The Golding

by Sonya Deanna Terry

  Chicken Kiev beckoned, but he couldn’t go past a burger. The one served to Table Four overflowed with fillings and was huddled against fat golden chips.

  Did he really want beef though? Or even chicken or pork or lamb? The meal Conan Dalesford prepared at lunch had been a meat-free barbecue of all things: organically grown herb-dusted veggies, char-grilled and basted with garlic. The thought of it tickled his tastebuds. A dinner of stuffed mushrooms, spicy pumpkin patties, zucchini fritters...

  When he’d asked Dalesford the reason he’d given up meat he’d said cryptically, ‘Something to do with a guy comparing a lamb to a puppy.’ Later he’d elaborated, and the story he related had been a thought-provoking one, both tragic and inspiring, the moral of which Matthew would never forget.

  In the queue, he found himself eye-to-eye with the back of an autograph-plastered baseball cap. Its wearer had a restless head. Each time Matthew attempted to read any of the signatures, the cap swivelled frustratingly.

  ‘Ahem!’

  A freckled hand held a plate of food out to him. ‘You want this?’ A big bloke in an Akubra was offering him the meal he’d been eyeing.

  Keen to accept, Matthew thought it prudent to check why anyone would give their meal away.

  ‘Asked for a beef burger and they gave me a veggie one by mistake. Not into eating green stuff.’

  No suspicion of Windex, fly spray, spittle or staleness, just a gift, an actualised desire of a meatless meal, minus the wait-time. ‘Thanks for that. How much do I owe you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ barked the benefactor but Matthew was already scanning the overhead menu and reaching for twenty-two-fifty in his wallet.

  ‘Nothing I said!’ The bloke bristled. ‘Take it or leave it, mate.’ He shook his head in disdain and strolled away.

  A small reunion was going on outside the bistro, a guy greeting his wife and young sons. The mother and boys were obviously freshly alighted from a U.S. vacation—each had donned Mickey Mouse ears for a snapshot. This image of jet-lagged domestic bliss, a mum acknowledging a trip to that famous fun park with an affectionate arm around each child, prompted for the second time that weekend a recollection of the Disneyland day trip. The memory of how he’d felt about Bernadette returned to him.

  She was descending the hotel stairs to the hotel’s spa while her youngest held Matthew’s hand and howled. ‘Bernadette...’ he’d said in exasperation.

  ‘Don’t cry, Laura sweetie,’ she’d called over her shoulder, voice marshmallow soft. ‘You have to understand that Mummy needs some “me” time. If Mummy doesn’t have that fluid-reduction slim-wrap, her clothes will look silly on her.’

  Matthew had told Bernadette they’d wait. Went to call the travel agent to arrange a later tour, but she’d been looking forward to the detoxifying properties of Tahitian clays ever since she’d read about them in the brochure. So Matthew and the girls had visited the magical kingdom without her...and without her getting to hear her daughters’ giggles when they’d been whirled around in the Mad Hatter’s stop-start teacups.

  Resisting the urge to wallow in resentment, Matthew shook away his residual bugbears and reminded himself that a conflict-free life had to be earned. Dalesford had earned himself a tranquil existence by living off the land. Escaped ‘corporate tyranny’ as he called it, long ago. Worked for himself, and from then on out, money had miraculously flowed.

  From the airport lounge, Matthew observed the stars beyond the tarmac. Roddie at work was right. They did resemble icicles this far inland. Translucent like crystal. Spiky white purity. Sharply edged and brimming with sparkle.

  Shortly before his plane touched down in Sydney, after viewing his problems from a perspective he hadn’t ever adopted before—from a place of peaceful insight—a realisation struck him. He sat forward with a jolt. The guy next to him spun round. Matthew sank back into his seat. The guy went back to his airport novel.

  ‘They’re all answered,’ he said under his breath.

  Without knowing anything about the BlackBerry list, Conan Dalesford had illustrated, by example, each of the answers Matthew had sought.

  * * * *

  Within the arabesque splendour of a palatial walk-in wardrobe her husband called ‘Aladdin’s Cave’, Dette riffled through her autumn frocks. An actress, he’d said when he’d taken her to Chavelle’s. You’d make a brilliant actress.

