The Younger Man

by Foster, Zoe

  I’ll come around tonight and we’ll talk, okay? And Mads too. We’re your friends, let us help you and love you and shower you in wine. Xxx

  She tried calling Mads. Voicemail! It was all too much, especially since Abby’s headaches were breeding, paying no heed to the paracetamol she’d guzzled with her double coffee.

  Mads, have you spoken to Chels? Think we should go to hers tonight with bottle of red and a kilo of Valium. Let me know what time suits X

  There. She’d done all she could for now; the girls could get back to her when they were ready. Or else she’d just show up at Chelsea’s tonight. Right now she had emails to write, an enormous desk to clean out and petulant staff to dictate.

  Just as Abby inhaled her first ulcer-inducing mouthful of teriyaki salmon, Mads called.

  ‘Hello, handsome.’

  ‘I’ve just spent my whole lunchbreak being yelled at by Chels because her boyfriend is a twat, but how’s your day?

  ‘Yeah, she hung up on me when we spoke this morning—’

  ‘Because you were pro-Jeremy, you muppet. Don’t worry, I heard. A lot. In Dolby Surround. For many hours.’

  ‘Hey, just before we go down that path, can I ask how things are with you and Dylan and …? I had so many good intentions to call you last Tuesday night, but I didn’t. And I’m sorry. What a shitty friend I am these days.’

  ‘Hold the theatrics; I’ve had enough of those for today. Everything’s fine, we’re going to try IVF, and it will send us broke and make me into a hormonal dragon, but we’ll be united and optimistic as we eat our two-minute noodles and try not to kill each other.’

  Abby laughed gently. ‘Well, I’m glad. And I wish you all the very best. You sound happy.’

  ‘Thanks. I feel pretty good about it, you know? Feels nice to have some help with all this finally.’

  ‘So how is Chels? Will she ever return my call, do we think?’

  ‘She’s still furious at him. She even had a couple of menthol Vogues. During the DAY.’

  ‘Whoa.’

  ‘As far as I can tell, she told that naughty Jeremy he’d done irreversible damage and never wanted to see his obnoxious face again.’

  ‘That poor guy, he’s obviously been anxious about this secret all this time, and then when it comes out he gets punished anyway.’

  ‘He should’ve been honest with her, Abs. Only the very evil or very stupid would deny that.’

  ‘Would YOU have told her if you were him? No chance! She’d be gone in a whiff of Chanel before you could even explain.’

  ‘Still. Terribly deceitful.’

  ‘Of course it was. But you have to see his rationale; he just wanted to wait till the right time … Hey, do you think her anger is amplified because she slept with him?’

  ‘Almost definitely.’

  ‘But from the sounds of things he and his wife are legitimately separated, and Oli—’

  ‘But the scoundrel is not yet divorced. And that’s what Chels is annoyed abo—’

  ‘Does he plan to?’

  ‘Who knows, she didn’t let him explain.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to go ’round tonight – I feel like a bad friend for making her hang up on me today, and I need her to get some perspective.’

  Mads laughed. ‘Most friends would be, “I want to be there for her”, and we’re both bulldozers, ramming our opinions down her gullet until she’s gasping for air.’

  ‘As if she wouldn’t – doesn’t – do the same. That’s why I love you two and why you love me. Now, will you come over, do you think? Or have you reached your limit on this for today?’

  Mads sighed. ‘Regrettably I have work to do. Give her a wallop for me, take wine and be prepared to smoke thin cigarettes that taste like Colgate.’

  ‘Can do. Love.’

  ‘Love.’

  As Abby finished her lunch, mindlessly scoffing it down, she decided she wanted Marcus’s opinion on the situation. As she called his number, she realised how much she respected him and his take on life. He had a far more gentle approach than she and the girls did, he took time to weigh things up, assess all angles and deeply consider each party’s feelings … whereas their preferred speed when leaping to conclusions was more suited to an auto-bahn. How he could be so wise at such an age, she didn’t know. She was certain when she was twenty-two she was screaming at other drunk, aggressive girls in tacky nightclubs when they dared speak to whatever lucky guy was on her arm that month. Should she ever meet his mother, she was going to thank her for producing such a lovely young man.

