Love and Punishment

by Unknown

  Francie sighed and had finally managed to drag her mind back to the screen in front of her when a familiar fog of Chanel Christalle perfume settled over the desk.

  ‘So, you all set for the big move tomorrow?’ Gabby Di Martino pushed Francie’s in-tray aside and found herself a perch. She tossed her long, tawny hair and crossed her long, tanned legs.

  Gabby was the newly appointed editor of the paper’s weekly P.S. section. It was the job Francie might reasonably have been expected to get when her previous boss left to have a baby, but she’d been passed over. Maybe someone in management had seen Francie was just going through the motions of late. Noted the pile of sodden tissues beside her keyboard and registered emotionally unstable.

  ‘It’s not anything personal, you understand,’ the managing editor had told Francie. The disembodied voice echoed from way, way down one end of a mahogany desk that was big enough to accommodate a space shuttle landing. Francie was down the other end. A small, blonde sandbag which had lost most of its contents.

  ‘Ms Di Martino is a talented and capable journalist and we at the Sunday Press are thrilled to have such an experienced staffer keen to take up the reins on P.S.’

  The dark wooden doors had closed behind Francie and left her standing in the corridor to piece together the story.

  Gabby Di Martino had unexpectedly landed back in town from Sydney. Francie wondered if she had compromising photographs of someone on the fourth floor in a zippered compartment of her butter yellow Dior handbag. A minion at ground zero would have to be sacrificed to make way for her. The minion would be Francie, who by now was accustomed to being everyone’s favourite doormat. She didn’t mind. In fact she thought she’d be better suited to compiling the obituaries page. Or maybe even that obscure paragraph of the Sunday Press titled ‘Late Changes to Television’.

  The entire third floor had been mesmerised watching Gabby move her gilt-edged mouse mat and plug-in make-up mirror into her office. More information came to hand as the days went by. Impeccable sources had it that her sudden arrival in Melbourne had indeed been precipitated by a ruinous love affair with a certain publishing executive. She had come down south to cool her high heels and wait for the old bastard to negotiate a settlement with his vengeful wife.

  This explained why Gabby, at the age of thirty-five and looking every inch the glamorous media princess, had been banished to the far-flung reaches of the Press empire. She should have been editing a glossy magazine from an office with a grandstand view of Sydney Harbour. Instead she was in Melbourne looking out at the arse-end of a five-storey car park. From what Francie could see, Gabby seemed to be taking it reasonably well. There was the sense she was just passing through. Someone would appear with a getaway limo and spring her out of this dump any day now.

  So Francie was still deputy editor of P.S. with seniority over . . . well, no-one in particular. There were only three permanent staffers to put out the supplement every week. Gabby, Francie and a young designer named Gus, who sat opposite her. He answered to no-one, and that wasn’t just because he couldn’t hear the questions through the iPod superglued to his ears. Francie suspected Gus spent most of his time at his work station playing Warcraft online. She was right. In fact he’d just won a gruelling orc battle in Gnoll Wood in the Frozen Throne Tournament and was through to the preliminary finals. He was celebrating with an icy cold can of turbo-charged caffeine.

  So, spot the odd one out in this corner of the office! There was Gus in his shabby black Judas Priest T-shirt, Francie in her one good grey wool crepe suit with the jacket buttoned up because she had inadvertently worn a black bra under her white singlet, and Gabby Di Martino wearing a sleeveless emerald green satin wrap dress, silver pencil-heeled sandals and chandelier earrings. Give up? Francie already had.

  Oddly enough, and for no particular reason that Francie could fathom, Gabby had decided to take on Francie’s rehabilitation as a pet project. She inquired after Francie’s wellbeing, brought her little presents. Francie sometimes imagined Gabby as a nurse, her marshmallow breasts stuffed into a tight white uniform. She was standing at the end of a pair of handrails while Francie shuffled along in her dressing gown: Come on now, luvvie. Just one more step. You can do it. You’re not tryyying. Sometimes Francie wanted to say, ‘Bugger off and let me crawl back to bed.’

  Gabby thrust a pink velour leopard-print make-up case under Francie’s nose and cooed sympathetically, ‘I’ve got a sweet little bag here you can pack your g-string in, darls.’

