Friends Like These

by Wendy Harmer

  ‘Well, sure,’ said Jo. ‘If you really want them here. I’ll ring Hannah next week. Just don’t be tempted to call Antiques Roadshow in the meantime, okay? Or I’ll have to ring the fraud squad.’

  There was a clatter of boots on the front porch and Jess and Bobby fell in the door.

  ‘We smashed ’em!’ Bobby cheered.

  ‘Five–nil!’ Jess pumped the air with her fist.

  The girls came to Jo for a kiss and a hug, then headed for the kitchen to raid the refrigerator, the biscuit barrel and the fruit bowl. They slouched off to the bedroom with their provisions. Jo watched with approval. In their daggy soccer uniforms, free of make-up and their hair in ponytails, they looked like fifteen-year-old girls should. Jo thought back to the sophisticated mini-adults chirping on Patti Tweedle’s terrace and hoped that the Reynolds girls would be teenagers for a few more years yet. She also hoped they couldn’t see that their mother was inebriated at 3 p.m. on a Sunday.

  The next head around the front door was Rob’s. Despite promising herself that she wouldn’t be judgmental, Jo’s eyes narrowed with suspicion.

  Rob caught the look. He pulled off his baseball cap and ran his hands through his hair. ‘Hi, Jo,’ he said, and kissed her cheek. ‘How’s the marriage-celebrant lurk going?’

  ‘Fine, thanks, Rob.’ She managed a thin smile.

  ‘You should see the girls on the pitch. They’re bloody good! It’s the grand final for us this year.’

  ‘Well done.’

  ‘I’d better get going back to Mum’s,’ he said. ‘I think there’s a chance of a job on tomorrow. Bit of bathroom tiling on a mate’s house-build, so...’

  That was probably a lie, thought Jo. He waved to her and then loitered outside on the front porch. Suze fetched her purse and Jo watched her through the gap in the calico blinds handing over some cash and then passionately kissing Rob goodbye.

  When Suze closed the door behind him, Jo opened her mouth to protest.

  ‘I know, I know. Don’t say anything.’ Suze snatched up her glass of wine and stumbled to the kitchen. ‘Just...don’t...

  say...anything.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  It was around 6 p.m. on Wednesday and the rain was coming down hard on the tin roof at 13 Middlemount Street, Rosebery. It would have been an unlucky number for a house if Suze still believed in such a thing as luck. But she was well past that, even if her husband wasn’t. Jo wanted her to keep believing, but it was as if the strings on a bunch of balloons she was holding were being severed one by one, and were floating up, off and away. One day bits of perished rubber would fall into the ocean and choke a turtle.

  Standing in front of her full-length mirror, Suze appraised her outfit and gave it a derisory snort. Hardly an ‘outfit’. More like a retro-fit of a years-old paisley peasant skirt and slightly too-tight blouse. She slumped on the bed to do the straps on her sandals and once more considered staying home. She’d spend tonight with Rob and the girls in front of the television. But on hearing their laughter from the front room, she knew she was too angry to be in the same room as him. She’d end up arguing and ruin everyone’s evening. There was nothing for it but to throw on some jewellery, tie her hair up and finish her make-up.

  There was a knock and Rob’s face appeared around the bedroom door. ‘Just doing some pancakes with lemon and ice-cream. You want some?’

  ‘I can’t. I’m due at this art auction and I’m late.’ Suze stabbed at her mouth with a lip pencil. Rob stepped into the bedroom then retied the strings of the floral apron he was wearing over his T-shirt and jeans. Suze felt a pang of love at the sight of him. He had never once complained about living in a house full of females. When the girls were small she’d loved watching his big, broad hands fastening tiny pink buttons and gently plaiting long blonde hair.

  ‘Why don’t you stay home, babe?’ he said. ‘It’s a freezing night. We can’t afford anything at their bloody art auction anyway.’

  ‘I’m well aware we don’t have any money, Rob. I’m helping sell raffle tickets. I’m expected.’

  ‘Hope you buy some. With your luck—’

  ‘I’ve had my share of luck in this life,’ Suze snapped. ‘We both have. Now it’s just all damned hard work. And it’s about time you realised that.’ She snatched her handbag from the dressing table and stepped towards the door.

