Dani shivered. A four-wheel drive wanted to pass. The driver wound down his window and gestured wildly for her to move.
‘Alright!’ she hollered. Mannaggia.
She pulled into a driveway and checked her boot. There was an assortment of clothes and a bottle of Cetaphil cream. She made sure she had underwear and a work outfit, then sent Clementine an urgent text message explaining the situation and asking if she could spend the night. Clem wrote back immediately: Of course!! Cooking for Dad 2nite. Spare key w/neighbr at 42. Chat tomrw? x
When Dani got to Clementine’s, she opened up her laptop and went to realestate.com. This was just the thing she needed to motivate her to start looking for a place to live.
5.47am. Daniela rolled to a stop in her parking space and pulled on the handbrake. Work had ground to a halt since the disaster with the re-positioning of the ventilation shaft, and the site had become a depressing place to be. The bones of the building looked like prison bars. The concrete cross-beams resembled a gallows.
Briggs was on her the moment she stepped onto the site.
‘Have you arranged another meeting with Dayton yet?’
‘I’m doing it,’ Dani waved her arm as if he was pesky summer fly.
‘And what about James? Have you told him he has to go, too?’
‘I will once the meeting is organised.’
‘Tell him now. He needs to be across the plans.’
Dani threw her hands in the air. ‘Why does he have to? It’s still my idea. I’m the one who’s going to be pitching it.’ She was tired and grumpy.
Briggs covered his face with his hands. ‘DeLuca, you know why. Don’t make this harder than it has to be. I don’t like it either.’
‘Fine,’ she muttered.
James was at the kitchen station mixing muddy black coffee. Dani hovered behind him, not wanting to ask him to come to the Dayton meeting.
She bit the inside of her cheek and prepared herself to ask. What came out was: ‘How are things with Abbey?’
Mannaggia. She didn’t want to ask that either.
‘Dani,’ James looked up from his coffee. She realised she was holding her breath and hoping to be told that the date had gone terribly. ‘Abbey’s good. She’s coming in later to take a look at what we’ve done so far. She wants to get a feel for the environment.’
Dani sat on an upturned milk crate to drink her short black, and indulged in more overblown fantasies that included setting fire to the building site.
She went to her desk. It was too early to call Dayton, so she opened some real estate web-pages and started narrowing the field for potential homes.
She knew she wouldn’t be able to afford to keep living in Glebe, so she picked Balmain as a starting point. It was a little further out, and closer to Ma and Pa. She clicked on the box to include surrounding suburbs, set her price ceiling at $450,000, and pressed search. The verdict came back: no properties found. She tried Lilyfield. It wasn’t near the water, which should mean cheaper house prices. She increased her maximum price to $500,000 and hit search. The website came up with three possible properties, one of which was a car park in Pyrmont. The other two were studios. She searched for a little longer, each time trying suburbs a little further away from her two anchor-points — the CBD, where the company’s offices were located, and her parents’ place in Leichhardt.
She wanted to be near her ma and pa, and made a mental note to visit on the weekend. At dinner the previous week, Gia had been vague and a little pale. When Dani had asked what was wrong, she said it was nothing. But Vincenzo pulled Dani aside before she left and said that Gia had seemed very tired lately.
‘What are you saying?’ The sound of her name drew Gia from the kitchen. As she strode into the lounge room, she appeared a little off-balance. She steadied herself against the wall before sinking into an armchair.
‘Are you okay, Ma?’
‘It’s these shoes. Who makes shoes like this?’ she demanded of her orthotics.
In her office, Dani picked up her phone and dialled her mamma’s number. It rang out. She would pop in on Saturday after visiting the two one-bedroom flats she had found. Putting the addresses into her calendar, she then called Dayton and scheduled another meeting. They weren’t happy, but they made time for her.
Dani slammed her car door. 8.04pm. As she bounded up the concrete stairs she could already smell sizzling onions. She was very late.
She spied Annabel and Clementine, and raced to their table.