  ‘Big Night Out Beauty’ was the name Gabby had given to a column she had created especially for herself. Even the piles of free stuff from cosmetics companies didn’t make the extra duty bearable as far as Francie was concerned. She couldn’t imagine the boredom of spending even three paragraphs waxing lyrical about ‘triple alphahydroxy acnegenic fruit acid complex’. What was it anyway? Face cream? Or fireproofing treatment for Boeing 747 engine housings?

  Francie opened the pink case and saw ten Bourjois lipsticks in shades from C’est Moi to C’est Tout. The sight of the ten little shiny torpedoes decorated with crystals penetrated Francie’s black cloud.

  ‘Oh, this is gorgeous! Are you sure you don’t want to keep it?’ Francie protested, sincerely hoping Gabby wouldn’t change her mind.

  ‘Hey, babe! Plenty more where that came from. It’s my little lip-warming party for you. Pretty soon you’ll have forgotten about Nick the Dick and you’ll be on the smoocherama trail.’

  Francie winced. ‘Don’t call him that . . .’

  Gabby stood and jammed her fists into her skinny hips. ‘Francie! Are you kidding me? The guy is a total loser! He screws your life. He takes up with Cruella De Vil. And you still think he’s worth jack? Get a grip, girl. And that’s an order.’

  Bugger off and let me crawl back to bed. ‘Thanks, Gabby. Keep telling me that. I know I’ve been a pain and really, truly, I am trying to get over it. In fact I went to therapy the other night and the counsellor said—’

  Gabby’s hands flew to her ears. ‘NO! Stop! I don’t want to know. My therapy is Appletinis, Brad Pitt in Fight Club and a honey bubble bath. The only counsellor I want is a new hard heat-seeking dick. Don’t tell me. I know I’m shallow, but I’ve worked at it.’

  Francie remembered she was supposed to smile. Gabby leaned down and placed one long acrylic fingernail under Francie’s chin. Francie could smell perfume, breath mints and vodka.

  ‘Look, doll, I think this move is really going to work for you. You know the house is stunning. Everyone knows Jessie! She’s brilliant. And wait until you meet Dave! Too cute! Robbie’s mad, of course. But they’re all single and having a ball. You need this, Francie. You need to change your life. You’re too sweet to let this whole bust-up wreck everything. Just be happy, that’s all.’

  Gabby kissed the top of Francie’s head. Thanks, nurse.

  ‘Now, I’ve had a look through this lippie selection and I reckon Rendez-vous is your shade. Try it. You could do with a bit of a lift. By the way, we’re on deadline, so move it. Byeee.’

  Gabby sashayed back to her office. You could see the guys in the sports department standing on the sidelines cheering her parade.

  Francie’s mind turned to the move tomorrow. The small removal van would be arriving at her house in Richmond at nine in the morning. There were still a few things to be packed tonight. Five years of her life with Nick was now in a pile of boxes by the front door. They were variously marked ‘clothes’, ‘cutlery’, ‘computer’. Francie thought that perhaps ‘shattered dreams’, ‘bittersweet memories’ and ‘abject failure’ would have been more appropriate labels. She should ring a man to take the lot to the rubbish dump.

  She looked at the next email on the list.

  From: corinneMc@hotkey.com

  To: ssingle@SunPress.com

  Subject: Closure

  Dear Francie,

  My boyfriend left me for my best friend a year ago and now he wants me to come to counselling with him to help him g
et over the guilt. What do you think?

  Once Francie would have thought it was a good idea. Two people sitting down like adults and resolving their conflict, moving on, being happy.

  But not now. She typed: ‘Take to his car with a hammer and tell him the only place you’ll go with him is to a panel beater.’

  Francie looked at this and couldn’t decide whether to ‘save’ or ‘delete’. She hit ‘save’ and decided she’d have another look at it when she felt more mentally balanced.

  If indeed such a day was ever to dawn.

  Three

  Later that night Francie was sitting in the middle of her lounge-room floor where the rug used to be. She was draining the last of a bottle of Tia Lusso (low-fat chocolate liqueur) into a glass. As a final farewell she had decided to drink her way through what she and Nick laughingly referred to as their ‘drinks cabinet’—a cane basket of sticky liqueurs they stowed under the kitchen table.