  25

  Chelsea wasn’t home when Abby arrived and knocked and called and texted and emailed and then called again.

  She waited for thirty-five minutes in her car, desperate to crack open the bottle of pinot gris and neck some – it was a revoltingly humid evening and she’d been looking forward to a glass of wine all day – but finally gave up and drove home. Her instinct was to call Marcus, and see if he was free and wanted to come over, but she knew he’d be in the office, working hard on her website. But maybe he could come over after? She’d text him and see …

  Then stopped. As Abby realised what she’d been about to do, she shook her head in an attempt to dislodge the thought from her brain. She had to stop automatically choosing him as her free-time activity! What had she used to do with her time? Lots of things, surely! Surely there were some hobbies … showing dogs or crochet or bingo, something must have eaten up her spare time. Now all she really wanted to do was hang out with Marcus and eat tapas and drink wine.

  Abby walked in the door, kicking her shoes off and immediately removing her painful, diggy-inny bra, and tried Chelsea again. The phone rang out.

  Fine. Text it was.

  Can my friend stop hating me so much and know that I want to know if she’s ok? xx

  Forty-five minutes later:

  Hi honey thank u. spent the evening with a friend, took my mind off things a bit xx

  A friend. Abby knew immediately that she’d gone and seen Graham, which made her want to cripple one of Chelsea’s permanently erect nipples. Graham Blackman was Chelsea’s kryptonite. He was a greasy, thieving, drug-dependent compulsive liar who cast a spell on Chels a few years ago, and had never bothered to take it off. He ran a very popular restaurant and bar in the city, which according to the law of Small Cities made him some kind of deity. He and Chels had shared a tumultuous six months together, in which he was definitely seeing and sleeping with other women. Chelsea had loved the heady faux-gangsta life he led, and leapt into it with the same gusto she leapt into the partying, champagne and cocaine. To say Mads and Abby disliked Graham was like saying water irritated the Wicked Witch of the West. He was Satan, right here on Earth, practising sin and disruption daily. He’d made Chelsea insecure, aggressive, combative and eventually, weak. She’d kept sleeping with Graham long after they ‘broke up’ but wouldn’t admit it to the girls. They found out through ancillary friends, or from his entourage of baboons, who roamed the city and its bars as though they owned them. Most of which they did. All of Chelsea’s wits and smarts melted when Graham was around. She became a strange, dependent groupie; another of his dazed wenches, constantly drunk because Graham didn’t like anyone being too alert around him for fear of them being able to see what he was really like.

  Abby started to call Chelsea’s number, then thought better of it. If she’d been out drinking with Graham she would be the furthest thing from receptive.

  Jeremy been in touch?

  Calling, texting all day, flowers, as if that’s going to make me forget he has wife n kid.

  Is it not worth hearing him out maybe? Then you can boot him for good if you need to. I understand you’re upset toots, but I also know you really like him …

  Ur a godamn dog with a bone sometimes, u know that?

  Yyyess! Abby could sense a micro-breakthrough. Time to ram it home. She typed so fast that she kept messing up the words, furiously deleting and re-writing in her panic to sustain
the goodwill.

  I get the sense Jeremy is worth it. You’re every guy’s dream girl so why would he do something to risk losing you without having some kind of strategy??

  Alrite, dalai, that’ll do.

  Dinner tomorrow? Lunch? Come on, I’ll let you boss me into eating something disgusting made with quinoa and bark …

  K, I’ll text u x

  xxx

  Abby felt much lighter seeing a kiss on the end of Chelsea’s text, and knowing she was softening her stance on Jeremy. Abby wasn’t sure why she was standing so firmly in Jeremy’s corner; she put it down to how happy, patient and calm Chels was around him. That deserved support.

