Michelle Vernal Box Set

by Michelle Vernal

  Annie rubbed her eyes. She knew she was smudging her mascara but she didn’t care because her mind refused to curb the memories of what they had gone through as a family.

  The pressure of what was happening to their eldest daughter had nearly torn her parents’ marriage apart as Roz played them off one against the other. Her addiction had driven not only her friends away and lost her her job, but it had the flow-on effect of tainting their own social lives. They became known as the parents of “that girl, you know—the one on drugs.” For her part, Annie stopped having her friends home, preferring to visit their houses for fear of one of her sister’s impromptu quest for cash, out-of-control visits. There was no doubt more, much more that Roz had been driven to do when she had found herself out of a job and still hungering for the meth but she had slowly cut herself off from everybody who knew and loved her. This had spared Annie and her parents from knowing that side of her life further. Instead, they chose to cling to the daughter and sister beneath the horror of her dependency. She was the person they wanted to hold onto, the girl they had once known who had had a life to lead and a dream to chase after. That was the girl they hoped would come back to them.

  Their dreams, along with Roz’s, had ended the day she’d stayed up all night partying and had driven her car into a tree on her way home to the latest flat she had been dossing down in.

  For Annie and her parents, though, that wasn’t the end. Oh no, she shivered and wished she’d been bothered to light the fire as she thought back, it was just the beginning. Her mum started smoking again and seemed to be in a perpetual fog of non interest after that knock at the door had come cutting herself off from Annie emotionally. As for her father, a big man with an argumentative nature, well, he seemed to simply give up, if the slump in his shoulders and disinterest in what was happening around him was anything to go by. Annie didn’t just lose a sister that day but for a long, long time afterwards she lost her parents, too. They were a physical presence but they weren’t engaged in the day-to-day minutiae of their youngest daughter’s life when she’d needed them most. Both of them were seemingly oblivious of the changes that a young girl goes through because neither had the energy left after the day-to-day, going through the motions of simply living for that. Annie understood that—she really did—but it didn’t make it any easier to take.

  At first, her grief was too painful too touch and so the eleven-year-old she had been was unable to talk about it; she bottled it up and hid it away from her friends. She didn’t want to share it because how could any of them possibly understand what she was going through? Not when they got to go home each night to their own safe, happy little houses where nothing bad happened. Suddenly the normal teenage interests they’d once shared seemed trite and she found herself having to bite her tongue when they’d whittle on about the latest boy band or who was wearing what to whoever’s party. What did it matter? She no longer cared and she soon found that people’s sympathy only stretched so far for so long.

  She could recall just sitting in her sister’s old bedroom; she stared at that print of Santorini and felt like the world was closing in on her. It was only the knowledge reinforced by that print that it was a big wide world with lots to see that stopped it from doing so. More than anything as she lay curled up on Roz’s bed, she wanted to wake up and get back to a normal life but this void she had found herself thrown into was the new norm and it was up to her to find a way to move through it. The time eventually came for her to sink or swim and somehow she managed to swim.

  The first thing she had done the day she decided to tentatively try to dog paddle was to contact her sister’s old pen pal. She didn’t know as she penned that first letter that she herself would form a lasting bond with the girl on the other side of the world. Of course, when Roz and Kassia had been in touch, email didn’t exist and there had been a wodge of handwritten letters still in Roz’s desk. Their lives at opposite ends of the earth had been brought together via a school pen pal program, with a shared birthday their initial common denominator. The two girls’ exchanges had been an innocent recounting of teenage angst and they’d written back and forth regularly throughout high school and beyond. Until, Kassia relayed later, one day her friend who was getting into a new social scene through her job had just stopped writing and she had never known why. She hadn’t known about the drugs, she didn’t know about any of that but through reading their letters, Annie had been provided with an insight into her sister’s life before. That was the way she thought of her now—the Roz before drugs and the Roz after.

  The year of the firsts passed with all the usual anticipated emotional upheaval around each and every significant date. Then the second year passed, a muted version of the first and then the third until one day Annie realised that her mother laughed occasionally and no longer smoked like a train. Her father, too, stood a bit straighter and began to state his opinion a tad more forcefully. As for herself, well, she found herself unwittingly beginning to look forward and not backwards. And so life went on, because although Roz would always be there in their thoughts and forever in their hearts, time, as they say, is a great healer. It allowed them not to get over her death—that would never happen—but rather to learn to live with it.

  Annie blinked the memories away and the screen came back into focus. The time in the bottom corner of the screen blinked midnight. Crumbs, it was getting late. Jazz stretched languidly on her lap, as though sensing his time for snuggling was nearly up. She’d better start winding her letter up if she was going to be fit for work in the morning.

  You can picture it, can’t you, and I don’t need to tell you it wasn’t pretty. Even less so the next morning when I woke up with a stonking headache. So now you know why I am never drinking again. It’s gotten late here, Kas, and I have work in the morning, so it’s time I went off to bed. Na-night.

