Friends Like These

by Wendy Harmer

  ‘Although you have to get yourself a new outfit. You’re not a daggy old deputy headmistress anymore. Brown! Could you have chosen anything more hideously boring?’

  There had to be a sting in the tail. Jo smacked Tory over the head with a folder of her old yellowing study papers from uni days.

  ‘Yeow! Get off!’ Tory squealed. ‘And we haven’t had a chance to have a chat about your sex life.’

  ‘Nothing happened with Michael, Tory,’ Jo warned her.

  ‘I hope you remember that. Even if you were drunk.’

  ‘Okay, I believe you. Only because Didi would kill you. Anyway, there’re any amount of blokes who’d want to shag you. You’re cute as. Apart from your weird hair. Just get ’em to take a number and keep the noise down. I’m making popcorn, want some?’

  Jo watched Tory go and shook her head, dumbstruck. She’d expected to be given the third degree on Michael’s late-night visit and...nothing. Jo continued with her excavations and finally unearthed a wedding album bound in white imitation leather and embossed with golden bells. A truly ugly-looking thing.

  The photographs were just plain embarrassing. A tribute to bad eighties fashion. That decade, Princess Di had walked down the aisle, and Jo’s country bridesmaids were sporting the same flouncy catastrophes in a particularly toxic shade of green. The dresses had huge leg-of-mutton sleeves as big as the girls’ heads. Disappearing under metres of blindingly white taffeta, Jo looked like a mighty galleon under full sail. Her curly hair was fluffed out in full heavy-metal rock-star glory and her head-gear—a revolting beaded bridle with a fake pearl drop on the forehead—would surely never come back into fashion. Most cringe-making of all, she was wearing fingerless lace gloves and clutching a bunch of baby’s breath. Yikes!

  Jo found herself laughing out loud at some of the poses. The shot of her and JJ standing on a bridge in a garden throwing bread to the ducks was a classic of the genre. JJ could just be seen behind Jo’s dress, which was being buffeted by the wind. She looked to be in danger of taking off at any moment like a hot-air balloon. In one corner of the foreground on the lawn two ducks were mating vigorously.

  Jo allowed herself to daydream about how she would do it if she were ever to be married again. She would wear a narrow floor-length ivory silk skirt with a neat little silver sequinned jacket. She would have her hair up and carry a simple posy of red roses. The ceremony would be on a Friday night at 6 p.m. and then the bride and groom would host an elegant cocktail party. She might even ask Tory to be a bridesmaid, just for the pleasure of seeing her in a dress.

  The front door slammed, announcing that her bridesmaid had left the building.

  ‘Well, that’ll never happen,’ Jo said aloud. And then she wondered what she meant. That Tory would never wear a dress, or that she would never remarry? Both prospects seemed utterly remote.

  It was then that her mobile rang and, without thinking, she answered it.

  ‘Hello, Jo speaking.’

  ‘Jo,’ Michael croaked. ‘Don’t hang up.’

  There was a pause. Not a silence, because that would have suggested the absence of something—an empty, dead space where time stood still. Instead, the moment was pulsing with possibility. Neither dared breathe for a good long moment.

  It was Jo who found her courage first. She’d been thinking about weddings and suddenly saw a white iced cake topped with a toy bride and groom. She took a knife and plunged it into thick, sweet icing, and hit the bottom of the silver platter with a tinny ring. That meant bad luck. The fates had denied her a wish.

  ‘I can’t see you again, Michael. You know I want to. But affairs with married men are what young women have. Not grown women...or at least, not women who’ve never experienced the deep satisfaction of being a happy wife and all that brings. I have, for almost half my life. And I’m still an “ex-wife”. I’m trying to be single, but I’m not yet. And you’re not single either. So that has to be the end of it.’

  This time it was a silence. An arid and pathetic expanse in which everyone recognised there was nothing to be done, so just turned away and went about their usual business. Michael knew that.

  ‘I’ve talked with Gemma,’ he said. ‘She’s determined to go ahead with it. She’s an adult, anyway, and can do things any way she likes. She hasn’t told her mother yet, but...I know you’ll do your best for her. So, I imagine that—’

  ‘Perhaps it’s not meant to be, if her mother doesn’t approve, but I’ll meet with Gemma and let you know how she means to proceed,’ Jo said formally, putting him out of his misery.

