Protection

Hazard lights flashed and the car boot opened. Tom threw his martial arts bag in, waiting until I’d done the same before slamming it back down.
“You seemed a bit out of sorts tonight,” I said. For a moment the gentle rustle of drought-parched trees were overshadowed by the passing hum of an urban drone.
“Yeah. Dramas mate, dramas.”
In the car, as we pulled out of the school parking lot, he powered down the Holden’s windows, all of them, letting in the night air and the first hint of autumn cool.
“I don’t think the instructor is too happy about the bruise on his face,” I said. “It’s coming up purple already.”
“Yeah, well serves him right,” said Tom. “He’s supposed to be teaching people to get out of the way.” He didn’t laugh, not even the half smirk I’d usually see when he got one up on the resident authority figure.
“So what’s the drama?” I asked. Tom shook his head for a moment then said,
“I got another letter from the Protector’s office, still sniffing around.”
“Seriously? What are they on about this time?”
“You tell me,” he said. “I’m over it.”

***

At Tom’s house, once we’d cracked open a couple of beers and retired to the lounge room, I asked,
“Can I have a look at that letter?” He passed it to me without comment. Less than a page, all simple language. I skimmed it, picking up on the key phrases; ‘ongoing concerns’, ‘custody’ and ‘Uncle Robert’s pornography offence’, all printed in bold. The word Uncle was in apostrophes and I wondered if the Department for the Protection of Aboriginal Affairs had figured out Robert was Tom’s uncle in the conventional, mainstream sense as well as by his standing in the community. I handed the letter back.
“It’s bullshit,” said Tom, folding the letter back into the envelope. “Some dickhead texted Uncle Robert that shit… He didn’t even commit the offence.”
“It wasn’t anything…”
“Illegal? Nah. It was a Playboy promo, nothing that would get you into trouble. But if they find tits on a black man’s phone it’s all fire and brimstone like they found kiddie porn or something.”
“Not the first time they’ve tried that double standard,” I said, thinking back to university classes on Australian history.
“Yeah, but now it applies to everyone’s cell phones, tablets and notebooks, not just some isolated townships in the territory.”
Tom’s partner Melanie arrived, ushering their daughter Eli through the door. Eli ran over to Tom while Melanie wrestled with keys and a garish pink ballet bag.
“Hello boys,” Melanie said. She came over and kissed me on the cheek. Tom picked up Eli in one beefy arm and said,
“This little one’s about ready for a bed time story.” He left me with Melanie while he carried Eli down the hall, listening attentively to accounts of pirouette accomplishments.
I cracked open a beer for Melanie and then saw her eyeing the envelope on the coffee table.
“Tom showed me that,” I said. She nodded slowly.
“It’s really getting under his skin,” she said. “You know they sent a child psychologist to do a risk assessment on Eli?”
“He didn’t mention that.”
“It came back fine of course. I mean, it’s not like Eli goes looking through Uncle Robert’s text messages.”
“Yeah, that and you see more explicit stuff on midday television these days,” I said.
“But they just keep trying to find something. I reckon they’ll start making things up if they don’t get what they want from the psych.”
“Have you got a lawyer yet?”
“We’re seeing one on Thursday,” Melanie said. “But I don’t know what they can do. It’s all about trying to prove a negative before there’s a formal accusation.”
“Do you think they’d seriously challenge custody?” It seemed like a stretch; neither Tom nor Melanie were accused of anything and their Uncle Robert wasn’t a caregiver.
“Michael,” I knew it was serious when she used my full name. “That’s why they do these things.”
Tom came back a few minutes later.
“Straight to bed?” Melanie asked.
“Yeah, but she wants a story from you as well.”
“Oh. Of course she does,” Melanie said.
“She seems pretty well behaved,” I said as Melanie got up and handed the beer to Tom.
“Well, she knows how to get Tom wrapped around her little finger, and then it’s my turn.”
“Yep, she’s daddy’s girl,” said Tom. There was a pause and it lasted long enough to feel the tension, see the worry in the corners of their eyes.
“I could do with another one of these,” said Tom, raising the beer. “Come on out to the garage.” On the way to the back door he stopped in the kitchen, took his cell phone from his pocket, held it up for me to see clearly and then put it on the kitchen counter. It took me a moment to catch on and then do the same.
It was cooling down outside but I could still see the insect menagerie swarming under the veranda lights. Down the length of the driveway to the backyard garage, he opened it up and hit the lights. A moment later he pressed play on an old CD player and 90s era metal ground out at a low volume.
“Close that,” he said as I came in the door. We grabbed a couple more beers from a small bar fridge, old band stickers plastered over it.
Sitting on his workbench, square in the middle of the garage, was a graphite black case, about two metres long. Serious looking clamps and a deadlock held it shut. I just looked at it for a while, figuring anything that serious in a backyard garage would explain why Tom didn’t bring his cell phone. People tended to forget that ever since phones got ‘smart’ they could be remote accessed and turned on for listening in.
“You want to have a look?” Tom asked. From his key ring, he selected a gnarly stick of metal that looked like a mangled drill bit. It fit the case lock with laser cut precision.
“You remember a couple of weeks back Adam and I went up to the Torres Strait?”
“Yeah, working on that doco, right?” He nodded and said,
“We went up there to film how some of the islands are being washed away… what’s become of the people who lived there.”
“Uh hu.” This had been going on for quite a while. The government had done the bare minimum until Saibai Island and a couple of others had pretty much gone.
“Between filming we made a short hop over to Papua… picked up something we couldn’t get in Australia.”
Inside was a rifle. It actually took me a few moments to recognise it as such, with all the mechanics, graphite boxes and USB cabling.
“Well,” I said. “Fuck.”
Tom pulled a box from the foam, opened it and handed me a packet of three vacuum sealed bullets.
“Fifty cal.,” he said. “If you look close there’s a pinhole camera in the tip. The camera links back to a computer. You can program it with coordinates, laser painting, even facial recognition if you know who you’re shooting at. The computer guides the bullet.”
“I’ve heard of these,” I said. “The Americans came up with them about, what, ten years back?”
“Yeah, but this one is Chinese. They’re less finicky about who they sell them to.”
“Huh.” I had a moment’s pause before asking, “So, what are you planning to use it for?”
“I haven’t made my mind up yet, but these last six years, with this Government, it’s getting pretty dicey to be a first Australian.”