  ‘It’s exhausting,’ she’d told him. ‘I get so tired of playing all these different roles.’ Wife. Lover. Mother. Friend. Guarding everyone’s secrets, including her own. Being married to Matthew should have been cosier than this, but those initial feelings of safeness had slipped from her grasp. And Diondra was always heaping guilt on her, telling her she should think herself lucky. She’d said, when Dette had called in last Saturday, ‘You found yourself the best kind of man,’ while gazing out at her lavish garden in glum resignation where Dominic, red and flustered, was inexpertly wielding the pool net. Diondra was right. Matthew certainly had some endearing qualities. Even-tempered...nice-looking, and Dette was most of the time able to overlook his mid-brown mildness, even though it excluded him from dark and mysterious or golden Apollo definitions.

  The fuchsia dress. She’d wear her fuchsia dress into the city this afternoon. Having always favoured feminine colours, she was forever grateful for pinks, but whether to accessorise today with gold or with silver had become the next dilemma.

  Clutching the dress, she briskly exited the haven that housed her clothes and reviewed her diary on the dresser. Today was important. She was to book herself tickets and accommodation for that Vanuatu trip. The nanny she planned to hire would have to be older than Matthew and plain. The trip was to be early May. The childcare agency would need to organise interviews with Dette by the end of March. So much for that notice she’d placed in the Inner-West Times. Only one response!

  Today she’d lunch at Raffaello’s in Phillip Street and then she’d embark on a search for swimsuits, new pairs of sunnies, lingerie sets, flirty accessories and half-a-dozen paler lipsticks to see her through Vanuatu’s dazzling golden days and sultry nights.

  Pilates at ten. Mani and pedi, a quarter past four. If she were lucky, she’d get to purchase everything she wanted in those few precious hours in between.

  <><> XVIII <><>

  Pieter was now standing opposite a door within the palace. Flickers of gold and red—garish hues of hair and gown—disappeared behind it. The maiden had gone to her retreat and Pieter was foolishly sheltering in the dark nook of a cold, forbidding castle.

  She was speaking to someone in silvery tones, but Pieter could not discern her words.

  ‘Wait!’ Pieter whispered to himself. ‘This part of the door has been damaged.’ Although achingly aware of the scurrilousness of eavesdropping, he was compelled to glean all he could from the conversation she had begun. Mentions of his rabbit friend’s whereabouts might suddenly emerge.

  ‘I suspect I met an elf this evening,’ she was saying in a quavering voice. ‘He didn’t seem to want to grant me my wish. For all I know he might have been rather dangerous, perhaps not of fey origin after all.’ With whom might she be speaking? The maiden gabbled on with hardly a pause and there came no response from her listener. For Fripso’s sake, he must observe. Just one glimpse, to see who it was.

  A piece of cloth, a tapestry in fact, had been stuffed into the door’s damage, but over and above a corner of this, the elf could see the golden girl kneeling and facing a shelf by the window. Beside the shelf was a closed-in basket, which, against the room’s gilded starkness, appeared comparatively decorative in its lattice patterning. Painted upon this basket was a scowling circular face framed in radiating beams, which Pieter mistook for a personified daisy, but recognised it soon after to be a grumpy depiction of Sol. Was this what body kings practised when locked away in their palace during Pieter’s slumbering hours? The worship of sun faces on baskets? He knew they were reputed to adore a number of inanimate objects that represented the searing
circle in the sky: stone sculptures, totem poles, flat pebbles of gold from the mines, referred to as coins, stamped with a likeness of the god they worshipped in profile and circulated obsessively to nurture inflated importance.

  ‘Ah well, shining friend,’ the girl whispered. ‘I bid you a wonderful slumber. I too must sleep.’

  The face continued to regard her with mute disapproval.

  Drawing away from the door, Pieter smiled, touched at the simple kindness that had sweetened the girls’ speech. He was sure he could never talk to a painted construction of cane this pleasantly.

  <><> <><><> <><>

  Diagonal light was permeating the luminous French windows of Dette’s bathroom. She hung her fuchsia dress and fresh undergarments on the door’s brass hook and navigated her way through steaming clouds toward her Jacuzzi, a frothy cauldron laced with the heady scents of Shady Lady Supremely Sensuous Bathing Emollient.

