seven, and stroke one in twenty nine. But he also knew off by heart the odds of dying in other ways, right down to the more obscure methods of bee sting and lightning strike.
‘Come on,’ Mick said to David. ‘Pick.’
‘Ummm. Righto. Arrr—car accident.’
Mick smacked his hands over his eyes.
‘Too easy!’ he said.
But Walter was warming up into it now.
‘Fatal on site, or delayed?’ he asked.
‘Delayed?’ David asked.
‘He means died after—in hospital,’ Mick answered.
‘Err—fatal.’
‘Driver or passenger?’ Walter smiled now.
‘Err—driver.’
‘Based on current statistics, the lifetime odds of a driver dying on site after having been in a car accident are one in two hundred and forty four. So, for every two hundred and forty four people now living, one of them will die, whenever they die, in a car accident.’
‘In Victoria? Or Australia wide.’
‘That’s Australia-wide. You’re a bit safer in Victoria. Here only one in two hundred and seventy five people will die in a car accident.’
Dave