***

A couple of days later I was back at training but Tom didn’t make it that night. He’d been booked in to see a lawyer that day I remembered. The text he sent just read ‘not fit to train today’. He didn’t reply to mine.
Friday, after work and after drinks with some of the faculty, I picked up a six pack and drove to Tom’s place. Melanie opened the door, kissed me on the cheek and led me into the kitchen. Tom’s sister Kate was there and between them they were halfway through a Nepenthe Pinot. Kate said hello and looked at me in a very particular way over the rim of her glass. It was a look she’d perfected sometime after I’d tried to turn it on with her at a house party and been duly declined. When I’d mentioned this to Tom he’d laughed. Apparently she just liked being liked.
“Hello Kate,” I said.
“Hello darling,” she replied.
“So… is Tom about?” I asked.
“Out the back,” said Melanie. “Here, let me take your jacket.” I paused a moment. Normally no one bothered with ‘taking jackets’ and the like. Then I noticed the pair of cell phones on the kitchen counter. Tom’s scuffed old iPhone next to some newer model. I took mine from a shirt pocket and left it beside the others.
They were in the back garage of course. Distorted metal tones carried out the door and through the yard. Tom and a mate of his called Adam, who I’d met enough times to be familiar with.
“Adam, G’day,” I said. “What the hell are you working on?” The rifle had been assembled and mounted on its tri-pod. Cables led away to the graphite boxes and then into a tablet.
“Math,” said Adam. “I’m trying to optimise ballistic pathways. It’s a fucking headache.”
“Fair enough. Here, this’ll take the edge off.” I pulled a beer from the six-pack and passed it to him. Another went to Tom and I popped one for myself.
For a minute or so I watched Adam mess around with some kind of graph – tweaking a parabolic line. Tom was unusually quiet, so I said,
“Didn’t get to training last night?” He just looked at me a moment, then said,
“No.”
“How did it go with that… meeting?”
“You mean with that lawyer?” I nodded. I hadn’t known how much Adam would be across the subject. Tom shrugged, “Nothing to do when there hasn’t been any decision to object.”
“So it’s a waiting game?”
“Yeah. A little bit at a time mind fuck waiting game,” said Tom. “I reckon that social worker will take her time. Wait until her ducks are in a row.” I shrugged and said,
“It’s not all bad. Let your enemy come to you and all that,” in a half-hearted reference to Sun Tzu.
“Yeah, that’s fine in theory, but if one of these pricks decides to do their own assessment and puts Eli in some kind of Protector’s care, I have to go through the courts to get her back. In the meantime I can’t do anything to stop them. Not legally.”
“That’s pretty bad,” I said. “When they’ve acted on a student at work it’s taken maybe three days to get everyone in front of a Magistrate. Plus a weekend, depending.”
Adam had stopped tinkering with the tablet and now leaned back in an old arm chair, looking at me.
“That’s just to get heard,” Tom said, “for the magistrate to decide if your argument has enough merit to go forward. If he reckons it does, then you get set a date for the actual hearing. That’s later. The Magistrate then gets to decide where Eli lives in the meantime, and that’s based on the psychologist and social workers recommendation.”
“Right, I didn’t know that,” I said. “So, how long?”
“Courts are apparently booked ten to eighteen months in advance, depending on priority.” That shut me up.
“The Protector’s department is keeping them busy,” said Adam.
“Let’s go outside,” said Tom. “I need a fag.” We moved into the yard as Adam turned back to the tablet.
“This is getting serious,” I said, once the garage door was closed. Tom nodded. He wasn’t looking at me, more at his cigarette.
“This is history repeating,” he said. “They’ve been turning back the clock one bit of bullshit at a time.”
