Unzipped (5 page)

Glenferrie Road is not my favourite strip of shops: everyone wears sunglasses, most of the women are blonde, highheeled, made-up. The men too. It’s Chapel Street with less bling and Balwyn with more youth. Taylor picked the cafe: she’d been told about its cakes.

As our food arrives, Taylor says: ‘That girl over there keeps looking at you.’

I’ve been looking out the window watching a woman try to park her too-big car into a too-small space. Fourth attempt and the tension is building.

Taylor nods to a back corner of the cafe.

BJ in her cycling clothes. With Justine. I don’t believe it. I haven’t been to this strip of shops since I was eighteen and had dinner with friends at the Nepalese restaurant up the road. That’s twice in nearly twenty years and here’s BJ with Justine. This is absurd. I’m going back to the window.

It’s only eleven and a little early for cake, but, as she says, she might not be allowed out for the rest of the year, so Taylor will take it when she can get it. ‘I’ll have this one, it’s fruit, practically breakfast. She’s still looking, Pete. I don’t know who she is, but she has a lovely face.’

Taylor’s right. BJ has a lovely face and I wish she’d go home.

‘Oh, I sort of know her. She was at the pub a couple of weeks ago.’

BJ smiles at me.

Please don’t come over.

She comes over.

I’d love to slide under the table, a puddle of embarrassment and anywhere-but-here-ness. Someone would come along with a mop and a bucket and I’d be safe.

‘Hi BJ. This is Taylor.’

Taylor has an annoying habit of liking people. In the old days, before kids, she listed on her resume that one of her interests was meeting new people. She was telling the truth. She’ll be intrigued by BJ. Why not? I am.

‘Hi Taylor. That’s Justine.’ She points to the interested face across the room.

‘Would you like to join us, BJ?’

Great.

‘She looks busy, Taylor.’

‘No, really,’ BJ looks at me, ‘we were just going.’

‘Stay. You can tell Peta and me why we should let cyclists onto the road.’

That’s it. I won’t get rid of her now.

I drop my serviette onto the table and grab my handbag. ‘I’ve got to go to the loo.’

‘Peta, are you here?’

‘Yes, I’m having a heart attack.’

‘Another one?’ BJ says. ‘Can you open the door?’

I put my head out. It’s just us.

‘It’s good to see you,’ she says as she locks the door behind her.

I need to get to the bottom of this. ‘Glenferrie is miles from Northcote, BJ.’

‘When you’re on a bike, you’re not miles from anything. We had to drop in on Jus’s mum. She needed a huntsman removed from her bedroom. Don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything stupid.’

I can hear Ruby:
You don’t have to, BJ. Peta’s got the stupid covered.

‘We have to stop this.’

‘Yeah, I know. You’re married and I’m not into complications. Kiss me?’

The toilet is cramped and there’s a Glen 20 tang. The globe has blown and the only light is from under the door. I’m afraid to touch anything. I set the environment to the back of mind—where Mark is—and kiss BJ.

Between kisses we talk.

‘I missed you, Pete. How long’s it been? Twelve hours? Eighteen?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t pash and count at the same time.’ I disengage. ‘What are we doing?’

‘We’re having a bit of fun.’ She kisses my chin, my neck. ‘When it stops being fun, we’ll know. Can you touch me here?’ She unzips her bike top, places my hand on a breast, squeezes it.

‘Harder,’ she says.

‘BJ?’ a voice, Justine. She knocks.

We straighten up and open the door.

To BJ: ‘You have lipstick all over your face.’

To me: ‘Your friend is wondering where you are.’

‘I thought you’d drowned.’ Taylor has ordered me another coffee. She forks a large chunk of cake into her mouth.

I sit, drop my bag at my feet, spoon two sugars into my coffee. Watch the sugar slide its funnel into my froth and try to think about nothing.

‘Sorry, I lost a contact lens.’ BJ smiles, then nudges Justine with her elbow. ‘We’ve got to get going.’

‘Yeah, we’ve got that thing,’ Justine says. She’s sharper when she’s been hit by a car.

‘A thing?’ Taylor raises her eyebrows. ‘Well, don’t ride through any red lights on your way to it.’

‘We won’t. We play fair on weekends.’ Good cyclists. There they go. Riding off into the traffic.

‘Lost a contact lens. Bullshit. That girl likes you.’

‘I like her too. And I like you. You have cake on your cheek.’

