Flesh & Blood

by A. E. Dooland

  God, this was not good. “A year,” I said, thinking the repayments would be lower.

  “Okay,” he said, and tapped away at the calculator. “That’s $320 a week. Is that cool?”

  The air caught in my throat. How the fuck was I going to afford that? It wasn’t like I had much of a choice, though, so I nodded mutely.

  “Okay, cool,” he said, and then spun his invoice pad around. “Write your phone number here,” he said, pointing, “and sign here.” I followed his instructions.

  Then, like it was the most normal, ordinary thing in the world, he unlocked an innocuous-looking cupboard beside him and took out a huge wad of $100s and started to count them.

  I hurriedly looked behind us, out the door. No one was watching. “Can’t you just, I don’t know, bank transfer the money to me?”

  He stopped counting for a second. “Yeah,” he said, squinting, “we don’t really do bank transfers.” He put the notes he’d selected into a money counting machine, which read them as $12,000, rolled them up, put a rubber band around them, and then simply gave them to me with the invoice he’d written out. “Glad I could help you after all,” he said, sounding like he genuinely meant it. “If you have trouble paying it, please tell me before you miss a payment, yeah? Number’s on the invoice, ask for Seung-hyeon and just say you’re a friend. Like I said, Dad doesn’t mess around, and if he finds out all those other rings aren’t actually yours, he’s going to kill me, too. So just pay on time, yeah?” He reached over and clapped me twice on the shoulder.

  I stared at the wad of notes. “H-How do I pay—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. “We’ll just take it directly out of your bank account.”

  Of course you will, I thought, and quickly put the roll of notes into the breast pocket of my jacket, buttoning it up. “Well… thank you,” I said, not 100% sure that it was the right thing to say to him.

  “No problem,” he said, beaming. “Like I said, glad I could help.” While I was gathering up all my cards and stuffing them back into my wallet, he was watching me a bit curiously, tapping an unlit cigarette against his mouth. “Hey, can I ask a question?”

  I looked up at him as I put the wallet back in my pocket.

  “That ‘wife’ thing. Did you… get that from someone, or were you going to give that to someone?”

  Given that he’d obviously bent some rules to help me, I felt like I couldn’t brush that question off, no matter how personal it was. “I got it from someone,” I told him. “But the money’s for a girl.”

  “Ah,” he said, looking like someone had told him something really interesting. When I frowned at him, he held his hands up in a ‘don’t shoot’ position. “Hey, I’m not judging, I’m a pawnbroker.” I worried about how easily that word rolled off his tongue as I left.

  Even though the wad of cash wasn’t visible in my pocket, as I rushed through the city back to my car, I felt like I had a huge red target on my back and my own neon flashing sign saying ‘rob me! I’ve got stacks of cash!’. I wished I could just bank it so I didn’t have to carry more than a few hundred on me, but I knew from transferring money to Mum in the past that anything over several thousand meant you needed to fill in reams of paperwork about where you got the money and what you were doing with it. I had a feeling Seung wouldn’t want me to do that.

  I drove it straight to Cloverfield without passing go, handed it across the counter to a very wide-eyed receptionist, and didn’t rest until I was sitting back in my car with my change and the receipt. My heart was racing. I put my hand on my chest.

  It’s okay, I told myself, trying to calm down. Bree’s fees are paid. They’re paid. You did it like you knew you would. You can relax.

  And I would have relaxed, except I had maybe $900, and out of that I was going to lose $500 for my car tomorrow, and god knows when that dodgy diamond place was going to take their $320 out. Early next week, probably. I unlocked my phone and entered everything into the calculator app—my credit card repayments, the fortnightly repayments for the car, and now these repayments— feeling rising dread as I tapped the equals sign. ‘650’ appeared on the screen, and I stared at it for a second. $650 per week.

  I was unemployed, two months away from being a full-time student and I was supposed to be figuring out my big proposal for my absolute dream degree right now. On top of everything, in a few months’ time I was going to lose the room I was staying in to Sarah’s baby, and god knows what the fuck was going to happen with Mum. I’d been ignoring her so much that it was all going to come to a head at some point.