  Then he was in front of her, barring the way, his face twisted in an angry sneer and bright colour flooding into his rough, tanned cheeks. ‘I’m trying! Fucking hell, can’t you see that?’

  Suze attempted to walk around him but he covered her move and was still right there in her face. She could smell alcohol on his breath—that would be the rest of her wine he’d swilled. ‘Don’t, Rob. I’ve heard all this before. I have to go.’

  ‘You started it with all your private-school shit,’ he said. ‘Wanting stuff we never had a hope in hell of affording. You never once stopped and thought what it was like for me!’

  ‘Of course I have. You’ve told me over and over.’

  ‘Those arseholes on their stupid frigging golf days handing me their business cards.’ Rob pranced around the room flapping his wrists. ‘We’re redoing the garden at the beach house, matey. Can you bring around a rubbish skip? Of course we’ll expect a discount. Wink wink.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Because that’s what they think of people like you and me, Suze. We’re just hired help to those pricks at Darling Point. We cart away their shit so they don’t have to smell it anymore. And if you think the girls are going to have a better life because they know people with money, you’re fucking kidding yourself.’

  Suze was urgently rattling a doorknob again. Just like she’d done in Geraniums Red. As if it was a bell that would convince him to start running. ‘Rob! Get out! I’m going.’

  But Rob wasn’t going anywhere; he was determined to have his say. His voice was raised to that pitch of resentful outrage that made Suze want to punch him. ‘You tell me,’ he demanded, ‘what’s the difference between me playing the pokies and those smug arseholes playing the stock market? At least I’m not sending poor bastards down mines in Africa to bring up diamonds for their skinny-bitch wives and then fucking around behind their backs.’

  Suze found her voice. The measured, menacing tone that she knew scared the hell out of him. ‘You went behind my back. You sent me down the mines for year after year in that crappy little office and I thought we were doing it for the same reason—to give the girls a chance in life. To give them something better than we had.’

  Her aim was true. Rob hung his head, wounded. ‘I always thought what we had was pretty good. Good enough for our parents. Good enough for you to marry me and have the girls.’

  Suze opened her mouth to take back something she’d said. She took half a step towards him and then stopped as he raised his head and went in for one last, nasty bite. ‘It was always good enough until you met that uptight bitch Jo Blanchard and her lying, low-life husband. He’ll cheat her out of everything she’s owed. You’ve said it a hundred times.’

  Suze backed away until she hit the wall behind her. Rob could take her self-respect, her faith and hope, but he wouldn’t steal from her one of her most cherished possessions—her friendship with Jo. The thought that Jo might turn her sympathetic eyes from her was more than Suze could bear. She lunged at him again. Bit back harder. ‘You don’t know anything about Jo. The difference is, you’ve already stolen from your own family. From your daughters. From your wife. You shared a bed with me, got up and looked all of us in the eye over breakfast and still went on with it! At least Jo’s husband had the decency to steal from people he’s never met to make his money. Now get the hell out of my room!’

  The insult crushed the life out of him, as Suze knew it would. She’d rehearsed this line in her head and had wondered if she would ever find the courage to utter it. Rob couldn’t find an answer. He slunk out the door and hurried down the hallway.

  As Suze stood o
n the footpath and put the key in the lock to the door of her van she felt as if she was, at last, uncoupling herself from Rob’s fate. As she’d so often thought of doing. Strange that it was on an ordinary Wednesday night, and on the same old street, that she felt she had finally reclaimed the key that Rob Reynolds had held in his broad palm for almost two decades.

  The college art gallery was jammed with guests and the noise was at full, ear-splitting volume. Ears were bent to mouths and lips to lobes to catch animated conversation. Suze eased her way through the fragrant crush, thankful no-one seemed particularly eager to engage her. At every turn she saw faces she recognised. Although many of them looked even younger than the last time she’d seen them—brows frozen, expressionless eyebrows hoiked to the heavens, lips plumped to bursting.

