by Unknown
Had he fucked Francie in the dark while his mind was full with the taste and smell of Poppy? Had he pushed himself into Francie’s mouth—an innocent, compliant plastic ‘O’—and thought of Poppy again as he groaned with the release of it all and the anticipation of even greater pleasure to come? It made Francie sick to her stomach to think of it. How pathetic it was that she hadn’t seen it coming.
He had started to find excuses not to have sex: ‘I have to learn these lines. You go to bed now, I’ll come in later.’
Said he didn’t want to go away to the mountains in July: ‘I don’t want to leave town then. Maybe something will come out of this play and I’ll be offered another part. Do you still want to go with a girlfriend or something?’
Begun criticising everything she did in the house: ‘What are these bizarre new cushions with the roses? Everything you bring home is so . . . girlie! I feel like I’m living in Hansel and Gretel’s fucking gingerbread house.’
Started staying out late: ‘The director took us all out for dinner and we kicked on back at his place. It’s a whole cast “bonding” thing. I couldn’t leave.’
Missed her birthday for the first time: ‘Shit, Francie, sorry! This play is just taking up every bit of emotional energy I have at the moment. You have to give me a bit of space.’
And stopped complimenting her: ‘You always look good. I don’t know why you keep asking me. Does it make any difference what I think? You dress for your girlfriends anyway.’
And to the question she found herself asking, despite promising herself she never would—‘Do you still love me, Nick?’—he had answered: ‘Of course I do! I’m here, aren’t I?’ Which had immediately made Francie think he had other options—that maybe one day he wouldn’t be.
So . . . all this had led Francie, inexorably, to the half-formed, terrifying thought that maybe she and Nick were on the way out. After all, they were the only couple who had been together five years in, as far as Francie could tell, the whole of Melbourne.
But she’d clung on, refusing to believe it was a possibility that they would break up. She had launched herself into a frenzy of domestic activity. Planted climbing red roses on the side fence, repainted the bathroom a blushing pink, made more jam—cherry, raspberry, blackberry—and trawled her cookbooks for ever more exotic recipes—Mexican chicken with chocolate sauce, black rice, stuffed peppers, devil’s food cake. As if she could seduce him with talismans of love and dark flavours. And all the time she was doing this she was aware that Nick was slipping away. She didn’t know why, but he was slowly drifting beyond her reach. If she could have boiled up a love potion on the old stove in that little wooden kitchen, with a toadstool and a hank of hair, she would have done it.
Then, one Monday night after Nick had again been distant and preoccupied all weekend, Francie broached the terrifying subject which had been haunting her for weeks. She was standing in the kitchen, about to deposit a joint of beef in a black iron pot of sizzling olive oil, when her question bubbled to the surface and burst.
‘Nick, is there something you want to tell me? Has something changed between us? Do you still want to be here with me?’
She felt as if it was her heart she was carrying before her: a lump of bloody, throbbing meat on a tray. He had looked at the red-raw offering and then plunged a knife right through until it clanged on the metal beneath.
‘I don’t know, Francie. I just don’t know anymore.’
And by that Friday, he was gone.
Now, six months later, Francie had gone too. She looked around her new room once more and then looked at the empty space in the bed beside her. She smothered her face in her embroidered pillows and cried. She hoped the cheap red dye wouldn’t come off on her face.
The digital clock read 3.49 am when Francie suddenly woke to a thumping noise coming from the room next door. For a moment or two she couldn’t remember where she was, but focusing through the gloom she saw her heavy wooden chest of drawers and her gold scrolled mirror in this strange room. She held out her two arms and checked. Yep, they were hers too.
There was a thump, a squeal, a giggle, another thump, and Francie remembered that she was in her new room in her new house. And then she realised that the sounds she could hear from the room next door were being made by two people. Two people having sex. Dave and . . . ?
Oh, brilliant! Francie immediately thought of Nick and Poppy flinging themselves around in bed. To be more precise, a bed in a bedroom at 35 Everton Street, Parkville. A smart, renovated little house with a neat front path hedged with lavender bushes. Francie knew exactly where it was. She remembered the first night she had driven there.
