Call Me Kismet

by PJ Mayhem

  I’d like to say I float through the week, swooning over Frankie knowing what I buy but at 4am on Tuesday, I’m jolted from sleep with whiplash-inducing force. I’ve been acting like an ostrich, burying my head in the sand and thinking that my super organised piles meant I was on top of things at work when they’re no more effective than a band-aid on a severed limb.

  I try hypno-breathing in the darkness to calm myself down but tasks, deadlines, the fallout of not meeting them and feeling personally responsible for it all race through my mind as though I’m in a Hollywood car chase, guaranteed to end in a spectacularly explosive crash. Regardless of how much I work to get on top of it, I can’t. Broomstick and the board keep changing things, adding new, more urgent, priorities and having me rewrite equally urgent reports to align with them. Broomstick has also got me covering the work of someone who’s on extended leave. I’m living in deadline hell and the fallout if I don’t meet them will be fatal—for the college at least. Everything feels out of control.

  By the time I head out the door to work I am so pissed off that I’m positively ready to explode. All the better to stop censoring myself around Broomstick, I think, searching for a positive. The one time I’d tried to get her to take some responsibility in a polite and civilised manner hadn’t worked so I don’t have anything to lose.

  I rush past PGGG clutching my coffee, fully focussed on what a bad mood I’m in so I can embody it and be authentic about it. I feel Frankie looking at me from not far inside the entrance. He’s chatting to someone in his sweet Frankie voice. It’s a cliché but my heart really does skip a beat, or maybe it’s palpitations from the anxiety and the caffeine. Then I hear him laugh and there’s no question. How dare he go ruining my bad mood and delighting my heart with his energetic zing, making me happy and bringing me joy just hearing his laughter? How am I meant to stay mad at Broomstick now?

  Turns out it’s pretty easy, especially when she’s sending emails that bark super snappy demands like: Strategic Plan!

  I’m tempted to email back and say: I’m sorry I’m not sure what you meant by that? Did you mean: ‘Fiona could you please send me a copy of the Strategic Plan when you have a moment, thanks!’

  It’s because I’d suggested she should probably take some responsibility. Ever since then her behaviour has gotten worse, as though she has her sights set on me and is trying to break me—get me to leave.

  I know I should probably work on my job anxiety and coming up with some strategies to deal with Broomstick in my session with Lionel on Thursday but it’s so much nicer to talk about Frankie. He’s an escape from all that crap. Besides, work is not going to get any better until I’m employed somewhere else but at the moment I haven’t got the time or energy to apply for anything.

  It must be full moon because even Lionel’s quite Jekyll and Hydish this week. On one hand he’s intuitively picking up on things, insightfully saying, ‘We only stay in circumstances or repeat behaviours when they’re not painful enough for us to change, no matter how uncomfortable we claim them to be. On some level we’re getting something out of them, even if it’s just staying in our safety zone, avoiding change or conflict.’

  On the other: ‘Have you thought any more about giving Frankie the Cuddle Card?’

  ‘There is no way I’m doing that with or without censorship. And if I were giving him anything, it wouldn’t be the Cuddle Card.’ Oh my Buddha, I can’t believe that’s come out of my mouth. I wasn’t intending to tell Lionel about the quote. I’d been trying so hard to forget I’d even had my initial thought about it. I have to tell him now, there’s no way he’ll let me back out of this. He’s already leaning forward in anticipation, bushy eyebrow raised.

  ‘And what’s that, Kismet?’

  ‘I read a line or three in a book that feel so perfectly suited to my Frankie situation. You know I’d normally hack myself to death rather than do anything remotely like this, but the thought just came to me and now it’s there, it won’t go away.’

  ‘The thought?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been thinking about writing it out and giving it to him. Not that I will.’

  ‘Excellent idea! I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear you even think of doing something like that.’ Lionel beams at me as though I’m his star patient.

  ‘I don’t know that it is. But it’s such a convoluted story, how I came to have the book, why I found it and even just the timing of me reading it. I almost feel I can’t ignore it, it’s as though it’s meant to be.’

