Cake at Midnight

by Jessie L. Star

Her words were heavy with sarcasm, but I reminded myself that spiteful comments between siblings didn’t count in the same way as they did with other people. Certainly Theo didn’t seem overly concerned. Until, that was, Helena’s eyes widened theatrically and she added, ‘Now that you do know, are you doing a compare and contrast of what he’s got now compared to what was on display in Turbulence? You know what I’m talking about, right? The photo of him stark–’

  ‘That’s enough, Lena,’ Theo said firmly.

  ‘What?’ she asked, all innocence. ‘It’s not like she wouldn’t have seen it.’ She turned her rather terrifying attention back to me and asked, ‘You studied it, right?’

  I nodded, but, trying to find some way to make the whole thing a bit less undignified for Theo, I added, ‘But it was censored in the textbook.’

  This news made Helena scowl, but before she could begin the scathing rant I could see building in her chest, Theo cut in. ‘Save your sanctimonious speech on the freedom of the arts, yeah? Maybe for someone who’s not still being undermined by a deliberately provocative photo more than twenty years after it was taken.’

  I glanced at him and felt my chest squeeze at how over it he looked. No wonder he was concerned about there being drama at his sister’s latest sculpture reveal, this was clearly a state of affairs that had plagued him his whole life. I couldn’t imagine the quiet, private guy I’d started to get to know tolerating the various outrages of the Leventis clan, let alone being one of them.

  And that was before you considered that each of Helena’s city-commissioned sculptures had been based on one of her family members. The Brother had come after the reveals of The Mother – a bare cylindrical tube with carefully positioned slits that, when the wind caught them, made the piece ring with shrill whistles – and The Father – an oversized eye sitting in the scoop of a gigantic silver spoon. Obviously, as the creator of those pieces, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Lena didn’t understand her brother’s issue with the notoriety of Turbulence.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re still hung up about this,’ she said dismissively. ‘You should be proud of that photo. It’s a masterpiece. It’s only prudes and sickos who have an issue with it, your tiny willy has nothing inherently wrong with it.’

  ‘And, on that note.’ Theo walked over to the door and held it open, looking pointedly at his sister.

  She let out another cackle and gave my knee a firm pat. ‘Make him come to the unveiling,’ she instructed me. ‘It’ll weigh on him if he doesn’t and I’m not sure I’ll be able to forgive him if he blows me off again.’

  I smiled awkwardly and she bounded to her feet.

  ‘She’s cute, I approve,’ she told Theo, leaning in to give him another smacking air-kiss. ‘See you on Friday.’

  ‘Don’t count on it,’ he replied, shutting the door decisively behind her.

  There was a weighted pause, the absence of such a big personality making almost as much of an impact as its existence had, and then Theo walked over and sank down on the couch beside me.

  ‘And that,’ he said heavily, ‘was my sister.’

  I licked my dry lips. ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What did she call you?’ I asked. ‘Three something?’

  ‘Three Bags,’ he confirmed. ‘As in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep”.’

  ‘The nursery rhyme?’

  ‘“Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full”,’ he recited. ‘You might have noticed I’m not exactly what people expect when they think of the Leventises, hence the black sheep reference.’

  ‘Wow,’ I repeated, wondering anew at how one of the most straightforward people I’d ever met had been given such a variety of aliases. Although, tonight was certainly suggesting he might not be quite as straightforward as I’d thought. ‘Blunt.’

  ‘Bluntness is one of Lena’s many talents.’

  It was so casual, the way he said ‘Lena’, as if he wasn’t referencing the woman whose name I read on a plaque in front of The Brother every lunchtime. As if the plaque wasn’t on a sculpture that was supposed to be representative of him. God, no wonder Vanessa had looked at it so askance – she’d found me eating a sandwich in front of an artistic rendering of her ex!

  ‘I can’t believe I just met Helena Leventis,’ I said wonderingly. ‘I can’t believe you’re Theodore Leventis.’

  He shrugged as if to say ‘believe it’, and went to tip his bottle of beer again before remembering his manners and nodding towards the kitchen, clearly offering to fetch me a drink if I wanted one. I shook my head.

