White Balance

by Paton, Ainslie

  But him and Bailey. Nah.

  She was probably the most resourceful, can-do person he’d ever met. Nothing ever fazed her. Need a cranky overtired kid to smile on cue? Bailey could make him laugh. Need a thirty person German choir to lip sync on an icy mountain top? Bailey could conduct. Need a series of champagne corks to pop in sequence? Bailey could tell you to the second when they’d go off.

  She could cajole, finesse, coach, sooth, bully and insist her way to getting whatever needed to be done, done—with the minimum of fuss and the broadest smile. She made impossible things look easy and the whole time they’d teamed, she’d never got the credit she deserved, no matter how hard he’d promoted her talents. He’d always felt bad about that. Even now it felt bad to remember, how she was overlooked. But that was the way it was at Bellingen Hart, a typical boy’s club. Like most of the agencies in town. He’d been pleased when she’d finally quit, years after he’d moved on, to launch her own event production company, and he’d referred as much work as possible to her over the years.

  And God, poor Bails—that disaster with the Energy Plan. He’d called her as soon as he heard, and they’d had a laugh about it, but he needed to call her again, and soon.

  Then it hit him. If you gave Scarlett Johansson dark curly hair and blue eyes, and shaved about twenty centimetres from her height, you had Bailey.

  Shit, him and Bailey!

  Olivia was laughing at him. “You’ve just worked it out haven’t you?”

  “Bailey. You know people always wondered if we were tying it on. I could never understand where they got that from.”

  “You’re not that bright are you, Bear? The two of you looked like a couple, you certainly argued like one.”

  “I honestly never thought about her that way. I thought she was a miracle worker and a life saver and a vastly overlooked talent. I relied on her and trusted her, and had fun working with her, but I never thought about being with her. Wow. And you did.”

  “For a while I wondered if I was her replacement.”

  “Ah Livy, you never said anything.”

  “That’s because I didn’t have to. I worked it out. You were oblivious to her as a woman.”

  “Shit yeah. Right up until about now. Now all I can think about is how cute she is. Now I’m not going to be able to talk to her without feeling awkward. Do you think she was interested in me, you know, in that way?”

  “Blake honey, the fact you have to ask me that proves how clueless you are. Of course she was.”

  “Shit Liv. But she had a bloke back then, Jason.”

  “And she spent most of her time with you, and for most of that time you were playing the field.”

  “But I never...”

  “I know you never encouraged her. But you’re an attractive man, even with this spare tire, and you didn’t have that then. You were doing this incredibly exciting work together. Of course she was interested in you.”

  His head was full of visions of Bailey, laughing, determined, tenacious. Giving him stick whenever he got ahead of himself. That neat little body and glossy hair, those clear blue eyes and wicked grins. She was the brightest button in the tin, the full colour spectrum.

  “God. You’re rewriting my history here, Liv.”

  “You started this. And you and Bailey makes about as much sense as me and Aid.”

  “But that’s just it—it does make sense. I can’t believe it, but it does.” He folded Olivia’s hand into his and gripped firmly. This is what he needed to say. “Let’s assume the death of either of us leaves the other in a bad place. Devastated, only half alive and colourless like Aid. It would make sense that moving on would be hard. And it would make more sense, given neither of us is ever going to truly be over the other, for you to be with Aid, who you already love in a way, and me to be with Bailey, who I already love, in a way.”

  “That’s only going to work if neither of them get married.”

  “Right, or one of us dies.”

  Olivia swung her leg over his and straddled his hips. She looked him deep in the eyes. She could see straight into him, into the heart of him, so she’d know this conversation had rattled him. She said, “Yeah, that too,” and pushed her hands through his hair. “They’ve never met have they?”

  Blake closed his eyes as her fingers raked his skull. She was making it hard to concentrate now. “Bails and Aid. No. He was in film school in LA when Bails and I were at Bellingen Hart. They know of each other, but no they’ve never met.”

