Chapter Sixteen

 
            Wayne and Guthrie rushed home to Gurthrie's house, hoping and praying that all the week's garbage was still intact. They cursed themselves continually for being so stupid in ruining the tape and then throwing it in the bin. Once at Guthrie's they hit the wheelie bin that was kept behind the shed in the backyard. They flipped open the top and a swarm of mozzies flew out. Relief came instantly: the bin was stuffed right to the top with five to six garbage bags. As they pulled them out one by one they felt things looked promising.
            'Everything seems to be intact,' Guthrie said, trying to avert his nose from the smell. 'Let's just hope it's in here somewhere.'
            Wayne wasn't keen on the task ahead of them. 'That's a lot of rubbish to go through,' he said.
            'No use complaining,' Guthrie ripped one of the plastic bags apart. The smell hit them like a truck.
            'Phew!!' Wayne cried. 'What do you put in there?'
            'What do you mean?' Guthrie was offended. 'It's garbage. Gee, what do you expect, Calvin Klein's Obsession?'
            'We're really up to our eyeballs in crap here,' Wayne complained, gingerly picking amongst the garbage as it was strewn across the backyard. 'Haven't you got some plastic gloves or something? This is putrid.'
            Guthrie was searching so feverishly that he hadn't given it a second thought. Wayne seemed to be being a bit precious, Guthrie thought. He stopped his fossicking for a moment. 'Okay,' he said. 'I'll see what I can come up with.'
            A few minutes later he was back with a pair of kitchen rubber gloves and some old gardening gloves that he'd found in the shed. They returned to their garbage sorting. Bag after foul bag was pulled apart, layed out in all it's appalling detail and combed over, until the smell started to seep into their clothes, skin and hair. Eventually all six bags were opened. The stench and mess got worse and worse. When they took a break an hour and a half later they had still found nothing. The grass in the backyard couldn't be seen for all the rubbish. Gusts of wind were catching the lighter items - plastic bags and bits of paper stained with rotted food - and blowing it all over the place. Guthrie looked despondently at the filthy mess.
            'If mum sees any of this she's going to flip,' he said.
            'We have to keep looking,' Wayne asserted, almost desperately. 'It has to be here somewhere. It's too important.'
            Guthrie surveyed the back yard that was now was a sea of rubbish. He was tired and fed up. 'I don't like our chances. This is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.'
            'Come on, get up,' Wayne insisted. 'It has to be here somewhere.'
            Reluctantly Guthrie dragged himself up and resumed the effort. They had been kicking through the garbage in a desultory fashion when Guthrie heard his mother's car pull up the driveway.
            'Great,' Guthrie said cynically, looking at his watch. 'That must be mum. I don't know how I'm going to explain all of this. She's going to be really pissed off.'
            'We'll just have to explain that we're looking for something,' Wayne said. 'It's simple as that.'
            Guthrie shook his head. 'She's not going to be happy.'
            'What in God's name is going on here?' Mrs Dulwich almost dropped her grocery shopping. 'Have you completely lost your mind? Guthrie, you're black with filth. Wayne, you're not much better. What's your mother going to think? I bet your clothes stink to high heaven.'
            'Mum, we'll clean everything up I promise,' Guthrie said breathlessly. 'We have to find that video I threw out the other day. It's an emergency.'
            'You should have thought about that before you turfed it in the first place,' Mrs Dulwich said. 'Why did you throw it in the bin if you were only going to need it in a couple of days?'
            'There have been a few developments since then,' Wayne explained vaguely. 'The tape is worth a lot more now.'
            'What happened to make the tape so valuable all of a sudden?' Mrs Dulwich inquired.
            'Er, we came across some information,' Wayne continued.
            'It looks like our media studies project will be going in a completely different direction,' Guthrie said, explaining nothing. Neither really knew exactly in what direction the project would now be travelling, if at all. All they knew was that they were emboldened by the documentary they had seen, and now wanted some answers from Kirsten Steele. 'A lot can happen in politics in twenty four hours,' Guthrie parroted something he'd heard on the news recently.
            Mrs Dulwich shook her head. It was clear she was going to get no sensible answer. 'I don't care what turn your project has taken,' she said. 'I want this whole mess cleaned up straightaway, and I mean everything. I don't want to find one bit of rubbish left out here, am I understood?'