She hadn’t gone inside. Alright, she’d admit that she parked up the corner of the street then sneaked down the side of the house and peered in through the window. But she didn’t go right inside. She couldn’t get in because she tried the back door and it was locked.
So, while she’d done a little trespassing that night, no-one could have charged her with actual break and enter. She had stood on a bucket and looked through the window. It was a bedroom, dark except for a small lamp shining a pool of light onto a bedside table and two pillows. This was Poppy’s bedroom then. The bedside light was still on, waiting for them to come back here.
The bed cover was slate grey and the pillowcases were white with grey piping. It was all very grown-up and sophisticated. Nothing like Francie’s adolescent jumble of pink, white and rose-print linen pillows. She imagined the rest of the house would be the same. Muted neutral colours with, say, a feature wall in aubergine in the designer kitchen. A kitchen perhaps installed with an impressive array of gleaming stainless-steel appliances.
In the living room she supposed there would be a large portrait in oils of the good lady herself—done by a marvellously gifted, intelligent, intuitive artist friend—hanging on the wall above taupe linen sofas. They would be decorated with cream scatter cushions and a chocolate-brown mohair throw rug. She imagined. She’d seen enough picture spreads of terribly chic living spaces to have a fair idea. In short, a home which looked the way Francie herself would have decorated it if she was a successful 43-year-old woman with impeccable taste. But at that moment that description didn’t fit Francie at all. She was a deranged thirty-something stalker standing on an upturned plastic bucket at eleven o’clock on a freezing July night spying into someone’s bedroom. Call the cops!
Francie had tried to pierce the shadows for more detail she could flay herself with. And there on the bedside table was a battered copy of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Again, predictable. The one piece of literature Francie had always been promising herself to get around to reading and had never found the time. If Poppy’s copy had been in the original French, Francie would have opened a vein.
The next day she went out and bought the book. She sat up in her bed and tried to read it, but the words floated and swam off the page in a viscous pond of tears and snot.
Tonight the book was packed away in a cardboard box Francie could just make out across the unfamiliar space. Maybe she would read it one day, when the remembrance of things past wouldn’t be just a reminder of what had once been possible and now would never be.
Thump! Squeal! Crash! More laughter! Well at least someone in this house was enjoying themselves! She thought of Dave naked and pounding away at some blonde Fluff Bat with her legs in the air.
Now there was an interesting development! It was the first time she could remember thinking about two people having hot sex who weren’t Nick and Poppy. That had to be some sort of move in the right direction. As second hand and sordid as it was. That’s what she needed more of. Less Remembrance of Things Past and more Imagining of Things Future! She wondered if thinking about having sex with Dave was a genuine expression of interest or just a cheap substitution racket?
Francie had to turn off her mind and get back to sleep. She finally hit on the image which was guaranteed to shut down her synapses. She was reclining nude on a
n elaborate four-poster bed swagged with billows of aubergine silk. In through the window, completely naked, with a garland of rosebuds on his head, tumbled George W Bush.
Six
Sunday morning found Francie in her new kitchen trying to light the gas griller without backburning her eyebrows. She had cleared a space for her new coffee-maker and it was burbling away. She was humming ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’—‘Cause there’s something in a Sunday, that makes a body feel alone . . .’ when Jessie appeared, playing June Carter to her Johnny Cash.
The gals sang together in a nasal drawl:
And there’s nothing short a’ dyin’
That’s half as lonesome as the sound
Of the sleeping city sidewalk
And Sunday morning coming down.
Francie turned her attention back to the griller.
‘Oh Jesus, don’t look in there!’ Jessie protested. ‘There’s probably a family of mice using that griller tray as a 7-Eleven! I can’t remember the last time we cleaned it.’
Francie, duly warned, took the tray out to wash it in the sink. Jessie was right. It was rancid.
‘So,’ said Jessie, pulling a juicer from the cupboard and a bag of oranges from the fruit basket, ‘how’d you sleep last night? Any sign of ghosts?’