  She looked at her phone: 9.44. If she was smart, she would put the wine in the fridge, run a bath, and go to bed. If she was embracing the ‘I’m in my thirties and I’ve supposedly hit my sexual peak and I have a toyboy to play with,’ side of her, she would send a suggestive text to Marcus and get him into her bed later this evening.

  How is it going, handsome? Looking like another 1am finish? Looking like an Abby’s place finish?

  She placed the phone on her kitchen bench and opened the wine. She’d earned it. She even had some leftover noodles – everything was coming up Abby.

  Beautiful woman, it’s going to be a ridiculously late one. I’ll crash at home so as not to bother a lady xxx

  Always with a school of kisses.

  It won’t bother me at all, I’ll leave a key in pot plant x

  He was sweet, she thought as she poured herself a litre of wine and sat down to enjoy her scalding hot dinner. Very thoughtful.

  I’m a bit wrecked, Garfield. Probably better I just head home. You know I wish I was there doing naughty things to you, right? Xxx

  Abby’s face arranged itself into a scowl. Don’t feed me your filthy wish list and then knock me back, she hissed internally. She picked up her phone to say as much. What difference did it make whose bed he slept in? It wasn’t like he’d get any less sleep. He kept spare t-shirts in his car, so he wouldn’t even have to go home before work in the morning!

  She thought about why she was feeling so incensed. Was it because she wasn’t getting her own way? Because he was bold enough to stand up to her? Because she actually, genuinely wanted to see him? Because he put himself first for once? If it was the latter she was very disappointed in herself. Especially since she’d been the one to rebuff men in the exact manner he’d just rebuffed her – sweet, sexy but final – a million times.

  Abby put the phone down and sat with her head in hands. She was being a moron. She was overtired, exhausted and reacting in a stupid and juvenile fashion. Who cared if he stayed over? Thank GOD she hadn’t texted him again. She was embarrassed just thinking about it. He was working late because of HER, and even if it wasn’t her website, big deal. He had a job; he couldn’t just drop everything and be with her whenever she whistled. The problem was that he did. That very first booty call aside, Marcus had always been front and centre whenever Abby had requested it. Obviously the moment he pulled back, it was going to feel strange and uncomfortable. She had to grow up. This wasn’t a one-way relationship. Was it a relationship? She supposed it was … They spent three to four nights a week together – that was far more relationshipy than Abby had been in the last few years. Oh well, she concluded, it was fine for now. She was having fun, it wasn’t serious and when she had some time she would figure out how to gently extract herself from it before it became anything more than what it was now.

  Some research for her trip would take her mind off Marcus she thought happily, pulling her laptop onto the bench and tapping in her password to bring it to life, failing to see that she was subconsciously plotting her escape plan from Marcus in doing so, in the shape of a plane ticket. She had to start getting serious about where she was going and when, so that the universe, and Allure and Marcus and everyone would know that this was serious, and it was happening, and nothing would hold her back from rambling through France or Italy or Greece and putting on ten impossible-to-shift-but-intensely-enjoyable-to-accrue kilos.

  26

  Even though Marcus had showed her exactly how to do it last night, and even drawn a cute diagram, complete with love hearts and stick-figure Abby and Marcus kissing, the laptop refused to come through Abby’s TV. Meanwhile, sixteen models, all putting small dents in her floorboards with their five-inch heels and talking at a level usually reserved for people calling their children in for dinner, sat and stood around her small lounge room and waited. She had forgotten to even offer them a drink or buy some snacks, she realised as she felt the sweat beading on her forehead and pooling under her armpits.

  Finally, her desktop screen came up on the TV. Some of the girls clapped.

  ‘Sorry, girls. As we all know, under state law no presentation is allowed to proceed until at least one technical difficulty arises.’

  The girls giggled and those standing shifted noisily from hip to hip; they’d already been waiting a good fifteen minutes.

  ‘Okay, I’ll be brief; I know you’re all busy and thank you for stopping by. So, as you know, Allure has, for the most part, become a fully online operation. From here, it’s just myself and my new assistant, Charlie, who you’ll love, and who starts next week. Think Zooey Deschanel, but cuter. Charlie and I will be your point of contact, but we will be your last point of contact: the website should be able to do most things for you.’