  She turned off the tall golden taps and sighed. She would probably feel better if she wept, but tears didn’t come easily these days. She’d grown tougher out of necessity. Easier to be angry than sad, anyway, although when it came to him, despite his infuriating ways that spun her into rages she could never control, a cold and watery desperation hid behind her got-it-all-together façade. Four days! He hadn’t spoken to her in four whole days.

  ‘I can’t give you a hundred per cent,’ he’d told her last Tuesday. ‘But I’m here for you. Remember that.’ Those words spoke volumes. They told Dette she couldn’t quite reach a corner of his heart that should only have been reserved for her. Failed ownership of something she valued. If it were something tangible, she would have given every cent she had, but the lack of admiration in those green eyes of his continually mocked her passionate declarations.

  Perching on the edge of the heart-shaped Jacuzzi, Dette waved her fingers beneath the bubbles, rainbow-winking splodges exuding the florally citrus notes of ylang-ylang, lime and hyacinth. The water was still a bit hot. If she cut out and pinned Sara’s needlework assignment, the temperature would be perfect when she returned.

  In her sewing room, she flicked on the rhythms of Boyd Levanzi, the hot hip-hopper everyone—including her ladies’ tennis group—was listening to, fastened the tissue-paper pattern in several swift moves, and steered the scissors through the length of pale pink chiffon that Sara had chosen for her summer blouse.

  ‘No-one will know you ran out of time,’ she’d told her eldest with a secret smile. Helping with this kind of homework was easy. Dette had been an ace at sewing throughout school—she’d had no other choice! How else could she have dressed as prettily as she had when the people who raised her were such awful misers? And even though Sara was much better off materially, the style-conscious teen had been previ­ously unkempt; had only in the past year learnt to appreciate the art of garment creation.

  Dette’s youngest, on the other hand, was already a fashionista, and she hadn’t even started first grade. When they’d shopped at the haberdashery on Thursday evening, little Laura had marvelled at the many and varied textiles in a series of overjoyed shrieks. ‘This one, Sara,’ she’d squeaked, after running across to point out a luxuriantly textured but highly inappropriate synthetic.

  Sara had rolled her eyes. ‘Are you on drugs?’ she said to the six-year-old. ‘Why would I want a summer top made of grey faux fur?’

  ‘You’d look like Izzie’s cat,’ Laura had explained.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And Izzie’s cat is bee-yoo-tiful! Why don’t you buy it, Sarie?’

  ‘Now, who’s Izzie, again?’ Dette had asked. ‘Remind me, girls,’ and Sara had told her she was the friend whose mother had encountered that weirdo in Grant’s outdoor laun­dry.

  ‘But they’ve moved,’ Laura said. ‘So we don’t see them at Dad’s flats anymore.’

  Dette rounded the pattern’s corner with a single fierce snip. Always burdened. Always worrying about him. Why was he so enamoured with ‘funny’ females? Why was pointless banter so attractive to men?

  She shook her head in annoyance, huffed out a sigh and rolled her eyes to the amber ceiling, a shade she found pleasing when she’d first had it painted. ‘You still haven’t booked Dan to re-do it,’ she chided herself. This was the third time she’d resolved to phone the interior designer. Metallic sheens were a sharper look this year. Petulant Peach on the sample card looked promising, but then so did Turnabout Teal.

  Dette placed the sleeves on one side of her sewing table and slipped the scissors through the chiffon once more.

  She’d ask Dan, while he was there, about the ceilings in the bedroom and robes. It wouldn’t take much to talk her into something more upbeat—easily earned cash for Dan. Given a nudge, she’d embrace the challenge of livening up its appeal.

  Two pins dropped from the table. Disgruntled by this, she knelt and patted the floor. Here was one of them, but where was the other? Where had it fracking gone?

  Mulling over her ceilings again, and the overall colour scheme, Dette groaned. The choices she’d made six months back were now too dull for her liking. Too uninspiring. Too yesterday. Michelle was already getting into the creams and sparklies on offer in furnishings. So was Diondra.

