Stockholm syndrome

And we'll fly
And we'll fall
And we'll burn
No one will recall
No one will recall
- Muse, 2003

We landed before dawn. Not a lot before dawn – the sky on the horizon was lightening from black to blue – but before dawn, nonetheless. If that was east, to the east was flat, brown land; to the west was low, scrubby heath, summer wildflowers and the far-off sound of surf. Looked pretty much like Western Australia to me.

“Well we’re near the beach,” I observed ironically. “That narrows it down.”

Lena didn’t say anything. Clearly my early-morning comedy routine wasn’t getting a run on any breakfast radio show she’d ever have a hand in producing. For the record, WA has nearly 13,000 km of coastline – nearly 21,000 km if you include islands. And a hell of a lot of flat brown land, too. So yeah, narrowed it right down. If pushed, based on the maximum range for the flying time we’d had (inclusive of the random path we’d taken) and the lay of the land around here, you could probably guesstimate we were somewhere between the Kimberley and Albany, but not much more accurately than that.

“Nice to get out and stretch the old legs, anyway,” I remarked aimlessly. “Choice of footwear wasn’t the best, though...”

Lena gave me her most vehement ‘Shut the fuck up’ look. I got the picture. Still didn’t change the fact that six buck Jim Beam thongs weren’t optimal for trudging down a narrow dirt track through the heath in the pre-dawn gloom. Behind us was Mr James, gently marching us forward; behind him, about fifty yards and holding station, was Mr Smith, waiting with the chopper. Technically we outnumbered our escort two to one, but they pretty much had the situation in hand. We could escape – if we could get away from Mr James and if there wasn’t a handy projectile-firing weapon somewhere in the chopper which Mr Smith could cover us with – but to where? I’d already resigned myself to falling in lockstep with our captors and being driven along like sheep. If this was Stockholm Syndrome, you could put me in a Volvo and feed me pickled herrings. Until someone actually pointed a gun at me or similar and brought this to some kind of endgame, there wasn’t much point rolling the dice.

We continued, and we continued, and we continued some more, until we didn’t.

“I’d stop right there,” Mr James advised firmly.

“Why?” sneered Lena, who was well into a sulk that her teenage self would have been proud of.

“Because,” Mr James said with a little sigh, “otherwise you’ll walk off that cliff.”

We’d reached the top of a little rise, beyond which – as we carefully investigated – emerged the Indian Ocean. Between there and here were plunging sandstone-limestone cliffs, amazing in daylight but not the sort of things you wanted to uncover by accident. Still, if you happened to end up at the bottom of them, it’d probably be easy enough to be made to look like an accident…”

“Sorry,” he added. “We’re slightly ahead of schedule.” What schedule was that, I wondered, trying not to fixate on the crumbling terrain just short of the cliff edge, and the water glimpses beyond – high tide?

So we sat, and waited, while Mr James made pleasant small talk – I was beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t an act, whether he just happened to be by nature the politest ex-special-ops private assassin in the industry. Lena wasn’t talking, so Mr James and I chatted about the one thing which two Australian blokes could discuss at the moment no matter their social standing, or whether one had orders to execute the other on a remote stretch of WA coastline – how shit the Australian cricket team were travelling. Having just got towelled in tests and one-dayers by the Saffers, we were now getting similar levels of respect from the bloody New Zealanders. Ponting was rubbish, the middle order were clueless and our bowling attack would struggle to dislodge dried dogshit from their shoes if you handed them a big fuck-off stick. Mr James was talking up the selection prospects of Adam Voges and Luke Ronchi, which either meant he was a native Westralian, or he was a looney. Either-or. You don’t have to be crazy to work here [executing people for Daniel Fyfe] but it helps, sort of thing.

Just on sunrise came a distant rattle from the headland to the north. A pair of headlights cut through the rising gloom, the silhouette of an old 4WD, something designed in the ‘70s with a set square and a sharp pencil. As it emerged from the darkness it became an old Range Rover, original colour indescipherable under many layers of dust and mud. It picked its way gradually through the scrub, meandering along the gravel track which ran from wherever it’d come from to wherever we were, trailing a wispy signature of dust which hung around in the hazy stillness of the pre-dawn.

