Maggie's Going Nowhere

by Rose Hartley

  ‘Springsteen will make you relate to anyone,’ Rueben said. ‘Criminals, honest people and everyone in between.’

  ‘But especially criminals.’

  ‘Criminals are eminently relatable.’

  ‘You’d know.’

  He stretched his delicious arms over his head and shot me a penetrating look from those lily-pad eyes. ‘The problem with criminals is a lot of them are good people. Some are better people than the supposedly honest ones.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘Look at you, stuffing around, taking money from Centrelink in the name of doing charity work, and instead of working for your pay you’re snooping in your ex-boyfriend’s emails and playing solitaire. I’m far more honest than you.’

  I yawned and closed my solitaire game. ‘Everybody loves to point out my hypocrisy. They do it all the time. But you’re the one who suggested I hack his Gmail. I was just doing it to please you.’

  ‘You’re a martyr.’

  ‘I am. You should be thanking me for making you feel better about yourself.’ I stretched back over my chair. ‘You know what my favourite word is? Milquetoast. I often catch myself muttering it on the tram while people try not to watch me. It means “a timid or submissive person”, which obviously describes me.’

  He laughed. So this is how it’s going to be, I thought. No mention of the close encounter in the clown suits.

  ‘I won’t be taking money from Centrelink much longer, anyway,’ I told him. ‘They’ll be taking it from me. Turns out my debt is . . . big.’ I rolled my eyes.

  He swivelled in his chair to face me, frowning. ‘How big?’

  I muttered a number.

  ‘Seven grand?’ he asked.

  ‘Ahem . . . venty.’

  ‘Seventy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s insane.’

  I shrugged. ‘Seven years of wrong payments.’

  ‘Have you got a payment plan worked out?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Get one worked out. They won’t let it go.’

  ‘Yeah, all right. Just one more thing I can boast about to my old school mates at the engagement party I’m going to this weekend. “I’ve got this great payment plan going with Centrelink so I don’t get charged with fraud! Huzzah!”’

  ‘Do they know you live in a caravan?’

  ‘No, thank Blob. But maybe I should take a normal, strapping young man like yourself to the party, to appear well-adjusted.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to make your friends fall over with jealousy,’ he said. ‘And I really don’t like engagement parties.’

  ‘I wasn’t really asking you,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m already going as someone’s pretend girlfriend and I think there’ll be enough judgement without me turning up with an ex-con on the other arm at my pretend-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s engagement party.’

  ‘Well.’ He turned back to his spreadsheet. ‘You do worry about what people think, Maggie.’

  ‘I’m a nice middle-class girl. I went to a private school. Worrying about what people think was what I ate for breakfast for eighteen years.’

  I went back to my solitaire game, but I was secretly mortified that Rueben had brushed aside the hints I’d dropped about asking me on a date.

  On the afternoon of the engagement party, Jen and I sat in her backyard letting the last rays of sun warm us through. Jen made some kind of quinoa salad with fancy leaf lettuce, while I put some hummus in a bowl and, while cutting up cucumber sticks, wondered if she was getting sick of me messing up her house. She’d been so quiet over the last few days I wasn’t sure she’d noticed the extra dishes I’d been piling up in her sink.

  Jono was due back in Melbourne any minute and was coming to the party.

  ‘You’re not going to pick him up?’ I asked.

  ‘I have to get ready for the party. He’s meeting us there.’

  This was out of character. Normally Jen dropped everything to meet Jono at the airport. Halfway through dinner she put down her bowl, slipped her old mustard-coloured gardening gloves on and began pulling out weeds and throwing them on the compost pile. Weeding the garden was a sure sign that Jen was trying to make a decision about something. I didn’t ask what she was thinking. Asking personal questions was immensely difficult, even of the people I loved. I could talk about myself all day, but asking my best friend what she was thinking about seemed like a terrible intrusion.

  ‘Your tomatoes could probably go in now,’ I said.

  ‘Mmm.’

  Jen ripped up some grass in a frankly vicious manner, her upper arms wobbling gently with the action. Abruptly, she paused and looked up at me.

  ‘If Jono doesn’t have sex with me this week, I’m . . .’

  I held my breath.

  She looked at the grass in her hand. ‘I’m going to tell him I’m not happy,’ she finished.