  Francie had already consumed the dregs of the Frangelico (hazelnut), the Grand Marnier (triple orange) and Amarula (wild African fruit and cream). She should have been feeling numb by now, surely. But no amount of alcohol was going to anaesthetise her during this self-inflicted torture. She was looking through a box of photographs. She might as well have been sticking pins in her eyes.

  In years gone by a woman who had split up with a man after five years would be sitting looking through a wedding album. Something bound in white leather with gold embossed letters on the cover—Francie and Nick, 1999–Eternity. She would have opened the cover and faded confetti would have fluttered out. Perhaps she and Nick would be quarrelling over who was going to get custody of that very special shot of them gazing at each other through a frosty champagne glass. Or the one with him taking off her beribboned thigh garter with his teeth. Maybe that would have been enough to convince them to give the whole thing another go.

  But there was no such thing as a de-facto album. Francie supposed that’s what she and Nick had been: ‘de-factos’. Such an unpleasant term. She always thought of a de-facto as one of those tacky peroxide blondes who showed up to testify when ‘colourful horseracing identities’ had their day in court. And it was just as well they hadn’t had kids. You can’t show the kids a ‘de-facto’ album. ‘Look, darling, here’s a polaroid of the night Daddy moved his stereo into my flat.’ But was it just as well they hadn’t had a wedding?

  Francie had a vision of what her wedding to Nick would have been like. It was one of her guilty secrets—flipping through Modern Bride magazine. It was chick porno. You could find these hefty volumes at the newspaper office library, and sometimes she sneaked them back to her desk under cover in much the same way as one of the sports writers might have done with a copy of Penthouse.

  She had made a mental list of what she would have chosen to wear if she had been a bride, and at the top of that list came tulle sprinkled with diamantés. OK, she knew it was hopelessly girlie. That any modern woman should really have been thinking of herself in a simple, elegant slick of white satin, like Carolyn Bessette when she married JFK Junior. But Francie dreamed of the whole princess routine: the Big Dress, the Glittering Tiara, the Glass Slippers, the Lot!

  Also on her list were the flowers: peony rose, tuber rose, iris and jasmine; the colours celadon, amaranth, titian and dove; the fabrics organza, duchesse satin, mousseline and silk. These elements, combined with pink champagne, redcurrant candles and a canopy of fairy lights, were interchangeable and could be endlessly configured into a million and one fantasy tableaux. And in the middle of each fantasy was Nick. In a classic black tuxedo. Waiting for his beautiful bride. Holding his hand out to take hers and fly her away to Always and Forever Land.

  Actually, she had read that a Japanese businessman was building a wedding theme park on the Gold Coast in Queensland. He was investing $27 million to create ‘Wedding World’ on 116 hectares of reclaimed mangrove swamp. How romantic would that be? Staging your nuptials at Wedding World? With the knowledge that only 453 000 couples had shared the same identical special moment as yourself.

  And imagine all the different ‘lands’ there—Profiterole Land, Whitney Houston Land, Candelabra Land. Great rides like The Cummerbund, where you’re catapulted thirty metres into the air on a giant purple taffeta slingshot. Or The Bomboniera, where you whizz around incredibly fast in a little tulle bag tied with a ribbon. There would be a souvenir shop where you could buy bridesmaids’ dresses bearing the legend: ‘My friends got married at Wedding World and all I got was this lousy teal taffeta dress with puffy sleeves’. Mind you, thought Francie, with my luck I’d be fast-tracked straight through Wedding World and be queuing up for tickets to Divorce World and Custody Battle Park.

  Francie was now, officially, drunk. She tried to focus on a photo of Nick taken on a camping holiday in Tasmania. He was putting up their tent on the edge of Wineglass Bay. He was on one knee, mugging for the camera, holding up a leftover tent peg. Remember that night? So perfectly quiet and still in their campsite hidden in the sand dunes that they could hear the flap of an owl’s wing as it fanned the night air. More than this she remembered how she and Nick had squeezed into a double sleeping-bag in their blue nylon tent. How he had slid down her chilled body and his tongue had made a warm, wet trail from her knees to her . . . She chose another photo from the cardboard box.