It eased up to where we were waiting, which was a small cleared area of dirt, sort-of at the junction of the track we’d walked along from the impromptu helipad we’d landed on (in reality just a clearing at the end of a disused dirt track) and the one the Rangie had come down. It might have passed for a scenic lookout had there been anything other than a geodetic survey marker here to identify the place. Not even a railing or two to keep tourists from disappearing into the Indian Ocean and becoming shark chum. Should any tourists be able to find the place, of course. If it wasn’t for the relative orientation of ocean-to-sunrise we could even be somewhere in the Bight, south of the Nullabor or something. In fact, given the way the coastline wibbled and wobbled about along the bottom of the state, who knew, we could be down thataway on a west-facing bit of wibbly-wobbliness.

The Rangie shuddered to a halt. I didn’t think old Range Rovers had come with diesels, and this was a real old Rangie, a three-door Series I from the ‘70s, so old it’d probably forgotten itself what colour it was – red, brown, something like that – so either this was a transplant or my hearing were playing tricks. After a solid bunch of hours in that chopper, even with headphones on, my ears were ringing like I’d just played a headlining festival set without my earplugs in. The driver’s door, on the far side from us, creaked open, propped, then thudded shut.

A figure hobbled into view. I noticed the bare feet first, seemingly indifferent to the gravel. Old, dusty three-stripe tracksuit pants and a grubby old green-and-gold Australian rugby league jumper. Accessorised with an ancient Quiksilver beanie, he looked like he was wearing highlights from the spring collection of the acclaimed European designer Yves St Vincent de Paul. What you noticed, though, was the beard. A real bushman special, that the lower half of his face seemed to disappear into. You’d call it salt-and-pepper, though it looked more salt than pepper, more grey with black streaks rather than the corollary. A crooked nose like a boxer. An old boxer, from the wrinkles around the corners of the eyes, creased with lines of age. Forty-something, you’d say. At the very least.

Except he wasn’t forty-something. He was a prematurely-aged thirty-two. I knew this, even though I couldn’t believe it – almost didn’t want to believe it – because I knew his birthday. I’d even been to his fifth birthday party. Ice cream cake, cocktail frankfurts, seaweed fights at the beach, the birthday boy crashing his new bike and skinning his knees. Bawled his eyes out, as you’d expect.

“Hello,” he said, and offered an apologetic half-smile.

I’d be apologetic too. Five years he’d had to think up with a killer intro line, and all Sam McCarthy had been able to come up with was ‘Hello.’

I know what you’re thinking. How couldn’t you have seen it coming? I’d been asking myself the same thing, with the benefit of hindsight, in the stunned silence of Sam’s old Rangie as we trundled back to the house. It really was the last thing I’d have expected. As far as I was concerned, he was dead; his family said so, the NZ government said so, the Otago newspapers said so, that photo of that horribly smashed bike on the side of the Queenstown-Glenorchy road said so.

What Sam had to say about it took a bit longer to come out. As did anything he had to say, it seemed. As he pottered around his kitchen making us coffee with his stovetop espresso – immersed in the detail of the ritual, a bit like my old man with his new Gaggia setup – short bursts of language would come forth, sort of half-chewed bits of sentences that often fell over before they got finished, or tripped over others.

“Sorry,” he said. “Not good with words.” And tapped a finger to the side of his head. “My head knock a few years back. Sometimes stuff doesn’t come out the way I sort of… think it.”

I was sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen – rustic 70s tiles and exposed pine, it looked a bit old and worn, a bit like its owner. Dishes were in the sink and stuff was a bit all over the place. The whole house was a bit like that – crooked and untidy. “Bit ramshackle,” he apologised. Then drifted off onto a tangent. “Wonder where they got that word from,” he mused. “Why you’d want to, erm, shackle a ram.”

“Ask your brother in law?” I suggested.

He looked genuinely baffled.

“If anyone would know it’d be a Kiwi…” I explained.

He thought that was very funny.

The house was an old fibro shack that had been progressively built onto over the years. Originally, it’d been a lighthouse keepers’ cottage, set back from the headland in a little protected dell, but both the lighthouse and its keeper had long since disappeared, with the building of a much larger lighthouse further along the coast on a previously more challenging bit of coastal geography. It was all a lot more overgrown and bushy than in the turn-of-the-century (previous century) black and white photo reproduction that was on the wall near the front door. I was trying not to reconcile Sam living in a former lighthouse keepers’ cottage with Chastity’s alarming story about what he’d done to her in a lighthouse keepers’ cottage. That story needed not to be true.