“One prospecting grant at a time,” I said, thinking of the half dozen or so land use disputes in the media.
“Yeah. You know where this leads,” Tom said. He was right. We’d actually met fifteen or so years back at a uni seminar on Australia’s colonial history, back when we were student teachers and I was becoming edified in all the gory facts and policies of institutional racism that I would later try and stuff into the heads of privileged private school kids.
“Back to the future,” I muttered.
“You know, it’s different now,” said Tom. “We’ve seen this shit before so it’s a bit harder for the ministers and lawyers to play divide and conquer. There’s a lot more education and communication these days, and more money in communities to get their own lawyers.” I nodded.
“Yeah, a bit. Good luck getting anything sorted by the Supreme Court these days.” The courts had followed the decades old trend of Australia becoming Americanised, culturally and legally, with the associated move toward political appointments and all the rest.
“You know some mobs up north have taken to arming themselves. Community controlled militias for law enforcement on traditional lands.”
“Yeah, well taking up arms didn’t work out so well historically,” I said.
“Historically,” Tom echoed. “Spears versus guns kind of stacked the odds historically”.
“I hate to think how they’ll spin it if they come to some sort of serious disagreement.”
“You know the Prime Minister will be in Adelaide in a couple of weeks,” said Tom.
“Oh joy. I wonder how many streets they’ll block off this time.”
“He’s going to be banging on about education reform and cultural heritage.”
“What, at the Elder Park forum?” I asked.
“Apparently.”
“Bugger. I have to go to that.”
“It’s outdoors, right?” Tom asked.
”Yeah, marquis and all that by the river. Why?” Tom just nodded at the garage.
“What?” It took me a moment to connect. “The fuck?” He just nodded, more slowly this time.
“Are you just fucking with me or what?” I asked. This time he shook his head slowly.
“You’re out of you fucking mind.”
“Keep it down mate,” Tom said, and I realised I’d drifted into that kind of irate half whisper that went hand in hand with beer and dubious behaviour.
“You’re serious?”
“Yeah. I’m not letting this shit go on, mate. Not with my kid in their sights.”
I tried to pick a flaw in the logic, but couldn’t find much ground on which to argue. Without kids of my own I knew I’d never get the moral high ground on the right or wrong of the idea.
“What happens when you get busted?”
“There are ways and means mate.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m going to send the family up north before; family holiday and all that. I’ll head up there on the next day, in a mates car.”
“Come on man, you know it’s not that simple.” Tom nodded and said,
“Details mate. You don’t want to know.”
“Yeah, no shit I don’t want to know.” I shook my head, genuinely angry, and took a swig from my beer. Anger derived from fear, as even while I quietly fumed I figured he might actually do it.
Tom gave me a moment before he said,
“I need eyes on the ground.”
“What?”
“Not to do anything. Not really. But I need someone on site, at the forum. There’s not many people I can trust, not with this.”
“Fuck off,” I said, more exasperated than trying to be rude. “Jesus, how about a reality check? Is it even realistic? I mean, how do you get, you know, a clear view?” I didn’t want to say shot, or line of sight. Not aloud. Not with the density of audiovisual that seemed wired into everything these days.
“Don’t need one,” said Tom. “The tech does away with all that. It’s less of a…” He simulated firing a rifle, silent but complete with imitated recoil, “and more like throwing a stone, only computer guided. It’s all maths, really.”
“Peachy,” I said.
“But I do need someone on site with a clear view.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to blab. Fuck it; we never had this conversation, but no.”

