Taming the Beast (6 page)

Jamie kissed Shelley, because he knew she expected him to, and then he kept kissing her because – as always – he found that kissing Shelley was much nicer than he had remembered. She really was a great girl, and they did make an excellent couple. Shelley liked it that he was studious and softly spoken; she said she couldn’t wait to see him finish uni and set up in his own accountancy business, that she dreamed about being his office manager and also his lunch
lady and personal masseuse. She cut his hair for him because she said she couldn’t bear the thought of another stylist getting her scissors on his precious sandy locks, and he didn’t want anyone else doing it because Shelley pressed her breasts into the back of his neck while she was cutting and told him funny stories about all the filthy haired, lecherous men she usually had to cut for.

‘Okay, stop.’ Shelley smiled up at him. ‘No, not stop, pause. To be continued in the near future in a more suitable location.’

He nuzzled her neck. Over her shoulder he saw that Mike and Jess had disappeared. ‘We could go inside. Find a nice, private room.’

Shelley giggled. ‘Or we could go back to my place. Mum and Dad won’t be home till after midnight.’

Jamie hesitated for too long. Her smile faded. She stepped out of his embrace. ‘You don’t want to come to my place?’

‘No, I do. Of course I do.’ He tried to pull her closer, but she resisted. ‘I was just thinking that I don’t want to wait that long. If we went inside–’

‘You could screw me and then come back out and moon around waiting for Sarah to arrive.’

‘That is so fucking unfair.’ He couldn’t believe how unfair it was. For once – yes, he admitted, it was only for once – he had not been thinking about Sarah at all; he genuinely had been thinking that he’d like to have sex with his girlfriend in one of the unfamiliar rooms of this unfamiliar house whose owners he did not know.

‘This jealousy thing is getting old, Shell.’

‘What’s getting old, Jamie, is you acting like you’re just killing time with me until your precious Sarah comes to her senses and gives up her mega-slut life to settle down with you.’

‘I’m not going to listen to this shit again.’ He started to walk away, stopped and turned back. ‘Sarah is my friend. When you disrespect her, you disrespect me.’

Shelley laughed, shrill and loud. ‘Oh, please, as if it’s offensive to call Sarah Clark a slut. It’s practically her official title.’

Jamie walked inside. He checked the living room, kitchen, lounge room, hallway. He went back outside and shuffled around the perimeter of the yard. She definitely wasn’t here. And Shelley was right about Sarah. So right that it felt like she had crept inside his head and walked around and taken notes.

Mike reappeared, looking dishevelled and happy. He told Jamie that he and Jess had seen Shelley crying in the hallway and that Jess was in there now, comforting her. ‘You’re in the shit, heh?’

‘Yeah. I guess I better go and make it up to her.’

‘Sometimes it’s better to let them cry themselves out.’

Jamie nodded and took a sip of his beer. He was exceptionally bad at small talk. Before Mike had come along he had been lurking on the edges of a group of people he vaguely knew from uni, pretending to be listening to the conversation. But by holding his shoulder and talking fast, Mike had drawn Jamie away from the group, and here he stood face-to-face with this bloke he barely knew who had very recently had sex with one of Jamie’s oldest friends. A different kind of bloke would say something like
so how does old Jess shape up in the sack
. Jamie didn’t know why he could think these things and not say them, but it explained why his friends were all girls.

‘The legendary Sarah hasn’t shown up then?’

Jamie shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen her. She might be around somewhere.’

‘Sounds like the kind of girl a bloke would notice though.’

‘True.’

Mike nodded and lit a cigarette. ‘Notice in a look-at-that-ugly-crack-whore-throwing-herself-at-everything-in-pants way?’

‘No! Did Jess tell you she looked like that?’

Mike laughed and held up his palms. ‘Jess didn’t say anything about how she looked. I just assumed from all those stories that she…’ He bit his lip, looking off into the distance. ‘So what
does
she look like?’

Jamie stalled by tossing his almost-full beer into a nearby cardboard box, then taking another from a slightly further away box, opening it, drinking from it. He had no idea how to describe Sarah’s looks. She was not ugly. She did not look like a crack whore or any kind of whore or any kind of addict. She did not look old enough to be in university or to live alone or to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and have sex. She did not look as though her voice would be as deep as it was.

