Pants on Fire

by Maggie Alderson

  “Yes. I’ve bumped into him twice recently—once was at the Easter Show and the famous Lizzy Ryan was with him. Except he introduced her as Lizzy Stewart, which I thought was kind of interesting.”

  “That’s it exactly!” said Antony, clearly filing away this new detail and thrilled with it. “They’ve gone public. Can you imagine? Billy told his own brother that he was in love with his wife, that they’d been having an affair for a year and that she was leaving Tom to come and be with him. It happened the night of Cordelia’s party.”

  “That explains why I didn’t see him there. So how come he was with her at the Show? That was a couple of weeks before.”

  “Tom was in New York on business. Billy told him when he got back.”

  “Poor old Tom. What did he do?”

  “Punched his lights out. Billy had to have three stitches—in his eyebrow, of course, which will just make him look more handsome than ever. Isn’t it heaven?” He clasped his hands together with delight. “Oh, I wish I could have been there. Imagine those two gorgeous Ryan boys fighting it out. But the best thing of all—Billy told him in the Four in Hand. Can you imagine, with all those rugby boys around? ‘Sorry, mate, I’m rooting your wife. And she’s going to be mine.’ Pow! Crash! Oh, Patrick White would have loved it. Primeval.” He paused and looked at me. “Of course, this lays it all open for you and Rory Stewart.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Billy doesn’t have to pretend he’s seeing other women anymore, so Rory can now hit on all the gals who were previously in Billy’s harem of pretend girlfriends, without betraying his maaate. You were one of them, sweetie.”

  “Oh, I think it’s too late for that.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I see Rory as a friend now. You know how that initial attraction fades if you don’t act on it? He was at Cordelia’s party, actually—last seen snogging a busty girl in a horrible suit. Looked very happy about it.”

  Antony’s left eyebrow shot up. He was looking at me with his evaluating face, exactly as he had when I first met him at the hat party. I looked back at him boldly and drained my glass.

  “The attraction fades, does it, Georgia? Hmmm. I wonder who the chick was . . . Probably very rich if she was wearing nasty clothes. We’ll have to find out. Ask Debs about it—then tell me. Does she ever come into the office these days?”

  “Debbie? Oh yes, from time to time. Not like every day or anything and never before eleven a.m. and often in a filthy temper, but we do see her. How was the wedding in Melbourne?”

  “Oh it was fabulous. We had the best time. We behaved really really badly. Debbie has been banned for life from the Australia Club.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “It’s a very snooty club. The members are mainly senior lawyers, you have to wear a tie to breakfast and all that bollocks. Very establishment. Beautiful old building, billiard room, the works.”

  “So what did Debbie do that got her banned for life?”

  “She gave the best man a head job in the breakfast room—members were having breakfast at the time.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. I just gaped at him, appalled.

  “Isn’t she hilarious?” he said.

  “No. I think she’s seriously deranged. She needs help and your attitude just encourages her. She could get arrested for doing something like that. I mean what does she have to do to get some attention? Was she totally off her face?”

  “Oh, you are boring sometimes, Pussy. She’d had a little cocaine possibly and maybe some eccies and rather a lot of champagne, but I wouldn’t let something really bad happen to Deb—or Bed, as I now call her, HA HA HA.”

  Was this bad enough for me to ring Jenny? I wondered. How would I tell her? Your daughter was caught giving oral relief to a man in the dining room of a major Australian establishment? I couldn’t do it. And it’s not like it was actually endangering her health, just her poor destroyed reputation.

  Despite her recent disgrace Debbie (or Beddie, as I now couldn’t help thinking of her) seemed to be in a better mood around the office and as Liinda was away for the week doing a travel story in Hawaii, I thought I’d grab the opportunity to talk to Debbie about the Jasper stalking incident.

  “Shame you missed Cordelia’s party,” I said to her casually, while we were going through photos of supermodels with spots for her next beauty story: “Bad Pore Days—Supermodels’ Skin-Saving Secrets Revealed.”

