Sonia laughed. ‘Goddess! I don’t think so!’ But she felt her eyes prickle with tears.
God! Why was she on the verge of blubbering to a total stranger? One kind comment and one gentle human touch had been enough to open her frozen heart the tiniest chink. She settled down into the chair and soon both women were bent over, heads together, as Chelsea focused on Sonia’s fingernails and Sonia recounted the mess of her life.
‘Damn!’ Sonia said when the nails were almost done. ‘I promised myself I wouldn’t spill my guts.’
‘You didn’t really,’ Chelsea said, as she packed up her nail equipment. ‘Not all of it, anyway. You didn’t tell me about your current sex life.’ Chelsea shoved her tongue inside her cheek and cocked an eyebrow at Sonia.
‘Huh! What’s to tell?’
‘There’s always something to tell. You’ve got two weeks to find me a story.’
‘I don’t think my track-rider budget stretches to regular manicures.’
‘You’ll come back to Chelsea, I know you will. And the next time you’re in you can tell me about your dreams of becoming a top racehorse trainer one day.’
Sonia’s mouth fell open. ‘How did you know?’
‘I may look like a nail technician, beauty therapist and masseuse on the surface,’ Chelsea said, pressing her flashy fingertips to her breast bone. ‘Yes! But my forte is being a natural psychologist and people-reader. You’re too passionate about your work and too clever to remain a track rider forever. Now go hit your boss for a promotion.’
The next morning, Sonia couldn’t take her eyes off her own glinting pink and white nails as she ran her hands over Old Hands’s dark bay neck, then gathered up his reins and hooked her leg up for Ali-Cat to bunk her on. Chelsea’s French manicure made her small hands look so pretty and she was surprised at how much she liked them.
‘Chuck us up some gloves, Cat,’ Sonia said as she shoved her feet into the high-hitched silver stirrups.
‘Don’t want to ruin your nails, dear?’ Ali-Cat said in a mock-posh voice.
‘I most certainly do not! I’m loving my nails!’ And out of the giant belly of the Colorbond stable Sonia rode on her dancing bay steed towards the sand track, finding it ridiculous that nice nails could help make her day.
Later, in Frank’s office, Sonia relished looking at her hands as she sat at the desk. She felt like a proper racing assistant as she shut out the stink of dogs and horses, the clutter of dirty coffee cups and half-eaten biscuits, the couch laden with wet-weather gear and horse blankets waiting to be stitched. She smiled at her nails as she flicked through entry forms and grasped pens, writing out the horses’ names. It was as if they belonged to another woman.
‘Like my nails, Frank?’ she said, splaying them out on the desk as the old man shuffled in, a smoke dangling from his lips.
He withdrew his cigarette and let out a long slow wolf whistle.
‘Getting in touch with our inner porn star, are we?’
‘Excuse me! No! I’m grooming myself to become the next Gai Waterhouse.’
Frank coughed as he picked up the race entries and squinted at them but did not respond.
‘Frank?’
‘Mmm?’
‘I’m serious. I want to be Gai.’
‘Save telling me your sexual preferences! Tell Ali you’re gay. She knows all types. She can sort you out for a sheila. Then soon enough you’ll be coming and I’m not talking Bart Cummings either.’ His eyes creased as he wheezed at his own joke.
‘Frank. I’m serious. What would it take for me to get my assistant trainer’s licence? For you to back me?’
Frank looked at her with his hang-dog eyes and shook his head. Ash fell from his cigarette onto the gritty carpet.
‘Don’t do it to yourself, girlie. Just don’t do it.’
‘But —’
‘Go find yourself a nice fella and make babies. Training horses is a mugs’ game. It’ll ruin you.’
‘But —’
‘Forget it,’ he said as he set down the papers, ‘I wouldn’t do it to you, girl. You won’t get nothin’ from me.’ Then he turned and walked out the door, treading on her dream and extinguishing the spark as he went.