‘I’ve been looking forward to this,’ said Clementine, surveying the room. Their neighbour was a tall Greek man who was decapitating an onion.
‘But I know how to cook, sort of. So do you,’ Dani said.
‘Yes, and I’m excellent at ordering both restaurant food and takeaway,’ said Annabel.
‘But look how many single men are here,’ Clem whispered.
She was right. There were blue jeans and hairy knuckles as far as the eye could see. A recipe for beef bourguignon sat on the countertop. As part of the husband-hunting strategy, Clementine had enrolled them in a six-week cordon bleu night class.
‘So, Annabel,’ Daniela said quietly as she diced some celery, ‘how did the big dinner go?’
‘Yes,’ said Clementine. ‘What intelligence did you gather on Harry Barchester?’
Annabel frowned. ‘I really like him, but he’s still in love with Mirabella. He kept on bringing her up.’
‘He just needs some time,’ said Clementine.
‘And how about your dinner with the photographer?’ Dani asked Clem.
Clementine picked up a cleaver and started hacking up some rump. ‘He was very nice, but there’s something I haven’t told you.’
She proceeded to tell the full story of her and Jason and Amanda and the baby. It was like watching her unravel. The edges of her fingernails were ragged, her lips pale.
Thwack! She brought the cleaver down on a piece of bone.
‘But are you sure?’ Annabel asked when she had finished.
Clementine nodded sadly.
‘He must have just found out,’ said Annabel.
‘His poor wife,’ said Clementine. ‘I’m so stupid—’
‘No you’re not.’ Annabel put her arm around Clementine’s shoulder and shook her, bracingly. ‘He’s an awful person. He told you he was getting a divorce. You did nothing once you found out he was married.’
‘It gets worse,’ Clementine’s voice cracked. ‘I’ve lost my mother’s—’ She held up her hand, unable to get the word out.
‘You haven’t lost that beautiful ring?’ Dani gasped.
‘I — I’ve lost so much weight lately. It — it’s been loose.’ Clementine sounded lost herself. ‘Now I can’t remember when I last had it.’
‘Oh, Clem, that’s terrible,’ Annabel said. ‘But it can’t be gone forever. Maybe it’s in your office somewhere? I’ll call all the bars and restaurants we’ve been to recently. We’ll find it.’
‘I can’t bear to think about it,’ Clem said. ‘Can we talk about something else?’
‘I guess it’s my turn.’
Dani confessed what had happened with Simon. ‘And now I have to deal with Simon at home and James at work. It’s a nightmare. If there was a Ten Commandments of Dating, thou shalt not sleep with thy colleague and thou shalt not sleep with thy housemate would be numbers one and two. No wonder I am in Dating Hell.’
Clementine cleared away the off-cuts. ‘Let’s focus on the positives. Harry. How’s it going?’
Annabel shrugged. ‘He’s perfect. I never truly believed in the husband-hunting venture,’ she confessed, ‘but I want to try it. I want to make him see that we would be a perfect pair.’
Dani knew how she felt. In the desolation of unrequited love you became desperate for any sort of system you could follow, any set of rules that would help you to convince the object of your affection what good sense being together made.
‘What about you, Dani?’ said Clem. ‘Do you like th
is Simon character?’
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’m just frustrated. I tried to smooth over this blip, but to him our friendship isn’t even worth the twenty-one cents it costs to send a text message. Argh.’ She threw her hands up. ‘Men! They’re so insensible. You try to explain to them why you’re upset, but it’s like yelling at a dog that has just chewed up your runners. You can scream and shout, but he’ll just sit there smiling and panting. Later he might try to hump your leg.’
‘If only we could have them neutered,’ said Annabel.
‘Come on,’ said Clementine. ‘Just because a company has a bad quarter that doesn’t mean it rolls over and dies. We need to make aggressive, market-driven moves.’
‘What you two need is some new prospects,’ Annabel said. ‘When our workflow is drying up, I hit the networking circuit and form new connections.’ She drove her knife into the chopping board.