  She was still rattled by her argument with Rob and grateful to have a book of raffle tickets to hide behind, although she was used to being invisible as a former member of staff. Suze edged her way to a darkened alcove and surveyed the scene from behind a pillar. She could see that the presence of the menfolk was thrilling for the women of Darling Point. They had risen to the occasion, their powdered cleavages on display like baskets of fresh, soft damper rolls in a humid bakehouse. Their husbands denied themselves little, judging by their paunchy waistlines. They reached for another one of those ridiculously tiny hamburgers and chuckled to see their wives waving them away in horror, instead satisfying their gnawing hunger with weeny sips of champagne.

  Suze snaffled one of the mini steak sandwiches that were going begging on a polished sideboard and took another glass. Unlike the ladies present, she wouldn’t wait in the hope that the next tray might offer asparagus on parmesan wafers or white-fish ceviche in an endive leaf and then indulge in an elegant no-carb, guilt-free treat.

  The men were clumped in front of the art for auction, primed by their wives to do the bidding on the big-ticket items. Not one, but two Brett Whiteleys, a large Margaret Olley oil and a selection of works by Charles Blackman had them doing their sums. Although not as urgently as they might have done at one of those innumerable A-list charity nights they complained they were press-ganged to attend where a Russian aluminium magnate might be lurking in the back of the room with pockets as deep as the Black Sea.

  Tonight they were much more relaxed and comfortable. Suze knew they would spend big, keen to show off in front of fellow parents, even as they rationalised they were here for a common purpose. Their daughters all shared the same classrooms and they all shared the same aspirations for them. Having kids, they agreed, was a great leveller. At least the money raised tonight would go straight back to the college, where they were sure it would be spent well—on themselves. They paused to appreciate the merlot they were drinking, forty dollars a bottle. Suze had ordered it often enough and knew it was a particularly celebrated vintage, chosen by a famous vigneron from the Hunter Valley whose daughter was a day girl in Year Ten.

  The younger women were a-twitter over a motley collection of props from the movie Moulin Rouge! Hand-painted panels depicting cancan dancers, advertising hoardings for a tattoo parlour and a trompe l’oeil of a Moroccan courtyard—complete with an almost-naked black dancer—were up for sale. This stuff was even more coveted. After all, it had been in an actual movie starring Nicole Kidman, who was regarded as an equal. An Eastern Suburbs habitué. She’d attended North Sydney Girls High School, but, it was understood, that was back in the days before public education had gone completely downhill.

  Suze downed her glass of champagne, took another and plunged into the middle of a circle of women nearby. ‘Raffle tickets, ladies?’ Suze was having more trouble unloading her book of tickets than she’d anticipated. The problem seemed to be with the prize.

  ‘Pearls? Oh God no! The fakes are so good now, there’s no point in having real ones.’ A tall woman with a perfect, even tan the colour of a roasted cashew nut attempted to wave her away.

  However, Suze had now come up with a sales patter that she figured would work. ‘Carol Holt donated the pearls. She’s over there, wearing them.’ She pointed.

  ‘Well, if Carol donated them...’

  ‘It’s a double strand of freshwater pearls the late senator brought back from India for her. They once belonged to the Maharani of Jaipur. Vogue said the Maharani was one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. You’ve probably seen that famous picture of her with Jackie Kennedy?’ Suze had simply made up most of this. In fact she had no idea where the bloody necklace had come from. She really was becoming an expert liar.

  ‘Twenty dollars a ticket did you say? If I give you a fifty, can I have three?’

  All the funds raised from the night were to go to the building of a new recording studio for the college. At DPLC there was no such thing as an untalented child. With the best teachers and the best facilities, all of them could shine. Perhaps they might enjoy a career as dazzling as that of Darling Old Girl and internationally renowned soprano Narissa Carlton-Hughes? Earlier in the evening she’d warbled some tune from an opera Suze hadn’t recognised, although the crowd had nursed their champagne glasses and rocked with eyes closed, nodding their approval. Of course they were opera lovers, one and all. That was from Madama Butterfly, wasn’t it? No...Carmen. Whatever, it was divine! The applause had been resounding.

  Opera, art, champagne and the beau monde of Sydney society all twinkling under the glorious vaulting ceiling of the first-floor reception room at the top of the grand staircase—was there anywhere else they’d rather be?