  “Yeah, I heard it was good,” she said. “And I heard you were smooching publicly with Jasper O’Connor. Yukko. You really have got the most appalling taste in men. Antony told me you just wanted a root, but really you can have meaningless sex with stockbrokers and rugby internationals, you know, you don’t have to resort to penniless failed photographers.”

  “Did Antony tell you about me and Jasper?” I wanted to understand the complete workings of Sydney’s jungle drums.

  “Antony and about fifty other people. Trudy told me. And Rory Stewart told my mum he’d seen you with—and this is a quote—“some kind of drug addict,” and now Jenny’s really worried about you.”

  “Bloody cheek. Fancy telling Jenny that. Tell her not to worry, it was just a fling. And Rory wasn’t exactly behaving like the pope himself either. He was snogging someone like mad.”

  “Oh yes, Mum told me all about that too. That was Fiona Clarke.” Debbie pulled a face. “Apparently he’s really keen. She’s going up to the Stewarts’ farm this weekend. Mum’s pleased he’s got a girlfriend at last, because he hasn’t had once since . . .” She sighed. “Since he had to move back up there.”

  I gave her shoulder a squeeze.

  “But you’d think he could have done better than her, for Christ’s sake,” she said vehemently.

  “Apart from the fact she was wearing a bad polyester suit, what’s wrong with her?”

  “Was she? That’s typical. She’s just so ordinary. A real wannabe. The kind of girl who goes to polo matches in a baseball cap and too much make-up, hoping to meet a rich husband. That’s all she cares about—the rich bit. She’s such a social climber. Can’t stand her. She’ll be so excited to think she has her hands on a Stewart too.”

  I was used to Debbie’s appalling snobbery and let it wash over me, while getting as many details about Fiona Clarke as I could.

  “What does she do?”

  “She does PR for a big property developer. The sort that is putting up all those Hong Kong slum buildings and calling them ‘lifestyle apartments.’ She sends out invitations saying things like ‘Be a part of Sydney’s new status address’ and they’re these hideous little poky units you couldn’t stand up in wearing Manolos. Heinous.”

  “She doesn’t sound like Rory’s type at all,” I said.

  “Oh, he’s just desperate to get laid, I reckon. Stuck up there on the farm. He was ripe for the picking.” She paused and leaned on the light box. “I have this theory that men ripen like fruit—when they’re ready to fall off the tree it doesn’t really matter who the woman is, he’ll drop into her lap. It’s all about timing.”

  “Actually, she was all over his lap,” I said. “But that’s a good theory. It explains why some of the most gorgeous men you meet are with the most ghastly women. I always thought it was something to do with their mothers. You know, at the risk of sounding like Liinda, we could do a story based on your theory. We’d get a great coverline out of it, although we’d have to come up with something better than ‘Why Men Are Like Fruit’—let’s think about it. You should bring it up at the next ideas meeting.”

  Debbie looked at me with a thoughtful expression. Yet again I noticed that she had the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen. A few cows at the Easter Show came close, but no other human.

  “That’s very nice of you, Georgie. Liinda would have just stolen the idea and I’d have forgotten about it until I heard her passing it off as her own at the next meeting.”

  So she did pay attention in those meetings.

 
; “Don’t worry,” I said. “I have an ideas file on my computer. I’ll tap it in there and remind you before we go in.”

  “Well, it would be nice not to feel completely retarded in an editorial meeting for a change. You and Liinda sit there having brilliantly witty ideas, but when Maxine starts screaming and shouting I just clam up and can’t think of anything to say.”

  And you sit there looking like you couldn’t give a damn, I thought. How easy it is to misjudge people.

  “Debbie, on the subject of La Vidovic, can I ask you something?” I wanted to grab my opportunity while I could.

  “Someone told me that she used to be madly in love with Jasper O’Connor and stalked him and all that. Do you think she’s still in love with him? Should I tell her I’ve been seeing him, rather than let her find out? She has warned me off him several times . . .”

