His Brand of Beautiful

by Lily Malone

  At the top right of the frame, distant and slightly unfocused, stood a pair of legs in denim jeans and boots, leather scuffed at the ankle.

  You wouldn’t know if she planned to shoot the guy or race into his arms. You could die wondering.

  The label blurred in a prickle of blinked-back tears. Christina’s tongue crept out to dampen her lips. She stepped sideways.

  Cracked Pots. He Loves Me Not. Shiraz. McLaren Vale.

  In a field of poppies a thick, slumberous, lipstick shade of red, CC Pot sat cross-legged, tossing petals over her shoulder.

  “So what do you think?”

  That wasn’t Jobe’s voice. Christina spun.

  Tate stood two steps inside the door, hands buried in the pockets of a tan sports coat. In the fishbowl of his boardroom, the slow cobalt burn in his eyes was back and with it, an intensity that made her spine melt. That’s the difference, she thought. Jobe has eyes I bounce off. Tate’s invite me in.

  Lily Malone

  “I think they’re amazing,” she breathed, turning back to the proofs. “The colours are incredible.”

  “Leesa has two of the best eyes for colour I’ve ever seen.”

  Leesa tried to blend in with the wall. Tate picked up a remote and pointed it at the Apple Notebook. The customer testimonials stopped.

  Christina stepped sideways.

  Cracked Pots. The Posse. Tempranillo. McLaren Vale.

  Jobe cleared his throat. “Christina?”

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “The closure, did you decide?” Jobe asked.

  “We’ll go with screwcap.”

  “Embossed with the gun on the cap?” Jobe addressed the question to her, but glanced at Tate.

  “I like the idea,” she said.

  “You want buyers to think you’re a brand on the edge, not over it, Christina. Too much emphasis on the gun might put some people off,” Tate said.

  “So what do you suggest? Leave it blank?”

  Jobe’s head pivoted between them.

  Tate shrugged. “I’d suggest a flower. It’s fresh. Unpretentious. It goes with a pot.

  Cracked or otherwise.”

  She wanted to argue. Like really wanted to argue, but in the end she rolled her eyes and said to Jobe: “Does he get bored being right all the time?”

  “Only boring,” Jobe answered.

  Leesa covered a snicker with her hand.

  “So to what flower, Bwana, would you have us turn our collective brilliance?”

  Simultaneously Tate and Christina said: “A daisy.”

  “It’s unanimous,” the designer grinned. “Leese, let’s go work our magic.”

  Leesa almost tripped over her feet trying to get out of the room, but Jobe lingered.

  He collected the proofs, tapped them on the table to neaten the edge. “Christina, take these with you. Tonight look with fresh eyes and tomorrow, call me with any of your changes.” He passed the pages to her with a business card, held the card a heartbeat too long. “That’s my direct line.”

  Tate moved a tan shoe.

  Jobe released the proofs. He favoured Christina with another dazzling smile and left the room.

  “Mesmerising my senior staff now are you?” Tate said.

  He stepped into her line of sight, close enough to block her view through the glass and when she tried to sway around him he shadowed her, step for step. His warm leather scent hit her and damned if her nipples didn’t tingle. The edge of the proofs crumpled in her palm.

  “Have you started packing?”

  “I have heaps of time for packing,” she responded. “Don’t let me hold you up. You look busy.”

  Only he didn’t look busy. He looked like he’d spent the morning playing tennis. He looked relaxed and vital and every second she spent here made her remember how long it had been since she’d had him deep between her thighs.

  “Tell your brother I’ll call him about the Landrover design for the launch,” Tate said.

  “Why don’t you just ask me?”

  “Cars aren’t your strong point, Christina. I ask you the dimensions of the bonnet, I bet I get the width of the boot.”

  She had to give him that. She exhaled. “Tate, please don’t mention the baby when you speak with Michael. I haven’t had a chance to tell him yet and if I don’t tell him just the right way he’ll try to talk me out of going on the launch and I have to be there or this whole thing is a waste of—”

  “You’re not going on the launch.” He said it very soft.