  I breathed out. ‘Not happy with the relationship? Or not happy about the lack of sex?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘The lack of sex.’

  ‘Maybe you should just leave him.’

  Her eyes took on the vague expression they always did when I made that suggestion and she didn’t answer, but I decided not to let it go this time. The wedding was so close, and Jen’s entire future was at stake. It was crucial to choose my words carefully.

  ‘Seriously . . . are you sure he’s the right person for you?’

  She went back to pulling up grass, her head ducked low so I couldn’t see her face. ‘He’s the man of my dreams.’

  Was that irony in her voice? Or did she really say that in earnest?

  ‘There are a lot of women who come through the shelter at my work who thought they’d met the man of their dreams, too.’ Not that I’d met any except Hannah. Jen didn’t need to know that, though.

  ‘What are you saying? You think Jono’s an abuser? Maggie, that’s gross.’

  ‘No, no. Of course not. Just that sometimes you meet a guy and think he’s perfect and then six years later you realise . . . he’s a butt. It’s hard to see clearly when you’re in love.’

  ‘How would you know? You’ve never been in love.’

  That shut me up. Jen took off her gloves, went inside to wash her hands and then came back out to finish her dinner.

  ‘I’m gonna curl your hair tonight.’ She chewed her quinoa, deliberating. ‘Not super curly, just wavy, like an old film star. Lisa will be so jealous. Not that I don’t like Lisa, she’s super nice. But we have to help Dan out, don’t we?’

  Jen finished her meal with a slight frown on her face. It wasn’t clear if she was thinking about Jono, or Dan, or my soon-to-be-film-star hair.

  ‘Poor sod,’ she said. ‘He really loved Lisa.’

  So that was it. ‘Yeah, he said so at dinner one time.’ I hardly listened to anything else she said after that. I had already started planning what dress to borrow from her.

  Jen steered me into the correct wine shop, where among the racks of hipster brand labels she picked out a cult pinot noir from the Adelaide Hills that I could give to the happy couple as an engagement present. It was a small-run, hand-pressed wine, expensive for me but not out of reach for a divorce lawyer who knew his arse from his elbow. It was the sort of wine that said something about the purchaser, something like I have money but I also have taste. I made a mental note to get Dan to pay me back for it, because I couldn’t afford to go around buying wine for strangers I probably wouldn’t like.

  Jen had also done wonders with my hair. Somehow she’d poured it into long, gentle waves, the kind you saw on models and wished you could replicate but always ended up looking like Kim Kardashian after a trip to the electric chair. She’d also done something sexual to my eyes with charcoal eyeshadow. I looked hot. My recent diet of wine and whatever food I could steal from Jen was working a treat. My butt was nicely rounded without being overpowering and I’d lost a small amount of weight. I felt pretty good as long as I could forget that the weight loss had come about from a lack of
money rather than any actual effort on my part. I’d scrambled myself into a tight velvet dress that made my boobs look good and hugged my newly narrowed waist, and revolved in front of Jen as she clapped.

  ‘You’re hotter than a bin fire,’ she said. ‘You look expensive, like Marie Antoinette.’

  ‘Hark, I may fucketh thine peasant tonight,’ I said.

  She curtseyed. ‘Ho, let us sexeth in yonder crops.’

  Jen looked gorgeous too, in an aqua 1960s-style silk dress with long sleeves and a high neck. The short hemline showed off the perfect skin of her tanned legs. Her curls were high and tight and her lips were red.

  ‘You put in a little extra effort tonight?’ I asked her as we walked out the door.

  ‘Gotta keep up with you.’ Subtext: Gotta get laid.

  We met Dan on the corner of Smith and Johnston. He was pale and nervous. He’d obviously shaved that morning and it made him look younger, and his flannelette shirt appeared to have been ironed.

  ‘You look nice,’ he said.

  Nice? I looked steaming bloody hot, but okay. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And so do you,’ he added, kissing Jen on the cheek.

  ‘Thanks, Dan. All the moral support you need tonight, okay?’ She squeezed his hand.

  He blushed. ‘Yeah, no worries.’

