‘Not so BK!’ Mackelroy lurched on jubilantly. ‘Some of the dishes might be a bit unpalatable but it’s silver service!’
Kant hadn’t meant for such a cynical tone to wash his words. He couldn’t argue with the show’s popularity, or that he had made a significant, if not the lion’s share of the input into the style. So it was with some apprehension that he had begun to have concerns about the ethical nature of the show. Indeed, he even wondered whether he was in fact making a difference at all to the contestants’ lives. He knew that wasn’t Mackelroy’s motivation. Was he merely exacerbating their sorrows with false hope?
Then the third series broke all the records again.
Before BKS, the television station Nerve Two, a small set up in Moonah, just north of the city, had been a fidgety table tennis player frantically struggling for primacy amongst a melee of muscled VFL ruckmen, skipping around, dodging the stamp of giants, wanting to be taken more seriously in a highly competitive arena. The tables finally turned after the success ful marketing of the Barry Kant Show to several mainland networks, resulted in it connecting up to all other mainland states.
*
Kant’s iPhone rang. He picked it up from the kitchen bench. The highland lilt was music to his ears. ‘Vinny! Now there’s a voice I’ve missed hearing.’
‘Och. Sorry to bust in on your last day of holiday, Barry, but I’ve just stumbled on a young laddie, almost literally. A big story and he has a fine way with him too.’
It had been a shrewd move by Mackelroy, after meeting Vince MacLean in Sydney, to offer him a crucial role on the show’s team in the beginning.
MacLean’s reputation as a foreign correspondent, reporting on the Rwandan massacres, and the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, had preceded him. But MacLean was exhausted, burnt out from the years in the field and needed a place to recoup, and maybe never go back to another front line again. The relentless reporting of so much horror had taken its toll in the form of chronic insomnia, his dark nights filled with demons and blood, the screams of innocents and the piercing silence of mass graves.
A haven was what he had longed for. His cousin Hamish told him about the quaint city of Hobart, a peaceful paradise, picturesque and safe from the bad world. So MacLean signed up as crew on a yacht skippered by James Mackelroy, competing in the Sydney to Hobart white water sailing classic. He liked the idea of arriving by sea as the early settlers did. All that salty water and fresh air would surely commence the purge that his soul so desperately needed.
Apart from MacLean’s observational expertise and zeal for uncovering the truth, Mackelroy had been instantly smitten by the lyrical sway of his Scottish accent, one thing the high lander would never lose. MacLean’s immediate answer was a firm no, but the journo in him was a restless spirit and by the time the yacht rounded the Iron Pot light in the mouth of Hobart’s Derwent River he had agreed to Mackelroy’s proposition. His brief, after a well earned respite, would be to locate broken shells, as he’d later refer to them, and encourage them to become contestants in a new reality show.
Finding the right combination of people was time consuming. To begin with MacLean compiled a list of the hearing times at the Family Law courts. He strolled in the parks at dusk and dawn, he hung about at the soup kitchens, hospital waiting rooms, and bus malls in the city, then further out in the grimier suburbs. MacLean engaged with down and outs rummaging for fast food scraps in garbage bins, aimlessly wandering druggies, and eccentric loners who reeked of stale grog and urine and who slept in impossibly windless and murky crannies of the city.
MacLean soon realised it wasn’t only the subjugated under classes that had the rights to dreadful misfortune. The well heeled and the comfortable could also share the fact that ‘shit can happen, any time, to anyone, anywhere’. And no matter how good their intentions to conceal their suffering from the rest of the world, out of dread or disgrace, it would be that hollow, disengaged look in their eyes that would give them away.
Kant took his coffee and sat near the window, sighing loudly for MacLean’s benefit at the proximity of going back to work. ‘Can’t swing a few more days off for me, can you? I was just starting to get the hang of doing nothing.’
‘If I wasn’t just a wee cog in the wheel I’d let you have another year.’
‘Well, I appreciate the thought. So, who’ve you got?’
‘Young African dude, and when I say dude I mean … DUDE!
He’s cool as. But when I found him he was slumped like an unwanted parcel on the steps of the GPO in Elizabeth Street. Saturday morning, round four.’
‘Don’t you ever go to bed?’
‘Och, only in my dreams.’
Kant laughed. ‘You could’ve shared a warm milk with me.’
The pause was long enough for Kant to realise that MacLean hadn’t a clue what he was suggesting.
‘Anyway, thought the laddie was drunk at first but he’d been beaten up something terrible. Said he’d been abducted. Sounded like rednecks to me. Took him up the bush somewhere out the back of beyond and dumped him there to find his own way back to Hobart. Or not.’
‘That it?’ Kant said, thinking this could have waited till he was back at work. ‘Unpleasant as it sounds, it’s just another mugging really. Don’t you think?’
‘Aye, but his big story is what happened to him in Africa. It’s huge. Reaches Tasmania, safe at last, then he gets the locals’ welcome.’
‘Okay, Vinnie. Look, I’m off to see my granddaughter in half an hour so … ’
But MacLean was clearly wound up with the story and needed to finish.
‘He’d escaped a far worse enemy in his homeland. The rebels there, took me back to Rwanda, would make these Tassie rednecks look like a bunch of fairies. Cold blooded killers, child soldiers too, sometimes even friends from the same village. Four weeks fugitive travelling with his siblings at night, hiding in caves during the sweltering days, saw them reach the so called safety of a Ugandan refugee camp. Fifteen he was then.’
‘Fifteen! What’s his nationality?’
‘Sudanese.’ Vince chuckled warmly. ‘Head like coffee bean, and despite what he’s been through he’s got one hell of a smile.’
‘Okay, sounds good. Well … you know what I mean. Book him in, maybe tomorrow arvo. First cab off the rank.’ Kant sighed again audibly, this time for real. ‘Oh, has he got a name?’
‘Has he ever. Ishmael Abraham Liri Mogamba.’
‘Impressive. Thank God for the bible.’
Another of those pauses.
‘How’s the holiday?’
‘Like magic … it just disappeared.’
There was no pause then. MacLean snorted a sympathetic laugh down the phone. ‘Oh, by the way, happy birthday BK!’
Chapter Four
Prone in the well worn armchair in his daughter’s living room, Barry Kant, grandfather and family man, held the newspaper between index fingers and thumbs, arms stretched to their limit, eyes straining to focus .
‘Left my wretched specs behind. Still can’t get used to keeping them with me.’
Melinda replied with a preoccupied ‘Mm.’
Barry was waiting for Rosie to finish her morning nap. Melinda was in the adjoining kitchen juggling bread baking, dish washing and surface clearing before Rosie awoke; she was always amused at how far her daughter’s little sticky fingers could spread themselves. Barry adjusted his weight onto his left