The Social Diary

by Ros Reines

Suddenly an all-too-familiar figure materialised in front of us. Lahar Kapoor was looking put out, and I could guess why: not only had he sent me an expensive bottle of champagne at the restaurant, he had invited me to the Taj and conveyed me there in his limousine, and yet I’d barely spoken to him since our arrival.

  ‘Savannah! I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

  ‘As you can see, I’m right here, Lahar. Have you met Daniel Acton?’

  ‘Yes, of course we’ve met.’ He still sounded annoyed. ‘How are you, Dan? Things going well in paradise?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks, Lahar. Are you selling plenty of jewellery?’

  ‘Yes, the money keeps rolling in,’ the flamboyant businessman replied, patting his pocket as if to reassure himself that his wallet was still chockers with the folding stuff. Then, turning to me: ‘Actually, Savannah, I was hoping to steal you away to have that little chat I mentioned earlier . . .’

  Lahar was clearly expecting me to excuse myself, but I had no intention of leaving Daniel’s side. There was something so mesmerising about him that I felt I couldn’t get up.

  ‘Sorry, Lahar, I’m just chatting to Daniel at the moment,’ I pleaded. ‘Why don’t you give me your card and I’ll call you in the morning to arrange a time to meet?’

  Lahar flinched and, for a moment, it looked as though he might explode. Then he seemed to regain control. ‘No, don’t worry about it,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘Look, if you two need to talk, don’t mind me,’ Daniel said. ‘I can make myself scarce.’

  I shot Daniel an alarmed look, trying to convey that the last thing I wanted was a tete-a-tete with Lahar. But the jeweller seemed to have got the message.

  ‘I’m not sure where I’ll be tomorrow, Savannah, so why don’t I call you?’

  ‘Great,’ I said, with far more enthusiasm than I actually felt.

  ‘I’ll leave you both to it then.’ He turned away from the table, scanning the room to see who else he could pester. Then he turned back and, with what seemed to me like a malicious smile, said, ‘Oh, and Dan, do give my best to Jacqueline.’

  ‘Sure thing, Lahar. She always loves to hear from you.’

  ‘Jacqueline?’ I ventured, hoping to hell that he meant my quarry Jacqueline Evans and not a possible girlfriend. If it was the former at least I would have something to report back to the boss. Both Daniel and I watched as Lahar made another beeline for Lady Victoria, who had just ordered yet more bubbles. She noted him heading towards her and leaned in to whisper something in Freya’s ear, both of them bursting out into laughter.

  ‘Oh, she’s just someone I work with,’ Daniel said casually. ‘Nobody special. Now tell me, Savannah, do you live around here?’

  It took another half an hour or so for us to leave the Taj. We tried not to be obvious about it. I left first and Daniel joined me at the front of the hotel soon afterwards, bearing a bottle of unopened champagne that he had persuaded the barman to sell to him. Despite my attempts at coolness, it felt utterly delicious to have him sliding into a taxi next to me and to feel his hand resting proprietarily on my thigh. We were heading back to my tiny terrace in East Sydney—more like a doll’s house than an actual home. It was so minuscule that only a bar fridge and a small cook top could be accommodated in the kitchen (fine with me as I wasn’t much of a chef), but it had been designed by an architect as his office, so it was ultra-modern and had lots of interesting features including a stained-glass window and a spiral staircase leading up to the bedroom.

  Daniel burst out laughing after I had turned the key in the front door.

  ‘Hey, Savannah, this place redefines snug,’ he teased as he followed me closely up the stairs.

  We were scarcely inside the bedroom before we were kissing each other. Next thing I knew we were rolling around lustily on my bed and I’d completely forgotten to tell him that I didn’t sleep with men whom I’d just met. I hadn’t been intimate with anyone since I had started work on the paper because the demands of my job had put an end to my social life. However, being with Daniel felt so natural that I just couldn’t help myself.

