I’M NOT DEAD.
Mike Nichols holds an army canteen above his head, shaking the last drops of water out. He’s in the back of a white van, one hand cuffed to a steel bar attached to the driver’s-side compartment. It’s been dark for a long time, suggesting the van is parked inside of something. He’s not underground. That would be a blessing. No, the interior of the van is as hot as hell—all the windows are wound tight. Mike stopped sweating hours ago. He knows it’s a bad sign.
The last bad sign of many.
Back at the police station, he was interviewed by a lanky detective with a cowboy’s name. Lloyd? Landon? Lowell. Lowell swanned around asking questions about Jamie Leaver. Hearing Mike’s answers, Lowell took notes as one might jot down a takeaway order. ‘You went to a party at Deputy Commissioner Sorensen’s house?’ Lowell said, brow lifted. ‘I didn’t even know he had a place down this way. You sure it was his joint?’
Mike told him about the men in his house, about his family.
‘I can look into that,’ said Lowell.
Then he left him in the interview room for hours.
No one followed up.
No word on Mike’s family.
Mike started wailing at the interview room door and got told to, Settle down, mate, we’ve got a mobile patrol looking into it.
Three hours later, Mike started up again and this time no one told him anything. Instead, three policemen braced him against a wall, bundled him up, and took him to a holding cell out back. After he simmered down, Mike called out and asked for a phone call, to which a uniformed cop told him that if he made any more trouble, he’d regret it. ‘He’s right,’ said the bloke in the adjoining cell. ‘If you keep yelling out, all that’ll happen is you’ll cop a flogging. They do whatever they like back here.’
Hours passed.
Then Lowell returned. ‘Come with me.’ The guy marched him out of the cell, down a corridor to the rear carpark where a van was waiting. Three men in overalls stepped out.
‘What’s this?’ Mike said.
‘I’m saving your life, dickhead,’ said one of them.
It sure didn’t feel like it when they cuffed him to the van’s interior.
They put a hessian sack over his head.
They drove.
No one said a word.
About an hour later, they parked.
They took the sack off and gave him the canteen.
‘Stay here.’
That was a day ago.
The fear and dread and time alone in the hot van is clarifying for Mike. He’s thinking about his life, which is what he assumes people do when they’re thinking they’re going to die. After they’ve cycled through thirst and headaches and delirium, after they’ve vomited on their clothes from heatstroke, and pissed in their pants and shit themselves from fright. If this is the end, Mike figures, it’s a lowly one, and to compensate he tries to make good in his mind.
It doesn’t work.
All he gets in return for his mental penance is more blame and guilt, like a compounding loop.
You fucked up.
You fixated on money.
You strived for nonsense.
You ruined your family. You hurt them. You may have even—
Mike screams and yanks on the cuffs for the thousandth time.
He’s caught.
And he can’t turn off the rest of it.
When he was a kid, they didn’t have a pot to piss in. Four brothers and not enough house to go round. Mike was the youngest, the one taking scraps and getting endlessly hazed. He was quiet back then, like his own son is now. The world isn’t built for quiet people.
While his father and brothers and his mother lived week to week, slowly fading out on hard work, beer by the carton, and a clip round the ear, Mike churned away, full of desire. He watched his brothers become versions of the old man, like some sort of fucked-up assembly line, marrying motherly women and producing more of the same, over and over. All the men in his family worked with their hands and backs. All the women stayed at home, hair pinned, sweating through the laundry and dishes and Christ knows what else. Everyone voted Labor. Everyone watched football. Everyone was the same, and then the same, and then the same. Fucking years of the same, not a day different. Households cluttered together and conjoined. Lots of talking, but no one saying anything.
Except Mike. He wasn’t born with whatever defect held his family in place. He didn’t watch the TV and say, All right for some. He didn’t lie in his bed in the corner of his brother’s room and sleep tight. He lay there and resented the snoring. He dreamed of more. He wanted out.
He quit school at sixteen.
Got a job.
Got another job.
Saved enough to live for six months in the city, then told them all to get fucked and moved to West End where he put it together, piece by piece.
A job in the Boundary Street fruit shop.
A second job in the bottle shop.
A stint tending bar.
Then a big break: moonlighting at a public service function, a late-night after-hours catering gig. Mike gives free pours to the right bloke and gets the inside word. Son, you know how to read a room. How’d you get here? The night unfolds like answered prayers.
It leads to a shit job working hospo for the National Party.
Then a better one working for the boys as a party driver.
It’s more than moving people around. It’s about keeping powerful men happy, keeping them entertained, on track, on time, with a side gig in information trafficking and backroom networking. Eventually, Mike gets into a car with the man who brings him right inside. This bloke has Mike pinned from the jump. ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, but bloody hell, go to night school and then call me.’
Mike did it.
He destroyed school on the second go. Crushed it.
He took his diploma back.
The party obliged. It was the ground floor, but the fast track too, knowing what Mike knew.
In no time at all, he worked his way up through the underworld of Queensland politics.
Through naked ambition.
Through Sonya.
And now here he is, on the job and handcuffed to the driver’s seat of this van, while the only thing he can think about, the only thing, is that Sonya and his children are in trouble. Real trouble. It kills him. Because right now, Mike’s old family, they’re probably out there, living their sad-sack fucking lives, nestled together where it’s safe, all because they never really wanted anything.