  “I’m not asking permission. This is my decision, Tate.”

  “The hell it is.” He gripped her elbow.

  She tried to snatch her arm back. “You’re hurting me.”

  He let go and she grabbed for the boardroom table. In the second before his hand steadied her shoulder, the room spun. She shrugged his hand away.

  “There’s no doctor on every street corner out there, Christina. You can’t just dial 000

  if something goes wrong and wait for the ambulance.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll be thirteen weeks by the time the race starts. If I have any problems before then of course I’ll reassess.”

  “You’ll reassess?” He spelled out every syllable.

  “Yes. Mikey hates dealing with the media, Tate. He’ll need me there. The success of our launch hangs on it.” I am not begging.

  Tate slapped his hands on the back of the chair and his tawny head dipped until his forehead fell beneath the line of his shoulders. Over his head, Christina could see Leesa out in the studio chewing her lip, oblivious, eyes intent on her computer screen. Behind Leesa, strawberry-blonde stared into the boardroom like she’d witnessed a train wreck.

  “Do you remember the night I told you about Jolie? About how she died?”

  “Of course.” I’ll remember it the rest of my life.

  “I didn’t tell you everything.” His voice grated like a truckload of wet cement.

  She touched his arm.

  “Jolie was six months pregnant when she died. None of us knew. The Consulate told us over the phone but Shasta and I had to see her with our own eyes before we could believe it.”

  Leather groaned as the chair pitched slowly back and forth beneath his weight.

  “Jolie filled two pages of her diary the day she felt the baby’s first kick. She said it was like having a moth flying around in your stomach and feeling the beat of its wings.”

  Christina’s hand crept to her belly.

  “There were pages and pages of baby names. She settled on Eva-Marie Newell if it was a girl. Oliver Gilbert Newell for a boy.”

  “What was it, the baby?”

  “She would have been my niece,” Tate said.

  Eva-Marie Newell. “I’m so sorry.”

  He flicked two fingers at her, never letting go of the chair. “I don’t want your pity, Christina. I want you to say you understand, and you won’t go on the launch.”

  “Tate, I understand—”

  “Not like that.” He bounced out of his crouch like a boxer coming off the ropes.

  “You’re about to tell me all over again you understand how I feel but I have to trust you because nothing’s going to go wrong and you’ll be fine. You think if you say it long enough I’ll either agree with you or give up trying to change your mind.”

  Lily Malone

  “I do understand—”

  “You cannot possibly understand how I feel, Christina. If I let you go on that launch and something happens to you or our child, I will blame myself for it every day for the rest of my life. And I’ll blame you. Until the day I stop breathing. I won’t be able to help myself, and it will kill me.”

  “This pregnancy is different, Tate. I can’t explain. I just know. Call it mother’s intuition. Nothing bad is going to happen. I need you to trust me.”

  He studied her, eyes hard. “If it’s so safe, why are you worried Michael will try to talk you out of it?”

  “Brothers always ove
r-react—” and she realised what she’d said. She almost bit her tongue trying to steal the words back and one look at his face made her wish a hole would open in his boardroom carpet so she could jump in. “God, Tate I didn’t mean—”

  He raised a finger in warning and she shut her mouth like a clam.

  “You’re not going.” He stared at the pages of label proofs she clutched to her stomach. “So help me, if I have to trash every Cracked Pots file and back-up to get you to agree. The cartoon. The labels. If I have to trash everything we’ve done. You’re not going.”

  She let her breath out, slowly. “You wouldn’t do that. Too many people have done too much work.”

  The muscle in his jaw clenched. “I’m not playing a game, Christina. I’m not bluffing.”

  “You think I am?” The sick feeling she’d had in the pit of her stomach just seconds ago, vanished. In its place she felt a strange sense of calm as the storm raged between them. “Do you want to know what I was doing the weekend I miscarried?” He lifted his hand to interrupt but she didn’t wait. “I’d been sewing cushion-covers. Nine of them. All gold brocade. And I’d watched a heap of season-three re-runs of Friends.”