  Six

  The Sydney News’ headquarters on Broadway, on the rim of the city, was no place for a woman with a hangover (it was that last bottle with Daniel that had caused the pain). If the wind blew in a certain direction it would whip up the sickening aroma of hops and malt from the old brewery nearby. Sleep-deprived and slightly numb with the annoying first signs of an obsession over Daniel, I was not exactly ready for a challenging day at work. There was always so much going on at the paper, along with a feeling of slight desperation in the air, as the section editors assigned crazy stories to the first person they clapped eyes on. Nobody wanted to go to morning conference without reporting that at least one job was in motion.

  It didn’t seem to matter that I had been hired to write about Sydney’s social life, as far as the blustering chief-of-staff Malcolm Yates was concerned; if I ventured down the ‘business end’ of the news room I was fair game. (I would later learn to hide out in my pod.) But this morning I had not been thinking straight; I had been so in need of a caffeine hit after the excesses of last night that I made the fatal mistake of walking past his desk on my way to the tea room.

  ‘Stephens, over here.’ Malcolm Yates had a way of summoning his staff that probably harked back to his brief stint in corporate affairs for the Australian Army. If he wanted to see someone he just hollered out their surname, and even the most seasoned journo was supposed to drop whatever they were doing and report to his desk for duty, notepad at the ready.

  ‘Stephens, get over here, now!’

  Oh dear; it looked like the coffee would have to wait.

  ‘Stephens, there’s a job I need you to do. You are free, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, tentatively holding my breath and looking around for a notepad to take down the details. In my befuddled state I just couldn’t think of an excuse, although I should have pleaded I was stepping out to do a tell-all with a socialite. Perhaps Lady Victoria might have been willing to give me that exclusive on her divorce settlement? But, no, I was too wretched to think of anything.

  ‘Good,’ he said as, embarrassed to be unprepared, I surreptitiously slid out a fresh pad from the pile on his assistant’s desk and found myself a brand-new biro, which actually worked. He seemed faintly amused by my clumsy manoeuvres.

  ‘Now there’s a problem with sharks attacking pet dogs in the inner harbour, so we need you to get down to Five Dock with a photographer, take a tinnie out and see whether there’s any action.’

  I looked down at my cream dress and high heels (I’d actually made an effort, as I was going to a Gucci show that evening). ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Do I have time to go home and change? This outfit is kind of inappropriate.’

  There was a deadly silence as the chief-of-staff looked at me disbelievingly.

  ‘Are you serious?’ he growled. ‘No, you don’t have time to change—this is a newspaper, Stephens, not a country club. Cover yourself up with a towel or something. Just get out there.’

  Minutes later I found myself sitting in the smelly front seat of the car belonging to one of the most uncouth snappers in the office, Noel. I’d heard that he occasionally slept in the old VW when his girlfriend kicked him out of the flat they shared, and it certainly felt stale inside. Noel didn’t seem to care. He had the radio cranked up to full volume as Cyndi Lauper belted out ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’. It felt like the American pop princess was mocking me from the other side of the world.

  ‘Yeah, so how’s it going?’ he said, turning to me to give me the full-on view of his depressing yellowish teeth. I felt even more queasy. If only I hadn’t drunk so much last night! Who went to lunch and didn’t get home until midnight? On top of that I had only toyed with my food at Emerald Ville, as I had tried to take in the scene around me; and dinner had been little more than bar snacks at the Taj. What I now craved more than anything else—even more than another night wi
th Daniel—was a cheese and tomato jaffle with lots of coffee and maybe a family-sized bottle of 7UP.

  ‘It would be great if you could slow down a little, Noel,’ I croaked. ‘I’m feeling a bit under the weather this morning.’

  ‘What?’ He deliberately screeched around a corner, the rust bucket almost becoming airborne.

  ‘Stop that!’ I shrieked. Telling him to slow down had clearly been a mistake. He seemed to be delighting in simulating a roller-coaster ride.

  When we finally arrived at the rowing club I was feeling positively wretched. But I wasn’t beaten. I may have been sent on the worst job of my career so far, heaving stomach and all, but so help me, I was going to make a damn good story of it.

  I had the feeling that Malcolm Yates had sent me out for a joke. Or as some cruel form of punishment that was a payback for doing the social round. Or maybe he was just a psychopath.