‘Mademoiselle!’ the teacher shouted. He picked up his knife, pointed to the tip and shook his head.
Annabel sniggered. ‘Not him. But look around. There must be someone for one of you here.’
‘I can’t see anyone I like the look of,’ Dani said.
‘This is part of our problem,’ said Clementine. ‘We’re too picky. We’re not supposed to be looking for perfect men — we’re supposed to be looking for sturdy, reliable men. The Volvos of the species.’
‘It’s hard to settle for a Volvo when you’ve driven a Ferrari,’ Daniela said.
‘Daniela, you really can be quite masculine,’ said Clem.
Dani was shocked. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘Well, you speak like a man sometimes, you dress in baggy jeans and those awful steel-capped boots, and you have daggy taste in music.’
‘I can’t believe you don’t like my music.’
‘I’m sorry, but I think we need some de-affirmations. There’s a perfectly good, slightly pumpkin-headed man over there looking at you who might make you happy. It’s important to remember that you’re not perfect either.’
‘Yes, but we know we’re not perfect,’ said Annabel.
‘Do we?’ Clementine was on a roll. ‘Annabel, you’re beautiful but you’re very vain. How much money do you spend on clothes each month? Imagine if a man frittered away the same amount on his car. And your cooking skills should be classified as a threat to national security. I’m just glad ASIO didn’t find out about your dinner party with Harry.’
Annabel pouted. ‘It was your recipe.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m getting to me. I’m the worst of the lot of us. I’m completely untrustworthy and immoral. I steal other women’s husbands, even though I see first-hand every day how hard marriage breakups are’ — she was getting worked up — ‘I’m a hypocrite, my career is a disappointing mess, I’m unethical, I treat men like they’re objects and I have just insulted my two best friends to their faces.’ Tears were glistening in her eyes.
Annabel and Daniela each put an arm around Clementine.
‘Don’t worry,’ Dani told her, ‘I’m sure there’s a very agreeable pyromaniac out there just waiting for someone to accept him for who he is.’
Clementine laughed through her tears. She wiped her eyes and brushed her hair out of her face.
‘Tonight we’re going to take matters into our own hands.’ She pulled out a compact, wiped away the black tear stains, then she re-applied her mascara. She flicked the brush in a sharp stabbing motion.
‘We’re going to take control,’ she said.
She glanced quickly around the room, waited until the teacher’s back was turned, then wound her arm up like a baseball pitcher and whacked the chopping board of onion pieces she’d diced moments earlier. Tiny white tiles of onion rained down on the floor.
‘Oh dear.’ Clementine fell to her knees and began scraping up the mess with her fingers. Two of their neighbours, including the tall Greek man, bent down to help her.
‘I can’t believe I did that,’ she said to the brown-eyed man. ‘I’m normally not clumsy at all.’
Dani smirked at Annabel.
After the mess had been cleared up, Clem asked the Greek man — Alastair — if he had an onion to spare. Over at his work station they chatted for a few moments. Clem returned with two onions and a business card. She looked determined as she cut into the bulb.
‘The plan was to minimise emotional attachment,’ she said softly, almost to herself. Then she wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve.
‘Damn onions,’ she whispered.
In her car Daniela put on some Bob Dylan and turned up the volume. She drove towards Glebe, but she didn’t go home. Instead, she wound her way through the backstreets, admiring houses and trying to guess their value. She crossed over Parramatta Road through Chippendale, down past the seedy pubs and saggy terraces of Redfern and Darlington and on to the more expansive homes of Waterloo, then the leafy streets of Alexandria, Beaconsfield and Rosebery. They were all places she could live, she thought.
She would be attending some open-for-inspections on the weekend. Although the thought of buying a house was thrilling, she wasn’t certain she was ready. Once she made a commitment to her mortgage broker, it would be a death-do-us-part situation. It would mean thirty-plus years of honouring and obeying interest repayments. Extricating herself from that kind of financial partnership would be far more difficult than simply signing divorce papers. She wouldn’t even be able to open a register for gifts.