‘Well, if it was a ghost it was a very friendly one. Dave sounded like he was having fun.’
Jessie laughed. ‘Oh yeah, that would be the vision in pink sequins he stumbled over at the end of the night. She had perfect Fluff Bat qualifications. Cute as a button, dumb as a box of hammers. It was a case of “lie down, I think I love you” at first sight.’
Francie was surprised to feel a twinge of something she supposed was . . . jealousy? Envy? It was odd to have that feeling about someone who wasn’t Nick.
‘So, did the drought break for you?’ Francie inquired politely.
‘Nup! But there was a definite sprinkling of rain until he told me he played guitar. I have a “no musicians” policy in place at the moment. Henry plays trombone in this band called Diving Bell. And I have promised myself that, now I’m almost thirty-five and on television, I owe myself a man with a real job, a car and a suit and tie. You wouldn’t think that would be too much to ask for, would you?’ She held out a glass of fresh orange juice to Francie. ‘But honestly, I might as well try to make a play for the Sultan of fucking Brunei! I dunno. I just don’t get it anymore.
‘Look at me, Francie.’
Francie looked. Jessie was a terrifying sight. She’d slept in her make-up and had two coal pits for eyes. She was still sporting her bright red Revlon Colorstay lipstick, which just looked weird at this hour of the morning, and her perky gelled hair had lain down and died. Francie wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Jessie had spent the night sleeping in the cellar in an open coffin.
Her housemate continued: ‘Now you’ve just met me, so you should be able to give me an unbiased opinion. Wait, I’ll turn around.’ Jessie twirled. ‘Have I got “loser” tattooed on the back of my head? Both heads?
‘I mean . . .’ and here Jessie turned back to her with an imploring look, ‘what’s wrong with me? This isn’t a joke anymore. I’m in danger of turning into a caricature of a love-starved female comedian. I know that, traditionally, women comedians can’t get a bloke, but that old routine is getting tired. Christ! I’m getting tired of hearing myself! So . . . you write a column in the newspaper about being single. Tell me where I’m going wrong!’
Phew! This had been happening to Francie a lot lately. So many women wanted her professional opinion on their love-lives. Which was ridiculous! Francie was just making it up as she went along. Couldn’t everybody tell? Wasn’t it obvious?
Her initial response to Jessie’s inquiry was: The reason you’re still single is because you’re too loud, you’re too cynical, you’re wearing too much make-up. But she then realised this was exactly what her mother would say. Looking past all that, Francie saw a fabulous woman who had everything to offer. Jessie had a razor wit—everyone in the country knew that! She was alive, opinionated, passionate. In fact, Francie reflected, Jessie was everything she wasn’t right now. She had beautiful big eyes and a very impressive cleavage spilling out of her singlet. She had a flat tummy and a curvy bottom fitting snugly into a pair of white footy shorts. Very nice legs. Francie guessed that being bad in bed was not part of Jessie’s problem.
In the end she said: ‘Jessie . . . you know . . . there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. I mean, look at me. Miss Mousey nondescript blonde. Good, quiet steady job. Unthreatening. Crummy journo going nowhere in particular.’
Jessie wanted to interject in this litany of self-abuse, but couldn’t quite find the space.
‘I cook, I can put in a zip, I can even knit. Jesus, I’m a human doormat. And I’m single too!
‘Don’t you think that if I knew the answer—why none of us can find a decent relationship—I would have put it in my column or on a website and given it to the women of the world? In the end it’s just got to be geographical or statistical or about demographics or marketing. Something!’
Jessie opened her mouth to speak again and then realised Francie was a long way from being finished.
‘It can’t be because we’re unlovable. I mean, it feels like that, but it just can’t be! First impression? I think you are adorable.
‘I just think we’re some weird blip on a radar. A bump on a graph. Single, available women in their thirties in the year 2004 in Australia. One day someone will look back at this anomaly, research us in retrospect and find that we were caught . . . I dunno, between song lines or tram lines or in some weird socioeconomic, demographic, romantic Bermuda Triangle and come up with an explanation. But, until then . . . we are a living, breathing mystery. All I can say is—I’d have a relationship with you!’