“How do you have your coffee?” he asked me. “I should remember, shouldn’t I…”

“Same as Lena,” I said.

“Was gonna be my next question…” He chuckled. “Bit too early in the morning for me.”

“You usually up at this time?” I asked. “I don’t remember you being a morning person.”

“I’m still not,” he shook his head. Then shrugged. “Not really an afternoon person either… it kinda depends on the Proton Pills.”

Lena had been outside watching the sunrise. I’d figured she needed a few moments to herself anyway, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed so I guessed she’d been at least that.

“Hey,” I said as she popped her head around the door. “Coffee’s up.”

She sidled over and took the stool next to me at the bar. Yup, she’s looking pretty frazzled. Had been all night, of course. She’d been more of the opinion than me that we were about to meet a sticky end at the hands of Fyfe’s private security personnel. Who, at this moment, were winging their way (is winging the right term in a chopper? Rotoring their way?) to a nearby heliport to refuel the Bell Ranger. Well at least that’s what Mr James had told us, for all we knew they might have simply abandoned us here to be killed and eaten by McCarthy. The stupid shit that goes through your head…

I was mainly surprised they’d just fucked off and left us without any apparent security detail. They were seemingly pretty confident we’d figured out we had no place else to go, even if we did try and get free. We could probably get the keys to the Range Rover off McCarthy, hammer out along the road that led away from the house (presumably there was one which didn’t go to the lookout), find out where we were… or we could sit around the breakfast bar and find out what the hell they’d brought us here for, if not to rub us out.

McCarthy went to the bookshelf – packed full of old, faded second-hand books with old, flaking spines and well-thumbed yellowing pages – and tugged out a thick bound album. “Memory’s not good,” he said, tapping his temple through the old beanie again, maybe trying to rattle the wires back into a better connection. Percussive maintenance for the win. “So, I like photos. It’s… it’s a trigger.” He opened the album, leafed through a few pages to get to the point he wanted to – a bit too fast for me to recognise at a glance the faces in the preceding pages, possibly intentional - then he pulled a stool under him, clambered on like a drunk getting onto a mechanical bull at a B&S ball, and lay the album out on the table.

April 8th 2004, said the slightly trembly handwriting – looked like I remembered Sam’s from school and band days, and probably was, judging by the way his hands trembled on the table. My crash. The press clipping from the Mountain Scene and a few bits and pieces culled from the ODT. The original photo of the crashed bike, in colour, presumably from the paper. A grainy one, auto-dated 11.04.04 in one corner, of a helmet on a table, in McCarthy’s signature matt-black, a sickening dent in one side. Half the rest of it had been expertly sawn away with some sort of surgical-grade angle grinder, so it was like a cutaway anatomical model of an Arai motorbike helmet. Another couple followed, dated 12.04.04; one of the mangled railing at Bennett’s Bluff, and one of the view down the slope to the lake. You could see the divots and scars that had been carved in the rocky scree, and scattered pieces of plastic and metal shrapnel which had been left behind. A bit of front fork. What looked like helmet visor. A boot, floating just near the edge.

“You’d have thought someone would clean up after you,” I offered.

McCarthy nodded. “I didn’t… take these,” he clarified, pretty unnecessarily.

“You were somewhere getting put back together at the time,” I said. “Out of the public eye.”

“Yes,” he said, in a tone that said ‘I have no idea, but I’ll agree.’

“What do you remember about the crash?” Lena asked.

He shook his head. “Nothing,” he admitted. “Nothing before, nothing after.” He realised that wasn’t very helpful, and he wanted to be helpful. “Going too fast, hit some black ice,” he explained. “So I was told.”

“Very early in the morning?”

He nodded. “Don’t know what I was doing out then. I had a job… driving jetboats and stuff.” He leafed back one in the album. A page of group shots – tourists in front of a jetboat down by the lake’s edge in what I guessed was Glenorchy from the background scenery, with two orange-jacketed guides flanking them. Different tourists every time. Different other-guides, too. Queenstown tourism industry tended to see a lot of turnover in staff, like in most holiday towns. I was going to take a wild stab in the dark and assume the tour guide company was owned by Fyfe, and the job was part of the salvage op McCarthy’s sister had launched after he’d begun to disintegrate post-Gasket – getting him over to NZ, sponsoring him for a job, putting him up and looking after him. Hadn’t really worked, but at least she’d tried.