  “You’re twisting things.”

  “I’m not twisting anything. Even doctors don’t know what causes a miscarriage, Tate.

  Some people say it’s just nature’s way. You can’t wrap me, or this baby, in cotton wool because of what happened last time, any more than you can change what happened to Jolie. Sometimes shit just happens and it’s nobody’s fault. If I stay home the week of the launch and I lose the baby unloading the dishwasher… will you blame me for that for the rest of your life, too?”

  His face went red, then white. “Don’t let your damn pride get in the way of doing what’s right here, Christina.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Jolie was too proud to come home after Callinan left—” he caught Christina’s glare,

  “—or she kicked him out, or whatever. She thought she’d disappoint my father—all of us—if she came home knocked up, and without the kid’s daddy.”

  “You think I’m too proud to admit when I’m wrong?”

  “Too proud. Or too pig-headed.”

  Strawberry-blonde stuck her freckled face around the door. “Is everything okay in here? Tate?”

  “Everything’s fine, Ruth,” he said, eyes not wavering from Christina’s face.

  “No, everything is not fine, Ruth.” Christina gathered her handbag and the stack of proofs. “Your boss is being a prize-winning wanker.” She exited the boardroom. Past the open cave of Ruth’s round, pink mouth. Down the stairs. Out.

  Chapter 23

  Tate tossed his favourite Sakura pen to his office desk, pushed his chair back and stood looking out over the street, the concentration that had driven him through the last three hours momentarily exhausted. Then he examined the sketchpad from his full height, rubbed the back of his neck and thought: It works.

  The office, emptied of its staff and humming white noise all around him, seemed to hold judgement.

  Heels clattered outside the window then faded as a young woman passed the ground floor, coat and hair fanning behind her in the streetlight as she rushed for a bus. It was only when his mobile rang and he saw Christina’s name on the display that he realised how much he’d been sweating on her call.

  “Hello.”

  Her breath linked them like a lifeline over the phone, he heard the soft phht as her lips framed to answer. “I don’t want to fight.”

  “Me neither. What do you want, Christina?”

  “You said I could borrow your tank. I can’t fit anything in my Golf. At this rate, moving will take me all month.” There was a pause he could have driven a truck through.

  “And I want to talk. About today.”

  “I’m sorry for being a wanker,” he said, and meant it.

  “Me too.”

  He chuckled. “You’re sorry for being a wanker?”

  “I’m sorry for everything. You should hate me for lying about whether I could get pregnant. At the very least you should hate me for not consulting with you on the plan. I’d deserve it.” Her voice hitched.

  “Give me fifteen minutes, Christina. I need something to eat.”

  He hung up the phone, shrugged into his coat and looked again at the cartoon he’d been tweaking all afternoon.

  CC and Muddy Pot carried a big blue daisy flower in their hands, about to pin it to the neck of a bottle of Cracked Pots’ wine. The flower was shaped like a ribbon that might have adorned the collar of the best dog in show. The difference was, the Cracked Pots’

  medal said Best Wine Not In Show.

  Big and bold under the cartoon, he’d written in his heaviest-point pen: Wine Shows Are For Wankers.

  “It should work,” he said again.

  ****

  Christina answered her front door in bright pink socks with purple hearts, a green shirt, cookie-brown leggings that hugged her thighs and a beanie that matched the socks. Her hair was loose beneath the hat, fringe split into Kit-Kat chunks. She was so beautiful, she made his chest ache.

  Behind her, wine boxes littered the hallway, piled four and five high, one topped with a yellow-handled tape dispenser. The jackets on the coat rack were gone, so too was the Spanish shawl, and her hall seemed wider without them. Air spun fat with cardboard fibres and dust.

  Lily Malone

  Stevie Nicks wailed from the kitchen. Gypsy.

  “It’s not that they’re heavy there’s just too many of them,” Christina said, leaning on the doorframe not quite in or out of her bedroom, speed-talking with her hands. The bedroom and hall lights threw shadows at every corner.