As if I can think about nothing. I’m too rapt to see BJ again. My eyes are smiling, even though I’ve got my face under control. They’re sparkling in their sockets. Look out!

The Monday morning after the unzipping I’m on the tram. After the couch, I took out a cyclist without trying. Who knows what could happen after Saturday afternoon. I might wipe out a loaded bus stop. I’m leaving my car in the garage until this affair is over.

Why is it called an affair? An affair sounds good, like a festival, bright lights and taffeta and no one getting hurt. Am I having an affair?

One couch.

One coffee, okay, two.

One unzipping.

Easy maths. It’s about intention. And I intend to get back to BJ’s asap.

This morning I was standing at the fridge, the door open so Mark couldn’t see my face when I said, ‘The library is taking longer than anticipated. I may have to work nights.’

I’m a cliché in a red dress.

‘S’okay,’ he said, ‘I won’t be here to miss you.’

He’s got a work dinner tonight and he’s off to Sydney tomorrow for a three-day conference: ‘When Legal and Social Media Programmes Collide’. Three days of how to make Facebook work for you. Hope he’s got a good book. Back in time to unpack and debrief, Carole Smart’s party on Saturday and Chicago on Sunday. He’s living for that firm and so am I.

I shut the fridge. Yeah. Might as well have an affair, he won’t be here to miss that either. I grabbed my keys and bag and kissed him goodbye.

Messy and half-missing, my concentration is shot this morning. I leave my book in my bag. Make an untidy circle in the fogged-up mist of my window. Glinting windscreens, oily rainbows shimmering on the bitumen, people everywhere.

In the CBD I hop off the tram a couple of blocks early, the three-step skip to the footpath bringing me back to my leap off BJ’s doorstep. How it felt to do something so unpredictable. Like I was a kid and finding out was back to being a daily event.

No rain. Three kilometres back it was pouring. Melbourne. In my bag I have an umbrella and a spare singlet—I’m all about just in case.

Over Queen Street, the fruit vendor on the corner is selling apples for two dollars, a single banana is a dollar fifty. People are queuing for two-dollar Granny Smiths, and I think I’ve got problems.

A bike courier wings by.

BJ walks like she’s got spurs and totes a gun. Does she ride with a swagger, too?

On the corner of William and Collins streets, among the black and grey clad shoulders, I text BJ.
Good morning, gorgeous.
I don’t mind how long it takes her to reply. She has uni. She has work. She probably has friends. Girls like BJ didn’t sit on the phone waiting for texts.

My phone vibrates.

Good morning yourself, gorgeous.

My day made at 8 a.m., I stride into the foyer and grin at the security guard. He looks over his shoulder to see if I’m smiling at someone else. The polished peak of his cap catches the shine of the lights.

In the lift I develop a plan: I’ll compartmentalise. The box was so successful on Saturday, a couple of compartments will be brilliant. I’ll get on the internet, find out how it’s done. Google is better than an anonymous advice-line, better than my horoscope recently abandoned. What does the moon have to do with my stars anyway? Google is an oracle in my pocket.

Guilt. Think about that later.

Why let the couch happen in the first place? That will need a compartment with several sections and a strong lid.

I’ll ask BJ.

See if she wants to go for a drive, I’ve got an e-TAG and all night.

Confident and anxious, excited and scared, new music, extra attention to what I’m wearing and a brand new pimple. I’m thirty-five but I feel like I’m seventeen.

I’m dodging the girls at work. Because we’re relocating, and none of us knows where we’ll be from one hour to the next, Jacqui, Jackie and Trish have been easy to avoid.

I’m not talking as much to Anna at the cafe.

She’s noticed. Of course she has, we talk all the time. About her kids and her husband, how she’d like to make more than coffee with her Coca-Cola rep. About the library and Mrs Dalloway and Chicago.

She handed me my coffee this morning. ‘You okay? You don’t look yourself.’

You bet I don’t.

‘Sure, Anna. Fine. Just tired.’

She nodded, turned to the next customer.

Tired is good. Everybody’s tired.

There is nothing sadder than an empty bookcase. The bottom shelves have scuff marks from people trying to reach the books on the highest shelves. I found sixteen biros, three tram tickets and a pair of underpants, filmy, latex green with black lace, jammed into
Antitrust Law Stories.
I hooked them out with a bent paperclip and dropped them into the bin in the toilets. Wouldn’t want anybody to think they were mine. If I was Ruby I would have slid them into a clear plastic document wallet with a note,
are these yours?
and taped it to the fridge in the tea room.