***

The drive home was a bit wobbly. Enough drinks that the nanny state breathalyser in the wheel pinged intermittently. Since the evening was effectively wasted, I bought another six pack and retired to my apartment balcony. Inner city, fourteen floors up, I could let the warm autumn air blow in, carrying the general hum of traffic and occasional carry on of the pub and club crowd.
Police drones tended to hum by at balcony level and I saluted one with my beer as it passed. Briefly I wondered how much airtime was spent indulging bored console operators, hovering outside apartment windows. Tom’s going to get himself locked up, I thought. Me too, I supposed, if I was stupid enough to join in. Oddly, that wasn’t what scared me; too surreal perhaps. What scared me was the chance that he’d pull it off.
Checking my phone, I found a message from Tom, received unnoticed while I was driving.
‘Mate, reconsider.’ I didn’t reply.

***

Throughout the week it nagged at me, not helped by my role in coordinating attendance of some faculty and students at the upcoming event. It occurred to me that if Tom’s scheme went ahead my professional peers and client group would be first hand witnesses. So much for duty of care. My Australian History class seemed a little edgy; picking up on the vibe or something. I kept a good face on, always had, but I guess a few of them were mature and intuitive enough to see I was distracted.
The more it nagged at me the more I processed just how much Tom was asking of me and that took up more and more of my headspace. It wasn’t just the risk; if I committed to this thing I would be committing to the constant paranoia that even if everything went to plan, someone someday might reverse engineer the action with sufficient resolution to identify my part in it. Tom was asking me to commit to a lifetime of that. There was also the guilt. Raised too much of a Christian boy I suppose (I was a teacher at a Lutheran school no less) to not wear the culturally mandated level of angst for being party to a murder. No sympathy for the devil and all that, but then no excuses for the inexcusable either.
All this was a background hum, however; not quite real in the hypothetical. The real question was how much did it matter? All the policies of this Government and the step by step erosion of human rights, just beneath the public tolerance threshold, were easy enough for most people to absorb. Just a little adjustment, a seemingly rational explanation here and there, a touch of low fidelity apathy and you could choose not to care – so long as you held to the belief that it didn’t apply to your home, your job, your family. The problem was I chose to care. I had to. That decision was made long before Tom made his pitch. There was an avoidance cost, measured in guilt, to doing nothing.