  ‘It’s really simple …’ Abby got the home page up and navigated around as she spoke, mousing over and clicking on different tabs as she went.

  ‘Abby,’ Sophie, a picture-perfect, all-American looking girl with the most glorious head of naturally long and thick hair Abby had ever had the pleasure of hiring/being jealous of, spoke.

  ‘Yes, Sophie?’

  ‘Um, Belinda said we get fined if we can’t do our shift now?’

  ‘Well, kind of. There’s a penalty if you cancel after the reminder text. It’s only $10, but you have to appreciate the amount of work that goes into finding your replacement. Of course, if you’re sick or you can find your own replacement, there’s obviously no fine.’

  Murmurs rumbled through the room. Which Abby had expected.

  ‘Guys, do you know how many phone calls and how much bribery has to occur when one of you doesn’t show or pulls out with an hour to go? The penalty doesn’t exist to take money from you, but to compel you to let me know with plenty of advance if you can’t do your shift.’

  ‘What if we get sick just a few hours before the shift?’ Amelia piped up.

  ‘Or our apartment floods? Mine did the other day, you know, and I had an appointment with my eyebrow threader and—’ Jacqui’s face was frowning and indignant.

  ‘Caroline? In Hayes street?’ Lucinda piped up.

  ‘Yes!!’ Jacqui confirmed, as though she’d been asked if she’d like a million dollars.

  ‘OMG, she’s the best. She isn’t to die for, she’s to die five.’ Lucinda closed her eyes and placed her hand on her chest in respect for the eyebrow threader.

  ‘Yes, isn’t she AMAZE?! I was so annoyed I had to lose my appointment, but I couldn’t just leave my house because, like, my whole floor was totally flooded, but you’re saying I would be fined for that? When it’s not even my faul—’

  Jacqui spoke in a tone and manner that demanded an uproarious ‘Yeah!’ from surrounding troops. Which predictably, it was.

  ‘Okay, everyone calm down, life happens, and I get that – we’ll deal with those incidences as they come up. It’s more about times when you have a clash, or circumstances change, and you can’t do your shift. It’s not that big a deal, it’s just a pre-emptive strike against me calling twenty-nine of you in a row, leaving voicemails and emails and sending texts, trying to fill a shift within an hour. Okay? Are we clear on that?’

  Some of the girls whispered to each other, but most stared at her blankly, on some level knowing they were guilty of that exact behaviour. Sian and Kylie had their arms folded and super
cilious gazes on their faces, mostly, Abby assumed, because they NEVER cancelled or let her down and were resentful they were being treated like criminals without having committed a crime. Abby didn’t have the energy to appease them and tell them how wonderful and reliant they were right now, she’d email them later.

  ‘Okay, where was I? So, alright, you each have your own login and password, and then – we created them for you, it’s just your full name as login, and your mobile number as your password, you can change it if you like – you’ll have your own area that tells you what jobs you’ve been requested for, when you’re working next, who else is working that shift, their phone numbers and emails so you can co-ordinate lifts or whatever, which outfit is required, and of course where each job is, and the Google map of it so you don’t get lost. Not that any of you ever would, of course. Especially not you, Tara.’

  Everyone laughed. Tara was renowned for her horrendous sense of direction and terrible driving. She’d once been forty-five minutes late for a job because she thought she knew the bar. The bar was called ‘The Local’, and there’s one in every suburb. Not surprisingly, she went to The Local on the other side of the city, and sat there innocently sipping lemonade at the bar, dressed as a retro air hostess, waiting for the other girls to arrive.

  ‘Also, we’ve got a Facebook page now, and as well as on the site in the gallery section, we’re going to start posting a few photos of you girls at work.’

  Instant panic.

  ‘Can we approve them first?’

  ‘Yeah, and can you not, like, tag us or anything please?’

  ‘I don’t want ANY photos of me in that disgusting silver dress on there.’

  ‘Yeah, or the white suits. Gerooss.’