by Rose Hartley
‘That’s life, isn’t it? Cats come and go. People sometimes leave, too. No way to stop it happening.’ He kissed me. ‘Never mind, we’ll just give it some time.’
His calm self-assurance no longer infuriated me the way it had when I first met him. I felt elation and fear in equal parts, as if I was holding a rare and beautiful butterfly and the only way to stop it from flying away was to keep my palm open and pretend it wasn’t there.
‘If we’re going to start a relationship,’ I said, ‘I should tell you about my warning bell. The pre-emptive strike.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I learnt it from my first boyfriend.’ I checked his reaction. Nothing but mild curiosity. So I took a breath and barged on ahead. ‘His name was Jeremy, it was when I was in high school. He cheated on me and I didn’t see it coming. He hooked up with the prettiest girl in our year at a party and I was devastated, because I’d been faithful to him. Now it’s just what I do. I run off.’
‘I bet he regretted it. What’s he doing with his life now?’
‘He’s a banker in Switzerland. Married to Switzerland’s only female rally-car driver, who also used to be a model.’
‘Oh.’
‘So I try to live like Tilda Swinton and have lots of lovers. More eggs in my basket.’
He kissed me. ‘High school was twenty years ago, idiot. Get over it.’
I slapped his chest where I’d been fondling it moments before. ‘Twelve years ago. I’m younger than you, old balls.’
He kissed me again to shut me up, then sat up. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’
‘Yeah, about that.’
Chapter 28
‘Mum, remember Rueben?’
My mother appraised him, while assuming her favourite power stance behind the kitchen bench. She’d taken to using my great-grandfather’s carved walking stick instead of her crutches, and had paired it with a red scarf and tall brown boots. I suspected she felt like an outlaw or pirate, clomping around the house with her frizzy grey hair and hard stare and mahogany walking stick. The house was due to go on the market in March, flaws and all, and I’d agreed to help her clean it up as soon as her cast came off in a few days.
The kitchen was filled with the smell of Moroccan chicken simmering on the stove. She gazed at Rueben’s tatts, facial hair and poised, wiry body, while I shifted uncomfortably in the silence.
‘Hm. Hello.’
‘Nice to see you again, Mrs Cotton,’ he said in that gravelly voice. I nearly shivered at the sound of it, as I had been doing every day since I’d met him. ‘How are the security doors holding up?’
Rueben had finished up at the Nicholson Street Angels with only Agnes the wiser about our relationship, and the new job at the software company was going well so far. Two nights earlier, lying next to me in the caravan, he’d suggested dinner with my mother.
‘That’s a bad idea,’ I said. ‘She thinks tattoos are trashy and will spend the entire night comparing you to my ex-boyfriend.’
‘I bet I can get her to like me.’
I secretly enjoyed the thought of bringing him to dinner with my mother, but couldn’t decide whether I took greater pleasure in the thought of irritating her or showing him off.
‘Fine.’ I shrugged. ‘Brace yourself.’
Rueben set the table, while I stood next to my mother as she stirred the pot and fired questions at me in a low voice.
‘What about that Dan fellow?’
‘He’s back with his ex.’
‘And Sean?’
‘Mum, give up.’
‘And what’s Jen doing with this policeman?’
I grinned. ‘They haven’t gone on a date yet, but he’s working on it.’
‘Rueben,’ Mum called, ‘would you please take this pot to the table? I can’t carry anything heavy anymore because of this young fool.’ She nodded to me.
Rueben obliged, carrying the cast-iron pot between oven mitts, while I poured the wine. Mum sat down, doled out the chicken onto our plates and went straight in for the kill.
‘So, those tattoos. I take it you’ve been in jail?’
Rueben looked like he’d been expecting it. ‘Yes. I went in for eighteen months when I was twenty and I’ve been out for fifteen years.’
‘Hmph. What were you in for?’
‘Mum,’ I cut in.
‘Armed robbery,’ Rueben said smoothly.
‘And?’
‘Assault.’
‘Domestic violence?’
‘No, I hit a guy with a bag of frozen peas and he needed stitches.’
Mum didn’t even smile. ‘Any sexual assault convictions?’
‘Mum!’
‘No,’ Rueben said.
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Any accusations?’
‘No.’
‘Fraud?’
‘No.’
‘Gambling addiction?’
‘No.’
We all paused while Mum thought of more worst-case scenarios. I took a giant gulp of wine.
‘Mum, he’s a very clean-cut sort of person now,’ I said.
She ignored me. ‘Drugs?’ She snapped.
‘Not anymore.’
‘Dealing drugs?’
‘Never.’
She sat back in her chair. ‘All right. But don’t go dragging my daughter down. She’s a bit useless already, she doesn’t need any help with her downward mobility.’
