“What part of ‘shut up’ don’t you understand?” Jools snapped. “Just let me read things for myself, would you? I do have a brain, you know.”
“No Jools, this is important.”
“Fuck off.”
“Two years later, leaving behind a young and grieving wife, heavily pregnant with their first child, he returned to India in a body bag . . .”
G skipped a few lines and then emphasized, “. . . this violation of his rights to a safe and secure future in Australia was widely reported in India, inciting extremist anti-Australia responses that included the burning of effigies of the Australian prime minister . . .”
Jools pricked her ears up as G read the last sentence. She turned and looked at him, acknowledging his presence for the first time this morning with a glance over the top of her reading glasses.
Hey, that’s bad, she thought to herself.
“That’s not good news, Jools. The Indian students are a multimillion-dollar industry for Australia and we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by allowing this Indian-bashing to continue. Don’t like it at all.”
G went back to the article, skimming and speed-reading the last few paragraphs when suddenly a two-line quote jumped off the page at him like a beacon flashing in a storm.
“This isn’t great news for the industry and certainly not indicative of the sentiment of the average Australian. We all deplore this senseless violence . . .” It was a quote in the article by their close family friend Paul.
But Jools was on a tangential thought plane to G. Instead, she immediately started thinking about her girlfriends Kaz and Bec, and the penny suddenly dropped. The three of them power walked together three or four times a week, workshopping life’s problems in a way that women can only do when their male partners aren’t around as they traversed the length and breadth of the heavily treed streets of Elwood and beyond.
They would discuss everything and anything, usually always prefaced by events in their children’s lives, and they loved nothing better than a bit of scandal or juicy news about goings-on in their own lives, or even more importantly, in other people’s lives.
Yet on all their walks, the issue of”curry bashing” had never been mentioned.
“Strange,” Jools said, verbalizing her thoughts for her ears only. “Looking back over the past few weeks, it’s as if the topic has been conveniently avoided.”
Which to Jools meant that Kaz and Bec were holding back, or alternatively, they just didn’t have a clue what was going on, which also was most unlikely.
And yet the beating of these innocent Indians indirectly affected both Kaz and Bec because their partners were heavily involved in building and renting student accommodation to the same Indian students who were being attacked, and even killed.
Yes, I can see why G’s concerned, thought Jools, this time hiding her unease from G. He still wasn’t in her good books. He’s always had a social conscience and could never stand to see violence inflicted on innocent people . . . or even animals, for that matter. But this could really be detrimental for Kaz and Bec and their very comfortable lives if this escalates any further . . .
Jools suddenly snapped out of her gray mood.
“Give me a look.”
“I’m still reading the article.”
Jools grabbed the paper from G as if it belonged to her.
“Try ‘please.’”
“Please.”
Jools read the headline again and started skimming through the first few paragraphs. Suddenly she was hit by a blinding flash of the obvious.
“Have you spoken with Paul or Steve about this? It could have a major influence on the success of their business. Aren’t they trying to get presales now on that development they’re doing in Carlton?” Jools’s mind was working overtime.
“Looking back at the last few months, it’s strange that Kaz and Bec have been so tight-lipped about the effect of this bashing problem on their business. It’s almost as if they’ve been sworn to secrecy.”
Jools’s genetic “gift” from her long line of shamanic grandmothers had given her a nose for smelling a rat, and the more she thought about it, the more she realized that the girls’ silence was starting to look like a cover-up. Or at least nondisclosure.
Convenient.
All the girls were interested in talking about recently had been how sales were slowing down and that they were having to refinance the development, but there was never any mention as to what was forcing them to resort to such drastic measures. Jools just assumed their need to refinance was due to the falloff in property prices and the credit squeeze the banks were imposing on their clients, but now she was beginning to realize there were more serious issues involved.
My God! If the Indian students stopped coming to Melbourne, Paul, Kaz, Sean, and Bec could potentially lose their business.
For a fact, Jools knew the business was highly geared and that the girls weren’t at all comfortable with the millions of dollars in borrowed money the two of them had been coerced by their respective partners to go as co-guarantors for. This accidently slipped out one day as they were walking between Milton Street and Glenhuntly Road. Jools did the sums and it was obvious that with a setback like this, coupled with a drop-off in sales and rentals, could potentially see them going belly-up.
“Hey G, do you realize that there’re cross guarantees left, right, and center with this Carlton development? Kaz and Bec are both locked in with a really bad case of sexually transmitted debt here.”
This wasn’t good. No wonder Kaz and Bec were playing their cards close to their chest on this one. Their livelihoods were potentially being threatened. Jools heard her phone alerting her to a new message.
R u around today? Coffee and a walk at 11 then brunch? Becs in. Looks like the weather is lifting.
It was Kaz sending her usual Sunday morning text.
Already eaten but walk sounds good. Gs in my bad books and I need to get out of the house. Meet u 21 squares one hour.
Putting her mobile back on the bedside table, Jools said more to herself than to G, “What a timely text. I’ll see if I can find out anything.”
