Liz squinted at the ceiling and repeated the phrase. ‘Whatever. Oh fuck it. Where are the samples?’ Nicola pointed to a stack of boxes containing the freebies with which cosmetic, hair care and perfume manufacturers inundated them in exchange for editorial mention. Liz pawed through the boxes until she had an armful of product and slewed off to the toilets.
Dear Anabelle, my husband likes to wear a Playboy Bunny costume when he does the housework…Dear Anabelle, I have fantasies about the ticket machines on the Melbourne trams, the main one being that I am a ticket machine, and commuters are putting coins into my slot…
Nicola put her head in her hands. Why were people so weird?
If they weren’t, would Johnny be dead? Johnny B. Dead?
She desperately wanted to talk to Liz about the events of the night before. But Detective Mann had warned her in a severe tone of voice
that there were ‘confidentiality issues’. He said she could be in far bigger trouble than she was already if she talked to anyone at all about what had happened. She wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘confidentiality issues’. He wanted to see her back at Bent Towers after work, at six, to ask her some more questions. She didn’t feel happy about returning to the scene of the crime, but he’d insisted. She’d ask him about this confidentiality thing then.
Liz returned, collapsed in front of a bookshelf and began clawing through the back issues. ‘Your Best Hangover Cures!’ she muttered. ‘Gotta be in here somewhere.’
Nicola scrounged in her desk drawer for a cylinder of Berocca. She fetched a glass of water from the cooler, and dropped in one of the wafer-sized vitamin tablets. As it began to fizz, she handed it to Liz.
Gratefully, Liz went to knock it back. She sneezed as the bubbles went up her nose, spraying pink liquid all over Nicola’s blue computer.
‘Bless you,’ Nicola said automatically, plucking a tissue out of the box on her desk and
wiping the beads of moisture off the translucent casing.
Liz didn’t reply. She looked like she’d suddenly remembered she’d left on her iron, an electric heater and all four gas rings on the stove when she’d left the house. Her eyes widened. The Berocca drink went flat in her hand.
‘Liz?’
‘Nicola. I really really really want to talk to you about something. It’s about Johnny.’
Nicola paled and swallowed. ‘You know?’
Liz’s lower lip quivered. She looked as though she was about to break into sobs.
‘Oh, Liz.’ Nicola had no idea how Liz could possibly know about Johnny but she was too tired to care. Relief flooded through her. ‘I’m in so much trouble.’
‘I suppose the important thing is that we’re still friends,’ Liz blurted.
Though she wasn’t sure why they wouldn’t be, Nicola leapt to her feet and embraced her boss. She and Liz sniffled into each other’s shoulders.
‘Ahem.’
Lip’s
marketing manager approached and cleared her throat. ‘Hate to break up a beautiful thing, ladies. But we’ve got an all-day meeting ahead of us, Liz.’
‘Shit, I forgot all about it,’ Liz sniffed, pulling away reluctantly. She turned to Nicola. ‘How about a drink tonight? We can talk about everything then.’
‘That’d be great,’ Nicola sighed. ‘I’ve got to see someone at six, but we could get together after that. Say seven o’clock. Where?’
‘Woolloomooloo?’
‘Why not? That’s where it all began.’
J
ust two months earlier, on the Friday afternoon before the Christmas break, Paddock, the publishing group that owned
Lip,
threw its annual Christmas party at an open-air restaurant on the finger wharf at Woolloomooloo. The party was for the staff of all the Paddock publications, which included professional-based journals such as
Udder People’s Money
(the financial broadsheet of the dairy industry) and
Architextual.
It was a glorious, full-colour tourism supplement sort of day. The restaurant was decked out
with giant floral arrangements whose fragrant scents mingled with the smells of salt air and the seared tuna and other snacks passed around by flamboyant waiters. Sunlight sparkled on the water like sequins on a fancy frock. Seagulls swooped and squawked like gossip columnists and the nautical rigging of the moored yachts tinkled like bangles on long brown arms. Nicola’s colleagues, giddy with champagne and their impending freedom, shrieked out each other’s names and hooted with laughter as they exchanged jokes and scandal and holiday plans.