Rueben squeezed my shoulder. ‘She’s pretty talented, from what I can see. She brought in over twenty-five thousand dollars for the charity with her fundraiser. The lights are still on because of her.’
‘Well, she’s always been good at screwing people out of money,’ Mum said.
‘It’s my main skill,’ I said.
Rueben dropped his head to inspect the chicken but I caught his smile. Perhaps he was recalling how I was not so good at screwing money out of Centrelink anymore: I had utterly failed there. They were insisting I repay the debt in full, although, since it was being docked fortnightly from my meagre earnings at the Angels, I would pay it back in literally about a hundred years. At least they’d declined to prosecute me for fraud.
‘And how long have you been seeing Maggie?’ Mum asked Rueben.
He smiled at me. ‘A few weeks. But I’ve been working on her for a while.’
‘Have you? Why?’
‘Mum!’ I said.
‘What?’ She shrugged. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Maggie’s my kind of girl.’ Rueben touched my hand under the table. I appreciated him pretending that he’d pursued me instead of the other way around, and I squeezed his hand back to let him know it.
Mum brought out chocolate mousse for dessert, so I forgave all her insults. When Rueben got up to use the bathroom, Mum leant in and I prepared myself for a barrage of criticism.
‘That man.’ She paused for a moment. ‘You could do worse.’
Rueben and I left at nine-thirty. He walked to the car while I hung back to say goodbye to Mum on the verandah and Dot did figure-eights around my feet, purring in the quiet evening.
‘So now that I have a boyfriend,’ I said, ‘am I an acceptable daughter?’
Thud. She whacked the side of my head. ‘You’ve always been acceptable, idiot.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Come here.’ She gave me the tiniest of hugs: arms only, wrapped around my shoulders, not too firm. It was miraculous, the first hug she’d given me since I was a child. ‘Boyfriend or not, I’m proud of how you’ve got your life together.’
‘I haven’t exactly got my life together. I still earn less than minimum wage and I stay at Jen’s place half the time.’
‘True.’ She turned to go inside. ‘But you’ve done better than I expected.’
I ran my hands over the racks of poufy dresses: pink silk, yellow polyester, a 1990s purple sequinned fishtail. The dresses looked sort of overgrown, like shiny shrubs, sometimes stained under the armpits, and fragile beneath the fluorescent lights. Th
ey loosened their musty scents when I brushed past them. I came upon a flowing 1970s maxi dress and pulled it out to show Jen.
‘Too fancy,’ she said. ‘It’s just a date, and I might even cancel.’
‘Jeez, doesn’t Pink Cheeks deserve a nice outfit?’ I asked. ‘Ooh, this looks like a Collette Dinnigan.’
Jen whirled. ‘You found a Collette Dinnigan?’
‘No, I said it looks like one. It’s made of polyester. This is an op shop, remember? We sell the good stuff to expensive second-hand stores.’ I looked at the clock on the far wall. ‘I’m going to have to get back to work soon.’
‘Work is next door, it’s not like you have far to walk. Look, there’s Agnes, she doesn’t mind.’
Jen waved to Agnes, who was talking to one of the grannies, and Agnes waved back, seemingly unconcerned that I was taking a long lunch break. I was currently Agnes’s favourite person, ever since Mrs Fitz-Hammond had written a cheque for ten thousand dollars in response to my fundraising letter. Mrs Fitz-Hammond and I had started having regular doughnut sessions. During the last one she’d shown me love letters sent to her by some famous French director in the early seventies, which contained the kind of explicit sex talk that made sticking one’s hand down a stranger’s pants outside The Fainting Chair seem like a chaste Victorian romance in comparison.
‘You haven’t lived until you’ve had a foursome,’ Mrs Fitz-Hammond informed me.
At the last afternoon tea she’d promised to write the Nicholson Street Angels into her will, and I hadn’t even had to ask her.
The grannies of the op shop smiled sweetly at us as they re-racked purple sweaters and polyester pants while Belinda stood motionless beneath the glowing exit sign, watching over her employees like a queen looking down upon her subjects.
‘You’re not really going to stand Pink Cheeks up, are you?’ I asked Jen. ‘He booked a table at Cumulus! That’s expensive, you know.’
‘I guess I won’t.’ Jen re-racked a horrible early 2000s tube dress and tugged a golden curl. ‘It’s just, Tommasio’s sweet, but he’s earnest. I mean, really earnest.’ She looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was listening, and dropped her voice. ‘Did you know he acted in student films during his arts degree, before he entered the police force?’
‘Really?’
‘He sent me a link to one of his short films. He was showing off, I guess.’
‘Did you watch it?’
‘Yeah. It was awful. He beat his wife to death with a telephone. And then he cried. It was really melodramatic. He and his on-screen dead wife were wearing fake wedding rings from the two-dollar shop.’
