by C. A. Larmer
It took another year for Alex to realise that it didn’t matter what she did to her hair or what clothes or car she bought, it would never quite be smart enough, and her name would never be Amelia Malone.
“Amelia’s back!” someone cried out, and Alex’s heart plummeted as she swivelled around to face the main office.
Monty was standing at the entrance and had mistaken her for the editor, that much was clear by her rapidly vanishing smile.
For her part, Monty felt her blood pressure spike—such relief and now such disappointment. She stared hard towards Alex. The hide of the woman!
She watched as Alex started tapping at Amelia’s desktop. Unfuckingbelievable!
She dumped her bag and stormed across. “What’s going on?”
Alex waited a beat before she pulled her eyes from the computer. “Hey Monty. What’s up?”
Monty waved a hand about. “What are you…?” What the fuck do you think you’re doing?
“She’s not here is she? And this is a bigger screen, better to check the layouts on.” Then Alex quickly added, “I’m trying to get the issue done, Monty. Somebody has to move it forward.”
“But Amelia…”
“You and I both know Amelia would be here by now if she was coming in today. She’s always in at the crack of dawn. So, hate to break it to you, honey, but it looks like I’m running the show.” Her voice faltered a little. “Unless, of course, she shows up tomorrow, in which case we all go back to normal.” She tried not to frown at the thought of that.
Monty blinked rapidly. “Is that what Gerry said?”
“He didn’t have to! I am the deputy, Monty. That usually means second in charge or at least it does in the rest of the publishing world.” She lightened her tone. “I’m sure we can all survive without Amelia for a bit.” Then she put on her best cheerleader voice. “Come on, Monty, we’ve got this! We can make this happen! Might even get the magazine to bed early for once.”
Monty looked at Alex like she was deranged, so the deputy dropped the aural pom-poms and said, “I need all the layouts as fast as possible. For some reason Hank’s ignoring my emails, so please tell him I need to see everything before it goes to the subs, yes? Everything. I’ll edit Mel’s self-defence story first thing, and meantime, you better get cracking on that swimsuit spread you just shot. I can see from the floor plan that it’s supposed to make this issue, but you’ll be cutting it fine.”
I’ll be cutting you fine, Monty thought as she stared at the deputy for a few more stunned seconds before turning around and heading back out and towards her corner of the office. Corner of the ring, more like. She felt like beating someone up, but it wasn’t Alex she was thinking of now.
Call her optimistic, call her delusional, but Monty had fully expected to find Amelia back at her desk this morning, her eyes rolling as she reminded them all of whatever it was they had clearly forgotten.
“I was at that marketing conference, you eejits!” she would say, or “I can’t believe you’d forgotten about [whatever it is they’d all forgotten]!”
Instead, it was like a horror show in here: Amelia still missing, Alex in the big chair and a magazine not even close to finished.
She glared at her mobile.
Come on, woman, ring!
“Call for you, Monty,” came Brianna’s monotone over the phone’s intercom, and she felt her heart fly into her throat. But it wasn’t the editor, it was the editor’s mother, and for a moment there she felt a rush of relief. Beryl must have heard something! Her first words quickly put paid to that.
“No news yet, dear?”
Damn it. “No, Beryl.”
“Never fear. I wanted to let you know we were just at her house this morning and everything’s okay.”
The spike of relief hit her again. “Really?”
“Yes, well, you had poor Ron in such a panic last night. First he wanted to call the police, then he wanted to rush right over. It was all I could do to stop him from getting in the car and driving straight there. He’s got a ticky heart, see, and he really shouldn’t get too excited. So I calmed him down, and we went over together this morning. And I’m so glad we did. Ron would have missed all the crucial signs. He’s such a bloke, dear, he really is.”
“Signs?” What was she rabbiting on about?
“Yes. Amelia’s overnight bag was missing, you see. You know, the one she bought on that last trip to Singapore? The bulky one with the funny gold squiggles all over it.”
“The Louis Vuitton keepall?”
