Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

It was the white-collar crime of the century. I was cooked! I was the personification of everything hated in this country- another fat cat milking decent, hardworking, ordinary Australians of their wages. I was officially a scumbag. A bag of scum! A shitheel. A heel of shit! I was all these things, and more. To my surprise, I was identified racially. A Jew! Even though I had never had any contact with the Jewish community, any more than I’d had with the Amish, the newspapers referred to “Jewish businessman Martin Dean.” And for the first time I was accurately called “half brother” of Terry Dean. That’s it. That’s how I knew I was done for; they were distancing my crimes from those of my iconic brother. They wouldn’t stand for me taking Terry’s legacy down with me.

A lifetime of my fearing people was finally validated- people proved themselves to be absolutely frightening. The whole country was in a whirlwind of hate, a hatred so intense and all-encompassing, you couldn’t imagine any of them were still able to kiss their loved ones at night. This was the instant I felt my destiny- to be an object of loathing- arrive and also the moment I realized there was something to this business of negative energy after all. I felt the waves of detestation profoundly, in my guts. Honestly, you wonder how they ever sneaked the abolishment of the death penalty past a mob like that. I was not unaccustomed to witnessing my countrymen’s hatred focused like death rays over the years: I remember the minister whose wife had paid for designer sunglasses with taxpayers’ money, and that practically was the end of the minister’s career. His son’s phone bill! Or the MP who was forced to deny claims that she tried to get into the Royal Easter Show for free. The people were upset that she didn’t pay her twelve dollars. Twelve lousy dollars! Imagine what they’d do to me!

Of course the appalled faces of my political opponents barely concealed their delight; they adored anything that allowed them to look indignant on behalf of the electorate. It was effortless the way they ground me to dust. They were spared the trouble of having to cook up a scandal to fry me. All they had to do was express shock and act swiftly, to appear to be the one with his foot on my neck. They were all lining up to denounce me, their voices dipped in sewage, pushing each other out of the way to take credit for my downfall.

Oscar was powerless to stop all this, assuming he even wanted to. Reynold had taken over the matter. Anouk tried to reason with her father-in-law and asked him to help me, but Reynold was resolute. “It’s too late now,” he said. “You can’t stop a tidal wave of hatred once it’s reached the shore.” He was right. There was no point making a foolish protestation of innocence. I knew how it worked. I was already sliced and diced in everyone’s mind, so what was I still doing here? You could see it in their eyes- they were astonished that I was still breathing. What a nerve! I considered appealing to the charitable parts of themselves. I even toyed with the idea of telling them I had cancer, but I dropped it. I’d assaulted their pockets, and nothing would soften them to my case. They could learn that my skin was being peeled away by a blind cook who had mistaken me for a giant potato, and they would cheer. Cheer! It seems that in our society Christianity has made permanent inroads in the eye-for-an-eye department but has made little progress on the practical application of forgiveness.

The biggest irony about this whole thing was that the chemotherapy sessions were over and were successful. So just when I had my life back again, it became unlivable. The Buddhists are right. Guilty men are not sentenced to death, they are sentenced to life.

Sadly, Jasper too was the hapless recipient of a severe hammering. I’m ashamed to say he finally had to pay for the sins of the father. He began receiving messages like “Please tell your father that I am going to kill him!” Poor bastard! He became a death-threat messenger service. And don’t think my wife got off any easier. Poor Caroline! Poor babe in the woods! She foolishly agreed to interviews, thinking she could set the record straight. She didn’t understand that they had her role clearly defined and would not stand for it to be corrected or amended. By pitting ourselves against the battler, we had lost our talent to be Australians, and thus our right to a fair go was forfeited. They savaged her. My one actual lie was uncovered and it became public knowledge that Caroline and I had grown up together. Thus her being made a millionaire made her look as guilty as I was. She was left weeping on national television. My love! Women spat on her in the street. Saliva! Actual saliva! And sometimes the saliva wasn’t even white but the dirty dark-green of long-term smokers. Caroline was not prepared for this; at least I’d had a childhood of persecution to prepare me, many mouthfuls of bitter experience to line my stomach. I started out as a figure of contempt and that’s how I ended up- hard to be too upset about it.

And now the saddest part, the tragedy: all my reforms were systematically dismantled, all my innovations, all my warped progress. That was it! The shortest social revolution in history! This little slice of Australian history was going down as a blight. They no longer liked the farce I had orchestrated. It was all coming clear to them now: they’d been hoodwinked. We were right back where we started. Further back, even. They were fast reducing me to a meaningless aberration, rewriting history at supersonic speed. Whole months were wiped out with every thirty-minute current affairs report. Every TV channel had the sad face of a pensioner telling of her sacrifice in sending in her one dollar a week, all the things lost she could have bought: milk, dishwashing liquid, and, with no trace of irony, lottery tickets. Yes, the national lottery was back in business. People had their crummy odds again.

In the mirror, I tried to smile; the smile made my sadness look like a permanent disfigurement. It was my own fault! I shouldn’t have fought against my meaninglessness any more than I should’ve fought against those tumors. I should’ve nursed my tumors until they grew huge and meaty.

I spent the majority of those days stretched out on the floor of my bedroom, my chin resting on the beige carpet until my chin felt beige, and my insides too: beige lungs, beige heart pumping beige blood through my beige veins. I was on the floor when Jasper charged in, intruding on my peaceful beige existence to pass on all the death threats he’d received on my behalf.

“And who the fuck is Tim Lung?” he asked.

Rolling over onto my back, I told him everything I knew, which wasn’t much.

“So my mother died on one of his boats in the middle of one of his gang wars.”

“You could put it that way.”

“So this man murdered my mother.”

“She committed suicide.”

“Either way, this bastard has ruined our lives. Without him, I might have a mother, and you might not be Australia ’s newest love-to-hate-him guy.”

“Maybe.”

“What does Eddie say about him?”

“Eddie’s not saying anything.”

It was true. The authorities were giving him a hard time too, not only as the administrator of the scheme. Having overstayed his visa, he was already a criminal- they confiscated his passport, called him in for questioning every other day, but had not yet deported him to Thailand, as he was needed for their investigations. Even so, he was the only calm one among us. His calm was natural and impermeable. I suddenly admired him, because even though I suspected that his tranquillity was just a mask, it was the most solid and durable mask I had ever seen.

“This is some mess,” Jasper said. “What are you going to do?”