  I stared at the receipt in my hand, the full weight of the situation I was in finally settling on my shoulders. My chest tightened, but I held my breath and refused to hyperventilate this time. I wasn’t going to go to pieces over this. I couldn’t, I needed to get a fucking job ASAP.

  TWENTY-THREE

  When I got back to Sarah’s, the first thing I did was get out of my stupidly expensive fucking car and pat myself down for coins. I’d needed to deposit all the money left over from Bree’s school fees into my account for my loan repayments, so I had almost nothing left. In fact, with the change in my wallet and between all of my pockets, I had—I counted—exactly $24.15 on me. There was probably more in my other jeans and in various places in my room, so I went inside to have a look.

  Bree was still in the shower when I walked through to my bedroom—thank god—so I slipped the empty ring box back into my case, and then shook out all my clothes and scavenged around my room for change. I ended up with several small notes I’d shoved in my pockets from various outings, and a $50 I’d put in my bedside table for emergencies and then subsequently forgotten about.

  This is an emergency, right? I reasoned, and fished it out from underneath all my junk. I ended up with a bit under $100—which was a tank of petrol and some Opal money for Bree at least—so I tucked it all in my wallet and then sat down on the bed for a second, looking at my small, upturned room that I’d shaken out for coins.

  Congratulations, Min, I told myself. You’re stuck with the world’s dodgiest loan from Sydney’s dodgiest pawnbroker for an entire year.

  But Bree can finish her year at school, another voice said, and I don’t have to give up Henry’s ring, and I don’t have to ask Mum for money. It comforted me somewhat, but I still felt really restless. I needed to get a job.

  I actually had no idea how to go about looking for a job; I mean, I knew about Seek and MyCareer and those websites, but I wasn’t sure how the interview process for professional positions was likely to go for me. As a guy, I looked way younger than 26. I wouldn’t even be considered for the positions I was qualified and experienced for. It probably wouldn’t matter anyway; I didn’t think I’d get a very good reference out of Frost after what I’d done, and the interview process was probably too long. I needed work now, not in four to six weeks.

  The only places I’d heard about employing people straight away were cash-in-hand and off-the-books jobs, so I took my phone out and did a quick Google search for them, and just ended up with a bunch of I Make Thousands at Home, Ask Me How! websites. I’d had my fill of dodgy with the pawnbroker, I didn’t want to waste time on jobs that wouldn’t end up paying me. I almost didn’t even care what it was—not like I had the luxury of being picky anyway. I just needed a job that started now, had heaps of hours, and that I could eventually fit around my master’s.

  I tapped my phone against my chin, thinking. From what I remembered her saying, Sarah had worked quite a few different jobs while she was at uni, hadn’t she? I suspected some of them were cash-in-hand, too. She’d probably know how to find those jobs—she might even be able to tell me a place that would hire me. I could ask her.

  I looked at the clock; it was lunchtime. I considered texting her about it now, and then remembered she’d had that mysterious meeting with Diane. It would probably be really insensitive to be bothering her about my own problems if it had been about something serious, so I se
nt, “Hey, just checking to see if Diane did in fact eat you alive this morning?” instead, and hoped she’d say it was fine so I could ask her about work.

  She didn’t reply in her customary 15 seconds flat, so I guessed she was still in that meeting. I sat on my bed and stared intensely at my phone for a minute or two. I’d have to wait.

  Sighing, I got out all my acrylics to embellish the card I’d bought Bree while I tried to ignore everything.

  While I was in the middle of it, a knock on the bedroom door startled me. I was sure the water had been running just a minute ago, and Bree normally spent ages fixing her hair afterwards…

  “Hey, it’s me!” her voice called, and the door started to immediately open.

  I wasn’t finished with her card. “Wait! Don’t come in!” I said back, and the door stopped swinging. “Can you give me a few minutes?”

  There was a long pause. “Why?”

  I blinked at the door. “Because I’m in the middle of the something?”

  She was silent for a second again. “Well, I need to get some clothes, I have to come in.”