  ‘Many thanks. Much appreciated.’

  Jo methodically went about repacking her box of artefacts and, along with the old album, in went Michael Brigden. She imagined him carefully stored between sheets of acid-free paper. He would be a memory she might turn to in years to come and wonder whatever became of him.

  And then she sobbed and the paper got wet and ruined everything.

  It was early afternoon when her mobile rang again. Jo carefully inspected the number and, seeing it was Hannah McGinty, took the call. They exchanged pleasantries and then got down to business.

  ‘I just can’t fathom what’s going on, Jo. I’ve looked at our art register, I can see the works you’re talking about, but they’re not in storage. There’re no copies on Kelly’s walls. I told the old witch I needed to find them for insurance purposes, so she let me in to have a look. I even checked her bedroom. That was gruesome.’ Hannah shuddered audibly. ‘She’s surrounded by these lovely antiques and she’s got a revolting Afghan rug on her bed. Anyway, they’re not there and after describing them to her, I’m sure she’s never seen them.’

  ‘Are you positive?’

  ‘Never seen them in her life. And you know the old biddy’s sharp as a tack.’ So was Hannah. She didn’t have a great eye for beauty, but took enormous pride in her cataloguing. She loved her systems and labels.

  ‘Suze says she found them in an attic.’

  ‘No way.’ Hannah was emphatic. ‘There’s no art in any attic here. I found everything a couple of years ago. Lots of bits and pieces, but I’ve finally got everything sorted now. And if Suze took them from storage, she never signed them out. This has upset me, to tell you the truth. I’ve never lost track of an artwork, in all the time I’ve been here.’

  ‘You’ve got the artist and the year recorded?’

  ‘They haven’t been on display for ages, according to my records—honestly, there’s so much stuff stored here, we’d need another whole building for all of it but yes, as you said, two watercolour-and-pencil harbour scenes. Eighteen by twelve,

  E. Walpole, 1885, 1887.’

  ‘You realise that’s Eunice, the first headmistress?’

  ‘No! Really? Well, you know I never kept up on all that history stuff.’

  But Jo had. She’d loved knowing who had walked the halls over the past century and all the stories of the remarkable families connected with the college. She could have kicked herself for not realising the significance of those paintings while she was there.

  Suze should have known it would come to this. Sarita read then reread the invoice and sucked air across the small, evenly matched pearls of her bottom teeth. ‘I am afraid this will not do.’

  ‘But...’ Suze began.

  ‘It is too much money, Suzanne. Much too much. The guests will be eating seeds instead of samosas, like small birds pecking at scraps. No-one can eat flowers and, in the end, it is the full belly that will truly warm the heart.’

  The transactions between them had never amounted to more than fifty dollars and now Sarita was inspecting a bill for almost a hundred times that. She wasn’t happy. Meanwhile, Suze knew that just a few postcodes down the road, the price could be twice as much. She had spent hours the night before, calculating, discounting and cutting corners, and she couldn’t see how she could possibly do the wedding flowers for less. Any cheaper and it would be extortion. This tiny Indian woman must have been trained by the infamou
s Bandit Queen from Uttar Pradesh.

  Sarita flung her emerald-green sari shawl across one slim, brown shoulder and looked Suze in the eye. ‘It has been very kind of you to consider our celebration and I am sure that you have done your best. My husband said we women should do the flowers and now I am coming to see his point of view. He is not often correct, but this time...’ She handed Suze the invoice.

  ‘I am so sorry you have wasted your efforts.’

  ‘Maybe...’ Suze made a half-hearted attempt to persuade and then gave up. ‘Maybe it’s for the best,’ she shrugged.

  ‘I can’t even imagine who I’d get to help me make the...that canopy thing.’

  ‘The mandapam? Yes, I was thinking the same. Who can we turn to? We certainly cannot rely on our menfolk.’ Sarita negotiated her way through buckets of tall greenery on her way out.

  Suze snatched the wretched invoice from the front counter of Geraniums Red. She would burn it over a candle at her homemade shrine and watch the five thousand dollars for the gas, electricity and water bills and the fees for the twins’ camp go up in smoke. Maybe Geraniums Red should be thrown onto the bonfire as well for insurance purposes. A can of spray adhesive and a match would set the place alight, but it was full of flowers, leaves and buckets of water. How long would they take toburn?