As the afternoon wore on, the gloss of her nails no longer bedazzled her. On her way home, Sonia deliberately paid their shiny dancing movements no heed as she fished in her pockets for money at the bakery. The rain was pouring down. She ducked her head and ran towards her ute, juggling the bread and quiche she’d just bought. As she fumbled for her keys, she dropped the lot. Quiche Lorraine spilled from its paper bag, smashed and swam like vomit in a puddle amidst cigarette butts and grime. Her keys fell beside a McDonald’s drink cup that swirled with chocolate thick shake and her wallet landed, splat, like a dead fish. She looked down numbly at the mess at her feet, the rain falling down the back of her neck, and realised her life was the same. A big dirty mess. As the rain’s chill seeped through her jumper to her skin, she felt the chill within her rise up to meet it. There in the car park she began to shake and sob. Her loneliness so complete in realising that this was her pattern. To try to do nice things for herself, to take a step forward along a better path, only to be stopped. Not by others. But always she met herself standing in her own path. The fallen child, the pregnant teenager, the failed mother with the dead child. The ruined angel.
She leant back against her ute and allowed the cold wet steel to bite into her lower back through her jeans. She wrapped her arms about herself and lifted her face to the grey clouds, so low they seemed to asphyxiate her. She felt her tears burn hot on her cheeks and the rain sting her with cold. She pressed her fingers into her eyes and tried to breathe composure into herself. And then, as she opened her eyes, she saw him. As if through a river.
He was in the Mercedes. The delicious man she had seen in the bakery was parked right there beside her. She could see through the veil of water running over the windscreen that he was slumped over his steering wheel as if he had crashed. But he hadn’t crashed. He was doing exactly what she was doing. Crying. His perfect face was covered by his perfect hands. She recognised the gleam of the silver ring. His shoulders were shaking. He was sobbing. Actually sobbing.
She was about to scrabble for her keys and wallet amidst the sodden smashed quiche and hurry into her ute, but the man glanced up. He fired a look at her like a gun shot. In that instant she saw the most intense human pain held within his eyes. A man in the depths of despair. Then, he closed down his expression and turned his face away. Gingerly, she opened the passenger door of his Mercedes.
‘Are you all right? Can I help?’
The man winced and his eyes clamped shut again, embarrassed. Ashamed.
Not knowing what to do as the rain poured down over her, Sonia hovered, watching the rain drops bead and pool on the sleek leather interior of his car.
‘Can I call someone for you?’ she asked.The beautiful man, his face covered, sat shaking his head vehemently. She thought he would shout at her to go away. But instead he said, ‘Get in. You’re getting soaked … please.’
She hesitated.
The ‘please’ he added was so refined, so kind. The please of a gentleman.
And so she did. She moved his jacket to the back seat and got in, trickling grubby suburban rain all over his plush, clean car.
She stared ahead through the windscreen, wondering what to say. Glancing across at him, she saw he wore a royal-blue ID tag around his neck. Printed on it in white lettering was the name of the city’s largest hospital. She was sure the tag said ‘Emergency Theatre Surgeon’. A surgeon! How very Mills & Boon, she thought.
She almost laughed. The stifled giggle deflected the pain for an instant. Just like at Jessie’s funeral, when the tiny casket was conveyed into a furnace behind a plush gold curtain and all Sonia could think over and over was, ‘You want fries with that, God? You want fries with that?’ There was nothing funny about the thought. But it truly felt that way, like God had eaten her baby. Like s
ome hungry monster. She felt the tears rise again and she half-turned to the man.
‘Please. Let me help you.’
He swiped his hands across his face and locked his eyes on hers. There was madness in his look. Sonia recognised it as the temporary insanity of grief. She had seen the same expression in her own dark eyes when she looked at herself in the half-blackened mirror on sleepless nights in her bedsit.