“That’s the one! And some of her clothes, I might add. I mean, Ron would never have thought to check her wardrobe.”
“So what does this mean?”
“It means we’re all a lot of worrywarts! Amelia wasn’t lying there with a broken leg, dying of starvation or whatever my silly husband was thinking.”
“But she wasn’t there, right?”
“No! But she’s clearly gone away of her own volition, taken her fancy bag with her. Probably on a well-earned break, I’d say.”
“But… but why wouldn’t she tell us?” Beryl was acting like it was all very obvious, but Monty still couldn’t see it. “Why wouldn’t she let Gerry know? And do you know where she went? Were there any—I don’t know—brochures around the place? Any indication at all?”
“Not that I had noticed, but I’m sure the postcards will soon arrive in the mail and we’ll all slap ourselves and want to slap her for not telling us.”
“Oh there’ll be slapping, on that we can agree,” Monty said, trying to lighten her own tone, trying to make it all sound like the lark Beryl seemed to think it was. “Okay, thanks for letting me know.”
But what she knew was still very sketchy, and it didn’t explain anything.
What was Amelia up to? What was she playing at? You don’t just pack your designer luggage and head off on holidays without any warning, without any word to your mother, let alone your boss. And you certainly don’t do it if you’re Amelia Malone and it’s deadline week.
Why hadn’t she scheduled annual leave like a normal person? Was her friend having an early midlife crisis? Had something happened to her?
Of course she didn’t articulate these thoughts to the mother, simply thanked her again and promised to be in touch should the aforementioned postcard materialise. But she wouldn’t be sending anyone down to the mailroom. Amelia would never just head off on holidays without telling anyone. It was laughable. The Eve editor, more than anyone, knew the dangers of doing that. And Monty wasn’t thinking of the ferry trip now.
Holidays were a dangerous perk in this cutthroat industry. That was how Amelia scored her job in the first place, snatching the top position while the previous editor, Nancy Verew, snoozed on a banana lounge in Bali.
It had been an infamous coup.
Monty was the first of the two friends to join the magazine almost twelve years ago, starting as a lowly junior designer soon after returning from Greece via a brief stint in London that didn’t bear thinking about. When Millie returned all those months later, quiet, depressed, despondent, Monty didn’t know how to help, so she suggested a job at Eve. They could work together! Wouldn’t that be fun? And maybe it would assuage some guilt that was starting to gain momentum as the story of Sarisi slowly leaked out.
The only opening at Eve, however, was for the even lowlier editorial assistant, the job Brianna now had, which was several rungs below Amelia’s skill set. She’d not only trained as a journalist at one of the country’s finest colleges, she had already been a feature writer on a national magazine before that dreaded trip, so the obvious next step was features editor, not Nancy’s lap-dog-cum-receptionist. But the idea seemed to embolden Amy, and Monty hoped it would come close to redeeming her, if not in her own eyes, at least in the eyes of Beryl and Ron.
It was Monty who organised the interview, who prepped her friend and polished her look, and who received the biggest lashing from Nancy when, after just nine months at Eve, Amelia ousted h
er from the top job.
“I went on a bloody holiday! My first in five years! And this is how I get repaid? Stabbed in the back by my receptionist!”
“I’m sorry, Nancy,” Monty had said, but she wasn’t sorry, not really. Amelia needed the job more than anyone knew. It had saved her life and saved Monty’s bacon too. And besides, she was so much more than a receptionist.
Amelia had taken to the job like her life depended upon it, and Monty half suspected it did. She poured everything into her work, was first in each morning and last out each night. She became indispensable, not only to Nancy but to everyone else in the office. Even though it wasn’t in her job description, she started helping with little things and large. She studied how the bestsellers in the industry worked and began suggesting small but subtle ways they could improve an article or embellish a layout. She became the queen of snappy headlines and break-out box ideas, and when Eve’s deputy editor, Penelope, an older woman with little passion and an inkling of what was to come, handed in her resignation six months after Amelia had started, Nancy didn’t think twice about handing the job to Amelia, even though everybody knew it was a mammoth skip and jump, at least on paper.