It was the first office function Fox had attended since Nicola’s rise to the dizzying heights of the editorial department. When they’d arrived at the party, a gaggle of female colleagues had surrounded Nicola. Fox edged away as inconspicuously as possible. He was looking at the water and wondering if he’d embarrass Nicola by asking for a beer when he was cornered by a monotonal American who introduced himself as Zane—‘as in zany!’ So far as Fox could tell, Zane was about as zany as a cat up a tree. But at least he had someone to talk to.
Gesturing in Fox’s direction, Liz pinched Nicola’s arm. She pulled her aside from the others and exclaimed, ‘So that’s him! He’s
gorgeous
! Unbelievable! What a spunk!’
‘Talking about me?’ The voice came from just behind them. Liz and Nicola spun around to see a good-looking man who wore a lopsided grin, fashionably tailored black trousers and a red silk-knit pullover.
‘You’re cheeky,’ Liz said, glowing in her beaded Collette Dinnigan frock like a cooked prawn in a particularly elaborate fishing net. They’d recently done a cover story on how to ‘Prevent Sun Damage Before It’s Too Late!’ but Liz had gone off to Palm Beach the weekend before with sample alphahydroxy-acid products that she’d mistaken for sunblock.
‘The name’s Johnny. Johnny B. Wright.’
Liz squealed like she’d won a Lancôme makeover. ‘Johnny B. Wright! The architect!’ She batted her eyes so wildly that her thickly mascara-ed lower lashes adhered to her upper ones.
Nicola smiled. ‘Any relation to Johnny B. Goode?’
If Johnny had heard this joke a thousand and one times, he didn’t let on. ‘Nope,’ he replied. ‘But Johnny B. Bad’s a very close cousin.’
‘His firm, Wright Angles,’ Liz excitedly informed Nicola after prising her lashes apart, ‘is doing that massive complex up on Bent Street.’
‘Which one’s that?’ Nicola asked.
In her excited attempt to point in the direction of the building with her hand, Liz sprayed the air behind her with half the contents of her Vietnamese rice-paper roll. ‘Oops.’ She turned an even deeper shade of red under her sunburn.
Johnny didn’t miss a beat. ‘Happens to me all the time,’ he said, jettisoning the contents of his own roll over his shoulder. A small piece of tofu bounced off Fox’s chest.
Fox looked over in the direction from which the phyto-estrogenous missile had been launched. Zane, who didn’t share Fox’s highly developed sense of personal space, had already backed him up to within a few centimetres of the wharf’s edge. Where was a water
cannon
when you really needed one, Fox had been thinking when Johnny
B. Wright catapulted into his life via a rectangular morsel of solidified soy extract.
Fox could see Johnny, Liz and Nicola doubled over in laughter at some joke. Was it at his expense? His alarm bells began to ring. When Nicola had shifted from accounting to editorial, and started getting invited to fancy dos with fancy people, Fox was both glad for her—she seemed to enjoy it so much—and apprehensive for himself. What had until now been a shapeless anxiety gelled into the very specific form of the sophisticated-looking older man who was paying what Fox considered to be an inordinate amount of flirtatious attention to his Nic. While continuing to nod at Zane, Fox kept an eye on Nicola’s little group.
‘So what are you doing here?’ Nicola asked, wiping a small tear of laughter from her eye. ‘Besides throwing food around.’
‘She started it,’ Johnny accused, pointing at Liz. They all laughed again. ‘But seriously, I’m not quite sure.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper,
further arousing Fox’s suspicions. ‘They’ve invited me to be a consultant for
Architextual.
In fact, I was just told I may be asked to contribute the occasional piece.’
‘Great!’ Nicola enthused, though why, she wouldn’t have been able to say.
‘I take it you ladies are journalists? Any tips for a rank amateur like myself?’ He raised his eyebrows, and spread his palms as though all the better to catch whatever pearls of wisdom were to drop from their glossed lips.
‘Well,’ Liz began, ‘your first line should be your best line!’
Johnny nodded, smiling. He considered himself something of an expert on opening lines.
Nicola, her own smile setting like gelatin, despaired silently for her colleague as Liz launched into her set motivational speech for aspiring journos, the same one she gave every year at her old high school and practised in front of the staff for days beforehand. Liz could be
such
a dag. Nicola studied Johnny’s face for signs of boredom or worse, mockery, and was relieved, if mildly puzzled, to discover that he appeared entranced.