  This one was of Nick in a peacock blue-tiled hotel room in Morocco. He was lying back in bed, bare-chested, with the sheets swathed around his slim hips and his forearm shielding his eyes from the daylight. Remember that morning? She had risen early while Nick slept off the effects of a hash and brandy bender. It was not yet dawn when she took a chair onto their balcony overlooking the town of Fez and curled up nursing a cup of sweet mint tea, watching the medina come to life. As the sky faded from black to deepest purple, the first melodic yodel from the mosque called the reverent to prayer. She had seen the first puff of smoke from a whitewashed house, followed by another, then another. Until the bare hills beyond faded beneath a grey-violet haze. Through the lazy, drifting smoky trails she saw a small boy riding a bicycle and dragging three baby goats on a string behind him. She kept watching as the first truck piled with carpets roared up the dirt road in front of the hotel.

  That was back in the days when she believed she and Nick loved each other enough to live anywhere. They could be airlifted from their lives and dropped into that whitewashed house over there and live happily ever after with the goats in their rocky pen. And as the new day was born she remembered bringing Nick to life too, with her fingers and mouth. Coaxing his inert body into consciousness. A call to prayer. And she remembered how his hands had reached for her breasts and . . . Every photograph in the box was like this.

  Pictures of them from their trip around the world. In Rome watching the fireworks on New Year’s Eve; standing in snow in Central Park; sitting on the step of a little shop which sold jewelled clay bangles in a Bombay alleyway. All of them were from a place she could never visit anymore. Nick and Francie Land. A land atomised by a neutron bomb which wiped out all living things and left the buildings still standing.

  And then Francie was crying again. It didn’t seem possible there could be any tears left! If humans were ninety-five percent water then Francie must have been at the low tide mark by now.

  She looked around the bare room. The light shades were packed away and the naked bulbs threw a harsh light onto the ceiling. She could see deep cracks in the plaster up there. She’d never noticed them before. Maybe the fractures had always been there and it was only now she could see the deep fault lines.

  There were pale squares on the wall where the pictures had been. The floor was a patchwork of dust indicating where the furniture had stood. She felt she was looking at the set of a movie which had wrapped. The whole team which had made it look real—the lighting guys, the make-up artists, the scriptwriters—had all moved on and her feature film with Nick was in the can. The photographs she held in her hands were stills from a movie no-one w
ould ever see. The Nick and Francie Story had gone straight to video. Hah!

  Eventually, Francie was in bed. Next morning she would remember crawling up the corridor on her hands and knees and wailing like an animal with its leg caught in a trap.

  That night she had a vivid dream. It was not particularly allegorical, nor metaphorical. Her brain didn’t seem able to conjure up anything that complex.

  She was riding a bicycle on a yellow brick road through an emerald green valley. She was towing a wolf on a string. Ahead in this storybook landscape she could see a magical white castle, which looked exactly like Sleeping Beauty’s in Disneyland. Francie walked across the castle’s heavy wooden drawbridge under a portcullis tipped with iron spears. She threaded her way through a labyrinth of deserted cobblestone alleys. Past a market stall selling silver bangles. Past a pretty central courtyard powdered with snow. Wings flapped overhead and she looked up to see Harry Potter’s white owl Hedwig leading the way.

  And then she was looking through a tiny window down into a cavernous room arched with wooden beams. At the far end of this room up on a seven-tiered dais were two golden thrones. And there, draped in splendid royal purple robes and crowned with all the jewels of Arabia, were King Nick and Queen Poppy. They were a magnificent sight. So radiant with joy and privilege that it hurt your eyes to look at them.

  It was then that Francie noticed her skin was brown and furry. Her reflection in a windowpane showed she was a mouse. She scurried down the hallway, her bald, pink tail twitching. Hedwig the owl swooped and her pink-clawed mouse feet scrabbled on the stone floor as she hesitated, then turned and crammed her furry body into a tiny hole in the wall. She brought her paws to her chest, curled into a ball of fear and fought for breath.