Mad About the Boy

by Maggie Alderson

  The only thing I wasn’t so keen on at the gym – apart from the unspeakable showers, which I never used – was the surly attitude of some of the regulars. They clearly resented people like me day tripping into their world and if I was too slow on a machine they made their feelings abundantly clear.

  One time, Tristan nearly got into a fight with a guy who started giving him a hard time about ‘shifting Princess Porky off the bench press’, as he delightfully put it. It was very embarrassing – although not as bad as running into Nikki Maier nude in the changing rooms, I reminded myself.

  I tried going at varying times of day, to avoid the crowds, but it didn’t make any difference, Muscle City was always busy, and I decided I would just have to toughen my attitude along with my stomach muscles, which I was properly aware of for the first time in my life – mainly because they hurt all the time.

  After my first three weeks with Tristan I had booked up for another fifteen sessions, but when that was up he told me it was getting hard for him to see me five days a week, because he was in training himself for some kind of he-man beauty contest. It was time, he said, for me to learn the discipline of coming to the gym on my own. I agreed to try it.

  The first time I went to Muscle City alone it nearly put me off for ever. By then it was late February and I had never seen the place so packed. I got there at 5 p.m. – leaving Percy to look after the Thursday evening late-night shoppers at Anteeks – and had to wait ten minutes before I could even get on a treadmill.

  It was then very hard to concentrate on gradually increasing my pace and gradient, as Tristan had taught me to do, as a long queue of restless men was forming, muttering loudly behind me. In the end, I felt so intimidated, I came off after seven minutes, when I should have done at least thirty.

  It was even worse on the weights machines. Without Tristan there to look out for me, I only got onto two of them. I would wait politely for my turn, only to be barged out of the way by one of the army of darkly tanned men in small shorts. It was more like doing ‘waits’ than weights, I thought grumpily, and after being gazumped one more time on the leg press I decided to leave.

  ‘That was a quick workout, Antonia,’ said the guy at the desk, as he handed my membership card back to me.

  ‘I’m surprised you noticed,’ I said, a little taken aback to be addressed by name. ‘It’s so busy in here today.’

  ‘Well, you are just about the only girl in here, so you do stand out,’ he said, smiling.

  Rather thrilled to be still a ‘girl’, I looked at him again. He was wearing glasses and he had a badge, announcing he was called ‘James’, pinned to his baseball cap. The combination of specs and hat made it hard to see his face, but his smile seemed friendly.

  I glanced back into the gym and realized he was right. It was all blokes.

  ‘Good heavens,’ I said. ‘You’re right. What on earth’s going on? Is it some kind of convention for tanned men?’

  He threw back his head and laughed. I didn’t think it was that funny.

  ‘You could say that. It’s Mardi Gras on Saturday,’ he said. ‘Come in on Sunday and you’ll have the whole place to yourself.’

  I felt so stupid. Of course I knew it was Mardi Gras any minute, Percy was in a right old twitter about it – actually terribly excited about the whole thing, despite his earlier claims that it was ‘déclassé’. Now it seemed he had a starring role on a float, which he had spent the last few weeks helping to build, and he thought it was the best thing ever. Tom was nearly as excited as he was. He was going to watch the parade with Vita and her nanny – her mums were in it, on their motorbike.

  ‘Or if you find the crowd in here too intimidating,’ continued this James person, ‘why don’t you come in late? We’re open twenty-four hours. There’s hardly anyone in here after eleven at night.’

  I told him I’d try it, with absolutely no intention of doing so, of course. The enthusiastic lie. Just one of our funny little English ways.

  The following Monday night I was down there at 2 a.m. Amazing, I know, but at that strange hour, lying in a hot tangle of sheets, it had suddenly made perfect sense. I’d been tossing around in bed since midnight, going nuts trying to sleep, and the idea just came back to me in a flash. Why the heck not?