  ‘It’s obvious that you’re starting to feel safer with Frankie. I’m not going to make you do it for homework but if you feel safe, why not do it, Kismet?’

  I could give Lionel a thousand reasons—probably more—but the buzzer goes.

  30

  GJ! SOS—Hit with bad bout of the Bevs. All I want to do is stay at home and bake some brownies to take down to Frankie. Germaine would so disappointed in me! Kxxx

  That’s the text I’d be sending Jane the following Monday morning if I’d done anything more than skate around the edges of Frankie with her lately. We love Germaine Greer, Jane and I. The fact that she’s gone extremely OTT and is erring on the best side of brilliantly crazy these days only makes us love her all the more. GJ would be none too pleased with the concept of me wanting to stay home and bake brownies for Frankie either. She’s busy anyway, too busy to deal with me worrying I’m turning into my mother.

  After her concern that she didn’t have any work coming up, Jane had landed on her feet in that cat-like way she has with a commission from ‘I can’t divulge but a big name in music’ or so she’d said on the voicemail she left the other night. I’d intended to phone her after my immediate temporary measure response of: Yay for you. Congratulations GJ xxx. I really had, I just hadn’t quite got round to it with work and … well, work. Intention is everything. Surely she will have picked up on my intent to call, even if I have been a little light on the action side of things?

  Still in bed, I feel grotty and hung over, as though I’ve crawled out from a month under a pile of damp straw. I force myself up. I may not be brownie baking for Frankie but I do have the carrot of a trip to PGGG dangling before me at the end of the day.

  Holy flapping prayer flags, I think I just accidentally winked at Frankie.

  Hopefully he’ll think it was a nervous tick from a hard day at work.

  It began innocuously enough. ‘Hi.’ I’d walked into PGGG and turned to Frankie at the counter, simply intending to smile. For all the times I hadn’t been able to find any, words chose that moment to possess me. ‘Don’t you ever do anything but work?’ floated from my mouth on a flirtatious upwind. It didn’t even make sense for Govinda’s sake—he was always there at this time.

  ‘Yes, sleep,’ Frankie deadpanned without an ounce of innuendo as we looked each other in the eye.

  I’d attempted a return to the safety of plan A— simply smiling—but even that was fraught with unforeseen risk. As if my words having taken on a life of their own wasn’t bad enough, my right eye (with twice-curled lashes) followed suit and rather than just crinkling with my smile, it had winked at him.

  Kismet, you idiot! Of all the times to go randomly winking, you do it when he’s talking about sleeping!

  But I wasn’t going to let a little wink bother me, or at least I’d give it my best shot not to.

  As if he’d rung Retro FM to request it, Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’ comes on and Frankie starts humming, giving me a look I can’t quite read.

  Last week things had been going so well. ‘He’s a very good teacher for you.’ Amethyst once said to me. I’d gathered she wasn’t talking elocution. I am learning resilience.

  ‘I’m going for a break,’ he calls to the young guy on the casual shift, gesturing for him to take over the till.

  I’m quite relieved. He doesn’t seem himself today and with my unwieldy words and randomly winking eyes, who knows what might happen if I end up in front of him at the counter?
<
br />   However, when I get to the checkout queue and there’s no sign of Frankie my relief evaporates. He hasn’t returned to serve me. His absence leaves me strangely bereft.

  At work on Wednesday I go through my to-do list. It could be mistaken for the Magna Carta but I have to say, if Frankie called up and said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, come home early, I want to shag you senseless on the new freezer,’ I doubt that my response would be: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I have the Prioritising Compliance Within the Organisational and Academic Structure report to finish and documents to format. Far too much to do for that sort of caper.’

  Pity he has no idea where I work or what my number is, but that doesn’t stop me thinking about it.

  When I’m so far into my fantasy that I’ve considered whether I’d even be bothered by the cold of the freezer and decided I wouldn’t as I’m so gagging for him, I take the scenario a step further, concluding that the cold of the freezer could add to the experience—heightening the intensity of the sensations.

  Maybe baking brownies for Frankie isn’t what I need to be doing for him.