  Lisa and her fiancé lived in a warehouse conversion in Fitzroy, just behind Smith Street. It was the kind of apartment building that was perfect for yuppies with too much money and not many interests outside of drinking coffee and wearing lycra. The door was made of heavy industrial steel, artfully rusted.

  ‘You ready?’ I said to Dan.

  ‘I’ll go on ahead.’ Jen walked up the polished concrete stairs.

  Dan faced me, his blue eyes wide and nervous. ‘Look, if it seems like I’m about to punch the guy, just drag me outta there.’

  ‘Maybe we should have a jailbreak signal. Like, I could start dry-humping you on the couch, or you could call me baby.’

  He laughed. ‘I’d love to see Lisa’s face if you dry-humped me on the couch.’

  ‘I think calling me baby would be worse.’

  ‘You don’t like baby?’

  ‘It’s almost as bad as schnookums.’

  He put his arm around my waist. ‘Okay, schnookums, let’s do it.’

  We walked into the apartment and it was like we’d opened up an issue of an architecture magazine, blown up a page filled with expensive objets d’art and stepped inside a languid, Instafamous model’s apartment in New York. Except the architects hadn’t been able to put in more windows, so one wall was floor-to-ceiling glass with views of the city and there was not a single other window in the whole place. Not even in the bedroom, and I know because I looked. Actually, the bedroom didn’t have a door. Just an archway.

  We hung our jackets on hooks in the hallway. A crowd of people was gathered around the space-age kitchen bench and a beautiful woman stepped towards us immediately. She matched the apartment. Long, honey-coloured hair, a tall, slender body and skin like a porcelain doll. She was almost enough to make me believe in God, because nothing on earth could have created facial features as symmetrical as hers. Her cheekbones were basically chiselled out of marble. Holy shit, this couldn’t be Dan’s ex.

  It was.

  She cracked a huge smile, showing white shiny teeth.

  ‘Dan!’ The embrace she wrapped him in went on a few seconds longer than was appropriate, but her eyes were squeezed tight to my curious look. Finally she released him and turned to me.

  ‘You must be Maggie.’

  Her teeth were so white I thought they might blind me.

  ‘Yes. Hello.’ The noise that came out was slightly strangled but she appeared not to notice. How had Dan managed to have sex with this unearthly creature without crying out of sheer awe? Maybe he did. Maybe that’s why she broke up with him, because he cried during sex, or made little voodoo pictures of her face to worship at an altar. My confidence shrivelled up like a dry, sad prune.

  ‘Simon, come and meet Dan and Maggie,’ she called to a man behind her. ‘Dan, Maggie, this is Simon O’Mahony.’

  Dan stiffened beside me. This was the divorce lawyer.

  He was an odd-looking man, between thirty and thirty-five, not strictly handsome, with the palest eyes I’d ever seen. His hair was close-cropped and he was shorter than Dan, who wasn’t that tall to begin with. He offered a broad and veiny hand to Dan to shake.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said Simon.

  ‘Yep,’ said Dan.

  Simon looked Dan up and down, assessing him, then offered him wine with polite formality. He was looking too closely at Dan’s baby face and shirt. Bumpkin: you could almost hear the sneer from Simon’s brain. He knew that Dan was not wearing the flannie in nostalgic irony like a Smith Street hipster. He was wearing it because it was useful, kept him warm, and had pockets.

  I was suddenly invested in Dan’s happiness. I wanted to impress Lisa and her new guy in a way that had nothing to do with my ego. Well, only a little to do with it. I smiled stiffly at Lisa and she wrinkled her nose and cheeks into a smile so enthusiastic it nearly ate her face. Neither of us could think of anything to say.

  ‘This is good wine,’ Simon informed us, as he poured some into Dan’s glass. I was momentarily confused, because the bottle he was pouring from was the same brand as the wine I’d brought, and I thought he was complimenting my present. But no, I was still holding my wine in a brown paper bag, and he was congratulating himself on his own good taste. I plonked my bottle on the counter.

  ‘Think you’ll like this one, then.’ We’d probably bought it from the same shop. I felt dirty.