  Dette knew Matthew enjoyed the luxurious haven she provided for him. After the bright lights of a sterile trading floor, their three-storey, square-topped, beige-clad home, elegant and the epitome of class with its subdued lamplit ambience and enterprising décor, was quite obviously somewhere he was able to relax in style. The problem with Matthew was he wanted everything to stay the same. She was better off sticking to accessorising for now. He’d agree to the new lounge suite idea soon enough. She’d bloody-well make sure of that.

  The renegade pin would be lost forever once Rhoda vacuumed. Well then! It could stay where it liked. ‘I don’t have time for this,’ Dette muttered. She rose to her feet. She’d have to finish up after the yoke was done. Her bath was getting cold, and she wanted to get moving.

  Dette slid her scissors noisily through the fabric, her thoughts liquefying into anguish. Why hadn’t she worked on her sense of humour from the time she was young? Snip! Snip! That recent admission of his, about admiring comediennes and upbeat women in general, Snip! Snip! Snip! had irked Dette, Snip! largely because she’d spent year after year attempting to follow her great-uncle’s adamant advice, and now, through sheer necessity, she was forced to emulate a behaviour she loathed. ‘You must be pretty and amusing, but never a jokester,’ her great-uncle had insisted. ‘Leave jokey-pokey to women of the lower classes.’ No-one ever argued with the magnanimous Colonel Doulton. He was arrogant of course, but he had a right to be: he’d been born of good stock! His fondest childhood memories had been playing hide-and-seek in Langton Castle, his uncle’s sprawlingly impressive Welsh estate, and playing Gin Rummy in a supposedly haunted garden grotto with the children of European royalty.

  Dette packed the cut-out pattern pieces away and descended the stairs to the bathroom, planning her necessary transformation into slapstick femme fatale. She would need to make herself thoroughly irresistible with an alluring new winter wardrobe, and she’d visit the salon for eyelash extensions that were a teensy bit thicker, to give her an air of exotic mystery. Blue-black perhaps, rather than the tentative brown-black she’d had with her first lot. Tina at Luscious had mentioned two appointments ago that the blue-black was significantly more glamorous.

  And she’d force herself to be extra attentive to his needs. No more arguing. He would get to see the better side of her nature. The sweeter, more pliable Dette. The Dette who planned to spoil him like crazy in her determination to become one of his obsessions.

  In the bathroom she paused a second to consult the mirror. A wisp had managed to escape from her showercap. She pushed it under the elastic, pondering over the possibil­ity of go­ing copper for winter. The new season’s light reds were gaining steadily in popularity. While Ronaldo told her the combination he mixed up—of Butterscotch, Straw and Platinum Pearl�
��was still in keeping with the latest 1960s look, especially if worn teased and teamed with hoop earrings, she was fearful the sun-kissed image would wane without warning, that she would risk looking outdated if she didn’t act fast.

  Once submerged in her bubble bath, Dette snatched up the cordless and phoned her ex, greeting him with a no-nonsense: ‘How could you let your daughters down like that? I have to find a babysitter now.’

  ‘And that superhero of a husband of yours can’t look after them while you’re away?’

  ‘Matthew’s refusing. Insists I pay someone to supervise them. I can’t believe you. How could you just—’

  ‘I’ll call you back.’

  Dette’s voice grew to a roar. ‘You will not! Explain why—’

  But Grant had meant business. The phone call dissolved in Dette’s ear.

  Diondra Wallace called a few minutes later to gloat about Dominic’s entry into the Real Estate Business of the Year Awards.

  Pleased to have the phone free again once Diondra’s smug monologue had ended, Dette called her cousin, a single parent living in one of the seedier parts of Sydney. ‘How would you like to make an easy five hundred during the school hols?’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  Of course Dette was serious. She needed someone to cover. An alibi to make her look more virtuous than she really was.

  ‘It’s Bernadette, is it?’ droned the voice on the other line. The voice became animated. ‘Gawd! What are you doing ringing me? Can’t imagine it’d be for a social chat.’

  ‘You’re kind of right about that. Not that I wouldn’t love to catch up, but I’m in a little bit of a hurry at the moment.’ Dette reclined against the Jacuzzi’s waterproof pillow. ‘Just wanted to ask you a quick five-hundred-dollar question.’

  ‘Wait a minute...don’t tell me, you’re doing market research. Matt’s lost his millions, and you’ve turned to telemarketing.’