I said all this to God, but there was so much silence afterward, a cold silence that seemed to get caught in my throat, and I heard myself suddenly whisper, “It’s time.” Enough was enough. It was duing English class, in a small, bright room with a U-shaped arrangement of long desks. The teacher, Wayne, was standing in front of the blackboard instructing the class on the use of clauses. The students were silent, though not respectfully so; it was the bewildered silence of a group of people who had no clear idea what they were being taught.
I stood up. Wayne looked at me as though readying himself to take off his belt and start whipping me with it. I said, “Why are you bothering to teach us about clauses? We won’t need them.”
His face turned pale, and he tilted his head back as though I had just grown a meter taller. “You speak English,” he said dumbly.
“Don’t take it as a testament to your teaching abilities,” I said.
“You’ve got an Australian accent,” he said.
“Yeah, mate, I do. Now tell those mongrels to come in here. I’ve got something to say to them.”
Wayne ’s eyes widened; then he did an exaggerated dash from the classroom like a cartoon tiger. People act like children when you surprise them, and bastards are no exception.
Ten minutes later they came running in, two guards in tight trousers. They had looks of surprise too, but theirs were already beginning to fade.
“I hear you’ve been running off at the mouth,” one said.
“Let’s hear it,” the other commanded.
“My name is Jasper Dean. My father was Martin Dean. My uncle was Terry Dean.”
Their looks of surprise got all freshened up. They hauled me away, down the long gray corridors into a stark room with only one chair in it. Was that for me, or would I be forced to stand while an inquisitor drilled me with his feet up?
I won’t detail all seven days of the interrogation. All I will tell you is that I was like an actor trapped by contract in a bad play with a long run. I said my lines over and over and over. I told them the whole story, though leaving out all mention of Uncle Terry being alive. It wouldn’t have done me any good to resurrect him. The government leaned heavily on me to tell them Dad’s whereabouts. They had leverage too: I had committed two crimes, traveling on a false passport and consorting with known criminals, although the second was not actually a crime but just a bad habit, so they let it go. I was hounded by groups of detectives, and agents from ASIO, our unimpressive spy agency, which Australians know very little about because it is never the subject of movies or television shows. For days I had to put up with all the clichéd tricks in their repertoire: the staccato questioning, the good cop/bad cop routine and its variations (bad cop/worse cop, worse cop/Satan in a clip-on tie), performances so terrible I wanted to boo. We don’t torture people in our country, which is a good thing unless you’re an interrogator pressured to get results. I could tell one of them would have given anything to be able to tear out my fingernails. I caught another gazing forlornly at my groin while dreaming of electrodes. Well, too bad for them. Anyway, they didn’t need to torture me. I played along. I spoke myself hoarse. They listened themselves deaf. Pretty soon we were all running on empty. Every now and then they let me pace the room and shout out things like “How many more times do I have to say it?” It was embarrassing. I felt silly. I sounded silly. It was so corny. Movies have made real life corny.
They searched my cell and found what I’d written, two hundred pages about our lives; I had only gotten as far as my early childhood, when I learned the Terry Dean story. They studied the pages intensely, read them carefully for clues, but they were looking for Dad’s crimes, not his flaws, and in the end they thought it was nothing but fiction, an exaggerated story of my father and uncle composed as a clever defense; they concluded that I had depicted him as a lunatic so no one could find him guilty of anything by reason of insanity. They ultimately couldn’t believe in him as a character, saying that it was impossible for a person to be a megalomaniac and an underachiever. I can only assume they didn’t understand human psychology.
In the end they gave the pages back to me; then they interviewed all my fellow travelers to see if my story of Dad’s death held up. The Runaways confirmed it. They all told the same story. Martin Dean was on the boat, he was very sick, and he died. I threw his body into the sea. I could tell this news was a tremendous disappointment to the authorities- they hadn’t caught me out lying. Dad would have been the ultimate prize for them. The Australian people would have loved to see my father served up to them on a plate. Dad’s death left a conspicuous hole in their lives, an important vacancy that needed filling. Who the hell were they going to hate now?
Eventually they decided to let me go. It wasn’t that they had no real interest in charging me but that they wanted to shut me up. I’d seen firsthand how the Runaways were treated inside the detention center, and the government didn’t want me talking about the systematic abuse of men, women, and children, so they bought my silence by dropping the charges against me. I went along with it. I don’t feel bad about my complicity, either. I couldn’t conceive that the facts would make a difference to the voting public. I can’t imagine why the government thought they would. I guess they had more faith in people than I had.
In exchange for my silence, they gave me a dirty little one-bedroom apartment in a dirty government housing block in a dirty little suburb. The federal police flew me from the desert into Sydney and dropped me off here, and, along with the keys to my grubby, minuscule flat, handed over a box of papers raided from my old apartment when we’d skipped the country: my real passport, my driver’s license, and a couple of telephone bills they hinted I should pay. When they left me alone, I sat in the living room and stared out the barred windows into the apartment opposite. It seemed I had not done all right out of the government. I had blackmailed them for this shitty place and a welfare allowance of $350 a fortnight. It seemed to me I could’ve done a lot better.
I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. My cheeks were sunken; my eye sockets went deep into my head. I’d gotten so thin I looked like a javelin. I needed to fatten myself up again. Apart from that, what was my plan? What was I going to do now?
I tried calling Anouk, the only person left on the planet I had any connection with, but this proved far more difficult than I’d anticipated. It’s not easy getting in touch with the richest woman in the country, even if she once cleaned your toilet. Her home number was unsurprisingly unlisted, and it was only after calling the Hobbs Media Group and speaking to several secretaries, that it finally occurred to me to ask for Oscar instead. I received a few noes before one young woman said, “Is this a prank call?”
“No, it’s not a prank call. Why shouldn’t I speak to him?”
“You really don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Where’ve you been living the last six months, in a cave?”
“No, a prison in the middle of the desert.”
That got me a long silence. “He’s dead,” she said finally. “They both are.”
“Who?” I asked, my heart freezing block-solid.
“Oscar and Reynold Hobbs. Their private jet crashed.”
“And Mrs. Hobbs?” I asked, shaking. Please don’t let her be dead. Please don’t let her be dead. In that moment I realized that of all the people I had ever known in my whole life, Anouk deserved to die the least.
“I’m afraid so.”
I felt everything pour out of me. Love. Hope. Spirit. There was nothing left.
“Are you still there?” the woman asked.