‘Hold me,’ he said. Then the ‘please’ came again. And she did. She reached over and grabbed him and held him to her as if her life depended on it. And perhaps today it did. She drank in his smell, felt the pulse of life beneath his thin shirt. She felt his pain and she offered him up all she could in her embrace. As she did, she felt his gift to her of gratitude and his warmth flood through her. Then they were kissing. Hungry lips tasting the salt of tears, watered down by rain. Bodies twisting together to make more contact, heating up the car. Fogging windows. Hands roving over each other, searching for the essence of life within, beneath the shell of clothes and onto skin. Passion chasing away the dark wolves of death. Breath coming fast. The breath of life and love washing in and out like the ocean. He, warm and dry. She, wet and cold. They melded together perfectly. A small rainbow inside the car, their union awash with the energy of life. The rain drummed on the roof like a million fingers from the outside reminding them that out there the world was cruel. Out there lay death and grief. But here, in this cocoon, they held life for now. Intimacy denying death. Human touch dispelling despair.
She would’ve done it. She would’ve made love to him there and then in his car without asking any questions, but he had been the first to pull away.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’ Now she was the one saying please. Catching her breath. Wanting to go on and on with this beautiful stranger. But she felt his energy shut down. She felt him slide back to the nightmarish place he had come from.
‘It’s been a really fucked-up day,’ he said as he ran his fingers through his short black hair, his voice choked.
All Sonia could do was nod, her cheeks stinging red.
‘But you made me feel better,’ he said, giving her a shy smile, the sadness still draining his face.
‘And you, me,’ she said, biting her lip and rolling her eyes at the madness of it all.
They both covered their mouths as if shamed.
‘How bizzare,’ he said.
‘How funny,’ she said. ‘But not funny as in ha, ha,’ she added quickly. ‘Please don’t think I —’
He held up his hand. ‘No! I don’t think that you normally … you know.’
‘Well,’ Sonia said, ‘seeing that you’re better, I’d better … you know … go.’
He nodded.
‘I’m Lee, by the way. Predictable name for someone with my looks, I know.’
She smiled a gentle sad smile at him.
‘I’m Sonia.’
‘Nice to meet you.’
‘You too.’
Sonia nodded as she got out of the car.
‘I could take you to dinner,’ he said, ‘as a thank you … as a sorry … and I’ll explain.’
‘No need,’ Sonia said, blushing. And she found herself shutting the door of his car, fishing out her things from the puddle and waving to him awkwardly as she got into her ute and waited impatiently for the diesel glow light to click off so she could start the engine and rumble away as fast as she could.
Later, back in her bedsit, she kicked herself over and over again. She should’ve said yes. She should’ve got his number. But that dark angel with the golden hair was back, standing before her, blocking her path. What would the Mercedes man want with someone like her? the dark angel hissed.
For the next two weeks Sonia did all she could to stop thinking of Lee. She rode more horses than she needed to. Mucked out more stables. She lugged more feed bags and carted more hay bales as she tried to obliterate the smell of him, the taste of him, the feel of him. She tried to not look for him constantly on the road, in the car park, at the bakery. But he was never there. At the point where she thought she would turn herself inside out thinking of him, she at last made her way into Chelsea’s salon.
‘My God! You look like you’ve come out of a horse’s rear end!’ Chelsea said. ‘Lucky I kept the next appointment free. I’m giving you a massage, girl! Now, come tell Aunty Chelsea all about it.’
Sonia slumped in the chair. Where should she begin? On that wet day when she had finally found the courage to ask Frank about becoming a trainer, and he had mocked and blocked her. The day where she had lived out one of the most intense moments of her life with the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, yet she’d let him wash away down the stormwater drain and out of her life.
She looked at Chelsea’s kind and open face. ‘Two weeks ago, the day after I had my nails done, there was this man …’ And so she began her tale.
She was not even a third of the way into the story when Chelsea began to narrow her eyes and ask questions in a Miss Marple kind of way.
‘A black Mercedes, you say?’
‘And you said he worked at a hospital?’
‘As a surgeon?’
‘Chinese-looking?’
After Sonia answered yes to all of her questions Chelsea sat back and smiled. ‘Would his name be Lee?’
Sonia’s mouth dropped open, her eyes wide with surprise, and Chelsea clapped her hands and screamed.
‘You know him!’