  This was apparently the spot where cute pooches were being attacked by sharks. They might have been rabid mutts for all I knew but, trust me, if one became the victim of a predator today, I would be playing it up for all it was worth. Man’s best friend was going to land us our rightful spot on the front page. In fact, if I had my way, ‘Fido’ would become the most well-known injured pooch in the city. He would be a ‘hot’ dog!

  ‘Here, you might want to use some bait,’ advised the old guy whose tinnie we were renting at an exorbitant hourly rate. ‘A bit of blood in the water will often bring the sharks to the surface in a feeding frenzy.’

  Great.

  I surveyed the outboard motor, which seemed so ancient that it might disintegrate with any pressure. ‘Are you sure that this thing works?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, handing over a jar containing the bloody guts of a fish. It smelled so disgusting I was tempted to jump in the water to try my luck with the sharks rather than share the tinnie with it. I nearly ended up in the harbour anyway; I almost capsized us trying to keep my balance while climbing into the little boat in my high heels and clasping my notebook as if it was a lifeline back to normality. If only my new pals at Emerald Ville could see me now. Maybe some would think that I did have it cushy, spending my working days being wined and dined at Sydney’s hot spots, but now I was being given the sort of reality check you could only describe as pure torture.

  ‘So what do you do for fun?’ Noel asked slyly. He seemed to be fixated on my legs, which were splayed out at odd angles in the tinnie, thanks to my tight dress.

  ‘I sleep,’ I replied, trying to calculate how many more hours of work I would have to endure before I could go home, have a really long, hot shower and slide into bed. In my fantasy, my sheets were crisp, white and cool, and already turned down, but the reality was that I had left them on a heap on my bed following my wild night with Daniel, which had felt like a wonderful release after the toughness of my job. Tim understood that it was one of the hardest rounds to do on the paper. When I was out in Sydney’s bitchy social scene, it was as though I was walking around in a mask; but Daniel was so warm and playful that I felt I could be myself. Now just thinking of him, I felt a shiver of excitement—there had definitely been a powerful connection between us. I wished that I could relive the night all over again.

  Snapping me out of my daydream, Noel asked, ‘Who do you sleep with?’ smirking at his own audacity.

  I decided to ignore the question. ‘Are you interested in car racing, Noel?’ I asked, to change the subject. I figured it was a safe bet; he bloody well drove as though he was on a race track, after all. ‘Ever covered a grand prix or the V8s?’

  ‘Oh, always the V8s on the Goldie,’ he said, raising his camera to photograph something just under the surface of the water which, on closer inspection, turned out to be nothing but a partially submerged piece of driftwood. ‘You ought to come with me some time. There are so many parties going on up there at V8 time, you could fill six columns,’ he boasted. ‘And I know everyone there is to know. They really lay it on for the media—we get stuck into the piss first thing in the morning, and keep at it all day.’

  ‘Sounds great,’ I said half-heartedly.

  Almost an hour passed and I could feel the skin on my face starting to burn. I was going to look mighty attractive covering that Gucci fashion show at The Duchess. What I really needed to do was to check into a beauty salon and stay there for an entire day. I needed a makeover but probably not as much as I needed a decent night’s sleep. Maybe if I allowed myself to drift off for a couple of minutes, this expedition would be revealed as nothing more than a nightmare.

  Despite our smelly bait hitting the water, there was no sign of sharks or any other sort of big fish. There wasn’t even a loveable pet scampering about on the shoreline for us to photograph. Meanwhile, Noel had moved on to character assassinations of just about everyone in the office. I murmured agreement, as you do when you are stuck in a tinnie in the middle of the harbour with a sex-obsessed racing hoon.

  ‘Garry is the worst photographic editor that any of us have ever worked with,’ Noel bitched. ‘He’s a total fool—always sending us out to jobs that have no place in the paper. He comes back drunk from lunch and tries to help his mates out by getting their dumb-arsed stories in the paper.’

  ‘Why don’t you complain to someone?’

  ‘Like who? Malcolm Yates? He’s an even bigger tool.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Thanks to this assignment my new strategy where the chief-of-staff was concerned was never ever to be in his orbit. ‘Then why not talk to Tim?’