  Percy was snoring so loudly after his weekend of wild excess I could hear him through two closed doors, so it wasn’t like I was leaving Tom alone. Working-out in the middle of the night seemed a brilliant solution to my maddening insomnia – and it would also mean I wouldn’t have to leave the shop for two hours in the middle of the day, which would be a relief, because I was never quite sure what Percy got up to in there on his own.

  When I arrived at Muscle City the receptionist chap, James, wasn’t there, someone else was manning the desk, but he’d been absolutely right, the place was as brightly lit as ever, all the machines were turned on, but there was hardly anyone in there.

  There were a couple of the tanned men, looking a little paler in the face now, chewing gum and flogging themselves on the treadmills – presumably hoping to make themselves tired enough to sleep after whatever exotic chemical cocktail they’d consumed over the weekend.

  There was one other woman there, I was glad to see, one of the tall, thin model types who seemed to frequent Muscle City, although Sinew City would have been a better name for them. Her neck bulged out like steel cables as she strained on the lats machine. Over in the scary area two enormous pecasauruses were ‘spotting’ each other – just one of the little phrases I’d picked up from Tristan – on the free weights. And then there was me.

  I was so thrilled not to have anyone menacing me for the treadmill I power walked for over forty minutes and then did my full round of weight machines without interruption. I got home at 3.15 a.m. and went straight to sleep. Bingo.

  I felt a bit knackered the next morning, although four hours sleep wasn’t much less than I had been getting recently. Percy was in an uncharacteristically grumpy mood at breakfast – he never slept in – nursing day three of his Mardi Gras hangover, and he refused to believe me when I told him he wouldn’t need to shop-sit any more because I was going to go to the gym in the middle of the night instead.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s quite a creative way of cheating,’ he said, huffily. ‘A little more imaginative than hiding Jaffa Cakes among your pants, but do you really expect me to believe that you got up at 2 a.m. and went to Muscle City?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I can prove it.’

  I went upstairs and picked up my sweaty workout gear from the bedroom floor. I walked back into the kitchen brandishing it.

  ‘Look! Nasty sweaty T-shirt. Horrid sweaty leggings. Vile sweaty socks. Want a sniff?’

  ‘Hmmmm,’ said Percy, wrinkling his nose and sipping his ginger tea. ‘It looks like you really did go. Amazing.’

  ‘If you still don’t believe me, you can ring them. Their computer logs everyone who goes in and out and when.’

  ‘All right, Antonia dear,’ he said, huffily. ‘Don’t get shirty. I believe you. And for God’s sake put those foul vestments in the washing machine. I’m trying to enjoy my breakfast.’

  After he finished huffing, we made a deal. Instead of minding the shop in the afternoons, he would take Tom to school on the mornings after I went to the gym, so I could have a lie-in.

  Obviously I wouldn’t go to the gym in the early hours on nights when he was still out carousing, so it would work out naturally. He always got up early anyway, so I’d leave my trainers outside my bedroom door if I’d been to the gym the night before. Percy was quite enchanted by the eccentricity of the arrangement, Tom was always delighted to have Uncle Perky take him to school and I was ecstatic at the idea that I might start to get some sleep. Rock and roll.

  Apart from anything else, with my new gym regime in place, I was glad to be back at the shop full time. A couple of hours out of it each day had got me out of my routine and I was really happy to settle back into it. For the first few days,
I was like a dog turning around in my basket. I gave it a good clean, rearranged all the stock and re-did the windows on an end-of-summer theme, with cushions made from old checked Welsh blankets, a row of 50s Thermos flasks and a big stack of mohair rugs and wraps in wonderful colours. Business picked up.

  I was happy to say that the opposite appeared to be happening at Nikki’s Knacks. I had to walk past it on my way from home to Anteeks and back, or anytime I wanted to get anything in Queen Street, and to my great satisfaction, there rarely seemed to be anyone in there. Certainly not Nikki.

  The first couple of weeks after it opened, she had been in there every time I passed, flitting around with a feather duster and fussily rearranging the ghastly little bits of tat – knick-knacks was the word for them – which were her stock. After that initial flush of enthusiasm I didn’t see her in there again, just Greg’s horrid friend Paul, sitting behind the counter like a poisonous spider. The sour look on his face would have been enough to put off any potential shoppers, even without the ugliness of the ‘objets’ on sale inside at their ridiculously inflated prices.