            'Yes mum,' Guthrie said.
            Wayne nodded in agreement.
            Mrs Dulwich kicked at an item of rubbish with the toe of her shoe to show her displeasure. She then turned and left, but the toe of her shoe had caught something that was buried under the general detritus. Videotape spool was dragged half way across the yard.
            Seeing the tape Wayne and Guthrie went crazy. 'Stop! Stop!' they urged, running after her.
            Mrs Dulwich stopped to see what was impeding her progress. Seeing the tape wound around her leg she instinctively went about freeing herself, kicking and stomping with little regard for the tape.
            'Aaaggh!!' Guthrie cried.
            'Don't do that! Don't do that!!' Wayne fell to his knees and delicately tried to disentangle the tape. 'It's the videocassette. That's what we're after.'
            'Just get it off me,' Mrs Dulwich demanded, now entirely out of patience.
            Wayne managed to free Mrs Dulwich, while Guthrie made a point of hugging his mother.
            'You found it!' he said overjoyed.
            'Eeeeugh! Get off me!' Guthrie's mother pushed him off. 'I don't want to smell of garbage. The first thing I want you to do when you're finished here is to have a shower and change those clothes. You pong, big time. Wayne, you should go home and clean up.'
            Although Wayne and Guthrie were exhilarated to have the tape back, they still had other bridges to cross. The tape was a mess and they couldn't be sure that all the material they wanted was still on it. Maybe the tape was completely ruined. That was the nightmare possibility. They sat down on a patch of grass and studied the spools of tape. It wasn't in such bad shape. There were a few sharp creases here and there, but nothing major. They carefully started winding the tape back into its case. Wayne did the winding and Guthrie straightened out the tape before it was pulled back into the cassette. After a few minutes the job was done.
            Wayne sighed heavily. 'There. Now it's all back together.'
            'Let's just hope there's something left on it,' Guthrie said grimly.
            Wayne's forehead creased in seriousness. 'I think there will be,' he said solemnly and optimistically. 'There has to be. I feel like something's destined to happen with this.'
            'Do you reckon?'
            'Yep, I do.'
            Guthrie looked around him at all the rubbish to be cleared up. 'What are we going to do next?'
            'First, let's clear up all this stuff. Your mum will go ballistic if we don't get that done. Then I'll ride straight home and see that the tape's alright. If it is, then……..then we'll have to talk about what we should do next. We'll have to think about it.'
            Wayne put the tape in a safe place in his back pack and the two friends went about the unpleasant job of clearing up a backyard full of garbage and putting it into new bags. Yet time didn't drag as they thought it would. Their minds were too full of what they should do, what course to take. They really had no idea of what to do next, should the tape still be okay.
            Wayne made it home just in time for dinner. While making a mess of Guthrie's backyard had only taken a few minutes, cleaning it up again had taken hours. Adding to the delays was Mrs Dulwich's frequent inspections. The boys had said that the job was done, but Guthrie's mother insisted on checking for herself. She would then find a plastic bag attached to a tree somewhere, or some used tea bags sitting on a favourite plant, and the boys would have to comb the yard again.
            Wayne didn't realise that he smelt atrocious. He sat down at the dinner table without giving a second thought to matters of hygiene.
            'Whew!!' Mrs Grimwood cried. 'You smell high. What have you been up to?'
            Wayne's father winced and gave him a dirty look.
            'I've been going through Guthrie's garbage,' Wayne said nonchalantly.
            'Excuse me?' Mr Grimwood said in disbelief.
            'We threw something out in the garbage that we needed back,' Wayne explained. 'What's for dinner, I'm starving?'
            'Don't think you're going to sit down to dinner like that,' Mrs Grimwood insisted. 'Go and have a shower. And put those clothes in the dirty clothes basket.'
            Wayne got up from his seat. He knew the quicker he got clean the sooner he would eat.
            'What was it you threw in the garbage that you needed back anyway?' Mr Grimwood asked.
            'A video tape,' Wayne called from the hallway.
            Mr and Mrs Grimwood gave each other quizzical looks.
            'Nothing he does makes any sense,' Mrs Grimwood said.