  Noel snorted. ‘Timmy doesn’t have time for photographers. We’re even lower on the pecking order than you lot in the women’s section.’

  Excuse me! I was about to correct him on my status when there was a sudden ripple below the surface of the water. Noel snatched up his camera.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked excitedly. ‘Is it a shark?’ Then a thought occurred to me. ‘Do you think it can bite through the boat?’

  Noel dropped his camera. ‘Nah, it’s nothing—just a school of fish. This is a bloody waste of time. I reckon we give it another thirty minutes and then head back to the office.’

  He pulled a half-eaten sandwich from his camera bag and started to demolish it.

  As the smell of baked beans hit me I put a hand to my lurching stomach.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t offer you any. I’m starving,’ Noel said, clearly misinterpreting the gesture.

  ‘No, that’s fine,’ I said weakly, silently cursing Malcolm Yates again. I turned to survey the shoreline. ‘Gritty’ was the only way to describe this semi-industrial side of Sydney’s harbour. It looked as though it belonged in some hardboiled cop show; I half expected a headless corpse to go floating past. Actually, I wouldn’t mind if it did; at least we’d have ourselves a story.

  ‘Okay, mission aborted,’ said Noel at last, starting up the outboard motor, which belched out a thick cloud of acrid smoke. I certainly wasn’t going to argue.

  I needn’t have worried about returning to the office without a story because Malcolm Yates had disappeared off to a boozy lunch. A very boozy lunch. I dutifully left him a note informing him that the ‘shark eats dog’ story was a non-event, then headed down to the cafeteria in urgent need of comfort food. I often avoided the canteen, which smelled of antiseptic and burnt toast, but today I could think of nothing better than that toasted cheese and tomato jaffle I had been dreaming about, along with a cup of black coffee and a bottle of Diet Coke. Bliss.

  ‘How’s it going, love?’ asked Val, the sandwich hand, who was wearing one of those plastic shower caps usually seen in operating theatres. If I thought that my job was sometimes hard to take, Val’s was a reminder that it could be much worse. ‘Are they treating you well?’

  ‘Fine, thanks, Val.’

  A motherly blonde, Val had obviously noticed that when I did make it down to the canteen, I usually sat by myself. I wasn’t exactly friendless, but few of my colleagues went out of their way to make me feel at home. The Sydney News was a cliqu
ey place to work, and any newcomers had to earn the respect of their peers before they were accepted. But I didn’t much care about that today thanks to my raging hangover and all that went with it. I wondered if Daniel was also feeling the effects of all the wine we’d consumed. We had ended up swigging from the champagne bottle in bed and laughing about it because I hadn’t had the right glasses in my minuscule kitchen. Did he see what had happened between us the night before as a drunken fling, or was it the beginning of something? Sitting here now in my soiled cream dress, reeking of fish guts, it was hard to imagine that I had what it took to interest an urbane, sophisticated man like Daniel. And who was Daniel Acton anyway? He had effortlessly deflected me every time I asked him about himself. He wouldn’t even be drawn on the mysterious ‘Jacqueline’ whom Lahar had mentioned. I was still hoping Lahar had meant Jacqueline Evans but thanks to my ineptitude at cross-examination I clearly had no future as an investigative journalist. And on the subject of the Evans family, I hadn’t even managed to gather any intel, which had been half the point of lunching at Emerald Ville the day before, I reminded myself. I really had to work harder at tracking the Evanses down. Tim was sure to ask me about them soon and a vague response would not do.

  I binned the remnants of my lunch, waved goodbye to Val, and headed back to my desk. On my way, I had the impression that several of my colleagues were looking at me curiously. Was it the eau de dead fish? Perhaps my dress was stained at the back from the motor oil on the boat and I hadn’t even noticed? The fragile state of my health was clearly making me paranoid. As I neared Erica’s office it occurred to me that she probably knew Daniel and could tell me his back story—if only I could persuade her to deign to talk to me without baring her teeth. But her office was empty, nothing but a whiff of stale Sobranie—her cigarette of choice—lingering in the air like an unwelcome guest.

  I was just debating whether to go and get another can of Coke from the machine to help with my dehydration when Janet marched up to my desk, looking self-important as usual.