  The bell over the front door rang and Suze was surprised, and relieved, to see Jo. She could do with the distraction from her woes. ‘Jo! How great! Come in.’

  Jo turned the Open sign to Closed. That was ominous. What could this be about?

  Jo found a stool in silence. When she was seated with her handbag in her lap acting as some sort of air bag, she came directly to the point. ‘The paintings. You lied to me.’

  Suze was caught out. She’d calculated that she had a few more days to invent a plausible story, but had so far come up with nothing. She would have to throw herself on the mercy of the court. She stepped out from behind the counter, and addressed a spot on the floor in front of Jo’s feet. ‘I did. I stole them. I’m sorry. It was utterly stupid.’

  Even though Jo had been determined to get the truth from Suze, the confession was startling. ‘Why? Why did you take them? Are they still on your wall or have you sold them...or what?’

  ‘I never took them to sell,’ Suze protested. ‘You said yourself they’re probably not even worth that much anyway.’

  ‘Maybe not to anyone else, but to the college they’re irreplaceable. Why did you take them?’

  Suze folded her arms across her bosom. ‘Did you see the hideous Wedgwood platter they gave me?’

  Jo heard a petulant child talking. It was ridiculous. ‘Suze! That’s pathetic.’

  ‘I know, I know. I just felt like they owed me...something.’

  The college didn’t owe her anything, Jo thought. She’d had a great job there and everyone had been endlessly kind to her. It was rubbish. Suze had a chip on her shoulder the size of Fort Denison in the middle of the harbour.

  ‘You’ll have to take them back.’

  ‘I know. I will.’

  ‘But the bigger issue is that you lied to me and I thought I knew you better than that. I’ve always trusted you. I thought you trusted me too.’ Suze must have been able to hear the hurt in her voice.

  ‘I do. Of course I do. I just had some sort of brain snap, that’s all.’ Suze shrugged.

  That shrug, it was what Jo might expect from some adolescent girl, not a grown woman. ‘Is this what you were talking about the other day when you said that only seeing the good in people brings out the worst in them?’

  Tears. That was the only way out of the confrontation, so Suze began to cry. At first it was a humble sniffle, but then great sobs heaved up from her chest. ‘I’ve had a shit of a morning,’ she blubbered as she leaned back against the counter for support and wiped her nose on her apron. ‘I’m going broke! Everything’s going wrong. And I just don’t know where to start, or maybe I should just finish...I don’t know anymore.’

  Jo fished in her handbag. She had stopped by her bank on the way there. She knew Suze had taken those paintings. That could only mean she was in distress. It was like Patrick said, people did dumb things when they were worried about money. ‘I had a think about it and maybe ten thousand was too much, but this is five thousand and in cash.’ Jo held up a wad of notes, hoping the sight of them would prove to be irresistible. Maybe she wanted Suze to take the money because she was guilty of lying too. She hadn’t told her about Michael. She’d kept that secret and they’d never had secrets from each other before. ‘Just take the damned money,’ she said. ‘You have to take it.’

  Five thousand dollars. Exactly the amount Suze was going to charge Sarita. Thank you, Ganesha, Lord of Obstacles! He’d heard her prayers. Suze dried her eyes, reached out and took the cash. ‘I’ll pay you back. I’m probably just being a drama queen. Thank you, darling.’ She stepped forward for a kiss and a hug and then stood back, her hands on Jo’s shoulders. ‘You’ve always been so straight with me and I’m really sorry. So ’fess up—you are a bit obsessed with Michael Brigden, aren’t you?’

  Jo’s hot cheeks semaphored her answer.

  ‘Yeah, I knew it. We know each other too well, don’t we?’