  Seeing me swan past used to make Paul’s scowl even deeper and sometimes I walked up and down several times in one afternoon just to annoy him.

  Now I was in the shop all the time, Dee came in to see me quite often and although she didn’t buy something from me every time any more, she usually had several carrier bags with her. She always seemed to have a new outfit on too – in fact I realized I’d never seen her in the same clothes twice.

  Although she still hadn’t let down her guard completely I had found out a little more about her. She didn’t have any children, her husband Frank was a ‘businessman’ and they lived down at Darling Point. Frankie, as she called him, had a very large boat he was terribly proud of – it had a helicopter on the front deck. She made a little moue that told me without words exactly how she felt about the boat.

  That was about as personal as we got. Mostly we talked about the stuff I had in the shop and how Sydney compared with London, Paris, New York and LA – all cities which she seemed to know very well, or as well as you can know anywhere from the back of a chauffeur-driven car.

  Most of all, though, she was interested in the shop and how I made it work. Not in the sneaky way Nikki had been interested, but out of genuine respectful enthusiasm for the end result. I was happy to tell her some of the tricks of the trade and she seemed to find it all fascinating. With the things she had bought from me over the months and the comments she made, I thought she had a real feeling for it. Not many people did.

  Eventually, when her visits were up to about three a week, I felt emboldened to ask her about the clothes.

  ‘I don’t want to be rude, Dee,’ I said, as I poured her some more Lady Grey tea – the one we had settled on as our afternoon favourite. ‘But I have to ask you something …’

  She looked alarmed but I continued.

  ‘Do you ever wear the same clothes twice?’

  Far from being offended, she giggled like a girl.

  ‘No,’ she said, laughing some more. ‘I don’t really. I have a few things, like my leather coats and my Chanel suits, which I do wear more than once, but mostly I find clothes disposable.’

  I must have looked as amazed as I felt. I hadn’t really wanted to believe that someone could actually do that – or would want to. I loved my old clothes, they were like family friends. I hated it when anything wore out and had to go. I must have been gawping at her. She turned a little more serious.

  ‘If I didn’t shop all the time, Antonia,’ she said, a furrow appearing between her perfectly arched auburn brows, ‘what would I do with myself? I don’t work. I don’t have children. Or pets. I don’t go out for lunch, because I don’t really like eating and I don’t like any of the people I know who would want to have lunch with me. I have my hair done every day. I get my nails done three times a week. But it still leaves a lot of time.’

  She shrugged her shoulders and crossed one slender leg over the other.

  I kept my mouth shut, hoping she would say more and she did.

  ‘That’s what I do during the week. I get up, I get groomed – at home, of course, I can’t bear all those bitchy hair salons in Double Bay – then I get dressed, and then I go shopping. In the evening and at weekends I do whatever Frankie wants to do, which is usually hosting dinners for his business associates, which I don’t plan, or cook, or clear up, or it’s entertaining people on his boat, which I don’t have to organize either. All I have to do is sit there and look expensive for Frankie. As I say, it leaves a lot of time.’

  I couldn’t imagine such an empty life.

  ‘But don’t you want to do anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘Like what?’ she said. ‘I could do some charity fund-raising – isn’t that what idle rich bitches like me are supposed to do? But that would mean being on tedious committees with dreadful people like Caroline French. I’d rather just hand over the money.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t know her,’ I said quickly, more surprised than wanting to catch her out.

  ‘Oh, I know who she is all right and that nasty Nikki Maier, it’s impossible to avoid them in the Eastern Suburbs, as you have probably found out, but I don’t know them well and I don’t want to. I don’t want to know any of those women.’

  She almost spat the words out. I hoped I hadn’t gone too far. She looked down at her tea for a moment and then raised her eyes again. She had a wistful look in them.