***

Late in the week, after work, Kate turned up at my apartment.
“Can I come in?” She asked, and I realised I’d been standing there like a stunned mullet. I hadn’t expected her. She’d never stopped by on her own before.
“Yeah. Um, sorry. I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
“That’s ok. Spur of the moment thing.” She looked stunning, but in a serious sort of way. It didn’t bode well.
“Can I get you a drink? I’ve probably got a few beers around here somewhere.”
“No. I thought maybe we could go to a pub?” Something else we’d never really done alone. It was clearly a pretence, but I figured one important enough to roll with it.
“Sure. Gouger Street is close.” She nodded then reached into her jacket, took out her cell phone and placed it on my kitchen counter. I almost rolled my eyes. Still, paranoia is only paranoia if it isn’t real. Briefly I wondered if Kate felt as naked as I did, leaving the apartment without our phones. Over a couple of pints Kate told me she was taking a holiday, up north with Tom, Melanie and Eli. Up north meant central Australia. Traditional Homelands so remote that even the Commonwealth Government didn’t track exactly who lived where. Off the grid, so far as that went. I just nodded as I took this in.
“So I guess he’s pushing on with this business.” I took her silence as a yes. “Who’d he find for the, you know, eyes on the ground side of things?”
“He’s still waiting.” I stopped mid gulp and put the pint glass down.
“Fucks sake. Does he know what he’s asking?”
“Yes. That’s why he asked you.” For a moment I shook my head.
“That just comes across as manipulative, plain old nasty.”
“No, it’s deep,” Kate replied, with an emphasis that I needed a moment to process. “It’s personal. I mean, who else could he ask?” When I didn’t say anything, she put a hand on mine and said, “Do you remember that night when you…”
“Undertook a gentlemanly proposition?”
“Yes, very gentlemanly, and very flattering.” She smiled and I managed one in reply. “It wasn’t a good idea – knobbing your brother’s best mate often doesn’t end well – but it was flattering.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So, indiscretions aside, what’s that got to do with all this?”
“Did you ever think that if I’d said yes, if it had worked out and we’d maybe settled down, had kids, then these policies would be applied to them? They’d be Aboriginal, so the Protector would have jurisdiction over your kids as well.”
***