‘Sure I do. He comes in here for massages. His shoulders get so tight operating for hours like he does. He’s a lovely guy. A total sweetie. And hot body! Hot, hot, hot!’ She smiled with pride. ‘He says I’m better than any of the expensive inner-city masseuses, and cheaper. He bowled in here one day about three years ago and has been coming back ever since. At first I thought he was gay. But no, he’s mentioned a few nursie girlfriends, but I think he’s a bit of a mum’s boy and the nurses weren’t up to par.’
Sonia shook her head. ‘But … that day, in the rain? The car … the kissing … with me?’
Chelsea waved her nail file about. ‘Oh that! Poor guy. I know what that was all about.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘So awful.’
She lowered her eyes so that her long false lashes rested on her cheeks and her bright voice softened.
‘He’s been on stress leave these past two weeks. There was a car accident, you see. In the rain. It was during his shift and it was a mum and two little kids. He got the mum and the older one through. But he operated for hours on the little girl. She died in the finish. She was six months old.’
‘Oh.’ Sonia winced as the moments with him in the car flashed in her mind.
‘Yes, he’s a surgeon and yes, he sees tragedy every day in Emergency, but his older sister lost a baby years ago the exact same way. Same age. The rain. Slippery roads. That day undid him.’
Sonia sat in silence, sadness swimming inside her. The understanding complete. The mystery of him solved. For two weeks she had fantasised that their meeting was the start of something. A love story so powerful. But now she saw only the bleakness of the moment. The totally random act the universe had devised to tease her with the thought that a happy, less lonely life was meant for others, but not her.
Chelsea frowned at her. ‘What?’
Sonia shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
‘You turn up like an angel during this amazingly hot guy’s blackest hour, have him kiss you, no, ravage you, and you’re like … shrugging?’
‘It was a freak thing.’
‘You bet it was. It’s called love! It’s called serendipity!’
‘But —’
‘But nothing. Get a grip! It was meant to happen. It’s meant to go on.’
‘But we’re from different planets. A scummy track rider with a fancy-pants surgeon? And how the hell do I meet him again, anyway? I haven’t seen him since.’
Chelsea tut-tutted and waved her buffer in Sonia’s direction.
‘Ye of li
ttle faith! Don’t let anyone steal your dreams, least of all your own self. You are not a scummy track rider. You’re a trainer in waiting. All we have to do now is line up another meeting with him. And change your attitude about yourself … which stinks, by the way!’
‘But how do I see him? Fling myself off Old Hands at a flat-knacker gallop so they cart me off to his hospital? Then lie there in front of him on the operating table, out cold, but still hoping in my unconscious state he’ll kiss me even though I won’t remember it because I’m out of it and dying?’
‘Or I could help you.’
‘You help? Yes! No! Oh, it’s ridiculous. As if he’d go for someone like me.’
‘Stop it, Sonia! What do you mean, someone like you? Someone who is smart, funny and beautiful? With rider’s buns of steel? And who is on their journey to becoming the next Gai Waterhouse?’
‘I am not beautiful. And I’m not Gai and never will be.’
‘You are beautiful, you just hide it under huge man clothing and beanies. And you are Gai. I know it!’ Chelsea rolled her eyes. ‘I mean you’re heterosexual but also have the potential to be Gai. Oh, you know what I mean! And I’m going to drag the Goddess out of you kicking and screaming, if it’s the last thing I do. Just you wait. I have exactly an hour before my next client. And let me tell you, Miss Sonia Wog-name-starting-with-L, I have formulated a cunning plan.’
When Sonia emerged from behind the curtain to pay her bill, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Chelsea had released Sonia’s long hair from its ponytail, straightened it so it had the sheen of a race-day thoroughbred, given her a massage and facial and made up her face. As she reached for her wallet she sensed someone in the waiting room behind her. She turned and saw him there. Mercedes man! Lee! Her mouth dropped open as he glanced up and smiled warmly at her.
‘Hello!’ he said.
‘Hello,’ she said shyly back. It was as if the world around her contracted and all she could sense was him, the peaceful, beautiful presence of him.
Girl & the Ghost-Grey Mare Page 4