Jools placed the paper down as if to catch her thoughts and G immediately picked it up. Her comments had captured his attention and he wanted to know more.
I can’t dismiss Jools’s intuition. She’s so like her mum, thought G. It’s uncanny how she just always knows what’s going on inside people’s heads. The whole damn family’s psychic. It’s this Gift thing she keeps talking about.
G opened the paper back up, but before he started reading he just couldn’t resist having a final dig.
“I presume that’s Kaz, seeing if you want to go for a walk. She’s as predictable as a Swiss clock.” G didn’t really have room at the moment to be sarcastic, but it just came out that way. It was his nature.
“Doesn’t she have a normal Sunday morning with Paul? You know, like chilling out and reading the papers.”
G was entering dangerous territory.
“If you expect me to stay at home with you and be lovey-dovey, well dream on, baby. I’m outta here.”
“I suppose that means a fuck’s out of the question then?” By this stage G was definitely baiting her as he knew he had a snowball’s chance in hell of even a hug, let alone the full monty, but still, there was no harm in asking. Stranger things had happened.
Bad move.
“You sexist arsehole. You’ve got to earn the right to make love to me, and right now you don’t have any brownie points.”
Jools jumped out of bed, throwing the bedding off both herself and G.
Oh shit! I might have pushed Jools a tad too far. Time to back off . . .
“Hey sorry, just kidding.”
Silence.
“What about while you’re walking with the girls I go down to the market and pick up some food for a BBQ this afternoon? Invite the usual suspects. I’ll cook.”
Jools stopped in the doorway, thought for a second o
r two, then glanced back at G over her left shoulder with a “you’re not my favorite person” glance.
Will I give in? G’s at least trying.
And in that moment, it was settled. A BBQ at their place.
“Sure, sounds good to me. I’ll ask the girls when we have our walk, but I’m sure it’ll be okay.”
By late morning, Melbourne had already lived up to its reputation and gone through three of the four seasons: an overcast and boring winter’s morning; rain for an hour or two starting around ten o’clock; and then miraculously out of nowhere spring appeared, with glimpses of warming sunshine breaking through the heavy cloud cover as the high atmospheric breeze blew the grayness away to reveal the glowing warmth only the sun could provide.
For a Melburnian this was the norm. The ever-changing weather pattern made life interesting, and if nothing else always provided a good topic of conversation—it’s sunny . . . no actually, ah, it’s raining . . . no, wrong again, it’s blowing its tits off. No problems.
By this afternoon, we’ll all be walking around in shorts”complaining” about the heat, thought G.
Glancing up at the sky while he was heading to his car, a stupid ditty suddenly appeared out of left field that he started muttering to himself as he unlocked the door:
The Spring has sprung,
The grass has ris,
I wonder where the birdies is?
The bird’s on the wing,
No! That’s absurd,
Coz everyone knows the wing’s on the bird.
The tom-toms had been beating away in the background, and as if everyone was just waiting for an excuse to get together, G’s suggestion about having a casual BBQ for the usual suspects had grown into something larger. The way the texts and phone calls were currently flying around, it looked like the original gang of six had blown out to close on twenty people.
Dingggg . . .
G’s mobile called to him. He was stopped at the traffic lights on Ferrars Street, about to turn right into the South Melbourne market. Lost in thought, he had been staring blankly at the twentysomething girl who was sashaying across in front of him, her long, wavy, auburn hair dancing around her shoulders as if she was being filmed for a shampoo commercial. She was carrying an environmentally friendly green shopping bag full of fruit and vegetables in each hand, and G was lost in a fantasy of eroticism and “if only I was twenty years younger” when Jools’s text snapped him back to reality.
The lights changed, and as he drove off he was aware of a slight warming tingle in his groin that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago.
You lecherous old prick, he thought to himself. But a cat can look at a king. After all, what married man hasn’t considered what it would be like to be with another woman?
U at the market yet? BBQ has grown to 20. Girls bringing salads and cheese. Buy meat & sausages??? I’ll do supermarket shop. Also beer & wine OK???
Why can’t she just ring? The thought ran around in his head more as a statement than a question.
G wasn’t really into texting. He’d much rather have a real conversation. It was always a source of amusement to him why people would spend five minutes composing a text which then required a follow-up telephone call to sort out.
G did the circuit of the market parking lot, looking for a spot where some inconsiderate shopper wasn’t going to run their cart into his car, or their snotty-nosed kid wouldn’t carelessly open the door of his parents’ 4WD, leaving a telltale dent in his door. G was a bit of a car freak and although it was almost out of character for him, he was always particular about his cars, of which there had been many over the years. Twenty-eight vehicles in thirty-six years, to be precise. And they were usually all cars with an edge. Most were totally impractical as far as Jools was concerned, so his current secondhand five-year-old BMW M3 continued with the tradition. When Jools would complain, G liked to point out it’d only had one owner before him, with low mileage, and had never been thrashed.