I held back a snort of laughter. ‘I suppose there’s a fine line between dweeb and man of your dreams, but I believe Pink Cheeks traverses it adequately. Here, this dress would look nice on you.’ I held out a short cream dress with a crocheted hem. ‘Empire line, 1960s, very Jen.’
She took one look at it and burst into tears. ‘It looks like a wedding dress.’
Crap. Weeks ago, on the day that Jen had been supposed to get married to Jono, I’d whisked her out for a pedicure and she spent the whole time doubled over in the chair, sobbing into the pedicurist’s hair as the poor woman tried to keep Jen’s foot still so she could paint her toenails. Since then, the only sign of Jen’s pain was the thick concealer she used to hide the dark circles under her eyes.
‘Right. Sorry.’ I re-racked the dress and handed Jen a tissue. She waved it away and wiped her eyes.
‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ she said. ‘It’s not really about Shitballs, just the . . . the symbolism of the white dress.’
‘Uh-huh. Listen, I know Tommasio’s earnest, but he’s not dumb. And he’s not at all like J—like Shitballs. He likes to help people.’
‘I know.’
I wrapped her in a tight hug. ‘It’s up to you. You don’t have to go on a date if you’re not ready,’ I said. ‘But if you do, can you get him to stop making me move the caravan? He hassled me twice last week.’
‘Yeah, all right.’ She sniffed. ‘You know what, it is a nice dress.’ She pulled the cream dress out again and held it up. ‘Besides, it’s cream, not white.’
‘Much less symbolic,’ I agreed.
‘Maybe it would be good for me to just face my fears.’
‘You don’t want to indulge a terror of cream dresses forever,’ I agreed.
She ducked into a change room and I helped her zip it up at the back.
‘Cute,’ I said.
‘How about you bring along Rueben and we make it a double date?’ she asked hopefully.
‘Hell no. Besides, Rueben and I are going away this weekend, to the Otways. We’re gonna celebrate my birthday early by banging in the rainforest.’
She whirled to face me. ‘You’re going away together? That sounds serious. Don’t freak out, Maggie.’
‘I’m not going to freak out.’
‘Yes you are. Look at you, you’re all antsy at the thought of a relationship. You’re going to run out on Rueben while he’s lighting the candles and go bang someone in the pub.’
‘I’m not!’
‘At least get the sexy times in before you run.’ Jen mimed vigorous hip-thrusting. Over her shoulder I caught the grannies staring, wide-eyed. ‘And then tell me all about it, ’cause Rueben is hot.’
‘He is hot.’ I got lost for a moment in the thought of Rueben shirtless, mentally tracing my fingers over the honeyeaters.
‘How are you getting to the Otways?’ she asked.
‘We’re taking the caravan.’
Acknowledgements
I am so grateful to everyone who helped bring this novel into the world, especially my agent, Catherine Drayton, and publisher, Beverley Cousins, as well as Claire Friedman and Genevieve Buzo. Without them, Maggie really would have gone nowhere.
Various people helped along the way, including my teachers at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop: Karen Joy Fowler, Chris Barzak, Saladin Ahmed, Maureen McHugh, Jim Kelly and Margo Lanagan, and my mentors Kaaron Warren and Sophie Hamley. Thank you also to Varuna, the Writers’ House, Manning Clark House, Arts South Australia, and everyone at Writers SA past and present, especially Sarah Tooth.
Thank you to the writing friends who never let me down: Liana Skrzypczak, Vanessa Len, Mike Reid, Pip Coen, Travis Lyons, Zack Brown, adrienne maree brown, Lilliam Rivera, Eugene Ramos, Tiffany Wilson, Melanie West, Becca Jordan, Nathan Hillstrom, Dayna Smith, Jess Barber, Bernie Cox, Evan Mallon and Sara Saab (who lets me borrow her jokes).
My parents, who are the most patient people in the world, my brothers, and Al McKinnon, Lil Ellis, Georgie Clark, Tessa Wood, and Zoe Gibbs, for treating the writing of fiction as a legitimate life choice. Bonnie Grant, for always coming up with the best lines. Emily Calder, for making up stories with me since 1990, give or take.
About the author
Rose Hartley is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Adelaide with her cat, Doris, and her 1962 caravan, Cecil. Maggie’s Going Nowhere is her first novel.
MICHAEL JOSEPH
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa | China
Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published by Michael Joseph in 2020
Copyright © Rose Hartley 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or its authorised licensees.
Cover photography by Dutch Scenery/iStock (caravan); Winterling/Depositphotos (wine bottles); The Corner/Depositphotos (vintage pattern); Serkucher/Depositphotos (cat)
Cover design by Lisa Brewster/The Brewster Project
ISBN 9781760144630
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