I don’t know how we got out of there. I remember Terry seeing me in the crowd and waving. I remember running. I remember Terry laughing and suggesting we split up and just before disappearing into the crowd saying, “Let’s see if he can underperform his own death!”
There was no bigger story in Australia, before or since. Not even the Federation got as much press. And the worst thing was, they had pictures. Someone took a beauty of Terry standing there, eyes shining, arm outstretched, the gun held out in front of him and a friendly smile on his face, as if he were about to give the captain an amiable piece of advice. Every newspaper and television station ran that picture. From then on, he was a wanted man. This was the real beginning of Terry’s infamy.
Our little town was inundated with police and reporters. The reporters were a nuisance. They wouldn’t take “Fuck off” for an answer. The police were irritating too. They asked me all sorts of questions, and for a while I was under suspicion. I admitted having gone to the game with my brother but said I’d lost him as soon as he ran into the crowd. No, I said, I didn’t see the shooting. No, I said, I hadn’t heard from him since. No, I said, I didn’t know where he lived. No, we weren’t close. No, I didn’t know who his friends or associates were. No, I didn’t know where he got the gun. No, I didn’t even know he had a gun. No, I didn’t expect to be hearing from him again. No, if I did hear from him I wouldn’t call the police, because after all, he was still my brother. Yes, I had heard of obstruction of justice. Yes, I knew what being an accessory was all about. Yes, I would be willing to go to jail, but I’d really rather not.
The police gave my mother a good grilling too, but she wouldn’t answer their simplest questions- when the chief detective asked, she wouldn’t even tell him the time.
Terry could never come home again. That was the thing that killed my mother. She cried inconsolably, and from then on slept most nights in Terry’s old bed. She made one of his favorite dishes every mealtime, and, perhaps to punish herself, she stuck the newspaper article with Terry’s picture to the fridge under a pineapple magnet. She obsessed over that picture, even going so far as to measure it with a ruler. One morning I came down and saw my mother studying it. I said, “Let me throw that away.” She didn’t say anything, but when I reached over to take it she elbowed me in the stomach. My own mother! Later, around four in the morning, I woke to see her sitting at the edge of my bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Do you remember William Wilson by Poe? And The Double by Dostoyevsky?”
These were books she’d read to me while I was in the coma. I remembered them perfectly, almost word for word.
“I think Terry has a double,” she said.
I shook my head and said, “I don’t think so.”
“Listen to me. Everyone has a double somewhere in the world. That’s what’s happened here. Terry didn’t shoot anyone. It was him, the double!”
“Mum, I was there. It was Terry.”
“I admit it looks like him. That’s what doubles are. Look-alikes. Identical look-alikes. Not look-a-little-alikes.”
“Mum…”
Before I could say any more, she was gone.
So where was Terry? At Harry’s? The next morning at breakfast I decided to go see for myself. When I stepped outside I saw that the reporters had gone home, but on the bus to the city it occurred to me I was probably being followed. I peered at the cars on the road. Sure enough, I saw it: a blue Commodore following. I got off at the next stop and went into the movies. It was a comedy about a husband who dies but comes back as a ghost and haunts his wife whenever she looks at another man. Everyone was laughing but me; I found it grotesque, and it made me really hate the dead, the selfish pricks. Two hours later, when I stepped into the sunshine, the car was still there. I knew I had to lose them, to “shake my tail,” so I ducked into a shop. It was a tailor’s. I tried on a black dinner jacket and I looked good but the sleeves were just a little too short. Out the window, through mannequin legs, I could see my blue hound dog. I asked if they had a back entrance, even though I wanted to use it as an exit. They had one. In the alleyway there was another Commodore, only this one was white with leather seats that I could almost smell. I fast-walked it down the street and looked for another shop to duck into.
The whole day passed in this way. It was very, very irritating. I just couldn’t shake them. They seemed always to guess my every move. Dejected, I caught the bus back home and decided I’d try it again when the Terry Dean story had died down a little, when it wasn’t so fresh. It had to peter out eventually, I reasoned. The public has attention deficit disorder. It’s famous for it. But what I hadn’t figured was that the Terry Dean story wouldn’t stop there because Terry Dean wouldn’t stop there.
The next day there was more news, and more police and more reporters. The two bookies named in the affair had been found shot dead in their apartments. Witnesses had seen a young man of Terry’s description leaving the scene. In the newspapers and on the radio, language used to describe Terry Dean indicated a subtle shift in public opinion- he was no longer a “lone madman.” He was now a “vigilante.”
Meanwhile, the eyes of the nation were fixed sharply on the inquiry into corruption in sport, which was being conducted with uncustomary speed. It had escaped nobody’s attention that any bookie or cricketer named in the report would become a potential target for Terry Dean, Vigilante at Large.
The report of inquiry into corruption in sport was released and made a matter of public record. It named names. Three more cricketers were mentioned: some for throwing games, some for passing on match information. More bookies were named too. Everyone was on guard. They were put on twenty-four-hour police surveillance. The police thought they were ready to catch Terry, because if they had deduced one thing, it was that he had started something he felt he had to finish. But Terry was one step ahead of them.
The thing was, no one really paid close attention to the inquiry into corruption in sport. They read about the cricketers and waited eagerly for Terry to make his move. But the prime minister had promised an exhaustive inquiry, and they delivered an exhaustive report that also contained sections and subsections detailing corruption in horse racing, rugby league, rugby union, Australian rules, soccer, the Commonwealth Games, lawn bowls, snooker, cycling, rowing, boxing, wrestling, yacht racing, hockey, basketball…If it involved an Australian running or sweating or handling balls not his own, it was in there.
The first time Terry showed the breadth of his passion was with the murder of a jockey named Dan Wonderland; he was found beaten and force-fed enough horse tranquilizer to kill a stampede. I gazed searchingly at the photograph of this man whose life my brother had taken, in the hope of seeing something evil, something that rose up out of the picture signaling unequivocally that the fucker deserved to die. It was taken after winning a race, and in it Dan Wonderland was beaming and holding up his arms in triumph. Even if I hadn’t known my brother had killed him, I’d have seen something infinitely sad in the face of this jockey, the look of a man who has just achieved a lifelong dream only to realize that his dream was really nothing special.
The next day there was another killing: middleweight champion Charlie Pulgar, who’d taken a very obvious dive in the ring, falling when, at the sound of the bell, his opponent smacked his gloves together. With Terry’s help, Charlie Pulgar took his last dive- off the roof of his seventeen-story apartment building into a steady flow of traffic.
Just as investigators started anticipating Terry’s next moves, he changed tactics once again. The inquiry into corruption in sport had also uncovered a phenomenon seeping into the world of professional sport: performance-enhancing drugs. With a little detective work, Terry ascertained who was purchasing and administering them: the coaches. Men who had always worked tirelessly behind the scenes shifted from the background to the foreground; their square jaws and haggard faces appeared more and more in the papers, as one by one they turned up dead.