The Fix by Nick Earls

could have afforded and no intersection. My expectations duly got beaten down. I gave up city views for city glimpses, and city glimpses for a balcony that opened out to the next block of flats. I gave up character for something solid. I gave up fully renovated for workable, or thought I did. I found my box of a flat and told myself it was four times the size of anything I could have bought in London, and I signed on the dotted line.
    After the shortest possible settlement period, I unlocked the door on the hot afternoon when they gave me the keys and I walked in to a stale smell, as though people had sat there too long and failed to live up to their own lowest expectations.
    It was mine, though. And it was a start.
    I had been on contract in London, rather than being an employee. That had been my choice, since it let me believe I was a serious journalist killing time as a fixer until the right offer came along. But the GFC crashed the party, and I was among the first to go. The contract made it easy for them, but plenty of employed staff went too. ‘Things look a lot less bad in Australia,’ my director said to me, in an apologetic tone he was about to become accustomed to. ‘You’ll probably end up one of the lucky ones.’
    So I took a box, the first box I could find, and I filled it with my stuff. I wanted to get out before people could look at me, before anyone knew. On the previous Saturday, my girlfriend Emily had decided we weren’t working out. I had already been packing boxes.
    As I caught the lift to ground, I wasn’t aware that two banks with head offices in the building were in the process of collapsing. When the doors opened I saw TV cameras, a scrum of media, and they saw me. They caught me, trapped me there. They asked which bank I’d worked for and I told them it hardly mattered now. They asked who I was and I faked a name. It was only when I saw the news that night that I noticed how they had framed the picture. I was carrying a Billecart-Salmon box, Grand Cuvée.
    I was that day’s perfect picture of the hard landing of greed, even though the picture was all wrong. I was no banker, I had no idea where the box had come from, and greed never landed hard in the end anyway. It was the engine of that machine.
    * * *
    ON WEDNESDAY I WENT back in to Randall Hood Beckett. Ben was out at a meeting with a client, but due in by ten, and Frank had commandeered his diary after that for me. Through the glass wall of Ben’s office, mid-screen on his sleeping laptop, I could see the post-it note on which Frank had written in bold black pen ‘10am – Josh. No excuses. F’. The laptop was turned around, putting the note on show, and I couldn’t know if Ben had left it at that angle, or Frank had turned it.
    I had put the siege file aside the day before without going through all of it. I had yet to watch any of the DVDs. I had realised that time was short and that I needed to make some calls, so I had gone through mymedia guide and pasted together a list of targets and their details.
    When I turned up at the office there were red and blue marker pens on my desk, so I drew a grid on my whiteboard and wrote up my pitch list. Surely rule number one when spinning anything was to spin yourself first, and my big visible list said I meant business, I had a plan. I wasn’t just the guy in the room with the boxes.
    My first call was to QWeekend at the Courier-Mail. They heard me out and said, ‘You know, it’s close. Normally we’d probably take it but we’ve run a few hero stories lately. And his dad rates as a bit of a white-shoe villain, but there were worse. I’m sure we’ll do it in news, though. If he’s getting the big gong on Monday, news’ll give him a run on Tuesday. We’d have a photographer and reporter going along.’
    I left messages on voicemail at the Weekend Australian and Financial Review magazines and, since Frank