I’m donating
Lloyd’s List Law Reports
to one of the lawyers. Don’t need them, we have an online subscription. They’re boxed up in front of the goods lift.

Taylor is on email:

hi pete, i can’t sleep as usual, how’s things? do you think you’d be free for some babysitting week after next? that girl give you any trouble? you giving her any?! t x

The thing about friends is that they know you. They know when you’re lying, avoiding. And they can tell—by your dips in concentration, the clip of your stride, the restlessness of your body language—when you’ve been fucking.

‘Why haven’t you been returning my calls?’ Ruby dumps her bag onto my table, picks up a menu. ‘Where were you last night?’

‘Last night?’

With BJ. She was meant to be studying and I was meant to being somebody’s wife. The somebody wasn’t home, he was at his work dinner.

Ruby isn’t buying, ‘We were going to the movies. Halfprice at the Nova on Monday nights, remember? I text you and I get nothing back.’

‘Sorry, I had it on silent.’

‘Is your email on silent too?’

‘What’s email anyway? It’s not communicating. There’s no tone of voice, no nuance. Email is without personality.’

‘You’re being very defensive.’

I look up from my menu. Honesty. I can do that face-to-face. ‘And you’re being annoying.’

‘Taylor said she hasn’t heard from you for days. She said to tell you the ball’s in your court.’

Yep. I have several balls in my court. They’re fading in the sun, getting hard and losing their bounce.

Feeling brittle. ‘Nothing is going on. It’s work, work, work. Work for me and work for Mark. He’s going to Chicago on Sunday. Can we order?’

We order two foccacias and two coffees with a side order of Ruby checking out the waiter. ‘I bet you could bounce a twenty-cent piece off his arse.’

‘I guess,’ I say. ‘I don’t know why you would.’

Ruby takes my hand. ‘Come on, Pete. Mark’s been away before. He’s always away. Why is this time different? You look tired. Maybe you could see my naturopath again.’

I don’t need outside help. Especially from a naturopath who’ll take one look at my tongue and take me off milk and bread and fun and sugar.

The waiter brings our coffees. Ruby watches him walk away. When it comes to perving, she’s single-minded.

‘Seriously, Pete, have you got a twenty-cent piece?’

‘You’re mental.’ I smile, shake my head.

Five years ago, when Mum was dying, we found out how we each manage things. I had Mum at home for the last few months, I held her hand, we’d talk, I’d let her sleep. I administered the medication, liaised with her doctors. Our mother went into palliative care. I couldn’t manage the smell of death and yearning. I jumped off and Ruby swept in. She made the ‘arrangements’ and I sat with our mother.

I care, it looks like sacrifice, but it’s what I’m comfortable with. And Ruby, the pragmatist, spent hours on the
phone, at the solicitor’s, at Walsh Brothers for caskets and cremations, ticking her boxes.

A Top Ten list is different from a To Do list. One is reflective, safe most of the time; the other feels like a threat, expectation on paper.

Ruby dumps three lumps of sugar into her coffee. ‘How about I stay over a few times while he’s away?’

You can do anything to your sister. Steal her shoes, handbag, a boyfriend, engage in the hardest of conversations, she’ll still have a sleepover.

I’m wrapping my foccacia up. Can’t eat it. Haven’t eaten anything much since the couch. ‘What about Tom?’

‘I’m not seeing him anymore. It was too weird, fucking him at night, bossing him around in the day. He got peculiar. I don’t think he likes having a female manager anyway, and once we started fucking…’

‘Do you have to keep saying the f-word?’ I look around. ‘How about making love?’

Ruby always has someone on the go, someone almost on the go and someone just gone. How does her heart manage? I chew my lip, nuzzle the malleable little lump inside my mouth, the inside lower-right corner, a worrybead. I imagine the thing shines and shines.

‘It wasn’t making love, Peta. Stairwells and underground car parks are counter to making love. How about banging? Can we call it banging?’

I laugh. ‘So you’re not banging Tom. Any prospects? Anyone on the bench?’

She laughs back, a mouthful of semi-masticated foccacia on show. ‘That’s better. Meet me after work? Come shopping? Myer’s open until seven. I promise I won’t ask you what’s wrong.’

‘What are we shopping for?’

‘Nothing particular.’