  Jo couldn’t help feeling that she’d been snared. Gone to free her best friend from the ropes and found herself entangled, and she didn’t know that she liked it much.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  On Woolloomooloo Wharf the outdoor dining tables were bathed in sunshine as Jo walked by. The scorching summer temperatures and atrocious humidity that had driven dripping customers inside for air-conditioned comfort had dissipated. Today waiters busied themselves with placing chairs and soon enough the tables positioned outdoors under umbrellas would be occupied by a mix of media types, celebrities and ladies who lunched—all attracted by the chance to dress up, stroll and perform in front of an appreciative audience. The uneven boards of the old wharf were a hazard for heels and the clientele literally tripped up the promenade, lured by the smell of old salt and new money.

  Sydneysiders were well acquainted with the grainy black-and-white images of these daytime meetings of assorted rogues that turned up in the newspapers and, far from being envious, they aspired to book a table on Woolloomooloo Wharf one day. They would have ‘arrived’ then, sitting three tables along from their favourite radio shock jock and eating the same Pacific Rim cuisine that apparently required every dish—from entrée to dessert—to feature chilli, noodles and some variety of pungent leaf.

  Jo found the doorway to the wharf building and the flight of stairs she was looking for, ascended, and at the top landing turned along a dim wooden gangway. The oily boards still held the earthy smell of sheep lanolin from the days when bales of wool were loaded from here onto sailing ships. She pushed open the door of Bligh & Bridge and was assaulted by the bright and blinding view of the harbour that stretched across the length of one wall.

  It was the practical joke that Sydney never seemed to tire of. The unprepossessing exterior, the dingy staircase, narrow hallway and door that led to...ta-dah! A scene of such overwhelming beauty that it left the viewer breathless. Bludgeoning an unsuspecting victim with the blunt instrument of a spectacular harbour view was one of the deep and abiding pleasures of the residents. In most of the nation’s capitals the residents could only look out on dun-brown, lazy rivers. That’s why they hated Sydneysiders.

  Jo inspected the opposite wall in the reception area of Bligh & Bridge and attempted to form an impression of Linda Priestley, Senior Associate and Accredited Specialist in Family Law. Numerous framed certificates attested to her extraordinary success. She’d been admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of New South Wales and the High Court of Australia.

  However, positioned alongside these were assorted photographs more prized than documents from venerable institutions. Here was Ms Priestley hurtling, triumphant, across the finish line at the City to Surf; here she was again kayaking furiously around Cockatoo Islan
d; and that was also her on deck as a member of an all-female crew in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, engulfed by a ferocious white wave and still cheering, pumping her fist in the air. Obviously she wanted the world to know she was a winner. Jo had a suspicion she knew her.

  A petite young woman in an immaculate scarlet jacket, tiny skirt and vertiginous black patent heels bounced across a sculpted cream carpet that rippled with the light reflected from the water. She thrust her hand at Jo. ‘Mrs Blanchard! Yep. It’s me! Linda Hunter. Graduating class of 2000. Married one of the Priestley boys from Riverview. Crap at art, but bloody good at water polo!’

  ‘Linda Hunter!’ Jo beamed. ‘My goodness! Aren’t you doing famously?’

  ‘Persevering and prevailing. You look amazing, Mrs Blanchard. You haven’t aged a bit. Still running?’

  ‘More a walk these days,’ Jo demurred.

  ‘What an inspiration you were. I once bet you were going to make us jog through the National Gallery when we went to see that Dobell exhibition in Year Nine. It’s brilliant to see you again. Come on in.’

  Linda’s office was a sleek black-and-platinum reflective prism. An arctic-white yacht outside the window seemed to be moored to her translucent plexiglass desk. Jo recoiled from the piercing light. With an electric hum a scrim was lowered that rendered the space in a more soothing aspect.

  ‘Sorry, that’s better,’ said Linda. ‘Sometimes I forget the old Sydney Harbour razzle-dazzle is a bit hard on the retinas.’

  She escorted Jo to a perfectly flat black leather seat edged with a rigid chrome railing that had all the comfort of a park bench. It was fashionable and modern, Jo supposed, but did nothing to make her feel at ease.

  ‘I really did love being at Darling Point. Great days,’ said Linda wistfully as she leaned back in a black leather and chrome chair. ‘My favourite place was under the stained-glass window in the library. I’d curl up in that big old brown leather chair and in winter the sun would shine through on my face. It was like being inside a beautiful leadlight lantern.’ Linda tapped her crimson nails on the desk as if calling her wayward memories to attention. ‘Is that chair still there?’