  “If Aid takes the partnership, and you get Bailey to help out for the next six months that will be the first time they meet.”

  “I guess so.” He looked into her lovely face. She had dirt on her forehead and a blush of sunburn on her cheeks. “What are you thinking?”

  “I was wondering. Bailey and Aiden?”

  “Nah. Bailey is too full on for Aid, especially now. She’d irritate the heck out of him, and she’d have very little tolerance for his crabby temper. Anyway I want them to work together, not get together.”

  “Just as well.”

  “Why?”

  “We need them. You know, if Hugh and Scarlett are busy.”

  “Right.”

  Olivia pushed him and he lay back on the deck. She came up on her knees, squeezing them into his hips, her hands braced either side of his shoulders. “Blake. If you die I’ll kill you.”

  He flattened his palms over the torn pockets on the bum of her cut-offs and pressed her hot centre against him. Through the smell of dog and garden there was his Olivia, wholesome and clean with a rising note of that expensive goop she used as moisturiser. “I’ll try to remember that.”

  She lay over his chest and he was glad they were staying home tonight.

  “Don’t die, ok Bear.”

  He pulled the band from her hair and fisted its tangles. “You either.” He kissed her slightly harder than he’d intended, to crush the sudden flare of emotion that sat in his chest clearly labelled fear and grief, and write them over with hope and love.

  7: Reputation Damage

  Doug Jewells flicked a towel over Bailey’s legs. “Tell me what else hurts.”

  “My pride.” Bailey’s voice came back muffled from her face being inside the cut-out on the massage table. She lifted her head, but before she could swivel around to look at Doug, he pushed it back down into the cut-out.

  “Stay down. No twisting and I don’t care about your pride.”

  “You should, it’s affecting my recovery.”

  Doug grunted. Bailey knew he was amused, but trying to be stern like a rehabilitation therapist was supposed to be with a patient who didn’t exactly follow instructions, and like the friend he’d become was supposed to be when they cared.

  “Didn’t we agree that since you insist on taking on more work than sensible for one person, you wouldn’t spend more than thirty minutes sitting without a break.”

  “Um.”

  “Don’t ‘um’ me. What kind of hours were you working? Don’t answer that. Your body is telling me. Way too many. Bailey, what did you expect to happen? You’ve had major spinal surgery. You worked so hard to beat the limp that was supposed to be a permanent feature of your life, then you go and screw it all up by sitting in a chair for—let me guess six hours at one go.”

  “More like ten hours—but yeah that’s the story.”

  Doug was so annoyed he stopped the massage, stilling his hands on her bare hips, “Bailey. You can’t do stuff like that and expect to be well. Your whole spine is in spasm and I’ll bet you have a sore neck and a headache as well as the numbness in the leg.”

  Bailey lay still, glad her face was tucked into the table so she couldn’t see Doug. She knew there was more of his lecture to come, and she must have tensed because he prodded her hard in the glute and said, “Relax,” as though a prod in the glute was ever going to make anyone do that.

  “I have to work, Doug.”

  “You have to be smart, Bailey, or you won’t be able to wo
rk.”

  “It’s not that bad is it?” Bailey heard her own voice kick up to a squeak she hadn’t intended.

  “Grab that towel, sit up and look at me.”

  Bailey brought her knees up and curled on her side, then pushed herself upright, hugging the towel to her torso. She looked at Doug, who she trusted implicitly for his advice, his skill as a therapist and his ability to ignore that she was often half naked in his presence.

  He gave a great sigh that dropped his shoulders and lengthened his neck. “You have way too much bright side, girl.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Your glass is too full. You’re too optimistic.”

  “How can I be too optimistic?”

  Doug sighed again and sat beside Bailey on the table, his feet on the floor where hers were dangling. “You never think about failing, about stuff going wrong. So you don’t have a realistic picture of what’s happening.”