  I exhaled, and grabbed a box to put over the paint and the card. “Okay, just give me—”

  No sooner had I said ‘Okay’, though, Bree burst in—fully clothed, despite what she said—and surveyed my room critically. She looked at me, and then at the box on my desk. Her brow was deeply furrowed.

  “What are you—?” I began to ask her just as she reached out and lifted the box ceremoniously off the table like she expected something awful to be hidden underneath it. Like she was bracing herself for whatever she’d find.

  It was just my paints and a card, and from the starscape I was painting on it, it was clear who it was for. Seeing that must have been an anti-climax for her, because she exhaled at length, looking so confused.

  I was also completely confused. “Surprise,” I said flatly, giving her a really odd look as I took the box from her and set it back on the floor.

  She was still staring at the card, looking haunted. “I’m sorry, I just… Andrej used to disappear, you were stressing about money yesterday, I don’t know, I thought…”

  “You thought I’d snuck a horse race in here?”

  Bree’s eyes were unreadable. “No, I know you don’t gamble. It’s just…” She shook her head, looking down her body for a second. “You’ve been… I don’t know. Never mind, it’s stupid. I’m stupid. I’m being paranoid. Sorry.” She snapped herself out of it, changing the subject as she gestured at my desk. “And now, look, you were trying to make a surprise for me and I ruined it.” She scrunched her face up, closing her eyes for a second. “Story of my life…”

  I ignored the uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach and gave her a hug, careful not to get paint on her. “It’s not ruined,” I told her. “I’m just not finished yet. You want to watch?”

  She did, so she went and grabbed a chair from the living room table and dragged it up beside me. “Did you get any commission inquiries yet?” she wondered. “Heaps of people commented they were going to check you out.”

  I made a non-committal noise. “Maybe,” I told her. “But I know Mum’s also emailing me as well because I told her my phone was broken, so…”

  She understood. “You want me to check for you?” I gave her a grateful smile and leant sideways so she could wiggle the phone out of my pocket and unlock it. In my peripheral vision, I could see her scrolling down a list. She glanced up at me. “So am I telling you or not telling you about how many emails she’s sent you?”

  I made a face. I could guess. “Just look for commission inquiries.”

  She pressed her lips together. “Okay,” she said brightly, and then kept scrolling. “Oh! Okay, there’s a couple. Let me read them out.” She tapped on one, and I saw her eyes moving on the screen as I finished mixing a purple. Maybe I wouldn’t need a job so quickly after all?

  As she was reading one of them, Bree’s eyebrows were up. She didn’t look impressed. “Wow. Um, okay. This might be paraphrasing a bit: ‘I’m a stupid fuck who thinks that $30 is a reasonable amount of money to pay for you to do me a full illustration’. Um, let’s just go to the next one…” She tapped on it. “This one is—whoa, I know this guy. He follows me on Facebook, he’s 41 and creepy as fuck. And—ugh!—he wants you do to nudes of me.” She paused, thinking. “$500 is a lot, isn’t it?”

  I stopped painting for a second to stare at her. Was she for real? “No,” I said firmly.

  She shrugged. “Okay. Well, that’s it, the rest of them are in Korean.” She put my phone in front of her on my desk and stretched.

  I sighed. I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up. “They’re probably Mum warning me artists don’t make any money and if I lose Henry, I’ll die alone in the gutter.”

  “Well, not alone,” Bree pointed out, grinning. “And you’re literally just starting out. Give it some time, eventually you’ll be this big famous artist who’s really rich, and I’ll point at the TV and be like, ‘That’s my boyfriend!’”

  Yeah, if I wasn’t bankrupt by then. I sighed. “I need a job.” I glanced across at my phone; Sarah still hadn’t replied? “No text messages?”

  Bree checked it and shook her head. “Who are you waiting on?”

  “Sarah. She had a meeting this morning.”