  ‘Is it a secret?’ I asked. ‘Your Leventis-ness, I mean?’

  His face twisted into a slight grimace. ‘Nothing about my family is a secret,’ he said. ‘I just don’t go out of my way to tell people.’

  And fair enough too, I supposed.

  ‘Did you mean it? When you said you liked The Brother?’

  I looked across at him so quickly I felt a little crick in my neck.

  ‘The sculpture, I mean.’

  ‘I did. It makes me feel kind of like I feel when I’m here in your flat; it’s like a pause,’ I said, trying to word it carefully as it was pretty obvious that his family’s art was a fraught subject. ‘A time-out. Even though it’s right in the middle of town, all the surrounding trees drown out the noise of traffic, and the sphere reflects all the green back. It’s peaceful.’

  He let out another short laugh. ‘Lena would hate that; it’s supposed to be an indictment of greed over knowledge.’

  ‘Greed? How?’

  ‘You’ve never noticed the wad of money on top of the books, under the sphere? The thing that’s making it look unstable?’

  I shook my head and there was a hint of satisfaction on his face as he said, ‘Yeah, Lena worried she’d made it too subtle. That’s her social commentary on me, you see: a foundation of knowledge disrupted by a desire for the capitalist ideals of success.’

  ‘Heavy.’

  He made a non-committal noise and we lapsed into silence.

  ‘Was she right? Will it weigh on you if you don’t go to her unveiling?’ I asked after a while, fairly sure I already knew the answer just from the set of his shoulders.

  ‘Probably.’

  He looked so weary that my chest throbbed with sympathy and I blurted, ‘Would it . . . d’you think it’d help if I came? If I went with you, I mean.’

  He looked at me in surprise.

  ‘I’m not trying to invite myself, or anything,’ I said quickly. ‘I just thought that maybe I could be a buffer or something, if you decided you did want to go.’

  ‘Lena didn’t scare you off, then?’

  Yes. ‘No.’

  One side of that private school mouth of his quirked. ‘I can see why you usually stick to honesty. You’re a terrible liar.’

  I picked at one of the many loose threads on my poncho. ‘I am,’ I agreed. ‘But I guess what I mean is that she wasn’t so scary that I don’t want to help out if I can.’

  I felt him shift beside me and then he asked, ‘Do you want to go with me?’

  Flipped like that, my offer took on a whole new meaning and I felt my cheeks redden. ‘Only if you want me to.’

  There was another long pause, and then he cleared his throat and said carefully, ‘Lena’s not wrong about it being a while since I saw Philomena and Harvey, I’m due a check in. As for the unveiling, I can’t see anything good coming out of it, but I also can’t see any way to avoid it without causing more problems. But none of that’s your responsibility,’ he added. ‘It won’t be anyone’s idea of a good night out and you don’t have to– ’

  ‘I’ll come,’ I said, much too quickly, and his lips flattened in a way I knew meant I’d been cheated of the rare sight of one of his proper smiles.

  And just like that, Theo and I, whatever we were, had a plan to head out into the world.

  *

  Theo hadn’t gone to any of Lena’s previous unveilings, setting the scene for one of the biggest bl
owouts he’d had with his family in years. None of them had talked in months. Keeping away from the unveilings had been a no-brainer, though. He’d spent years cultivating his life to be as distinct as possible from his over-bearing family’s, after all.

  After The Brother’s unveiling, he’d spent an anxious couple of weeks sure that, any day, some nosy journalist would take the ‘story’ of his non-appearance and run with it. He wouldn’t have said he’d lived in fear, exactly, but there’d definitely been trepidation when he’d checked his Google alerts each day, sure that this would be the day a photo of him appeared and his professional image was blown out of the water. He’d got away with it in the past because Lena had decided to use his absence to up the mystique of her work, but she’d just made it clear she wouldn’t be taking that route again.