  “Oh, that was hilarious. The way she carried on you’d have thought he was a real catch, although it did get messy in the office and we had to stop using him. I did think that was a bit rough on him actually, because he was a good photographer.”

  She let out a bored sigh. I knew she couldn’t understand why anyone would possibly want to give Jasper O’Connor a moment’s thought, but she struggled valiantly to answer me.

  “I don’t think she could possibly still be in love with him but she did stalk him pretty heavily. It got pretty ugly.”

  She went back to flicking through the slides. I could tell her attention span for other people’s problems was running out.

  “But I don’t think you need to tell her, no. Why open yourself up to all that aggro? And if she does find out you can just tell her it’s none of her fucking business, which it isn’t. Hey, look at this zit on Linda Evangelista’s nose. Needs its own postcode. Excellent.”

  So maybe I didn’t need to talk to Liinda about it—good. But what about Jasper? I needed to have things out with him anyway. After his behaviour at Cordelia’s I’d seriously cooled off on him. I had let him come home with me after the party, but I hadn’t seen him since, and I hadn’t returned his last five phone calls. However, I still wanted to know if there was a good reason he hadn’t warned me that one of my workmates was liable to have a psychopathic freakout when she found out we’d been seeing each other. And also, my conscience was nagging me a bit—I’d been talking about him to all these other people, surely it was only fair to let him tell his side of the story.

  That night I walked round to Caledonia and found him up in the cupola.

  “Pinkie, darling,” he said, smiling beatifically and opening his arms. “Is your phone broken? I’ve called you so many times. Sit down, I’ve just been watching this amazing 1970s Brazilian film. It was the story of—”

  I jumped in before he could get going on one of his endless rambling theories of the universe and his precise place in it.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” I said, sitting opposite him and folding my arms. “Why don’t you tell me the story of when my friend and colleague Liinda Vidovic stalked you?”

  His ebullinet mood vanished and he got the ugly look on his face I’d seen at Cordelia’s party.

  “Who told you that?”

  “It appears to be common knowledge. Common to everyone but me.”

  “So that’s why you haven’t rung me.” His face contorted with anger and he slammed his fist down on the seat next to him. “I will NOT allow that woman to ruin something else good in my life. She’s already fucked up my career and I’m not going to let her fuck this up as well. I really enjoy spending time with you and I won’t have her coming back from the grave like Carrie to haunt me.”

  “Well, that might be easier to arrange if you tell me about it, Jasper,” I said, keeping my voice low, to try to cool him down. His naked rage scared me a bit.

  Jasper’s whole face had become a scowling mask. It was hard to believe it was the same one that was so lovably open when it smiled.

  “Come on, Jasper. Would you rather I just believed what everyone else has told me, or are you going to tell me your side of the story?”

  “Fucking Liinda Vidovic was the worst thing I ever did,” he said, suddenly. “I fucked her once and she fucked up my whole life in return.”

  “Wasn’t the fact that it was only once the whole problem?”

  “Yeah. She seemed to expect me to marry her, just because we’d had one root. I should never have done it, but we got really drunk and stoned one night, at least I did, and we just fell into bed. You know how that can happen . . . But we were really good friends and I thought she knew me well enough to know it was just a one-night stand.”

  No wonder he was such good friends with Plonker.

  “So what happened after that?”

  He lit a cigarette, and I felt so shaken I lit one too. Still horrible.

  “Look,” said Jasper, his face returning to its normal contours. “Liinda’s been around, she’s no country bumpkin, you know that, don’t you?”

  He looked at me questioningly, not sure how much I knew about her past. I nodded.

  “Yes, I know about all that, Jasper.” And the fact that he did too and he still thought she’d be game for a quick shag appalled me. He shrugged.

  “OK. So I thought she could handle it. But she behaved like some kind of wronged virgin. I felt like a hunted animal. She used to follow me around Sydney. She was really good at it. I’d look round and there she’d be. I tell you, she should work for ASIO. Or the KGB.”