  “I have a very realistic picture of the penguin, Doug. I’ve been going to bed with him and getting up with him for the last week.”

  “But if you’d have been more realistic you’d have known you and the penguin still had some distance to go before you could be sure he was done with forever.”

  “I don’t want to think about failing, or limping.”

  “Ok. I understand that. I know that’s what got you through the whole injury drama in the first place. You refuse to admit defeat. That’s how you surprised the hell out of the surgeon. But you need a more realistic view of your pain threshold. You must’ve known you were sore from all that sitting?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m not mucking around, Bails. I’m not. I need you to be more balanced about this.”

  “Well you don’t have to worry. I’m officially unemployed for six months.”

  “I’m delighted. What happened?”

  “An unhappy client sacked me.”

  “Don’t care. Still delighted. That would be the bruised pride thing then. Oh, wait. What are you thinking you’re going to be doing for the next six months? Now is not the time to go bungy jumping, or pick up part time work as a brickie or shelf stacker at Coles. You can use this time to rest and recover properly.”

  “You don’t really need me in this conversation, do you?”

  “Good point.” Doug gestured to the table, “Down you go.”

  Muffled by the table again, Bailey said, “I knew you’d be happy. I thought I could start swimming.”

  “Excellent idea.”

  “And perhaps start back at the gym.”

  “Not yet—but yes I agree. For the moment, just the swimming and the walking, and the other gentle floor exercises, plus plenty of rest. I don’t want you tearing around all over the place.”

  “And we’ll kill the penguin.”

  “If you behave yourself, yes. I can’t see any reason why you can’t lose the penguin again. And if you can be a little more balanced, lose him forever.”

  Bailey let Doug focus on the massage. She knew he was genuinely frustrated with her and she was sorry about that. But he was wrong about her having too much bright, too much optimism. If she’d been too optimistic, she’d never have made a single phone call this week looking for replacement work. If she had too much in her cup, she’d never have been worried about possible fallout from the boning. If she was too positive she’d never have spent any time worrying about the things she might not get to do because of the injury. Simple things like carrying shopping, lying on her back in bed, and waking up without being stiff like an old woman.

  And she did worry about those thing, about being able to use the lawn mower and dig in the garden, and being comfortable as a passenger in a car, even wearing heels on occasion again. And they were such little things, well outside the bungy jumping, skiing, horse riding or dancing all night realms.

  Doug was wrong. She had a very realistic picture of what she still had to lose if she didn’t recover properly.

  Her youth.

  He broke into her thoughts. “Are you stewing over what I said?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Good.”

  “Geez.”

  “I’m on your side remember.”

  “If you promise not to—ouch—do that again.”

  “That was a good ouch. We’ll be having more of that if we want to kill the penguin. I’ll talk to you so you forget...”

  “Ow!”

  “...about the hurty bits. Tell me about the morning photo.”

  “It wasn’t painful.”

  “It’s a dangerous game you play, given I have all the power here, and I know where to damage you.”

  “Alright, alright. The sea was really wild this morning, huge swell, the air was full of salt mist. I didn’t think there were any surfers mad enough to be out there. I stood there and watched and then out of nowhere this surfboard shot straight up in the air like a rocket. It was out of control. I never saw the surfer, but I took the shot and the board fell back down and disappeared. I was worried someone was out there, so I asked the life guard when he put the closed beach signs out. He said someone lost a board out there yesterday, snapped a leg rope, so I guess that was it.”

  “It looked like a flying fish at first, the way you shot it, like a Marlin.”

  “Yeah, it was a freaky shot, got lots of reaction to that post.” All the regulars had piled on. MacGuffin still conspicuous in absence. “Means whatever I post tomorrow will be boring by comparison.”

  “Just what we need for you—an order of boring,” said Doug, then he said, “Flip,” and he started on her neck.