Johnny caught Nicola looking at him. His smile broadened and he shot her a discreet yet unmistakably conspiratorial glance. Nicola felt flattered. Johnny B. Wright, she concluded on the spot, was the most cosmopolitan man she’d ever met. She liked the graceful manner in which he was responding to Liz, and the way his smile deepened the character lines in his face. Character lines on men were what were called wrinkles on women; all the ‘Polished Silver!’ articles in the world on fabulous older women couldn’t erase the fact that only the Y-chromosome set had managed to make collapsing collagen work for them.
‘And what do you write about, Nicola?’ he asked when Liz finally wound down her lecture.
He laughed when she told him. ‘A sexpert,’ he said, winking. Although, generally speaking, winking counted as one of the ‘Ten Signs That He’s Not in Your League!’, Johnny carried it off with class. ‘Let me know if you ever need a research assistant.’ He raised an eyebrow suggestively. ‘I’m a bit of a sexpert myself.’
Nicola didn’t know
where
to look. The truth
was, the longer she’d had her job as Anabelle, the more she realised how little she really knew about her subject, especially when it came to some of what she now thought of as the outer suburbs of sexuality. Nicola had a geographic notion of sexual experience and knowledge. She conceptualised all the basic positions, from missionary to doggie, as a kind of centre of town, the Sydney CBD to be precise. Oral variations extended the map slightly eastwards, say to Potts Point or Rushcutters Bay, and anal took it westwards, to Pyrmont and Rozelle. Spanking was Newtown, threesomes Marrickville. Lactation fantasies took the map out to Mosman, diaper play to Sans Souci, chubby chasers to Parramatta and felching was Blacktown. Nicola lived in Potts Point. She’d never been to Blacktown. Fox came from Blacktown, but he’d have decked anyone who called him a felcher, even if he couldn’t have said what it meant, exactly.
Johnny, Nicola thought, looked like he’d been not just all over the city, but around the world a few times to boot. She felt his gaze on her body like a caressing hand.
Fox, ever vigilant, decided it was time to slide down the pole and extinguish the flames before they grew into a conflagration.
‘Dotcoms are
still
the future, Fox,’ Zane said.
‘Mate. I’m flat out keeping up with sitcoms. Now, if you’ll excuse me…’ Fox strode over to where Nicola was standing. He slipped his left hand possessively around her waist and lightly kissed her ear. ‘Hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Gonna introduce me to your friends?’
‘Fox,’ Nicola smiled. ‘This is my boss, Liz.’
‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Fox said politely.
‘All bad, I’m sure,’ Liz giggled, more right than she knew.
Daft, scatterbrained,
and
klutzy
were some of the things Fox had heard about her, though Nicola was in fact very fond of Liz.
‘And this,’ Nicola continued, ‘is Johnny B. Wright.’
The two shook hands as though holding a masculinity competition. ‘You in the magazine game as well?’ Fox asked.
‘Johnny’s a famous architect!’ Nicola informed him.
Nicola’s enthusiasm worried Fox. ‘Oh, mate,’ Fox drawled, shaking his head, ‘some of those new buildings, they’re the worst.’
Johnny cocked his head. His smile looked a tad strained.
‘Fox means, you know, in case of fire, it’s hard to rescue people.’ Nicola laughed nervously. A thin line of sweat beaded her upper lip.
‘It’s the windows. They don’t open,’ Fox confirmed.
‘My buildings conform to all the standard fire safety regulations. In fact, as far as tall buildings go, they’re among the safest in the world.’
‘As far as tall buildings go,’ Fox scoffed.
‘Ooh! Guys! Look at this!’ Liz, who’d been trying to remember without success the ‘Three Easy Steps to Avoid an Argument!’ clapped her hands with relief at the approach of a food waiter. He was holding a tray on which there was a pile of crusty bread, a flat dish of olive oil with a splash of balsamic vinegar, and another plate of mixed seeds.
Fox looked like a Hollywood cowboy who’d been spinning his pistols on the main street when
the director yelled, ‘Cut!’ He stared at the tray suspiciously. ‘What’s this—birdfood?’
‘Delicioso!’