Suddenly she was furious for being exiled from her home; the home she had found and furnished and invited Simon to move into. If he was going to behave like this, he should be the one to leave. As she turned roughly into Glebe Point Road she felt the argument rising up inside her, the words were waiting to spew out. She pulled into her street. The lounge room light was on.
Good, she thought. Time to settle this.
Daniela wrenched the handbrake into place and cut the motor. She slammed her car door and charged up the stairs two at a time, and opened the front door, ready. And there, sitting on the couch, was Liz. There was knitting laid across her lap. She looked at Dani with placid eyes and put a finger to her lips.
‘He’s sleeping. How are you?’ she mouthed silently. Dani felt the anger drain out of her. Her resolve crumpled like a wet tissue and she slunk off to bed. Lying awake, she stared at the ceiling. The rage was gone, and in its place was a soggy pile of regret.
Chapter 16 Clementine
Jason called six times on Saturday, and twice on Sunday. He called once on Monday while Clem was at the cordon bleu class, and once on Tuesday. By Wednesday he seemed to have got the message that Clementine didn’t want to talk to him. She had stayed in all week in case he had come around, banging on her door again. But on Wednesday night, peeling an apple into the compost that contained the rotting remains of her birthday tulips, she decided enough was enough. She took Alistair’s business card from her wallet and invited herself out to dinner with him on Saturday night.
Alistair Papodakis had big eyes with dark pockets of skin beneath them that made him look like a mobster. But he was gentle and enterprising. Over lamb moussaka at a Hellenic restaurant Melanie Sissowitz had recommended, he told Clementine about his online phone-plan comparison website, Phoney.com.
‘Great name,’ said Clem. ‘How did you know you wanted to start an internet company? Did you study business?’
‘Would you believe I’m a student of the Classics? Euripides, Homer, Menander. There is not a great deal of money to be made from essays on Greek history, however. I was an impoverished bohemian who could not afford to pay his phone bill, and so Phoney was born out of necessity.’
Alistair ticked all the husband-hunting boxes. He was smart, successful, well-read, social and interesting. Clementine smiled and passed him more moussaka.
Her first appointment on Monday was with Gordon. He arrived with a shaved head.
‘Chemo has started again,’ he said. ‘I do this as a sign of solidarity.’
The w
hite skin of his scalp was perforated where thousands of tiny hairs had started to break through.
‘How have you been this week? How’s Claire?’
He lowered himself wearily into a chair. ‘We’ve been arguing. We haven’t told the kids about the prognosis. Claire says she wants her last days with them to be happy, not filled with misery and fear.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think I should give my dying wife what she wants,’ he said uneasily.
‘But?’
‘I — I worry about keeping them in the dark.’
Jodie and Lyle Carson were seven and nine. Jodie barely knew her mother unburdened by cancer.
‘I feel like they have a right to know that these few months … weeks with their mother are going to be their last.’
‘It’s a decision parents have to make together. A lot of people grapple with it. Are they being merciful or evasive, they wonder.’
‘It’s difficult to argue with someone who’s dying. It’s the ultimate trump card. Jodie doesn’t even fully understand what death is. When our rabbit Jack died, she kept asking when he was coming back from Heaven.’
‘Children are very sensitive,’ Clementine said. ‘They understand more than we know. They’ll detect a change.’
‘You think we should tell them?’
‘I think you should decide together what you think is right for your family.’
Clementine had been due to see Premendra after Gordon, but he had called to say he was tied up chasing executives. She was glad to have the hour to herself.
Since her mother was diagnosed, she had been having regular breast, ovary and cervical cancer screens, and despite more than a hundred clear tests she always felt the same stab of fear as she waited in the doctor’s office. Sometimes, months later, she would feel the pointed edge of anxiety press against her heart. She would imagine she had been feeling rundown and weak, and would find herself booking in another scan. All the while she would wonder: Who would take care of me?
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