  After she’d seen Doug off, showered and was sipping Turkish Apple tea, Bailey went into her office. She only intended to plug in her phone to charge, she had no intention of ruining Doug’s work by sitting for hours in her chair at her laptop, but it was ok to check email quickly. She wouldn’t sit down. She’d stand, read anything new and then set herself up in front of the TV to relax with a couple of eps of Game of Thrones.

  She skipped the news service emails, the blog feeds and an offer to buy Viagra online. She parked a joke email from Sarah; it was bound not to be funny, but Sar was big on making sure her inbox was full of not very funny email jokes. Then she clicked open Urban Dictionary’s word of the day.

  Phone-yawn: the act of taking out a mobile phone from a pocket or bag to check for a message, resulting in people around you pulling out their phones and doing the same.

  That made her laugh.

  But the incoming email that pinged into her inbox shut her mouth with a hard clack of back teeth. Its sender, the client who’d bought her time in August, the client on whose promised income she felt secure enough not to be panicked about the next six months. The subject line read: Contract Cancellation.

  Bailey sat, the ergonomic mesh cushioning of her Aeron chair in no way mitigating her hard landing. She opened the email, from the Department of Immigration. She scanned it, then she read it word by word. It started out all nice and easy, “Dear Bailey,” ended all happy, jolly, “Kind regards,” but in the middle of those four words sat a paragraph that compromised all Doug’s good work. In effect her services were no longer required.

  Oh they didn’t actually say, ‘Dear Bailey, you screwed up the Energy job so we don’t want a bar of you, nah-nah-na-nah-na’, but they might as well have. They went on with some palaver about official changes to the approved suppliers’ rosters and the opportunity for Bailey Wyatt Events to re-pitch credentials in twelve months time, at which point they looked forward to working with her again.

  They didn’t say, ‘sorry about cancelling your contract within the allowable period where we don’t have to compensate you’. They didn’t say, ‘look sweetheart, you’re professional poison with the Federal Government right now’. They didn’t say, ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’. Except effectively, they did.

  It was a blackout alright, just of a different kind.

  Sitting comfortably on the elastic weave of her Aeron, B
ailey felt like she might as well have been that surfboard untethered, buffeted and rocketing out of control.

  8: Application for Atrophy

  He couldn’t do it.

  Blake’s grand vision, the whole partnership thing. And it wasn’t only about not wanting to fuck things up for Blake.

  He was already on a good wicket and his tolerance for boat rocking was decidedly at a low splash point. Campbell, Abbot, Turner New York thought he was the ant’s pants. Chuck Campbell talked sizeable bonus. Mike Abbot talked global campaign out of Sydney and if Glen Turner hadn’t been dead a decade after an unfortunate accident involving a small mirror and too many white lines, he’d have probably had something good to say about Aiden as well.

  The fact that all his Sydney colleagues, once comrades in arms against the evil forces of agency management, hated his guts now that he was their boss was beside the point. The office was profitable again after two years of struggling to breakeven and what do you know, being the boss and kicking heads suited Aiden’s mood.

  With Blake it would be different. Blake wanted him to problem solve as well as pick up the creative reins again. Get back into the razzle-dazzle and excite clients about new ideas and new ways of thinking. Blake assumed he missed all that, the thrill of connecting ideas, using imagination to create change and stimulate people. And he did, some days, but most days, he knew he was browned-out and simply didn’t have any good ideas left.

  And that’s why he couldn’t do it. He just hadn’t worked out how to tell Blake that yet.

  The whole idea of working with Blake again had turned up something good though. It’d given him a reason to head back to the gym. He’d needed to think, and he needed to get clear head space, away from CAT Group politics, away from the dirt in his inboxes, and away from his usual out-of-office non compos mentis funk. Thinking clearly in the house was simply not going to happen. The house was a visual reminder of the state of his mind, unkempt, tatty and unliveable. So he’d fronted up to the gym, talked his way in without his membership card—God knows where that was—and hit the treadmill.