  “Those are mostly shoes. This pile is cooking gear and crockery. I can’t believe you’ve lived in that place five years and you don’t own a kettle.”

  “I own one,” he said mildly, thinking how much Remy would love busting all this dust: “I just haven’t unpacked it yet. I haven’t cracked the right box.”

  “What do you do for coffee in the morning? Boil a billy?”

  “I wait till I get to the office.”

  She made a clicking sound low in her throat and shook her head. “Anything that’s packed can go. The boxes are labelled. Throw them wherever you plan to put me in that palace of yours and I’ll sort it out when I get there Saturday after the City to Bay.”

  “Sure. Let me finish this.” He waved the yiros at her.

  “My God. What is in that?”

  “Lamb with sour cream, hummus and tabouleh.”

  He might as well have said dead rat on toast. She put a hand on her stomach and stepped back. “Whatever it is, don’t let it in here.”

  He ate standing in her bedroom doorway, a shoulder to the frame, while she unpacked her sewing table and used the queen bed to fold lush swathes of material. He knew she had something on her mind. He’d let her work up to it.

  “I went to see Michael and Lacy after work, after I saw you. I took the label proofs.”

  She met his eyes over a pile of shirts. “I didn’t tell you how brilliant they are. I think—that is, we all think—they’re amazing. So thank you. I don’t say it enough.”

  “I’m glad you like them.” Pinkish sour-cream soaked through creases in the wax paper. He probably had it all over his chin.

  “I told Mikey about the baby.”

  “And?”

  Propping a box under a shelf of her wardrobe she started herding stuff in. “He’s happy for us.”

  “You told him you wanted to go on the launch?”

  “I did.”

  “He wasn’t worried?”

  She rolled her eyes. “No.”

  “He knows about the miscarriage?”

  “Yes.”

  Tate harrumphed around a mouthful of lamb and pitta bread.

  Christina started talking very fast. “Saffah went to India on a month’s art sabbatical when she was pregnant with Michael. Elle
Macpherson hiked the Kokoda Trail. I bet somewhere in the world there’s a woman who’s climbed Everest pregnant.”

  “Elle Macpherson did not hike the Kokoda Trail.” He crumpled the yiros wrapper and threw it so it bounced out the front door like a golf ball. He watched it skip across the verandah, and when it stopped just shy of teeing-off the top step, added as if he hadn’t thinking about it all afternoon while he calmed down and drew cartoons: “You could drive in the Bush Bash with me.”

  Christina stopped shoving clothes in the box and looked up sharply. “But that’s crazy.

  With Lacy and the wine, the Landrover doesn’t have room.”

  “Not in the Cracked Pots car. In a car I drive. You can do all the media you want with Michael when the race stops, but when the race is moving, you ride with me. At least then I’ll know you’re in a car with someone who can drive outback roads.”

  “But you’ll never get a car in the race this late,” she protested. “We only got in after the cut-off because Bram pulled some strings.”

  “Abraham Lewis is not the only man in Adelaide who can pull strings.”

  “It costs ten grand just to enter a car, Tate. Lacy’s been selling sponsor logos on the Landrover for weeks.”

  “Do you really think I’m worried about the money, Christina?”

  “No.” Her face flushed. “Of course not.”

  “Good. Then this would be your cue to thank me and stop arguing. This is the best it’ll get.”

  “So why do I feel like I’m being railroaded?” She dumped the overloaded box of shirts on her bed and stared at the clothes as if they might answer.

  “These boxes to go, right?” He didn’t wait for a response. He hefted the top two boxes and headed down the front path for the Jeep.

  A quiet, “thank you,” squeezed out the door behind him.

  ****

  Christina Clay walked into his architecture award-winning four-walled mausoleum for the second time about three-thirty on Saturday afternoon. Actually, stumbled into it was closer to the mark, mannequin crossways in her arms like a sculptured sack of potatoes.

  “My feet hurt,” she complained, struggling to lump the dummy, her keys and a shoulder bag that looked like it had a baby elephant stuffed inside, through the gap between her Golf and his Jeep without scratching the paintwork.