“How’d they find you?” Lena asked. “I mean, if you were that badly injured…”

He shrugged. “They were out looking for me?” he suggested. “Late coming home, or something.” A bashful smile, which seemed to be his way of apologising for his mental lapses. “My sister Anne… you remember Anne? Always been a worrier. The bike… she found it. Ran over it,” he smiled absently. “Middle of the road, hard to miss… they found me.”

“In the water, or…”

“Think so. Dunno,” he said. He flicked back to the ‘after’ photo from a few days later, where someone (Anne? Fyfe?) had carefully catalogued the crash site. One wavering finger came down on the water’s edge. “I see that and I get shivers. Like, I’m cold. I feel cold, like I’m in the water. I guess that means…” He shrugged. “I get cold now a lot, though. Nerve damage or something.”

In his slow, laborious way, McCarthy explained that they’d got him out, and he’d been choppered to hospital in Christchurch. And was promptly lost by the Canterbury District Health Board, officially at least. Throughout several surgeries and rehab, learning to walk and talk again – a few photos of which were scattered over the album pages to follow – he never actually existed in the NZ health system, public or (later) private. There was a good reason for that. He was dead. He’d never really existed in NZ – he’d entered on his Australian passport, but had worked under a locally assumed name (and a locally assumed accent) when driving boats for Fyfe, judging by the name tag which read DAVE above a New Zealand flag which was in amongst the tour photos – but now he didn’t exist on any level. Not legally, anyway.

“Coroner said that I drowned,” McCarthy explained. “That solved a lot of stuff. So we just let it be… Or rather Anne and Dan did,” he admitted wryly. “I was still being fed baby food with a spoon.” I read through the laundry-list of injuries which had been scrawled on a bit of hospital notepaper and added to his scrapbook collection: broken jaw was on there. And was about the least of his injuries. He’d come off a bike at serious speed, hit a railing and been rag-dolled down a rocky slope. A lot of energy had needed to be absorbed. Most of it had been absorbed by the shattering of bones and cartilage.

“You should be dead,” I said with an amazed smirk.

“I know, mate,” he said softly. “A lot of days, I think so too.”

He turned the page.

Sam with a wheelchair – and a beard, though not as big or bushy (or grey) as this one – and a Santa hat, doling out the presents from under the tree to Anne’s kids. Sam and Dan Fyfe outside the clubhouse at Millbrook (super exclusive course between Queenstown and Arrowtown) – “first time, did a full nine holes that day,” he said proudly. “Would have been about two without the cart.” Sam, Anne and Anne’s eldest on top of Key Summit on the Routeburn Track – “it’s about an hour and a half. For normal people. Four for me. Kids went up and came back and went back up before I got there.”

The album ended there. It marked the end of his time in NZ, and he didn’t need a photo album to remind him why. “I got the bill,” he explained. “For all the shit things I’d ever done. Chastity - Kate Stratford - got hold of Dan. Blackmailed. Had to start paying my way.”

“Blackmailed over what?” Lena asked.

“Rather let her tell you about that,” he said grimly.

Oh.

“She said you’d raped her,” I said, flatly. “Pretty horribly.”

McCarthy frowned. The words came out like pulling teeth. “Dunno what to say to that,” he said. “Kate Stratford’s an actress. She exaggerates.”

“Clearly enough to form the basis of blackmail, though,” Lena responded, suddenly going all Kerry O’Brien on his arse. “Something convincing enough to require a settlement…”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t help you.”

“Sam, you have to,” Lena said. “Otherwise there’s only one account of this, and it’s hers.”

“You don’t think I know that?” he said, nearing fracture. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything. I have these gaps… this black space. I know bad things are in them... I know what my dreams look like.” His eyes were reddening. “Go ask Kate. But get her to make it the real version, not the wannabe-fucking-actress version.” He hadn’t sworn before. I’d wondered if he’d forgotten how to do that too, but nope.

I shouldn’t have, but I wanted to dig him out of the hole Lena was determined to bury him in. I steered the conversation away from Chastity. “What made you decide to come here, how’d you find the place?”