  As dissatisfying as it is, particularly given the potential of the imagined alternative, I should really get back to the report.

  ‘Come to Friday night drinks with us tonight, Fiona, you hardly ever come anymore.’ Angela and Tiffany teeter up to my desk, clutching each other’s arms for balance. They haven’t been drinking already, it’s just the height of their shoes.

  Tiffany holds up her hand as I start offering excuses. ‘No, Fiona, this time you’re coming. No arguments.’

  Angela giggles. ‘Handbags at happy hour, no later than five-fifteen.’

  Bless them. I watch them wobble back to the Creative Think Tank, as they refer to their Marketing Department desks. True, they have all the substance of two dandelion puffs in a gale-force wind but they’re adorably sweet and well intentioned and they’re always good for a laugh, even if they weren’t likely to provide a full snort. I’m at serious risk of acquiring Snort Deprivation Syndrome, spending so little time with Jane.

  ‘You have so much to offer, it would be such a pity if you wasted your life stuck in that place, running around after Broomstick,’ Tiffany says to me on Friday once we’re settled with drinks in the outside area of the bar.

  Angela’s too occupied with her first mouthful of chardonnay to speak but nods in agreement.

  ‘You don’t want to become a prune woman,’ Tiffany continues. ‘Prune women’ was what we called those late-middle-aged women who worked long hours at soulless jobs, their work–life balance way out of whack, the life sucked out them, puckered up like prunes.

  For a wisp of millisecond I consider telling Tiffany and Angela about Frankie, or at least about Jack, holding them up to say, ‘See, there’s life and surprises in me yet—no prune woman here!’ But I smile and say, ‘You’re probably right.’

  The whole so-a-date-date with Jack feels surreal now, like a bad dream. Jack behaving exactly the same as he did before only makes me more confused as to whether it really did happen. As for Frankie, destiny is not something Tiffany and Angela would be keen to hear about. They want something solid, tangible. They’d only pressure me to be moving forward. Harmless enough as they are, they’d be unrelenting if they thought there might be a chance of some girly gossip. Apart from not needing the pressure, I’m not into displaying my private life like laundry on a Hills hoist. I know Tiffany and Angela, they’d be cracking Situation Frankie open like a walnut, wanting to know every detail about it and picking him apart with their prescriptive how-men-should-be ways. Beyond the parameters of my Spiritual Support Pit Crew and, within limits, Jane, Frankie is something I want to keep to myself.

  ‘Too right we’re right,’ Angela says, flushed with her post-chardonnay-coital glow.

  ‘It’s not that easy when you don’t really drink, or hang out in the usual pick-up spots.’ I sip from my soda water. ‘It’s like a sea of relationship short straws ended up here—just filling in time to retire.’

  ‘Some people like older men.’ Angela’s constant perky positivity sometimes makes me want to slap her, but not tonight.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Angela. Not like this sort of older man. Ones with money or who are at least a bit distinguished or something.’ Tiffany is forever pulling the rug out from Angela’s blitheness but in a way that doesn’t ever seem the slightest bit nasty.

  Angela looks at me. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I think you might need to lose that Chinese liniment of yours. I passed you in the street the other day and I knew it was you before I saw you. It’s not that it stinks, but it certainly isn’t Britney’s Believe in terms of perfume.’

  ‘I know,’ I say, even though I haven’t a clue as to what Believe actually smells like. ‘It’s my neck and my headaches. I’m killing myself with aspirin as well.’ I’m always careful not to apply the liniment on PGGG days but I’ve needed to use so much of it lately it still probably oozes through my skin like grog on an alcoholic.

  ‘The internet then!’ Angela has a eureka moment.

  ‘Yes, you have to get on e-hilarity or RSDD.’

  Their ‘cat that swallowed the cream’ smiles twitch into giggles. I know they’re bursting to tell me whatever it is that they’ve come up with in the Creative Think Tank.

  ‘RSDD?’

  ‘Yes, RSDD!’ Angela says, giving way to laughter.

  ‘Regrettably Shagless, Desperate and Dateless.’ Tiffany follows Angela into laughter.

  ‘We can look at all the profile photos with you, cull them.’