The truth was, Nancy was stuck. She was due on holidays in a fortnight, and there was no time to advertise. The features editor was pregnant—she was no use!—and nobody else was putting their hand up.
“I’m giving you an extraordinary opportunity,” she told Amelia at the time. “You’re a very lucky woman; don’t make me regret this.”
Oh, how Nancy would regret it.
Not nearly as intuitive as her deserting deputy, she didn’t see the writing on the wall like the rest of the team. They had been bypassing both Nancy and Penelope for months, seeking out Amelia’s advice. She had an uncanny eye for detail and an extraordinary knack for words, and they looked forward to Nancy’s meetings with Gerry so they could head straight to Amelia’s desk.
There was no getting around it. Amelia was a natural born editor who made Nancy look like a fraud. So when she finally went on her infamous six-week break—one that would chain overworked editors to their desks for years to come—Amelia stepped it all up a notch.
This time she didn’t just suggest ideas, she rewrote entire articles, gave them slicker headings, and had the entire magazine redesigned. She shifted sections around and dropped stock pages she’d never liked, and despite howls of protest from the art director and panic attacks from the production department whose job it was to keep a holidaying Nancy in the loop, the magazine had never looked so good.
It was as though it had been reborn.
Now more dynamic than anything else on the market, the advertisers lapped it up. Revenue doubled overnight, they had to go up a book size, and this was the only reason Nancy could not change it straight back when she returned, horrified, from her break.
When the new-look issue hit the stands two months later, it was the highest-selling issue in Eve’s history, and Nancy’s fate was sealed. Even if Gerry had wanted to keep the old editor, he had very little choice but to move her to “Special Projects”—which everybody knew was publishing speak for “out to pasture”—and hand the relative newcomer the job.
It was the fastest rise to the top in Australian publishing history, seconded only by Amelia’s immediate dismissal of Eve’s disgruntled art director as she parachuted Monty into the coveted design spot.
For her part, Monty felt dreadful, but Amelia was unrepentant.
“Honey, the magazine was screaming for a makeover. Sales were plummeting, advertisers were jumping ship, and if I hadn’t done what I’d done, we’d all be out of a job.”
She had made it sound so reasonable, so inevitable, but Monty often wondered why Amelia couldn’t work with Nancy to bring change, why she’d waited until Nancy was in Bali to make her move.
“It’s a cutthroat world out there. It’s kill or be killed,” Amelia sometimes added, this attitude a by-product of that missing year in Greece.
“Besides,” she’d predicted, “with us at the helm it’ll be the top-selling woman’s magazine in the country one day.”
In fact, Eve quickly became the top-selling woman’s magazine per capita in the world, eclipsing her more famous sisters Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Elle, and earning her a certain status with Gerry and his ilk that few other editors ever received. Even the formidable Lizzie seemed in thrall to her.
Yet despite it all, Amelia never seemed satisfied. She just got more intense as each year passed, more determined to increase circulation, to prove her worth over and over. But what else was there to prove? Hadn’t she done enough? And was that why she’d suddenly upped and left? Monty wondered.
Perhaps she was exhausted. Perhaps she was hoping that one of them would do an Amelia and finally give her a break.
Monty scoffed. That was as plausible as Beatrice’s anti-aging advice.
She put another call through to Gerry.
TOM
Tom didn’t normally let his son sleep over at a friend’s house on a school night, but then there was nothing normal about their life today. Still, he was glad Phil wasn’t around to see how trashed he got last night, how quickly he trashed everything. Again, he had to thank Polly for that even though he hated being indebted to anyone.
As he waited for the kettle to boil, he slouched against the kitchen bench and wondered how his life had unravelled so fast.
A flash of something caught his eye through the side window, and he spotted his brother outside his own kitchen, waving him across. Tom ran a hand through his shaggy red hair, turned the kettle off and stepped out.