  Lots of love and kisses to you and all the Bikakis family

  Annie

  xox

  She clicked Send and waited a moment before going through the motions of closing down her laptop. Her hand stretched over to switch the lamp off on the desktop but hovered there for a moment as her eyes alighted on the photo framed beneath it. In front of their boutique Cretan hotel, Eleni’s stood, its’ namesake the short, rotund Mama Bikakis. She had insisted on wearing widow black since her husband dropped dead some ten years earlier. With her cheeks puffed out proudly, she was flanked on either side by her handsome sons. On her left was Kas’s husband Spiros and on her right his younger brother Alexandros. The latter was a somewhat clichéd, tall, dark, and handsome with straight white teeth set against the deep olive of his skin. Hence his rip snorting success with the female tourists who came to stay at their family-run accommodation. Spiros was slightly shorter than his brother and although his hooded black eyes gave him a serious look, the smile that twitched at the corners of his mouth belied his good humour. At his side was Kassia.

  Annie smiled involuntarily as she always did when she saw her dear friend. Her two sons had rounded her figure out in the last few years but her face was still that of the girl she had first started writing to nearly twenty years ago. Thick, long black hair she insisted on getting her hairdresser to curl framed a strong face. Almond-shaped brown eyes behind which a wicked sense of humour to match that of her husband’s lurked to soften her features. She wasn’t pretty as such but she was arresting in her own unique way and her looks would stand the test of time far better than mere prettiness would.

  Nikolos, the baby, was perched on his mother’s hip and Mateo stood in front of his parents, who each had a restraining hand resting on his little shoulder. Both boys had an unruly shock of black hair and an impish grin to match their Bambi eyes. They looked every inch as cheeky as the tales their mother relayed in her letters.

  Annie sighed and blew the family a kiss before she flicked the light off. She’d dearly love to give those two little boys a hug from their honorary New Zealand aunty but a visit to Greece wasn’t on the cards.
Not with saving for a house, and the never-ending bills that went hand in hand with the cost of living. Who knew? There might be a wedding to organise too, one day, one day very soon if she had her way.

  “We’ll get there, Jazz,” Annie murmured and scratched behind the old tomcat’s ear. He’d curled up on her lap as she typed her email. At the sound of his beloved’s voice, he sighed contentedly, opened one beady yellow eye and fixed it on her. “Well, actually, you won’t but don’t fret. I’d never leave you for longer than a couple of weeks and Best Cats is rated a five-star in the world of catteries, so you’d be well looked after.”

  Jasper narrowed his eye, not liking the sound of the word cattery before he stretched and left one paw dangling lazily in midair. Annie looked down at his tattered gingery fur. He’d never win any cat beauty pageants, that was for sure, but he’d needed a home and she had needed the unconditional affection he provided.

  When he’d disappeared for three whole weeks after the second big earthquake they’d had back in February 2011, she had been beside herself. It was enough that the city she had grown up in had been destroyed in a fateful few minutes but people had actually died too. So, trying to make sense out of something that made no sense at all, she had pounded the pavements, night after night. She called Jasper’s name and pictured him quivering in a corner of some stranger’s garage or worse, crushed by the bricks of a falling chimney. She’d all but given up hope when she got up one morning to find him sitting at the back door, looking none the worse for his extended walkabout. Although she had been over the moon to see him, scooping him up and smothering him with kisses, Tony had been nonplussed to see his nemesis staring smugly at him from his vantage point in his fiancée’s arms once more. “Look who is home!” Annie had exclaimed excitedly. She decided to take his return as a sign that maybe things would be okay after all. “Say hello to Daddy, Jazz.”

  Jasper had hissed.

  “Oh, don’t be a nasty boy.” She’d known full well the pair’s relationship would always be strained, thanks to their dodgy start. Shortly after she had moved in with Tony, Jasper had made his feelings at having to share his mistress’s affection very clear by piddling in Tony’s work boots.

  She smiled at the memory of the expression on Tony’s face as he had stuffed his foot inside the sodden boot. Annie got to her feet and tucked Jazz under her arm. “Come on, you. It’s time to go out.”

  Tony drew the line at sharing a bed with Jasper.

  As she opened the front door a crack, she saw the night was misty with the onset of cooler weather. Jasper mewled his protest at leaving the warmth of the house behind. But then something caught his eye and he jumped out of her arms and ran out the door with a speed belying his years and disappeared into the inkiness. She hoped she wouldn’t be presented with a dead mouse or worse, a rat, on the doorstep in the morning. She shuddered at the thought as she turned and padded up the hall to the bathroom.

  Annie picked her wide toothed comb up from where it nestled next to Tony’s razor in the vanity drawer and tugged it through her hair. She sighed. Her hair frizzed out around her face, like Little Orphan Annie, her namesake, but if she didn’t stick to her nightly ritual, she’d wake up to a headful of ginger dreads in the morning.