            Mr Grimwood took up his paper and continued reading a gloomy article on the state of the economy. 'God knows what he'll make of himself.'
             After his shower and dinner Wayne managed to talk his father into letting him use his camcorder for a few minutes, under supervision. He had wanted to check the salvaged tape straight away, but his father wouldn't let him use the camera with dirty hands, and his mother insisted he eat first, like all civilised people (Mrs Grimwood was always concerned with civilised behaviour.) He linked the camera up to the television in the spare room and prepared for the moment of truth. If there was nothing on the tape, or if it didn't play at all, then they were up shit creek without a paddle. Wayne dropped the cassette into the holder and clicked it shut. He crossed his fingers for good luck, then pressed play. He waited, and waited. The tape looked a bit wobbly to start with, but he was pretty sure it had been wobbly anyway. An image of Kirsten flickered onto the screen. So far so good, but the real test would be to sit through all the material. He felt sure anything could go wrong at any moment. Suddenly Kirsten could be drowned out in snow, or more critically the sound could drop out. About two minutes into the tape there was some major disturbance. Wayne felt his heart knock at his ribs. He braced himself. Things might yet get worse. The video image flickered violently, it started rolling over and over, a heavy, thick green strip wrapped itself over the top of the screen. Then it disappeared. Wayne settled back into himself. He breathed a bit more easily. This must have been the section where the tape was violently ripped out. The rest of the tape continued to play without much drama. There was the odd flicker, but nothing dramatic. The tape then moved into the accidentally taped material. Wayne reacted emotionally and forgot all the dramas of the past few hours that were involved in retrieving the tape. There was Kirsten again, saying that he and his friend were hopeless and ugly. It hurt, and he felt like throwing the tape back in the garbage again. She had no right to say that, Wayne sulked to himself. She was supposed to be all for young people. She was supposed to be their friend.
            Wayne pulled himself together. He put his feelings as much as possible to the side. There were larger events, he felt, now overtaking him. They had controversial material on Kirsten Steele. What to do? Wayne rewound the tape and called Guthrie.
            As soon as Guthrie heard the phone ring he demanded that all clear the way for him. 'It's Wayne,' he assured his mother and father, making a beeline for the wall phone.
            'What's happened? Is it okay?' Guthrie asked straight off the bat.
            'The tape is fine.'
            'There's nothing wrong with it at all?'
            'There's a bit of a hiccup two minutes in, but that's none of the stuff we need. It's just of Kirsten talking on the record.'
            'But when she talks off the record?'
            'It's pretty much in perfect condition. There's one or two blips on it, but that's all.'
            'It's a bloody miracle,' Guthrie marvelled.
            'So now we have the tape back again. What do we do now?'
            'Er, I don't really know,' Guthrie confessed. 'What can we do?'
            They sat silent for a few moments on the phone, trying to figure out what course to take.
            'Maybe we should hand it over to a current affairs program or something?' Guthrie suggested.
            Wayne wasn’t happy with the idea. It didn't seem to offer much scope. Plus it would take everything out of their hands. Then he thought of something that hadn't yet crossed his mind.
            'We'll have to confront Kirsten with it first,' Wayne said. 'If we hand it over to the media without letting Kirsten know we have the tape she might say we set her up or something. Maybe she wasn't talking about us.'
            'Not likely,' Guthrie said.
            'Yeah, but the point is we have to give her a chance to explain herself, otherwise it'll look like we’re just two vicious kids with chips on our shoulders. We have to be professional about this,' Wayne cautioned.
            'I still think we should ring up some TV station with our story.'
            'Then it wouldn't be our project anymore, we couldn't use it. We should at least wait until later.'
            'Oh, yeah!' Guthrie suddenly realised the sense of this.
            'So you agree?'
            'Yeah. Let's see what Kirsten has to say for herself. I've sure got some questions I'd like to ask her.'
            'Okay. I'm going to make a few copies of the tape for safekeeping. I'll give one to you, and another I'll hide here. Then we'll have a tape that we take to see Kirsten with.'
            'Shall we call her to let her know we’re coming?'
            'Na. We'll just turn up at her office, catch her off guard,' Wayne said. 'Then maybe we'll be able to talk to the real Kirsten Steele.