“I didn’t,” he said. “Came with a deal Dan did for a farm out to the west of here. Looked a good place to hide.”

“Nice and quiet, good for writing music?”

“Erm, yeah…” He stroked his beard. It made a pretty good prop. “Yeah, the music. Sorry about that. We’re sorting that out.”

“Sorting what out?”

“The stuff with… I didn’t know. I had a bunch of old CDs with demo tracks, I didn’t realise one wasn’t mine.”

“Whose idea was it to recycle your old demos into kids’ music anyway?”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t… that wasn’t the idea. The idea for Superfun… it was Anne, really. We thought it up when I was in rehab. I used to make up silly songs for her kids, just mucking around… made-up lyrics with old riffs I knew. She came up with the ‘creative concept’, she called it. Artwork and design and the look of everything. Was her thing. Design. I would write the music. Was the plan. Until I got set up here and couldn’t remember how to write music…”

“Hence the recycling.”

“Yeah. To start. I think I’m getting better,” he said. “But, damage done.”

“It’s alright mate. Your secret is safe with us…”

“Yes, particularly after my story got skewered,” Lena remarked thinly.

“Delayed,” McCarthy. “Just long enough for you to see if you want to… I dunno.” Indicating me with a wave of his hand, he added, “Can’t do much about what you said on stage, Channel V filming live…”

“Luckily for you everyone just reported I was drunk, on drugs and/or psychologically disturbed, Tim Rogers at Falls style.”

“Yeah,” he nodded, as though he understood the reference. “Luckily.”

“Sorry,” Lena said, “I just don’t find it as easy to accept this sort of media manipulation.”

“Faaaarrrk,” I exhaled, frustrated. “You right there?”

“What?”

“C’mon Lena, bit of fucking perspective,” I retorted. “You know how this shit works. You revelled in it for years. Don’t pretend you’re outraged, just because it’s your story.”

“Whose fucking side are you on?”

“Mine,” I said. “Just like you. What’s your point? You going to print saying that Fyfe’s lot are recycling Sam’s old demos… that’s now known to be false, because Sam is himself. And you’re not printing that either.”

“You gonna stop me?”

“Personally?” I queried. “If it means not being dropped out of a helicopter by Mr James on the way home, yeah I think I fucking might. Enough with the pretense of journalism ethics, Lena. You fucked off the right to that when you wrote that fucking story about me.”

“Fuck you both,” she declared, tossing her stool over and storming out.

I sipped my coffee.

“That was a bit rough,” Sam said. His hands were shaking more than normal.

“Yeah, it was,” I agreed. “But she won’t be told otherwise, will she? Earth revolves around her. She thinks this is all about getting her the greatest fucking exclusive in the history of the world.”

“Would prefer it didn’t,” Sam blanched. “Already had to call in a lot of favours for this.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do it?” I asked. “What’d you hope to gain? Did you really think she wouldn’t expect to be able to write about it?”

Sam hung his head, deflated. “I just thought… I didn’t think. That’s what Anne was saying. I didn’t think. I hoped. I hoped I could explain, that you guys would understand.”

“Might help,” I said, “if you were honest about what Chasti… Kate… Chastikate? Yeah her. About what Chastikate is blackmailing you over.”

“Like I said…”

“When’d Dan buy the place?”

“Four years ago? Maybe?”

“Chastity said you’d…” I hated the word, it made me physically sick. “Raped her. In a lighthouse keepers’ cottage. Like this. But you wouldn’t have been in here at the time she said it happened, soon after the band went bust - early ‘04 or whatever. So unless you’ve always had a thing for living in lighthouse keepers’ cottages…”

Sam realised it didn’t add up.

“Beginning to think this was why everyone said this was a shit idea,” he remarked ruefully, glancing up at the clock on the microwave. Half-seven. “Might have to call for backup,” he admitted, as much to himself as anything. “Excuse me a minute? You want to go see if Lena’s got lost in the bush yet?”

“I’ll go find out... MIRANDA… MIRANDA…”

At best, ‘calling for backup’ meant Mr James and Mr Smith heading back to hold his hand and make sure no more nasty questions got asked. At worst… we’d be floating offshore by mid-morning. Figured it was only fair to warn her.