  The room was full of glittering people. Even the men were shiny. The kitchen was all stainless steel with hints of marble here and there. Jesus, what would the rent be on this place, eight hundred a week? Clearly they weren’t short on cash. Simon and Lisa must have visited Mid-century Modern for their furniture because I recognised a 1960s couch and coffee table set I’d been eyeing off about six months earlier. I tried to remember what had been written on the price tag to make me leave the shop in such a hurry: maybe three thousand dollars? The sight of three issues of an architecture magazine artfully fanned out on their coffee table nearly made me laugh out loud. There was no substance to the place: no lived-in mess, no awkward family photos, no books. I guess that would have spoiled it. You can’t have any sign of actual human life in a warehouse conversion, because they’re not made for humans to live in. Warehouse conversions are for display purposes only.

  Simon poured me a glass of the good wine and I felt him assessing me, probably feeling smug because I was such a poor replacement for Lisa. Jen’s amazing make-up couldn’t alter the fact that I had round cheeks instead of high cheekbones.

  Even among my own friends I was known as the Local Failure, the girl who bounced back to her mother’s house so often the Jehovah’s Witnesses left extra pamphlets when they visited just in case I came home the week after. So what did that make me now, among all these conspicuously successful people? Any minute someone might announce that I lived in a caravan. Where is Sarah Stoll, I wondered? Is she behind me? Is she waiting for the right moment to strike? What if she hears about my living situation? I tried to stifle the fear. I have nothing to be ashamed of, I told myself. It was bullshit, though. You don’t grow up middle-class in Australia and go to a private school without learning that it’s not okay to be poor.

  Simon turned to Dan without breaking eye contact with me. ‘And when are you two going to take the plunge and move in together?’

  At the condescension in his voice I exchanged a look with Dan, who was too outraged to answer.

  ‘You’ll find out what it’s like,’ he continued. ‘Word of warning, the first year is hell. You’ll need two bedrooms. Trust me, you need your own space, don’t you, Lisa?’

  Lisa giggled, a little self-conscious. ‘Oh my God, yes.’

  ‘What could be worse than being in the sam
e room as the person you love, right?’ I said.

  Simon pretended not to hear me and switched his gaze to Dan. ‘You need to make time once a week to sit down and formally discuss the issues you’re having. Really hash it out. Basically, you just need an hour a week in which to argue.’

  Well, now that I knew how to make it in the world according to Simon, the Successful Divorce Lawyer, I felt like going home, getting completely smashed and maybe eating a kebab. Lisa began talking to me about her dress. Apparently it was new and she’d had to hide it from Simon so he wouldn’t know she’d been shopping.

  ‘And then I said, “Oh this old thing? I got it ages ago!”’ She laughed that nervous, breathy laugh.

  Lisa and Simon were slippery. I couldn’t figure out how to act. Lisa didn’t seem to mind my lack of speech; she had the art of one-sided conversation down. As she chattered, I realised with something like horror that Jen and Dan were right: Lisa was nice. She was making an effort to include me and make me feel welcome. When she smiled at me, it was a genuine smile. Devoid of character, perhaps, but genuine. She kept patting Dan on the arm as she spoke. She cared about him. Holy crap, maybe she really did want to be friends.

  I excused myself and found the bathroom. Weird that it was so hard to acknowledge that Lisa was nice. I liked Dan, but I wasn’t in love with him. I half wanted to date him because living in a caravan didn’t seem like a long-term prospect, but that was all, so it couldn’t be jealousy, right? Is that why I wanted to hate her and was frustrated because she was harmless? I scoured the bathroom for some sign of life, a hint of freak show, but I found nothing. They didn’t seem to own shampoo, deodorant, razors or dodgy pills. Just some expensive Aesop hand wash. The chitter of the party filtered through the walls. Simon and Lisa don’t like each other, I decided. It was his staginess, her high-pitched laughter that decided the point. The way he derided her subtly with his little jibe about needing space. Was that what marriage was like when you only did it so you didn’t have to be alone?

  But Lisa didn’t have to be alone. She’d had Dan. He might have been beneath her socially and in terms of appearance, but he was a good person. She seemed to have real affection for him, whereas Simon and Lisa didn’t seem to enjoy each other’s company. Dan had said they’d only been together for six months but Simon was exactly the type of man Lisa had always wanted. Wealthy, confident, slick. Dan claimed bitterly that he was just an amusement for Lisa while she waited for the real thing to come along.