  When she was satisfied there were no knots left, she moved on to Step Two. She pulled a facial wipe from the near empty packet and took off her make-up. As she peered into the mirror, her newly naked green eyes grew wide as she spied something she didn’t like the look of. She leaned in even closer to the mirror and frowned. What on earth was that angry red monstrosity on her chin? Homing in on it, Annie gave it a squeeze for good measure. Ouch! Yes, it was definitely a spot. Surely at thirty-one years of age, she should be past getting corkers like that? Apparently not, if that monster glaring back at her was anything to go by. Nope, there was nothing else for it: she’d have to nuke the bugger. She smeared toothpaste over the raised lump. She was sure she had read somewhere that toothpaste dried pimples out. It must be all that menthol, she decided, as she cursed Attila. It was all her bloody fault: stress played havoc with your skin, everybody knew that. With one last sigh, she brushed her teeth.

  She smelled like a tube of Colgate as she tiptoed out of the bathroom and pushed open the darkened bedroom door. Tony was asleep, so thankfully she wouldn’t have to launch into an explanation as to why she smelled so minty fresh. She slid in next to him and warmed herself against his slumbering bulk for a moment before she closed her eyes and willed herself to sleep.

  Tomorrow was going to be manic at work. There was the much anticipated signing-off of an account Manning Stockyard had been wooing for months and her boss, Attila, did not work well under pressure, which in turn meant she was going to need all the sleep she could get. Annie cleared her mind of all thoughts of work and drifted into one of those vivid half sleeping, half waking dreams where she told Attila she had a face on her that could curdle milk. When a loud oink of a snore erupted from Tony, she jolted back into wakefulness. Her leg twitched under the covers as she contemplated kicking him but she resisted the urge. She knew from past experience that a good boot would only make him more restless. Instead, she counted sheep.

  Chapter Four

  Annie caught a glimpse of her hair in the reflection off the big glass doors of the Albrect Building where she worked in Victoria Street, and immediately wished that she hadn’t. Her mass of curls had, in the twenty minutes it had taken her to get to work, escaped Houdini-style from the bun she had secured them into. Instead of the efficient PA to up-and-coming advertising guru and extremely horrible boss, Adelia Hunnington, she had portrayed upon leaving the house that morning, she now looked like a madwoman. The toothpaste on the spot had not been a good idea, either, as she now had an angry red pimple on her chin that was also surrounded by flaky skin. Suffice to say, it was not shaping up to be a good hair or face day, which from prior experience Annie knew did not bode well for her general working day. Bloody Tony and his snoring! She sent him a mean telepathic message.

  His grunting like a stuck pig had been the root cause of her tossing and turning most of the night and she needed her sleep. Not just for beauty purposes, either, although the fact she’d aged ten years in the last six months was down to Attila and her workaholic tendencies. She’d had her working through half her lunch break most days and always managed to pop out and waved some urgent document that had to go out that night just as Annie put her coat on to go home. She sighed at the injustice of it all and she had finally drifted off into a deep sleep just as Tony got up at his usual ungodly time of six o’clock, which meant she’d ignored her alarm for a good twenty-five minutes when it had shrilled an hour later.

  She glanced at the stairwell and momentarily contemplated taking the stairs two at a time to the fourth floor offices where she had spent the last few years of her life in full-time employment. It would be good exercise and her skirt did feel on the snug side today but oh sod it, she decided and headed for the lift instead. She wasn’t that keen on the stairs since the earthquakes; actually, she wasn’t that keen on the lifts either. It was a bit of a problem really. Half a second later, she wished she had opted for the stairs, though, as a familiar nasal voice sounded behind her.

  “Morning, Annie. You’re looking lovely as always.”

  He could only see her rear view, so Annie could only assume that Pervy Justin from the accounting firm on the floor above hers was in fact referring to her bottom. She ignored him and stepped into the lift. He wasn’t deterred by her silence.

  “It’s going to be a cold day out there if that frost this morning was anything to go by. Brrr.” He shivered for effect and rubbed the tops of his arms. “You probably should have put a warmer top on.” He felt his way around until he hit the number five button. His eyes never once strayed from the thin fabric of her blouse.

  Annie sighed and pulled her jacket closed. She really should lodge a complaint with someone about him but that would take energy and lately all her energy
reserves had been zapped. It was the same every year: the emotional build-up followed by the exhausted aftermath of Roz’s birthday. It wasn’t as though she was consciously thinking about her sister during this time. She was just there—a constant on the periphery of her mind. She took a step back from Justin so she was pressed up against the railing and silently willed the numbers to hurry up.

  Tammy on reception didn’t look up from her iPhone as Annie called out a cheery good morning to her. The greeting was not given because she meant it—Tammy was an uppity little madam whose main focus in life was the electronic gadget currently in her hand. No, it was given automatically, done out of habit. The receptionist mumbled the same token pleasantry back, not bothering to peek out from behind her waves of brown hair as Annie breezed past the screen behind her into the typing pool area.

  Once upon a time, it had been a nice place to work with its floor-to-ceiling windows that showcased a smattering of Christchurch’s high-rise buildings and the Avon River. Nowadays, the only constant in the outlook was the river. Slowly the buildings were pulled down around them and at present, the vista resembled what she imagined a postwar zone would look like. It was hard to visualise the bright, new modern city the powers that be assured them all would rise up from the rubble. She had nothing to complain about, though, she reminded herself as she did every morning, because she was one of the lucky ones and life really does go on. That was a lesson she had learned years ago.