She looked like – she was – the daughter of suburban, upper middle-class professionals. She was what a lot of people called short and skinny, but what Jamie called average. Her skin was so pale she could be mistaken for an English tourist. She was the only person Jamie had ever seen who could have hair down to her arse without looking like a religious freak. It was shiny and not quite black, and when she tied it back, her ponytail was thicker than Jamie’s wrist. Her eyes were fucking terrifying.

Of course he didn’t say any of this to Mike. He just shrugged and said, ‘She’s okay,’ and went to find Shelley.

Most kids Sarah knew applied for their Learner’s Permits on their sixteenth birthday, spent a year of Saturdays learning to drive, received their Driver’s Licence on their seventeenth birthday, and on turning eighteen, a brand new car from Mum and Dad. Sarah managed the first step okay; at sixteen she was still – barely – living up to her parents’ expectations. But then everything went to hell, and she spent most of that year struggling to keep herself fed and clothed and in school, and so had neither the time nor the money to take driving lessons. Her seventeenth birthday was a blur of drinking, smoking and fucking, followed by another year of bareknuckled survival, and by her eighteenth she had decided it was better she didn’t have a licence because she was quite often either drunk or high, and besides, getting lifts from men was the easiest way to get them into her flat.

The downside to her non-driver status was that she was reliant on the local private bus company to get her to and from work each night. As the only bus service in the district, it had no competition, and thus its drivers were careless about sticking to the timetable, sometimes ignoring it altogether and ending their shift an hour or two early. On these occasions – and after freezing her arse off at the bus stop for twenty-minutes, Sarah realised tonight was just such an occasion – she was forced to either walk, hitch or call Jamie. She had promised Jamie she would never, ever hitch, and she had promised herself she would only ever do it in daylight.

‘Shit.’ She stamped her feet against the cold, but her legs were tired after her double shift and the stamping hurt, so she stopped. She looked back at the steakhouse; she would have to go back in
there to use the phone. She really didn’t want to do that: the drunks started to get nasty after eleven and she was still in uniform which meant she couldn’t kick them in the nuts or tell them to go fuck themselves. Not without losing her job, anyway.

‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ Her leather jacket was warm enough, but the wind whipped against her bare legs. Her sore, tired, cold, bare legs. She swore again, stepped to the edge of the footpath and stuck out her thumb.

It didn’t take long – three or four minutes, seven or eight cars – before a late model Commodore station wagon pulled up alongside her. ‘Where you going?’ the driver called out. He was fortyish, dark, thinning hair, wire-rimmed glasses. Sarah peeked into the car: a child safety seat and a couple of picture books on the back seat; an empty diet coke can on the floor in the front; a blue bear with a polka-dot bowtie hanging from the rear-vision mirror.

‘North Parramatta. Just past the gaol. Is that out of your way?’

‘Not at all. Hop in.’

The car smelt like the bottom of Sarah’s fridge, but it was warm and she was off her feet so she was happy. He drove like a man used to chauffeuring small children around. Slow, but with frequent, fast glances to the side, over his shoulder and into the rear-vision mirror.

‘Just got off work?’ he asked, glancing sideways and down at her legs.

‘Yeah. I normally catch the bus but it didn’t show up.’

‘Still though, you really shouldn’t get into cars with strange men.’

Sarah looked at him. He had a lot of wrinkles around his eyes, and his nose was the tiniest bit crooked. From the front it probably wouldn’t even be noticeable, but Sarah was looking at him side on, and so she could see the kink that was probably from football or maybe squash. Not from a bar fight though: he was too clean cut.
He was about three years away from being past it. He had nice ears. Small, neat ears.

‘I mean…’ he glanced at her legs again, ‘I could be an axe murderer, or a serial killer.’

‘You could be, but you’re not, are you?’

He chuckled, revealing a double chin. ‘Well, I’d hardly tell you if I was, would I?’

Sarah smiled. ‘You wouldn’t need to. I have an inbuilt psychopath sensor.’ She touched the top of his arm, briefly, as a test. He gasped, then tried to cover it by clearing his throat. She touched him again, this time letting her hand rest on his forearm. ‘I’m perfectly safe with you, I can tell.’

He looked at her face for the first time. ‘How old are you?’

She skimmed her palm along the soft fur of his arm. ‘Old enough.’

The man frowned at the windscreen. ‘Where do I turn off?’