I found Lena up by the remnants of the old lighthouse – just a concrete pad and a besser-block shed now. She’d been crying. I’d been a cunt. But then again, so’d she. While she pretended not to have been crying, I pretended not to have been a cunt.

“You alright?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “That was horrible. I didn’t deserve that.”

“Yeah, that was my reaction reading that article...”

“I said sorry about that. How many times do I have to?”

“Yeah, I know. And there was that tax evasion shit which may or may not have got us the BDO gig. I remember. But it doesn’t undo it. And it doesn’t mean you get to do it again scot-free.”

“Why not?” she demanded. “We’ve been kidnapped, held against our will, dumped somewhere in the bush… they get to do that scot-free?”

“Are you going to spend you entire career using your laptop to get even with people who’ve pissed you off, or are you planning to grow the fuck up at some stage?”

“Fuck you.”

“Fair question. Deserves an answer.”

“Fuck you is my answer,” she said. “And yeah. I am. I’m getting a real job. Giving up writing. Getting a mortgage and a dog and finding some dull fuck to breed with.”

“Does Bear know about this?”

“I was making a point,” she said, witheringly. “I thought you’d get it. What with going to Agnes’ wedding and seeing what a hollow fucking shell she’s turned into.”

“Lena, what are you here for? What are you actually trying to achieve out of all this?”

“I’m here because some private security arsehole…”

“Yeah, whatever. This started before last night, I think you’ll find. Asked you the same fucking question three or four months ago, when all this shit started. When you turned up on my doorstep and we went touring down the coast for the weekend to watch Spam Filter go round and hassle McCarthy’s neighbours. What is it you want out of all this? Do you even know? Closure? Revenge? Validation? Or just a big fuck-off byline?”

I knew what she wanted out of all this, because I’d known her for nearly all her adult life and could read her as well as I could any woman I knew. (Yeah, that well.) McCarthy was still her longest standing, most significant relationship. That relationship, and its end, had left its thumbprint on her, coloured her world view and her relationships since. Basically, as I saw it, she was still looking for a solid, secure, evidence-based reason why that was all his fault and not hers. However, since she knew I knew that, she didn’t need to say it.

“I don’t see why I can’t write about this.”

“Because no other fucking journalist would get to be in the position to,” I snapped. “Because you’re here for the same reason I’m here. Because you matter to him, not as a writer, but as a human being. Because we are his friends. And because he got sick of having to lie and cover up the fact that he’s even fucking alive to you and me.”

“He just wants us to help cover it up as well.”

“So?” I said. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing so important to you personally, or to people you care about, that you wouldn’t write about it for a buck… oh hang on, yeah. You told the entire fucking nation my brother killed himself. Sorry, forgot about that. Carry on.”

“Do you forgive anyone for anything?” she wanted to know.

“Yeah. I forgive him,” I said, “for his mind packing up on him.”

Surprising us both with the admission, to be fair.

“And for what he did to her in there?”

“You mean in the house he didn’t live in until a year after she says it happened?”

That got her attention, at last.

“Seriously, do your fucking maths, girl. And by the way since when did you give a shit whether your replacement lived or died?”

OK, so the ‘replacement’ line – yeah, well out of order.

“I’d like that back actually. That was over the top. Sorry. By the way, he’s called for backup, so you should have got your questions in earlier. And probably made out a last will and testament… See you back at the house.”

“Angus…” she called after me. Propped. Stopped. Turned around. Her face was streaming. Again. I felt like a cunt. Again.

“Yeah?”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Scared?” I said. “Scared of what?”

“Fuck, I dunno, that they’ll fucking kill us?”

“For what?” I said. “For finding out about their evil scheme for world domination… that they’ve been incredibly careful to let us in on?” I frowned. “You’ve been watching too many Bond films, Lena.”

“But you just said…”

“It’s a joke, Joyce,” I replied. “C’mon. Cheer up. Our oldest mate in the world isn’t dead at the bottom of a fucking lake. He’s alive, Lena. Not by much, looking at the state of him, but he’s alive. Our oldest friend. And you said yourself that the reason you guys never worked out was that you were friends first and foremost and were trying to be lovers as an afterthought.”

“When the fuck did I say that?”

“Oh did I say you said that? I meant, everyone who ever saw you two together said that,” I said. “Now come on.”