“You heading to work?” Harry indicated Tom’s grubby overalls, the words Shepperdin Building Supplies embroidered across a front pocket.
“Someone’s gotta pay the bills.”
“Heard anything?”
“Nope.”
“You call her parents?”
“Last night.”
Just thinking about the call made his blood boil again. It had lasted less than two minutes. He asked if they knew where their daughter was. They sounded surprised then concerned, then as things started to heat up, he hung up. He already knew he was a disappointment, didn’t need to hear it from them.
“And?” Harry was waiting.
Tom wished he had some good news. “They haven’t heard from her. Not expecting her until next month.”
“Shit! I was hoping she’d be there. Scarlett said everyone’s tried her mobile phone and she’s not picking up. You try her mobile?”
“I’m not a moron.”
“Okay, chill out. It’s just weird, right? I mean, sure, she might be cranky with you—”
“I didn’t do—”
“I’m not saying you did! But you know what chicks are like. You probably left the toilet seat up again or something. I get why she might’ve walked out. We’re not the most gallant of gentlemen, us brothers. But I don’t get why she isn’t talking to her friends. Why Scar and Polly haven’t heard anything.”
“You’ll have to ask Amy that, mate.”
“I would if I knew where she was.”
The two brothers watched each other uncertainly for a moment, then Harry said, “How about you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. What about you?”
Harry held his gaze. “I’m not the one whose wife took off.”
“Oh Jesus, man, like I need reminding. Good morning to you too.” Tom turned to walk away.
“Hey, come on, Tommo, I’m on your side here.”
“Then don’t fuckin’ rub it in.”
Harry held both palms up. “Not rubbing anything in, just worried is all. She’s been missing… what? Three days now? Four? That’s… Well, it’s a worry.”
“Thanks, Harry. I do know what the situation is. I do have a bloody calendar.”
He rubbed his bushy brown beard. “Geoff called again.”
“What? Shit. Why?”
“It’s his job, mate. He’s also worried.�
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“What’s he worried about? I already told him she’s okay.”
“Yeah, but how do you know that, man? If she’s not at her mum’s, how do you—?”
“I just know!”
“Okay, easy. It’s… Well, Amy wouldn’t just up and leave Phil, would she? Why would she do that?”
“You’ll have to find her and ask her.”
“No, Tom, you have to find her. She’s your wife last time I looked. Make a bloody effort! And quick smart. The wagons are circling, and a few of them have had it in for you for a while.”
He knew exactly to whom his brother was referring. While some locals liked him, there was a small posse, Amy’s posse, who had grown increasingly cold. And this was before she’d vanished. He included Harry’s wife Scarlett in that camp. Tom wasn’t sure exactly what he’d done to earn their wrath, or what Amy had said. It wasn’t his fault the single mums flirted, was it? Wasn’t his fault there wasn’t a job outside the local supermarket for his wife. Certainly wasn’t his fault Amy was above that kind of yakka. Yet their antagonism had been growing, was clear in their haughty looks and expressionless smiles. They tolerated him, but they didn’t think he was good enough for adorable Amy.
He scoffed to himself. If only they knew the truth. If only they knew her past.
“I’m just saying, find Amy and fast. Get her to call home or Scarlett or someone. At least make a bloody attempt, Tommo. Just hanging around acting like nothing’s happened makes you look suss.”
“I’m not hanging around; I’m going to work.”
“Even worse. Cross your t’s, dot your i’s, right?”
“Jesus. How come Amy gets to piss off on holidays and I get all the grief? Why isn’t anyone worried about me?”
Harry looked at him sideways. “Should we be?”
He caught his eye. Sighed.
“I’m simply sayin’, mate, I’m not the enemy here. You need to talk, you need to unwind, you know where I am.”
“Yeah, can’t miss you. Back there sniggering at my failed marriage.” He went to go, then railed back. “Bored with your own wife, hey? Not getting enough? Have to poke your nose into my life?”