‘Left at the next lights.’

He drove on in silence. Sarah wondered what he had been doing, driving this family wagon around the suburbs so late on a weeknight. She suspected he had been heading for one of the Sorrel Street brothels. Either that or he actually was a psychopath looking for his next victim.

‘So where are you off to tonight? After you drop me off, I mean.’

He licked his lips. ‘Oh… nowhere.’

They were nearly at her place. She was so tired; she really should just go to bed. The man was biting his lip, concentrating way too hard on his driving.

‘Pull up in front of that truck.’

He did as she asked. Leaving his hands firmly at ten and two o’clock, staring straight ahead. She was tired, yes, but that was the
least of what she was feeling. Waitressing robbed her of herself; she became a girl in a uniform who would smile perkily at the twenty-something blokes who asked her if hospitality was a fulfilling career; a cookie-cutter waitress who would not pour beer over the head of the old man who pinched her arse every time she walked by his table; a sturdy competent pair of hands moving from wiping to stacking to scribbling order codes to scrubbing. Fourteen hours of being closed to the world left her bursting to be opened.

‘I’m going to have a beer before bed. You want one?’

The man gripped the steering wheel with shaking hands. ‘I do, yes.’

He babbled while she unlocked her door – he had been to a work function, couldn’t stay long, his wife was expecting him home – but once inside he fell silent.

Sarah watched his face; she could always tell how a man would fuck by the way he reacted to her flat. Raised eyebrows and a turned-up nose meant the bloke would go on to screw her like he was the prince and she the scullery maid; sad eyes and pitying sighs meant she would be the little lost girl getting fucked by her kind protector; open disapproval at her housekeeping skills warned her she would be the naughty daughter getting punished by Daddy; and hesitation, fear even, meant she would be driving the action, showing the poor fellow that everything was okay. Her favourites – and the rarest by far – were the ones who didn’t react at all, didn’t even look around. The blokes who had her on her back as soon as the door was closed, who could spend a day and night in her slum and never discover the colour of her walls or the layout of her kitchen.

‘Is this…’ The man squinted at her. ‘You live alone?’

‘Yep.’ Sarah walked past him, reaching her arm to the right to turn on her bedroom light, then to the left to light up the bathroom. The one in the combined hallway/kitchen/living room was
already on. The man continued to squint through the gloom. She really should get a lamp. A tall, bright lamp to stand next to the sofa. But then what was the point? All she did here was sleep, screw and study, so as long as she could see her books, she didn’t need much light at all.

‘Have you lived here long?’

Sarah handed him a beer and opened one for herself. ‘Forever,’ she told him, which felt true. It had been five years, which was almost a quarter of her whole life.

The man sipped his beer, staring intently at the nicotine yellow wall in front of him. ‘How old did you say you were?’

‘I didn’t.’ Sarah peeled off her jacket and kicked off her shoes, sighing at the immediate relief this gave her feet. ‘Smoke?’ she offered.

‘No, I don’t–’ He nodded at the pile of textbooks on her foldout card table. ‘You’re a student.’

‘When I’m not a waitress.’ Sarah sank into one of the five-dollar chairs, indicating to the man that he should sit in the other. He hesitated, perhaps wondering if the rickety old thing would hold him, then lowered himself until he was perched on the edge of the seat.

‘What do you study?’

‘Arts.’ Sarah stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. At first she had thought he was the nervous type, but it was clear now he was a protector. She could see the cogs turning behind his small black eyes: how it would only take a little money to get her some decent furniture, how the least he could do was pay her uni fees, how he could make sure he always picked her up when she worked late, so she wouldn’t have to come back alone to this grim little flat.

‘Hey, you haven’t seen the view.’ Sarah stood and walked the three steps to her bedroom and then the two to her bedroom window. She knew without checking that he was right behind her.

‘It’s an alley.’ There was an angry edge to his voice. ‘A garbage filled alley.’

‘What a pessimist. You’re looking at a treasure trove. Look, we’ve got a couple of mattresses, some car tyres, and that cane chair would be lovely if only the seat wasn’t punched out.’ Sarah felt his breath on the back of her neck. ‘That TV out in the kitchen came from that alley. It doesn’t have colour, but it works well enough otherwise. I like to watch the late news when I get home from work. It keeps me company.’