“What use is all that power to you when you can’t use it? And then when you do, you cop a speeding fine,” Jools said to him as recently as last week when G suggested to her that she might like the three demerit points he had just been issued for doing over a hundred kilometers per hour in an eighty zone. He was already up to nine points and the extra three would see him maxed out at twelve points.
Licence suspension? Not good.
To G, when it came to cars Jools just didn’t quite get it. He’d given up years ago trying to explain his passion. There was just no mileage in it and they would never see eye to eye on the matter. She wasn’t the one who got off on the moment every time she sat in a car that was cool, the one who would wind down the window at the traffic lights just to listen to the resonant throb of a throaty exhaust coming from a desirable make that happened to be alongside, the one who preferred to watch the latest motorsport program in preference to some trashy series on the TV.
So as soon as G was happy that his precious car was safely parked in a corner spot against a wall so there was only one side of his car exposed to a possible dent, he rang Jools to sort out the shopping.
Fuck the texting.
By the time G arrived back from the market, the house was a hive of activity. Jools was in the kitchen with Cait prepping salads. She had already taken Mia and gone on a morning walk with her girlfriends while G was at the market. Jools was still in her black, body-hugging spandex capris, tight powder blue polo shirt, and Asics runners she had been given by her sister Erin, who owned a sports shop with her husband. As he put the first of the groceries down on the kitchen bench, G just couldn’t resist glancing sideways at his wife’s toned body.
You might be fifty-two, but you still have a body to die for, he would have loved to have complimented his wife with, but he knew that in her current mood she would have bawled him out for being a letch, so he let the thought slide.
But you still run rings around your girlfriends, G kept as a private thought to himself.
G might have occasionally looked lustfully at a bit of young flesh—after all, what red-blooded male didn’t?—but as the saying goes, why bother with takeout when you can dine at home, and he had a gourmet meal that was currently standing at the sink. It was almost as if his occasional past indiscretions and dalliances over the years had brought him closer to his wife. So much so that the older he got, the more G realized that Jools really was like the proverbial bottle of red wine that just kept getting better with age.
Feeling that warm tingling glow in his loins again, G walked up behind Jools, and putting his arms around her waist and slipping them inside her polo, started kissing her gently on the nape of her neck. He savored her slight natural sweet smell that was mingling delectably with the floral lemon scent of her body lotion she must have put on before her walk. Closing his eyes, G breathed in deeply and slid his wandering hands teasingly over her soft stomach and up toward her breasts.
“Get off me,” said Jools with a cold inflection to her voice, slipping deftly to the left and with a twisting motion that effectively extracted his wandering hands out from under her top. “I’m busy. When will you ever learn? Cait’s in the next room. Go make yourself useful and get the rest of the shopping out of the car, will you. We’ll have guests arriving in an hour and a half.”
G was used to Jools’s rejections of his advances; being affectionate wasn’t high on her agenda. After being married for so long, G just accepted a lack of physicality as an integral part of their relationship. Jools demonstrated her love for him in other ways, and she was always a willing partner between the sheets, so that was great compensation.
But it still didn’t stop G from trying.
G was also sensitive enough to know Jools was embarrassed about the menopause-induced thickening around her midsection that was starting to manifest of late, and even though he was her husband, she still didn’t like him groping her”fat” stomach.
If Jools would just realize, I don’t even notice it. After all, it�
��s not as if you’re overweight—just getting slightly thicker, that’s all.
In G’s eyes, this was a part of her beauty and he loved every extra fold.
Although out of character, Paul, Kaz, and their seventeen-year-old daughter Sammy were the first to arrive. For them, this was early, considering it was only 1:30 p.m. and the BBQ wasn’t due to kick off until 2 p.m. Kaz was never early for anything. Instead she was regularly”fashionably late,” as she liked to put it.
“No one ever really expects you to arrive at the stated time, do they?” she would say without the slightest hint of an apology.
And as if tarred by the same brush, Paul wasn’t much better, especially if it was the weekend and before midday. Their daughter Sammy, well, she just tagged along for the ride, learning bad habits. Paul and Kaz were both night owls who wouldn’t think of crashing until at least midnight or beyond, so morning was often a nonentity. On the weekends, jumping straight to the afternoon from the night before and totally skipping the morning was not unusual for them, especially Paul. As a couple, they really needed their own personal time zone that was thirty minutes ahead of everyone else, so by arriving their standard half an hour late they’d manage to synchronize with the mainstream and actually arrive on time.
But they were here, early and bearing gifts: enough green salad to feed a small army, a vegetarian Moroccan couscous with what looked like roasted pumpkin, eggplant, and chickpeas, something else that was covered on a large platter which G assumed was BBQ food, and to wash it all down, Paul was carrying an armful of red wine.
Shiraz no doubt, probably from Heathcote, G thought to himself. Paul was never one to bring a dud bottle of wine . . . or two or three. He could afford it and he always drank quality, making him a convenient friend to know if you also liked red and wanted to drink something other than quaffing wine.
The Cait Lennox Box Set Page 4
