‘Oh yeah, I’m fine. It’s nothing.’
‘Right, well…’ she paused a little awkwardly. ‘God, Leo, sorry to hear that, anyway.’
I tapped my toes against the carpet to expend the strange nervous energy I felt. The small talk felt unnatural and it was only prolonging the inevitable. ‘You wanted to talk about Declan?’ I said.
‘Yes, I really did – do. Can we meet?’
‘Meet?’ This was unexpected, but as soon as she said the word, I realised it shouldn’t have been.
‘Uh, I’m…’
‘Please,’ she said quietly. The rhythmic tapping of my toes against the floor stopped. ‘I won’t take up much of your time, I promise.’
‘Okay.’
‘When suits?’
‘I’m on sick leave. I can meet whenever you want to.’
‘Now?’
‘Now? But…’
‘Later today then?’
‘No, now is okay.’ I sighed, then cautioned, ‘I don’t know what you think I can tell you, Molly.’
‘But you found him, didn’t you?’
At the memory I felt my chest contract. I could still see him in my mind’s eye – Declan, lying limp on the filthy, threadbare carpet in a storage room in the basement of my cousin’s building.
‘Yeah.’
‘Then…’ she let the word hang.
I waited for her to finish the thought, but when it became clear that she wasn’t going to, I said, ‘Okay, where do you want to meet?’
Declan and I met in the first few weeks of our course at Sydney Uni in the mid-1990s. We were paired together in a tutorial group to complete a joint assessment that in hindsight was most likely a cruel joke on the professor’s part; the kid who still lived in a public housing unit with his unemployed mother partnered with the son of a billionaire who had been raised in a mansion on Sydney Harbour.
I was rough around the edges in those days, and I knew it. I remember sitting down next to Declan and feeling so intimidated I could barely bring myself to speak. Fortunately, I soon realised I wasn’t the only person feeling out of my depth; Declan looked confident, with his uppity clothing and his carefully enunciated speech. The fa?ade didn’t last long – within one study session it was pretty apparent to me that he was going to need me to pass that assignment much more than I needed him.
Dec and I bonded deeply and quickly as only teenagers can, collectively stewing over a shared sense of injustice about our individual situations. As a young Aboriginal man in the sea of mostly white students in our class, I was an outsider and I was only there because of a special entry programme and my ability to write a convincing essay. But even as an exceedingly wealthy white kid, Declan did not belong in that group of students either – at high school he’d failed his final exams miserably. Were it not for his father’s deep pockets, Declan would never have made it to university at all, let alone gained entry to a highly sought-after course at a prestigious institution like Sydney Uni.
With all his easy privileges it should have been easy for me to hate him and there were some days that I did. But Declan had one beautifully redeeming quality: he did not see money or lack thereof, or colour or race or any of the other trappings or categories that most people filter the world by. Right from the very beginning, I was nothing more or less than a friend; somehow, it never really occurred to him that there was any reason why I shouldn’t be. When I finally, reluctantly, invited him to my home, he stepped into the tiny, dank apartment I shared with Mum and looked around.
‘Shit, Leo!’ he had said, genuinely confused and shocked. ‘You’re poor?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I didn’t realise,’ he said, and he shrugged and opened the fridge to look for a snack.
Declan was one of a kind – one of the good guys.
Only an hour or so after our phone call I waited in a café at The Rocks for Molly to arrive. The dull thud of dread in my gut had not abated. There was no denying that the Torrington family had been embarrassed by Declan’s death – the instant cover-up they manufactured for the media had more than proven that. I wondered whether anything I could tell Molly would comfort her.
‘Sorry, I’m late…’