Selling something, Walter wondered? Although that didn’t seem right.
‘I suppose so,’ he said. He checked with Ros-at-Reception that the smaller of the meeting rooms just off Reception was free and they went in there. He indicated a seat and the young man sat down, folded his hands on the table and leaned toward Walter.
Not selling something, Walter decided. The body language was wrong. He had recently done some reading on body language. This man was trying to ingratiate himself, certainly, but not in a sales kind of way. This was something else.
Walter’s mind flashed back to the phone call he had made to the train company just moments ago, and flushed with embarrassment and guilt. How stupid to ring a transport company and ask if anything had happened to one of their services. He remembered how the person who he had been transferred to, the one who kept calling him Sir, had asked him for his name, and how he had then hung up. He couldn’t have sounded any more like a terrorist if he tried.
He looked at the young man sitting with his hands folded on the table. Surely they couldn’t have traced him so quickly.
‘I want to talk to you about the accident,’ the young man said.
*
‘Tell me about the accident,’ Dr Feldman had said.
‘Why?’ Walter had responded in a surly manner.
This was in the early days, soon after coming out of hospital, before he had got into his groove with Dr Feldman.
‘I want you to.’
‘Why? I don’t understand why.’
‘I’m asking you to, that’s why.’
‘You know what happened.’
‘Correct.’
‘So why do you want me to tell you? It’s stupid. It’s irrelevant. It’s unnecessary.’
‘All of those things, yes. But Walter, that’s why you’re here.’
Yeah yeah. He was there to talk about the accident. The Australian Centre for Post Traumatic Mental Health had referred him to Dr Feldman. That’s where all this psychiatrist stuff had started. But he didn’t want to talk about the accident—he didn’t even want to think about it.
*
Michael Everaardt sat watching Walter who seemed a million miles away, his eyes blank and staring straight ahead.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked after a while.
He touched Walter on the elbow.
At the touch Walter’s eyes slowly focussed.
‘Can I get you something? Some water?’ Michael asked.
‘No …’ Walter said. ‘No thanks. Who are you?’
Michael wriggled in his chair. This, he knew, was where things were going to get sticky—stickier.
‘I’m a writer.’
‘Oh,’ Walter said with considerable dislike. ‘You mean a journalist, don’t you?’
‘I know you feel you were hounded by the press, but if you could just give me just a few minutes … I can assure you, you’ll have final say on what’s in and what’s …’
Walter didn’t appear to be listening. He got up slowly from his chair and stood with his feet firmly planted. Michael didn’t know this about Walter, of course, having never met him, but the stolid, sturdy stance was very much a Walter thing.
‘No,’ he said simply.
Michael stood also and put his hand out to touch Walter on the arm soothingly.
‘I’m sure we could come to some …’
‘No we couldn’t,’ Walter said, moving away slightly. ‘I think you should go.’
So he went. There was little else he could do. Coming as he had without making an appointment, without announcing his intentions or his profession, was stupid enough, without compounding the felony by making a complete arsehole of himself now.
Michael considered himself a pragmatic kind of guy and, with only the slightest head-nod of acknowledgement to Walter, he walked back out into the foyer and pressed the lift-call button.
As amazing as it was considering their shared circumstances, this had been his very first face-to-face meeting with Walter Kovak. He had seen the wife before, Maggie was it? But never Walter himself, well not properly. He’d seen photos of him in the papers and news footage of him leaving the hospital, but he’d never seen him in the flesh like this, back in his own life, in his own suit and tie, out of the news and back at work.
He had been, he admitted to himself, slightly excited by the prospect. In fact, wasn’t it this that had led him into acting so rashly? So easy, wasn’t it, to look him up on the net, find out where he worked, ask at Reception if he could see him? They’d sent him out just like that, as if he was just anybody. And so he’d got his first face-to-face look at Walter Kovak.
And yet … like someone meeting their favourite movie star and finding out that he or she was shorter than expected, or their skin wasn’t as perfect as it was up on screen, that they were annoying or tongue-tied or rude, or worse that they were old—that they were, in fact, ordinary, everyday people— Michael was aware of a feeling of acute disappointment. Here was a man who had survived a major accident, a man who had survived against the most alarming, the most stupendous odds, and yet face to face he was a totally ordinary bloke, kind of daggy, working in an insurance firm. There was nothing special about him at all.
3.
THE ODDS OF DYING
Walter was washing up his mug in a small, drab kitchenette when Mick walked in with another young man very much in the Mick mould, a face that Walter hadn’t noticed around Equity Insurance before. Mick was younger than Walter, perhaps in his mid to late twenties. He belonged to a group of young men, mostly Aussie, who all went to bars together after work on a Friday night, or out for lunchtime curries, or for a Red Bull and a smoke, or whatever it was they did when they disappeared from the office. He was pasty faced and flabby, and wore loose-fitting, slightly too-big trousers halfway down his arse, a half untucked shirt and loosened tie. He had a general air of not caring about the job (not that Walter would hold that against him particularly) and not being particularly intelligent, but he was, Walter thought with a sigh, the type who would get ahead.
Walter didn’t much like Mick. He didn’t like these sorts of young men. He didn’t understand them. The way they spoke for example.
Hey, mate.
Alright?
All good.
Much on?
Yeah. You?
Enough.
That’s the way.
How could they go on like that, with a whole string of non-sequiturs, and then move away from each other as if they’d had some sort of conversation? Walter didn’t get it. He just didn’t get it.
Mick spoke to him with a smirk on his face and in his voice.
‘Walter. This is David. He’s new. With me over in wealth management.’
‘Hey, mate.’ David said.
Here we go, Walter thought.
‘Hello,’ he said with a polite smile. ‘Good to meet you. I hope you settle in OK.’
With that Walter presumed it was all over, so he dropped his eyes and made a movement indicating he wanted to pass out of the