  I had to restrain a smile.

  “She used to send me letters,” he continued. “Every day. It was really creepy. And she knew everything about me. She managed to blab her way into every party I was invited to. There were endless silent phone calls and it made no difference if I changed the number, she still got hold of it.” He shook his head at the memories.

  “Did you ever consider getting a restraining order?” I asked him.

  “I was just about to do that when Commandant Maxine Thane took matters into her own hands. Liinda had deliberately stuffed up a couple of really important jobs we were supposed to be doing together, and apparently she was being a psycho in the office as well. I think it was your friend Lady Muck—Debbie Brent—who told Maxine what was going on in the end. So Maxine told Liinda that if she carried on stalking me she would lose her job instantly, and she told me that I couldn’t work for Glow anymore. Bye-bye career.”

  “But surely you didn’t only work for Glow.”

  He looked a bit shifty.

  “Liinda told my other clients a load of lies about me—the worst kind of lies, the ones that contain a grain of truth—and gradually they all stopped hiring me. And when you stop getting your Vogue covers it’s amazing how fast your advertising work dries up.”

  “What kind of little half truths?”

  “Oh, stupid shit about me fiddling expenses—when I’d just billed for a few more rolls of film than we’d actually used. I mean, all photographers do that. But when they looked into it, and found that there were a few rolls unaccounted for, they assumed everything she’d told them was true.”

  “Are you sure that’s the only reason your career . . . slowed up? Did Liinda really have that kind of power?”

  I was starting to feel like Angela Lansbury, collating all the facts and trying to work out who really dunnit.

  “She’s a total witch.”

  I wasn’t sure I entirely believed him.

  “Well, I’m going to have to tell her I’ve been seeing you,” I said. “She’s going to find out anyway—I think it would be better if it came from me.”

  “It’s up to you. You’re the one who has to work with her. I wish you luck.”

  He flicked his ciagrette end out of the window and reached for his little tin of grass and cigarette papers. He looked quite relieved it was all out in the open.

  “Thanks for telling me all the gory details, Jasper,” I said, standing up. “I’m going now.”

  “Don’t you want to stick around and have a couple of Js wit
h me?” He smiled his most winning smile.

  “No, Jasper. I think you’ve been really sneaky with me and I don’t want to stick around you at all.”

  “Well, fuck off then, you snotty English bitch.”

  “And a Happy Christmas to you, Jasper.”

  As I started down the stairs something crashed into the wall next to me. It was the plastic pineapple ice bucket.

  “Grow up,” I shouted back at him and he suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “I don’t know what makes you think you’re so morally superior, Miss Manners,” he said in a calm, measured voice. “You’ve been bad-mouthing my mate Nick Pollock all over town for not calling you after you screwed him once, and you haven’t returned my last five phone calls after fucking me senseless for the past two months. Men have feelings too you know, Georgia. Put that in your magazine.”

  And before I could say anything he went back up into the cupola and slammed the door.

  I was shaking when I got home, but told myself it was a good thing I’d finally seen Jasper’s true nature. I couldn’t believe it was the same guy who’d taken me to a deserted beach and written my name in pink chalk on the pavements of Elizabeth Bay. I was upset by his nastiness, but I wasn’t heartbroken. He never meant anything to me anyway, I told myself, and I went to bed to watch a video of High Society that he’d recorded for me in our better days. He’d known it was one of my all-time favourites and had stuck a photocopy of Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby round the video box, with our faces pasted over theirs. I threw it on the floor.

  But as the familiar story unfolded and I watched my screen heroine, Tracy Lord, deluding herself that she wanted to marry a man she didn’t love, I couldn’t get Jasper’s last words out of my mind. I realised with a sudden jolt that while he’d been leaving flowers on my doorstep and cooking me meals with only pink ingredients, I’d been gadding around town, telling everyone I didn’t have a boyfriend and that Jasper O’Connor was just my souce of anonymous sex.

  Maybe the one with their pants on fire was really me.