I like how Ruby shops. She’s whimsical. She never knows what she wants until she sees it. Then it’s love.

Our coats back on, she swings her arm around my neck, ‘Last time for today. What’s wrong, Pete?’

‘Nothing. I’m fine. Don’t ask. I mean it.’

I text Taylor:

Sorry, T. Can’t babysit
—
staying in town on the weekend. Talk soon. P

It’s taken all my adult life to feel this hormonal—polite way to say horny—now I know why Ruby says she has needs. Shopping, we checked out the leather jackets. Ruby was looking, I was sniffing. I got right inside a rack and inhaled. BJ.

I bought a jacket. Five hundred dollars, plus. Picked up my car and dropped Ruby off at her place in Darebin— out of my way but I didn’t mind—and drove to the oval on Cotham Road, five minutes from home. Pulled into the car park, lights off, engine on, doors locked, and unwrapped the jacket.

Cars drove past, their headlights illuminating me for a stretched-out second. I reclined the seat and pushed my skirt down over my hips, past my still shod feet, and lay it flat on the seat next to me. The smell of leather, the memory of BJ, hard, relentless and grinning. I pretended my fingers were hers. When I came, my foot struck the accelerator pedal, and the engine burst into life. Phwoar!

The text says,
Meet me at the McDonald’s across the road in twenty minutes?

I type,
Roger.
Courier speak I’ve picked up from BJ.

On the way out I’m stopped by our receptionist.

There’s talk Blaire was a runway model in a past life; she certainly has the walk, the hair and the face. My theory is that she was kicked out of the army for being too rigid. She mans the reception desk like it’s a sentry post. That’s her job, but it’s the way she asks. JJ&T call her Who-goes-there?

‘Blaire, I’m just nipping out.’

There is no just nipping out. Her pen is poised: ‘To?’

I’d love to tell her the truth. She could write:
At 10:30 Peta Wheeler left the office for a quickie at Maccas. She didn’t know how long she’d be but she hoped it’d be a while.

‘The Supreme Court Library.’

‘For?’

‘A judgment reported in Lloyd’s.’

‘You don’t have that?’ The arch of her eyebrow asks what kind of library it is I think I’m running.

I’m leaning against the door. ‘I got rid of them because we had an online subscription but I’ve just had to cancel it—cost-cutting.’

I hope BJ doesn’t think I’ve changed my mind.

‘And how long do you think you’ll be?’

The weight of an ‘and’.

‘I should be back around eleven.’

When I finally press the button for the ground floor I’m aching.

At McDonald’s I take a booth towards the back with a good view of the street. I watch BJ chain her bike to a parking sign. She looks like a pirate, dirty, lawless. She looks great.

‘I followed you up the hill.’ She sits next to me. ‘Fuck, that’s a sexy walk.’

She smells like cigarettes.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Horny, desperate and inappropriate look good on me.’

She sneaks a hand between my legs. I jump.

Her hand is sliding up my inside thigh. I close my eyes, breathe through it. Her thumb closes the distance.

‘You’re not wearing underpants. Jesus.’

‘Let’s go to the toilet,’ I say. ‘I have to touch you.’

I never thought I’d have sex on work time. With a woman. In a McDonald’s toilet. Nobody said having an affair has to be romantic.

Top Ten Best Things About BJ:

1. I like how she walks, like a cowboy, like a criminal, like she’s got somewhere to go even when she hasn’t.
   
2. Smoking is disgusting. It’s vile. But when BJ smokes, God, it’s sexy, makes me want to get into her mouth (I can’t believe I just wrote that).
   
3. I like her swearing
   
4. I like how she looks like a boy and smells like a girl.
   
5. I like how she plays hard like a boy.
   
6. But she’s soft like a girl.
   
7. Her hair, it’s as dark as her eyes and everything shines so blackly.
   
8. I like her bed. I like using every square inch, then sleeping, stuck together, until I’m late for my real life.
   
9. I like how smart she is. Practical.
   
10. I like her laugh, it’s bent and broken and crazy, it fills the room, seems to hang there, like helium balloons pressing into a ceiling.
    

Yeah, ten is not enough.

11. I like how she looks in her work gear, bike shorts, bike top, those clacky shoes, gloves, bike lock and radio hanging off her, she looks like she’s in the S.A.S. Yum.

12. Yum? Grow up Peta Wheeler!

13. I like that she likes me.