  ‘I wanted to do a degree, Antonia,’ she said. ‘I left school when I was fifteen and I am all too aware of how much I don’t know, but Frankie wouldn’t let me. He didn’t want any wife of his mixing with scruffy pinko students, as he put it. Not good for business. He said I could do a flower-arranging course, or yoga, as long as the teacher wasn’t a bloke, but not a degree. After all, it would make me more qualified than him, wouldn’t it? And big Frankie wouldn’t like that, oh no.’

  I felt really sorry for her. I thought I had a tough break, sleeping alone while my once-beloved husband snuggled up with another man, but at least he had enhanced my life while he’d been around – with a lot more than money. And even without Hugo, I had Tom who filled my life with love, and darling Percy. I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be Dee, when I had an idea. I poured some more tea for us both and presented my suggestion as though I were changing the subject.

  ‘By the way, Dee,’ I said, busying myself with the hot water and deliberately not looking at her, ‘on Monday I’m going on a buying trip through the Blue Mountains. Would you like to come with me? It will take a whole day. It gets a bit boring doing all that driving on my own, I’d love some company.’

  She didn’t need to reply. The delighted expression on her face when I looked up was all I needed to see.

  10

  That evening when I got home from Anteeks, there was a strange man sitting at my kitchen table. He had his back to me, so I couldn’t see his face, but he looked quite young. He had very black hair gelled into pointy spikes, a bit like Sid Vicious, and a thick silver ring in one ear. Over a long-sleeved black T-shirt, he was wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves ripped off, with the words ‘Recherché Rebel’ spelled out on the back in metal studs. As he lifted a glass of water to his mouth, I saw he was wearing a thick studded band on his left wrist and a big silver skull ring on his pinkie finger. I was a bit alarmed.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, trying to keep my tone friendly, in case he was a psychotic junkie burglar. At the sound of my voice, the man turned round and smiled. It was Percy.

  I dropped my bag of shopping on the floor and made a sound that was halfway between a yelp and a squawk, I was so surprised. At that point Tom came skipping into the room.

  ‘We tricked you, we tricked you,’ he was singing, as he danced round his great uncle. ‘You didn’t know it was Perky, did you, Mummy? Did you? Doesn’t he look brilliant? Perky, Perky, show Mummy your face properly.’

  Percy had stood up and
was striking poses so I could take in the full impact of his new look. The transformation really was amazing. He had another silver ring through one eyebrow and a stud beneath his lower lip. His brows, which had been delicate bleached arches ever since I had known him, were dyed as black as his hair. He was wearing black trousers with all kinds of zips and cargo pockets on them, and enormously complicated boots with laces and straps and thick soles, like tractor tyres.

  ‘Percy,’ I exclaimed, not sure what I really thought. ‘You look amazing. You look so young.’

  ‘Oh I know,’ he said, draping himself languorously over the kitchen counter, the back of his hand to his brow, like a silent film star.

  In fact, he looked more like some kind of superannuated thrash rocker, but in a weird way it did suit him. I had loved his old look with the mauve hair and the poet shirts, but I had to admit, the new style had taken years off him.

  ‘Whatever prompted this astonishing make-over, Percy?’ I asked him.

  ‘I was feeling so twentieth century, darling heart,’ he said. ‘I looked at all the young chaps at Mardi Gras and I just thought – what the heck? I’ve always liked to change my look from time to time and I suddenly realized I had got stuck in a Quentin tribute time warp. Before you met me I had an Eton crop and a monocle and wore only bespoke suits and Lobb brogues, before that it was flowing blond hair, velvet trousers and Hussar coats. This is New Millennium Percy.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s great, good for you. What do you think, Tom?’

  ‘I think it’s brilliant,’ he replied, sitting on Percy’s knee and playing with his piercings. ‘Who-woulda-thunk-it? Can I have my eyebrow pierced, Mummy? For my birthday?’

  ‘No, you cannot.’

  ‘Ohwuh. Pleeeeeease, Mummy. It’s so rad and Percy said it didn’t hurt.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Vita’s mummy has got her front bottom pierced. Vita drew me a picture.’