  So, even though he knew the unveiling was a prime opportunity for his family to do what they did best and expose him for their own gain, he knew he should go. Lena was right, she’d worked hard on her sculptures and, despite all their issues over the years, he’d regret it if he didn’t turn up at least once for her.

  But to allow Giovanna to witness the absolute shit-show his family was going to put on for her? To take advantage of her kindness and accept her invitation to act as a buffer? It made him feel sick to his stomach and he wanted to tell her that he’d changed his mind and she shouldn’t go with him after all. Or, at least, he’d wanted to want to, but he just couldn’t quite make himself.

  He looked across at her and, despite the lateness of the hour and her uncomfortable interaction with his ballbuster of a sister, she smiled back at him just as she had before Lena had burst in and outed him. There was no sign of fawning, no ‘I’m sitting next to a semi-celebrity’ adjustment to the way she looked at him. After all these years, it seemed that someone was finally seeing what being a Leventis was like from his perspective.

  In some ways, this past week with his neighbour was some of the simplest time he’d ever spent with anyone, but he was starting to think it was a lot more complex than either of them were allowing themselves to admit. They were both smarting from something: him from the breaking off of his engagement and everything that’d gone with it, and her from her realisation that O’Connor wasn’t as nice a guy as he seemed.

  They were hiding in his flat together each night, not exactly friends, not exactly anything else, and Lena’s intrusion had thrown the strangeness of the situation into stark relief. Luckily his sister was oblivious to anything that didn’t specifically revolve around her, and hadn’t picked up on Giovanna’s feeble attempt to explain their relationship. But her inability to define them hadn’t gone unnoticed by him.

  And so, as much as he wanted to protect Giovanna from his family, he also wanted to have something else with her besides an hour at midnight – because he knew that, whether it was due to her getting over O’Connor or, worse, getting with him, one day soon, she wasn’t going to knock at his door.

  9

  Another evening, another abstract relationship with a guy, another decision about what to wear.

  ‘I’m getting serious déjà vu from this.’ Zoë echoed my feelings from her customary position on my couch and I nodded.

  ‘No joke.’ I riffled through my meagre selection of posh dresses, as if moving them back and forth would magically multiply them. It didn’t. There were still only three options.

  ‘Still,’ she said, ‘at least it’s a real date this time.’

  It was clear that Theo didn’t like his Leventis-ness being bandied about – the name change was a not-so-subtle hint – so Zoë was the only person I’d told, but it was a confidence I was beginning to seriously regret.

  I’d heard some variation on the ‘you’re going on a date’ theme ever since I’d told her how I’d basically invited myself to his sister’s event, so it was mostly with resignation that I said, ‘Doesn’t matter how many times you say it, it doesn’t make tonight a date.’

  ‘And it doesn’t matter how many times you deny it, the definition of two people who’re into each other going out together is a date. And don’t even try to tell me that you’re not into each other,’ she added before I could protest, ‘because I saw the way you two looked at each other when we met him at the rivulet last week. It was revolting.’

  I rolled my eyes. Zoë wanted me to move on from Dec, I got that, but to suggest that Theo, with his good looks, obvious intelligence, amazing job and incredible heart, fancied the girl across the hall who could only speak moron around him was just stupid.

  ‘At best, I’m going along as a buffer between him and his family. At worst, he was too nice to say no when I asked him whether he wanted me to come,’ I said. ‘Date doesn’t come into it.’

  ‘So why are you freaking out so much about what to wear?’ she asked pointedly.

  I shrugged. ‘Because I don’t want to embarrass myself. Or him.’

  ‘That’s tragic.’ Zoë came over to join me. ‘But you know what? I reckon it’s time to crack out the not-sure-whether-it-was-a-wise-investment bronze number.’

  I looked doubtfully at the dress in question, the one that, so far, I’d only worn while practically revolving in front of the mirror as I tried to decide whether it suited me or not.

  ‘Is it a bit much?’

  ‘For a Leventis bash? Isn’t this the family who brought three live wolves to a gallery opening a couple of years back?’