Johnny enthused, taking a piece of bread, soaking it in oil and then rolling it in seeds. ‘It’s a kind of tapas. I ate it all the time when I was in Barcelona.’ He pronounced it ‘Barthalona’.
‘You’ve been to Spain!’ Liz gushed. ‘How romantic.’
‘Barthalona?’ Fox asked. ‘Ith that in Thpain?’
Nicola, embarrassed, turned her attention back to Johnny. Sometimes, she thought with a flash of annoyance, Fox seemed determined not to fit into her new and glamorous world.
‘It
was
quite romantic,’ Johnny was saying.
Nicola observed Liz visibly wilt. ‘I’m sure,’ Johnny added, ‘it would have been even more romantic if I’d had a beautiful travelling companion like yourself, of course.’
Liz perked up, though his eyes had darted in Nicola’s direction—a move not unnoticed by either Nicola or Fox.
The sun was going down. Like champagne that had been poured too early, the party began
to lose its fizz. Their group, together with Zane and some other colleagues and acquaintances, moved on to a bar in the wharf. One by one by two, the others peeled off until it was down again to Johnny, Liz, Fox and Nicola.
‘All right, kiddies.’ Johnny fixed them each in turn with his bright gaze. ‘What d’ya say? Want to paint the town red? I’ve got a party we could all go to.’ He slung one arm around Fox’s shoulder, who stiffened, and the other around Liz, who collapsed onto his side with such enthusiasm that she nearly fell over. Johnny winked at Nicola. ‘It’s a very special party.’
‘Oh, I dunno,’ Fox said, shrugging off Johnny’s arm. ‘I think Nic and I might just call it a night. What d’you say, Nic?’
‘But it’s early!’ Nicola exclaimed.
‘It’s eleven,’ Fox pointed out. He was eager to get away from Johnny, with whom he’d forged a tenuous truce for Nicola’s sake.
‘C’mon, Nic! Fox?’ Liz pleaded tipsily. Lurching now in Fox’s direction, she grabbed at and fiddled with Fox’s shirt as though she were trying to unbutton it. ‘You
gotta
come.’ She let out
a champagne burp, covered her mouth with her hand and giggled, ‘Pardon me!’
Politely but firmly, Fox extricated himself from Liz’s clutches. He pulled Nicola aside. ‘Sweetheart,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘I don’t mind going out somewhere if you want. Liz can come too if you like. But not that tosser.’
‘Well, I don’t think he’s a tosser at all,’ Nicola asserted. ‘And I want to go. Let’s be adventurous for once in our lives.’ She had no idea how adventurous they were going to be.
Fox didn’t like to be difficult. And, as someone who regularly ran into burning buildings, he resented the implication that he was the timid one.
Johnny told the taxi driver to drop them off at Mary Street, in Surry Hills, just east of Central Station. He led the group through a narrow alley until they came to a graffiti-covered doorway. He was about to knock on the door when he remembered something. Drawing a large red handkerchief from his pocket, like a magician, he handed it to Fox. ‘Fox, my man. Take this.’
‘What for?’ Fox stared suspiciously at the cloth
as though at any moment pigeons might fly out from it and shit on his head.
‘It’s a Red Party. I meant it about painting the town. Our two lovely ladies are already wearing red.’
Liz, who assumed he was referring to her frock and not her sunburn, gave ‘The Look That Tells Him You Want Him!’ her best shot. Nicola blushed and fiddled her bra straps back under her frock. ‘Don’t cover it up,’ Johnny said. ‘Red bras are very sexy.’
Fox’s hand tightened around Nicola’s. She saw out of the corner of her eye that he’d clenched his jaw. He looked extremely fuckable. She stood on tiptoes and kissed him, in a display that, she would never have openly admitted, was as much for Johnny’s benefit as Fox’s. Then she took the handkerchief and knotted it around his neck. ‘That looks great, honey,’ she said.
Fox touched the scarf dubiously. ‘I feel like a poof,’ he grumbled.
Johnny smiled and beat a sharp tattoo on the door. A freakishly tall man, with vermilion hair and a crimson waistcoat and trousers, opened the
door and ushered them to the lift, which was draped in swathes of maroon velvet. It opened onto what seemed at first to be a movie set. Nicola squeezed Fox’s hand.