  ‘Yes! Let’s write you a profile now.’

  ‘We’re good at this sort of thing. Remember, we’re professional marketers. We’ll have you running off the shelf. Oh! I didn’t mean you were “on the shelf”—you know what I mean.’ Angela falls over herself to clarify.

  ‘Thanks, but the whole online-dating thing isn’t really me. What about the chemistry?’ I’d rather die than be posted on an internet dating site, and when it comes to chemistry, you either have it or you don’t, and I know exactly who turns the flame of my Bunsen burner up to full heat.

  Tiffany and Angela both need a constant supply of men. Not that they have a string of them, they’re just the sort of girls who always have a man. Not just a boyfriend either, they have to be living with him and if it doesn’t work out, they’re out of there faster than they’d have the guys calling Roses Direct if they’d forgotten their anniversary. As ditsy as they appear, a single look or word cracked like a whip from Tiffany or Angela can fell a man before he has time to blink.

  ‘It’s about training them,’ they’d once counselled me. ‘Start out as you mean to go on.’ To be honest, I haven’t ever quite understood the whole ‘needing a man’ thing let alone the ‘having them live in fear of you’ thing.

  ‘I’ve just remembered. I’ve got a friend,’ Angela blurts.

  ‘Oh, you mean apart from us,’ Tiffany and I say in unison.

  ‘Ha, ha—funny. You’re so amusing aren’t you, biatches? No, this is entirely new and it’s brilliant. My friend has set up a site: Meet My Friend.’

  ‘What? Why don’t I know about this?’ Tiffany asks.

  ‘Not like you need it. It’s brilliant—you get a friend that sees the best in you to promote you and screen your respondents.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but that sounds a bit like a pimp to me.’ I stab at the lemon at the bottom of my glass with my straw.

  ‘Oh, let us, Fiona,’ Tiffany pleads. ‘It’ll be fun.’

  ‘Darling, you’d have more chance of Broomstick telling me I’ve done an excellent job and offering me a pay rise.’

  In our session this week Lionel asks me if I’ve always worried so much about doing what Jane thought I should do.

  ‘Well, maybe,’ I reply, ‘but it hasn’t been an issue before.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because you’re finding your own voice. It sounds like there’s been a history of codependence.’

  ‘St
rong female friendships aren’t necessarily codependent, Lionel. If we were a couple everyone would think it was normal.’ The way people had questioned our closeness over the years had made me defensive.

  ‘My point exactly. You’re friends, not a couple, and now you’re both looking for something more—her potentially with a baby and you maybe with Frankie or a new relationship. It’s only natural that things have to change.’

  I sit quietly for a moment, cuddling Positively and not correcting Lionel. Technically I hadn’t been ‘looking for a new relationship’, it was only because Amethyst had mentioned him being in my aura as my destiny that I’d ventured down that path again.

  ‘Have you thought anymore about giving Frankie the quote?’

  ‘I have it in my diary. I wrote it and rewrote it until my writing was as close as it could be to perfect.’ The tell-tale talking-Frankie lightness returns to my voice.

  ‘Sweet, but in your diary isn’t going to help anyone. Are you actually going to give it to him?’

  ‘One day, if it feels right, I might, but I doubt it.’ I sigh and pull at my hair in frustration. ‘It isn’t something I’d ever do but then I have this weird feeling that I will. Not that I can imagine actually doing it. I feel sick just thinking about it.’

  ‘Remember the work we did on your fears and that voice that tells you to keep everyone away so you don’t get hurt? Don’t give into it. Isn’t it worth taking the chance? You haven’t told me what the quote says yet. I can be your independent judiciary.’

  Beaten, I repeat the line from The Thirteenth Tale verbatim.

  ‘That is the perfect note for you to give him,’ Lionel says. ‘Any man would be flattered to receive it from you.’

  It’s unusual for Catherine to call me to meet up when it’s not a whole family thing but Mum and Dad have gone away for the weekend with Johnny and Vonnie—a golfing trip (don’t think I hadn’t had Mum on the phone about it)—and Brian is working, apparently.