“Kate twisted my arm,” I said, standing in the doorway to Tom’s shed.
“Huh?” said Tom. “She talked to you, did she?” I chose to take that at face value. Perched in the same old armchair as before, Adam was leaning over a mess of parts, peeled out of an iPhone.
“Get your mobile,” he said.
A few minutes later, as Adam did god knew what to my phone, Tom and I drank a beer in his garden. It was evening again, a week since I’d walked away, or thought I had.
“So what do you need me for?” I asked.
“Spotter, basically,” said Tom, speaking quietly even though the distorted grind of thrash metal spilled through the garage door. I found myself checking peripheral vision for drones and gauging the liability value of his comment against the likelihood of surveillance. “The math is pretty much done, but we only get one shot at this and I want to be sure.”
“What does the spotter do?”
“You will be in a seat in the audience, right?”
“Yeah.” I’d already been forwarded my entry pass.
“People will be taking photos, filming with their cell phones and all that.”
“Pretty normal for these things,” I said.
“So Adam is modifying your phone. The camera is getting replaced with a better one – a military grade digital scope. You will be able to zoom right in. The flash bulb is getting swapped out for an infrared range finder.”
“Right.” This I was less confident about. He saw the look on my face, scepticism coming forward, and he added, “It only runs for a few seconds. No way they can detect it in that timeframe.”
“Uh hu.”
“You get a buzz, like a notification or whatever on vibrate, to let you know the round is in the air. That activates the infrared. The computer does the rest. Afterward, you keep your SIM card, destroy the phone and walk away.”
Back in the shed, Adam showed me the somewhat rearranged innards of my phone.
“When I turn it back on, it will do what it always has – including GPS to within about ten metres, ability to be hacked into by telecoms, ASIO and all that. It’s no more safe than it ever was. But none of that will give away the changes to the camera and infrared flash. It would actually be more suspicious if we just took it off the grid.” I nodded and took this in, trying to think of what they might not have covered, and the gaps in planning that would get us caught.
“What about noise?” I said. People would notice the whopping great bang over their back fence.
“My family will all be long gone by this time ,” Tom said. “Adam and I just need to worry about getting ourselves out. The rifle and computer go in the boot and I drive north. Gone before they track the source.”
“I still don’t get why you need a spotter,” I said. “With the camera in the bullet…”
“Yeah, on screen it looks like old school smart bomb footage. Thing is, even after we correct for aim and all that, at this kind of range we are really pushing it. The bullet is going to slow down. A few seconds out it will go from supersonic to subsonic. For that half-second the photos will be all over the place. You, and that infrared beam, act like a homing beacon and in the last thousand metres the camera comes back online to bring it home.”
“So this big, fat, supercharged bullet is going to be falling subsonic when it hits.”
“Well, yeah. But it’ll hit him in the face. That should do it.”
After he’d handed my phone back, Adam took off his latex gloves. I had the feeling there were layers of precaution at work that I wasn’t thinking of, and maybe needed to play catch up on.
“Four days,” I said, beer in hand, looking at the rifle braced on its tri-pod.
“Yep,” said Adam. Tom said nothing.
“You realise we’re going to make history,” I said.
“Fuck history,” said Tom. “I don’t care what or who this bastard is. He’s not forcing me and my kid to live like my grandparents did.” He was looking at the ground as he talked and for all that he spoke like he always had, I got a sense of the deep running bitterness and passion that had turned cloud talk into lethal action.