  Suze had the urge to run. To slap, slap her way down the stairs in her flat sandals, skid across the black and white marble tiles and then flee down the white crushed-quartz driveway and into space. Rob was right. They had no place being here! How had she ever imagined they could get away with it? The only thing to do about her rising panic was to drown it. She took another glass of champagne—her fourth—and headed for the display of student art at the back of the room.

  The multimedia installation entitled Rosebery Dreaming was made up of multiple ceramic sculptures, ink drawings on fine parchment and printed, hand-dyed linen panels. The accompanying catalogue credited it as the work of Roberta Reynolds. Suze was overcome with pride to see her daughter’s name in print.

  Through eyes swimming with tears she read a paragraph from former student Marigold Wong, who was now exhibiting in Tribeca, New York:

  The art department at Darling Point was where my passion was nurtured. Almost all my classmates from senior class are now practising in the arts as architects, designers, curators or artists. And the best thing? No matter what media we wanted to investigate—ceramics, pottery, video, painting, fabric making, or even chipping away at enormous slabs of Italian marble—we had the chance to dream and explore. Thank you, thank you, my darling, darlingest, Darling Point.

  No mention of Josephine Blanchard, Suze noted. Jo had been Marigold’s mentor for years.

  Suze recalled the early days, when Bobby had come home from the local primary school with a Mother’s Day offering—cut-out bits of coloured paper stuck with Clag on a polystyrene potato-wedge container. The tatty thing was supposed to be used as a jewellery box. If Bobby had gone to the local high school, Suze imagined she would still be presented with sticky collages made of clippings from fashion magazines. No kiln for firing ceramics there. No slabs of Italian marble. Maybe Bobby wouldn’t have had the chance to discover her rare talent. If she did indeed become a professional artist, she would be the first in both Suze’s and Rob’s family. They were all blue-collar workers. That was the best they’d ever managed.

  And Jess was doing so well with her clarinet that her teacher said she might make it into the conservatorium, even the Sydney Symphony. That dream alone had to be worth the price of admission. She had to believe what Jo had said. That one day it would all be worth it. Even if she never had the money to buy jewels to put in that box, it had to be worth it.

  Suze noticed a trio of women admiring Bobby’s installation. ‘T
hat’s my daughter’s work,’ she said proudly.

  ‘Pardon?’ The tallest, blondest and thinnest of the women peered down at Suze over the rim of her champagne flute. She was a Year Seven mother, Suze guessed. New to the college. There was certainly no flicker of recognition from her.

  ‘My daughter made this,’ Suze repeated and indicated the installation. The woman paused to take in the apparition in front of her—from the flaking red toenail polish to the buttons of the lacy blouse that had popped open to reveal a grey and fraying bra.

  ‘You have a daughter here?’ the woman inquired again, incredulous. Suze nodded.

  ‘Well, good for you, sweetie!’ A thin arm reached out and a sinewy hand clutched at Suze’s upper arm. ‘It’s good to know that people like you understand how important all this is. I can only imagine it’s been such a sacrifice for you. Truly, well done, you!’ And then she turned away. Suze now knew what it felt like to be a bed-ridden patient visited by a lesser member of the Royal Family.

  Gulping at her champagne, Suze turned, lurched and barged into the buttons of a Savile Row suit. Hunter Valley merlot slopped on the front of her blouse. It was James Johnathon Blanchard, who produced a large handkerchief from his trouser pocket, reached towards Suze’s unfortunately dripping cleavage and then, recognising her, thought better of it. ‘Suzanne! Shit. What are you doing here?’ he growled.

  Looking up into his florid face—upper lip beaded with sweat and pale-blue eyes narrowed with contempt—Suze could see it all. It was JJ’s driving ambition that had brought two entire families down around his fat, arrogant head. He was solely responsible. For everything. All he touched was corrupted and defiled.

  ‘Hello, JJ.’ She could hear her own slurred words and that she’d just addressed him as ‘Zsa Zsa’. She mustered what particles of composure she could. ‘My girls are in Year Eleven, so it’s probably me who should be asking you that question. How’s the weather in old Shanghai, matey?’