Jessie was now looking at her with surprise and even Francie herself couldn’t believe where all this had come from, but there it was. She turned her back and began scrubbing furiously at the griller tray.
‘Hey . . .’ Jessie came up behind her at the sink and put her arms around Francie’s shoulders. ‘Thanks for that. That was amazing. If it wasn’t against my religion, I’d have sex with you too.’
There was a delicate cough in the vicinity of the kitchen door. Jessie and Francie turned and there stood Fluff Bat. Tall, blonde, in a wildly inappropriate pink sequinned dress and jewelled high-heeled sandals.
‘Hi,’ she chirruped. ‘Can I thmell coffee?’
Fluff Bat had the most adorable lisp which made you want to smooch her immediately.
Francie and Jessie quickly untangled themselves and switched to hostess mode. When Fluff Bat was comfortably seated at the kitchen table with a coffee and orange juice, Jessie sat opposite and began her interrogation. Francie had the distinct feeling that Jessie was not so much making conversation as gathering material, which was not to say she disapproved. They were both fascinated by this elegant, fresh-faced sylph who was now blithely piling strawberry jam on her toast.
By Francie’s reckoning, Fluff Bat, whose name was in fact Antonia, had had five hours’ sleep. But she looked—what was the word? Dewy? That look that cosmetics companies were desperate to bottle and get rough old bags to pay top dollar for. Antonia (‘call me Ant’) looked as if she had somehow managed to fit in a visit to a beauty spa between crawling out from under Dave and making her way to the kitchen. Her face was scrubbed and pink and her long blonde hair was brushed straight. Immaculate.
‘So . . . er . . . Ant . . . you’re up early,’ said Jessie.
‘Yeth, I have to get to work.’ She turned down her pretty mouth.
‘And where’s that? I don’t think you told me last night.’
‘A little cothmetic boutique on Toorak Road. Drop in, I’ll give you a dithcount.’ She handed out business cards from a tiny pink beaded purse.
‘So, this is the first time you’ve ever met Dave. Isn’t he gorgeous?’ asked Jessie.
&n
bsp; Francie squirmed. Next Jessie would be asking, ‘Do you come here often?’ or ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a dump like this?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Ant couldn’t have cared less about Jessie’s inquisition. Clearly she was used to post-coital interviews. ‘He’th cute . . . and funny. I’ve never met an architect before. I’m tho over lawyerth and thtockbrokerth. You know, guyth in thuits? They think coth they’ve got tonth of money it makth up for having no perthonality. You know what I mean?’ She looked at the girls, her raised eyebrows lost behind her glossy blonde fringe.
Francie watched Jessie get up from the table and stagger to the sink. For one horrible moment she thought she was going to be sick in it.
‘Yeah,’ said Francie, covering the awkward silence. ‘I know what you mean. You can get stuck in a groove with guys. For instance Jessie can’t get away from musicians at the moment.’
‘Eeeyew! Musoth . . .’ Miss Fluff Bat waved a perfectly manicured hand under her wrinkled button nose. ‘They thmell! They never have any money. They never take you anywhere nithe. They alwayth want you to come and watch them play . . . like ith foreplay or thomething. Ith never turned me on, watching a guy jerk off in public. No thankth! I try not to travel cattle clath if I can help it.
‘Anyway, I’ve gotta run,’ she sang as she fanned the air with a piece of jam toast. ‘Theeya.’ And with that she tottered out the door.
Jessie watched her go with open-mouthed amazement. ‘That girl is a deadset genius—I mean, geniuth.’
‘Yep,’ agreed Francie, laughing. ‘Those high-maintenance gals have got it made.’
‘High maintenance, yeah . . .’ repeated Jessie with a faraway look in her eyes, like Toad of Toad Hall. ‘I’m going to do some work.’ She took her cup of coffee and headed down the corridor.
