Secret Kill

CHAPTER ONE The plastic chair dug into my butt as I sat in the back of the conference room. I ran my fingers around my neck inside my shirt collar. The air-conditioning was arctic, but my neck felt as if it were on fire and itched like crazy. I willed myself to stop scratching. Sometimes my whole body itched with the sensation of insects crawling over me. My doctor had told me it was stress and advised me to take up yoga and meditation. I threw the pamphlet for the Serenity Yoga School at him and stormed out. I tried to concentrate on the director's speech as he rabbited on about the importance of young people who'd taken the wrong path in life (he avoided the word criminals, all very P.C.) being given the chance to make a fresh start. I'd heard it all before, several times. Every time New Life Inc. had a new intake of participants, they invited me for morning tea and asked me to give a speech. They called them students, but whether they actually learned anything was debatable. 'We’re very honoured to have as our guest, the patron of our organisation, the managing director of Palmer Product Packaging, Mr Jackson Forbes.' I got up to a thin round of applause and walked up to the front of the room. Richard returned to his seat at the back of the room next to Matthew, the program facilitator. Seated around the table were a dozen young people, from late teens to mid-twenties; ten men and two women. They slumped in their chairs, blank-faced and fidgety. A lank-haired girl picked at the scabs on her arm. The boy beside her, his pale arms like ghostly twigs protruding from his stained T-shirt, regarded me with a twenty-cones-a-day gaze. A beefy lad directly on my right placed his hands on the table, making sure I saw the words tattooed on his knuckles. Death and Anarchy. I could read all their thoughts as if they were in one giant thought bubble—‘What’s an old fart in a suit got to say that I'll give a f**k about?’ ‘Thank you for that warm welcome, Richard. Please call me Jack—Jackson sounds like your local coffee shop guy whose name tag says Awesome Coffee Ninja and wears his hair in a topknot.’ That got a few sniggers. I gave my usual speech about growing up in a public housing estate with a violent alcoholic father and clinically depressed mother, spending my childhood dodging fists and broken bottles and saving my mother from Valium overdoses, finding refuge in crime and drugs with my older brother Sam and the neighbourhood kids. A story, or variations of it, familiar to most of them. Then seeing the light at 24, leaving Sydney for Melbourne and spending three years doing s**t jobs before finding something that I could even remotely imagine myself liking. I didn't go on with the 'rah rah if I can do it, you can do it' kind of stuff that some ex-cons do. I just gave them the facts and let them draw their own conclusions. When I finished, I studied their faces. I knew what they were thinking. 'It's all right for you, you just got lucky. There's no way I could ever get to where you are.' It's true that I did get lucky when I met Lindsay, whose father was the owner of Palmer Products Packaging, a multi-million dollar business that his father had started in his garage. But that was just the beginning of the long road to the top. Old man Palmer didn't give me any slack—he came down on me like a ton of bricks at every opportunity. And that luck wouldn't have found me if I was still doing drugs and crime. ‘Anyone got any questions? I asked. Silence while they squirmed in their seats and looked down at the table. ‘What prison were you in?’ Tattooed Knuckles finally asked. ‘I didn't go to prison. Some of the crimes I committed I didn't get caught for, but I was well and truly on the road to getting there.' His expression said it all. If you haven't been to prison you're not a real crim. This paved the way for the others to pepper me with questions. What drugs did you take? What crimes did you do? What happened to your friends? And your brother? I knew why they were asking those questions. They were trying to bring me down to their level—to find some way of relating who I used to be to who they were now. When the flurry of questions died down, Richard was half out of his seat to do his thank-you speech, when a young guy put up his hand. He’d been silent up until now listening to the others. There was something still fresh and innocent about his face, and it wasn't just the crop of pimples on his chin. I guessed that he was fairly new to the game, maybe hadn’t even done time. But if there was any hope of him getting out of crime, he needed to stop hanging around with these others. That was the problem with these programs, worthy as they might be in theory. Hanging around with other crims was not the best way to get straight. 'Why did you decide to stop doing crime? Did you like wake up one morning and decide you'd had enough?’ I wished I could tell him the real reason; maybe it would make Tattooed Knuckles sit up and wipe that sneer off his face. Instead I nodded. 'Something like that. I was in court on a stealing charge and the magistrate told me if I came back before him again he'd send me to prison. To my mind, that was the worst thing that could happen to me, so that was my wake-up call. But that moment when you to say to yourself, “I don't want to do this any more” will be different for every person. Your determination must be strong because it's not easy. There'll be times when you'll be very tempted to slip back into your old life.' The kid didn't look completely satisfied with my answer, but before I could elaborate any further, Richard stood up. 'Thank you very much, Jackson, for an inspiring speech. I'm sure you've given everyone here food for thought. And speaking of food, let's have some morning tea.’ We stood around and drank instant coffee from styrofoam cups and munched on cardboard biscuits, the students in one group and Richard, Matthew and I in the other. The young kid didn't look my way once; he was absorbed into the group, nudging the scabby-armed girl and laughing loudly at some joke that Tattooed Knuckles cracked. #