  She had a point. And yet I hesitated. While Theo had seen me in pretty much every outfit I owned during the month or so when we’d been strangers passing in the hall, and then at my best in my emerald dress at the AHC party, ever since then he’d seen me at my worst, my forehead bruised and my clothes baggy. I wanted to look good, not for him exactly, but for me around him.

  I ran my hand across the slinky material, watching as the gold undertones shone through the bronze. ‘Do you think I can pull it off?’

  Zoë’s expression turned suddenly sly. ‘If not, I’m sure the Nod Next-Door could help you with it.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ I deadpanned, my fingers trailing down to the hem that was a few centimetres too high for my liking. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘It’s not as short as you think it is,’ she said firmly. ‘And the muscle definition in your thighs is to die for. Now, I’m not going to stand here and go on about how much you underestimate your own hotness, we haven’t got time. Get in the dress, I’ll do my thing, then the Nod Next-Door will come over and make googly eyes at you and you’ll preen for the rest of the night.’

  I wouldn’t say I was convinced, exactly, but I did as she said and retrieved the dress from the rack.

  I shaved and exfoliated and did all those things they show in montages in films to show that someone is in a frenzy of getting ready for a night out. Then I braved the dress, letting the silky lining slip over my head and zipping myself in so it conformed to my body like a glove. The wide neck sat demurely across my collarbone, but then the slightly glittery material made a fuss over my breasts and hips before stopping mid-thigh. I don’t know what confidence high I’d been riding the day I’d bought it, but I’d definitely been dumped back to the ground since then.

  ‘Stop tugging at it!’ Zoë barked, pushing me down on the bed and waving a foundation brush in my face. ‘We’re going to go for a gold smokey eye and nude lip, okay?’

  It was nice of her to make it sound like my opinion counted when we both knew it didn’t, and off she went, dabbing at my face while I sat passively, accepting her ministrations.

  ‘So, does the great grandson of one of our prime ministers know that you’re not exactly from around here?’ Zoë waited until she’d moved on to my hair to ask that pointed question, making full use of the fact that she had a firm grasp of my curls so I couldn’t pull away. She was a wily one.

  ‘It hasn’t really come up,’ I said, realising too late how defensive I sounded. ‘It’s not like we do a lot of talking . . . and not like that,’ I added as she made a sound of amusement. �
��When we’re together he works and I read, there’s not really a lot of room in that to suddenly be all: “Oh, hey, by the way, have you ever heard of somewhere called Jarli? Yeah, low education, high unemployment, that’s the place. Well, that’s where I’m from.”’

  ‘You ashamed of our roots?’

  It was a loaded question and one that had a variety of answers depending on what day you asked it. Growing up in Jarli required a certain type of acceptance. When walking down the street, for instance, even if you kept your eyes firmly trained on the ground, you had to accept that someone would inevitably demand, ‘What are you fucking looking at?’ You also had to accept that this was a question with no right answer. Jarli is the sort of place where you aren’t so much expected to hide your light under a bushel as to bury it six feet deep and then pour a slab of concrete on top for good measure.

  For the three of us – Dec, bright and ambitious; Zoë, beautiful and aloof; me, darker skinned and with my heart on my sleeve – it’d been a tricky place to negotiate. And that was before you took into account Aggie’s determination for us to improve our vocabularies and prospects, dragging us further still from our neighbours’ and classmates’ expectations of what their lives would entail.

  But it’d been home, still was in some ways – my parents still lived there after all – and, like all places, had its own thing going for it. There were plenty of genuine, salt-of-the-earth folks living there and a strong community spirit even if it was mostly in a ‘we can threaten to kick that guy’s head in, but who the hell are you to do it?’ sort of way.

  Zoë knew all this, so I just answered the question she was actually asking.

  ‘Theo wouldn’t care where I’m from, he’s not a snob.’

  I felt her give my hair a tug. ‘Good,’ she said simply. ‘So you don’t have to be nervous about meeting his family, do you?’

  It was only after the fact that I realised Zoë had bullied me into giving myself a pep talk. Wily.

  ‘Right, you’re done.’ She gave my shoulders a quick double pat and then stepped back to let me have a look at her work in the mirror.