  Recognition flashed across Bree’s face. “Oh! That’s why she didn’t respond to me earlier.” I glanced quizzically at her, and she explained, “All my assignments and classes are up on the portal already, so I texted Gemma and Sarah to find out what nights they can help me, because I was going to do my timeline myself instead of Sarah having to do it. Hang on.” She got up and ducked out of the room, returning with her tablet. She held it so I could see; she’d marked all her assignments and exams in already. The first one was on Oct 2. Two months away. “Look! I figured out how to use it. I don’t know when Sarah and Gemma can help me, though. Do you think it’ll be the same?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t think I could speak for them. “Ask them?”

  “I did. They haven’t replied.” She sat back, making a face. “Gemma hasn’t replied since yesterday, actually. Like, at all. I think she is upset with me for only getting 64 in Maths, so I texted her about that and told her my teacher is a fucking asshole, too, but nothing.”

  I stopped painting for a second. I found that a bit concerning, and I wondered if she was a bit upset with Bree about it. Then again, Gemma wasn’t judgmental, was she? She also struck me as a bit absent-minded as well, so it was possible she’d just read the messages while she was busy and forgotten to reply. I sort of recalled her taking ages to get back to me on the odd occasion I’d messaged her. “Give it a bit longer,” I suggested, and then put the finishing touches on the card.

  Bree loved it, and insisted on putting it out to dry on the main table so that everyone could see it. “Don’t spend any more money on me, though,” she told me sternly, making me panic for a second that she knew. “Like, a card is okay but you don’t need to buy me jewellery or anything. Just paint me things. That’s the best present. I used to always totally fantasise that you painted me things before I met you.” Then, she went to go fix us some lunch.

  I glanced up at the clock; it was nearly 1pm. I still hadn’t heard from Sarah, and I’d never had any sort of meeting with Diane that went for four hours. Diane didn’t have that sort of time. I worried about it and fished my phone out of my pocket again. Maybe it had gone really badly and that’s why Sarah hadn’t replied, or maybe Diane was doing the performance reviews this year or something? I sent another hopefully more sensitive text. “Hey, I hope everything is going okay…”

  That message, I got a response to. My phone surprised me by vibrating in my hands. “Sorry, I’m in a really heavy meeting that’s probably going to go until Christmas—just ducked out for a couple of seconds to text you from the ladies’—I’m a total mess right now—have stuff to tell you but can’t do it now or over the phone. You’ll be home tonight, right?”
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  I frowned at my phone. Was that bad? “Yeah... are you okay?”

  “Definitely not, but I don’t have time to text it to you now.” There was a pause and then another one came through. “Also that is totally not a cue for you to spend all day worrying about it btw.”

  I laughed aloud. “Good, because I have quite enough to worry about already.”

  “Hah. We’ll make a night of it when I get back, okay? We can put Schoolgirl to bed nice and early, eat bland cereal and cry about our crap lives, it’ll be great. I have to go right now xxxxxxxx”

  I ran my eyes over that last message a couple of times. Well, she wouldn’t have joked around if it was terrible, right? Still, despite the fact it wasn’t really bad, it still didn’t seem like a great opening to be all like, ‘Hey… tell me where I can get cash-in-hand work!’. I should probably leave that for tonight, if we were going to hang out.

  It would be nice to just chat with her, there was so much going on for me at the moment. Fuck it, just chilling with her and letting everything out actually sounded fantastic, didn’t it? If anyone could hear the stuff that I’d done, it’d be Sarah. She’d fucking kill me for it—whatever, I deserved it—and I’d have to make sure that she understood I wasn’t fishing for money, but it would be great to tell her. She’d probably have some ideas about how I should try and juggle work and school, too. She’d been through it, after all.

  Over lunch, Bree decided to start going through some of her assignments to see what they were like, and her cheerfulness faded a bit. “This stuff is intense,” she said, showing me some of the Chem homework. I’d never seen so many hexagons in my life. “It’s going to be a crazy hard semester, I hope I do okay.” She closed the file and relaxed back into her chair. “Oh well! I can spend some of the weekend going over this stuff with Sarah and Gemma so I won’t have to sit in class and look like an idiot.” She set to work reading an assigned text.