***

Elder Park was teeming with suits, school blazers and media. No shortage of uniformed police either. Ubiquitous ultra-light drones were black specks buzzing high overhead. Earlier in the day I’d been talked into helping a colleague herd a dozen or so high performing year eleven students into the forum. The inappropriateness of that, all things considered, had fallen by the wayside as I’d completely failed to find a reasonable way out of it. I must have looked more harried than frightened as I ran headcount and made sure they all provided their school ID at the entry gates, then went through the motions of confirming my ticket and ID. Before I knew it the all-important security screens were behind us and I was doing the sideways foot shuffle between rows of chairs to my allocated seat. Fortunately, I was placed among other staff, the student group from my school being a few rows back.
Only when I sat down and took in the lay of the land did the work distractions recede and the dull gut sink of anticipation kick in.
The ground sloped gently down from the road and the park side entertainment complex to the artificially tranquil (and periodically sanitised) stretch of Torrens Lake. Pavilions, all in white, were erected along the waterline, backs to the lake, the pavilion open to the crowd, the city and the suburbs beyond. Mental mapping, I pictured a Google eye view of the roadways and city blocks between the pavilion and the inner suburban house where Tom and Adam would right now be loading the rifle. Given the angle of the stage, the bullet would come in high and a little over to the left.
Thinking of the camera, I fetched my phone from my jacket pocket. Checking that everything was working, I actually started messing around with the upgraded camera zoom. Seeing a pretty journalist near the media hub, I focused right in on her face, zooming on peach coloured lips. Not bad for a hundred yards. The only problem seemed to be shaky hands and normal body movement causing me to wobble off target. This settled down as I zoomed out a little – more like a portrait shot on screen – and steadied my hand on the seat back of the chair in front. The place was still filling up. Other folks were likewise messing around with phones; photos, video or whatever apps they passed time with.
Gradually I took on board something Tom had said earlier. For all that there was an ethnically diverse crowd; Asian, Middle Eastern, a few African faces, plenty to promote our Multicultural Australian identity, I couldn’t see any Aboriginal faces in the crowd. This didn’t mean a lot, ethnic and cultural heritage didn’t necessarily equal skin colour, but something about it felt off. They’d needed a white guy to get access to the forum. The logic of that sunk in further and I refocused the phone camera on the stage.
Nerves gradually built as the wait went on. Chairs filled up. I found myself steadying my elbows on a knee, cocked up with my legs crossed for elevation. It felt awkward but at least the camera was steady, with a view over shoulders and between heads. Sweat was building under my armpits, partly from the combination of crisp autumn sun and dark wool suit jacket, but not entirely. I started feeling grateful that the Prime Minister’s talk was first up and I wouldn’t need to grit my teeth through too much bureaucratic waffle.
Eventually a speaker stepped up to the stage, exact to the schedule, and roused the crowd for the PM. Statesman smiles and broad hand waving met polite applause and the PM, ever the white haired alpha male, took his place at the lectern. I don’t recall the words, not taken in as I tweaked the zoom, optimising for stability, to keep his face in the frame.
Without warning the phone vibrated, as though I’d received a text, and the camera flash icon appeared on screen. My heart shuddered and time slowed down. For a moment I reverted to my mental map, picturing where the bullet would be right now, passing over the parklands, sound wave catching up as it decelerated over CBD office towers. As the seconds passed a brief flurry of gestures broke out among dark suited men at points around the stage. Some pressed fingers to earpieces. Some turned to the PM, faces hard like masks, body language wound tight. One stared intensely into a hand held tablet, reviewing god knew what intel. Then he looked up and started scanning the crowd.

***

Autumn was in full swing, cold air pouring over the balcony, turning my knuckles blue around the beer bottle. I’d found some therapeutic quality in cold and open space; it helped me keep a clear head while I tried to assemble some kind of narrative around what had happened – a take on events that I could live with. It meant I could go inside later without feeling compressed by the walls and the same damn thoughts churning around in my head. Police drones were much more busy now, passing by on their circuit every half hour or so. I liked to be able to see them. It reminded me that no police had come knocking on my door. No one had found the phone.
I guess the plan had worked, technically. The PM wasn’t dead, but he was pretty definitively removed from public life. Even the tabloids were adhering to his family’s request to respect his privacy, while they nursed him through what was left of his life. In the chaos after the shot landed, police had tried to keep everyone on site, but that was a hopeless cause. I’d been driven out along with the surging crowd, and then spent the next hour trying to track down students, more scared by where they’d ended up, the possibility someone had been trampled in the stamped, than by the smoking gun evidence in my phone. Only later had I thought to take out my sim card and dispose of the hardware (I’d gotten so paranoid I actually melted it – in the oven, before throwing it off a jetty somewhere). All manner of theorising and finger pointing filled the media, to the point that I couldn’t turn on the TV anymore. Terrorists, bikie gangs and so on got their share of blame, among the more wacky conspiracy theories. Tom was long gone with his wife and kid, and Kate apparently. Even though no one was pointing the finger with any accuracy, I’d caught part of some bulletin about Territory Police raising concern at the increase in gun ownership on traditional lands.
Of all the things that had happened, the one that kept coming back to me was the wild gulf between what I’d thought it would look like and the flesh and blood reality. News footage, multiple angles of it recycled ad-nauseam, showed bone and blood exploding away from his temple, enough that other people had caught bits of shrapnel. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known – really known what I was doing. That’s what I told myself, with no way to test it. What to make of that, of Tom and what it said about me, kept coming back around, trying to find a place and some sort of meaning that would sit ok in my version of events.