I understood what he meant then. All too well. I’d had the same thoughts myself for the first few weeks after I’d moved in. ‘Don’t worry, sooner or later you’ll hear Mr and Mrs Ruben in apartment 21 screaming at each other and throwing the crystal around and you’ll take the Miss Marple thing back. I did.’
‘Ah. So these are just the civilised people?’
I nodded and laughed as I dusted some icing sugar off one side of my mouth. ‘Pretty much. They’ve all got their secrets, though, just like everyone.’ I leaned in towards him then. ‘Mr Hughes, for example, has been having a rendezvous or two with Hilda Tennington. I’ve caught her sneaking out of his apartment a few times now.’
‘Really? Hilda? Sly old dog.’
‘Apparently he needs his eye drops put in for him.’ I nodded as conspiratorially as I could before I leaned back out and started talking normally again. ‘What I really meant to ask you about was the room.’
‘Oh. The room. I’ll take it, if that’s all right. Long as you can promise me I won’t be the one who’s murdered at the start of the midday movie.’
‘I think I can promise that.’
‘My piano? That’ll be OK too?’
‘It’s fine with me. It’ll be nice.’
‘What about everyone else? They mind?’
I looked around at them all. Somehow, I didn’t think so. ‘Jasper, if I know them as well as I think I do, they’ll probably be knocking down the door to have sing-alongs. You’d better learn how to play “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” before you move in. It’s their collective favourite.’
‘Easy enough. Then I’ll take it.’ He stuck out his hand for me to shake to seal the deal. ‘But only if you call me Jas.’
Chapter Two
So, Jas it was.
And after the ladies had made him polish off the few leftovers on the table we waddled back upstairs. I made sure we were out of earshot of anyone else before I told him the one and only condition of his moving in.
He could only stay till the end of the year.
I explained that it wasn’t personal or anything. None of us—the whole fifty-two, three cats and two illegal dogs—who lived in the building would be here this time next year. Because, in approximately eleven and a half months’ time, Magnolia Lodge was going to be demolished to make way for a swanky new apartment complex. One hundred apartments, a pool and a gym. One hundred apartments that you couldn’t swing a cat in, but would look like all the other hundreds of apartments and townhouses in the rest of the street.
Jas said this was fine, that he’d be finished uni by then and was planning on moving to Sydney when he was done.
He moved most of his stuff in that night.
Over the next six months or so, we got on brilliantly. Even better than I’d thought we would. Our lifestyles suited each other, for a start. When we weren’t at our crappy jobs—waitressing at a café for me, piano-tutoring at a kids’ music school for Jas—or at our separate unis, we were busy at our ‘real’ work.
I’d be sweating away down in the boat shed, welding together my latest piece of sculpture, or making my way to the dump to search for interesting pieces of scrap metal to use for my next. I was thinking about holding an exhibition in the middle of the next year. Meanwhile, Jas would be tinkering away at the piano, songwriting. Sometimes, if the wind carried to the boat shed just right, I could hear him playing the same bar of music over and over again, adding a piece, subtracting a piece, the song getting longer, in fact becoming a song, as the days passed. Our work was similar in an adding, subtracting, trying things out way that eventually led to an end product after a lot of sweat and a bit of good luck.
When we needed some time off we’d head to the local swimming pool, have a barbecue in the nearby park, or just take a walk. Once I took him to Byron Bay for a week, to visit my mother. He was blown away. Not a great surprise, because most people were by my mother and the things that surrounded her: by her house, which was wooden and built over five levels down a hill to make the most of the view; and by her own sculpture, which dominated every room and the front courtyard of the house and was made entirely of sandstone—not like my metal productions at all (to tease me she would call me ‘junkie Charlie’ because of my frequent scavenging trips). But mostly by her, with her booming voice and large-enough-for-a-whole-group-of-people personality.
The real surprise was the fact that she liked him back. Suffice to say that Mum didn’t get on with all that many people. She either liked them or she didn’t, and usually she’d tell them her verdict within the first five minutes of meeting them. Sometimes it could be quite embarrassing.
She told me on the phone, a few days after we left, that Jas would be very famous one day. She could tell by his aura. When I relayed this to him, Jas thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, but he still called her back pretty smartly to see if, hopefully, she had any other nice big fibs to tell him.
Community life at Magnolia Lodge went along swimmingly too. Right from the moment he started flirting with the Miss Tenningtons on the lawn, Jas was a hit with the elders of the building. The funny thing was, after a few months of our living together, a rumour seemed to have passed around that we were married. We became officially Jasper-and-Charlotte to the people we knew fairly well, or ‘the nice young married couple in apartment 10’ to the people we knew only in passing.
One day, when we came home, there was an invitation under our door to my own wedding shower, organised by Mrs Kennedy in apartment 14. I went over, invitation in hand, to explain that we weren’t really married, but when she opened the door Mrs Kennedy and the three other ladies who were there planning the party were so excited I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth.
It was a recipe shower, as it turned out, and I still have all the recipes in the scrapbook they gave me today. I don’t use the Miss Tenningtons’ mutton one very much—never, in fact—but the caramel fudge one from Mrs Holland comes in quite handy on rainy Sundays.
Jas and I became even more involved in building life after our fake marriage. We played croquet every second Saturday, and even started going to bingo on the second Tuesday night of each month. After our first night at bingo we made a pact.
We would draw the line at bowls.
Bowls, we decided, would be taking it too far. Apart from the white uniform being expensive, and a little more than unflattering, we agreed that it was probably best to save something for our own retirement.
As we got to know the people in the building better, little treats started to turn up on our doorstep. Lemon butter. Lime butter. Passionfruit butter.
There was a lot of butter.
Pumpkin scones, fruit scones and plain scones were also popular.
We’d do little things in return. Change lightbulbs. Open tough jars. Things like that. Whatever we could, really. But while things were tottering along beautifully with everyone else, it was at this time, around the six-month mark, that Jas started to act a little oddly.
I’d always thought it was strange that he never brought any friends back to the apartment. In fact, a few weeks after he’d moved in I’d noticed this and thought that maybe he was worried that it wouldn’t be OK with me. So I mentioned it, asked if he wanted to have a house-warming or something and invite all his friends along. He just shook his head. He was busy, he said. With his work. Now, I knew that he didn’t get on with his family very well, that they didn’t agree with what he was doing—studying music—but there must be people he socialised with, and why he didn’t want them in the apartment was a mystery.
As for me, I had people over by the dozen. My mother, my aunt Kath, friends from work, the odd love interest—whoever.
I didn’t give up on the friends thing with Jas, though. I would ask again, every so often, just in case he changed his mind. Or, that is, I kept asking until things went a bit strange. Because all of a sudden Jas started bringing people home. Every weekend. Always different ones.
And all girls.
The first time, I didn’t think much of it. I got up on a Saturday morning, half dressed, and went into the kitchen to find some tall blonde girl there I didn’t know. I knew Jas had been out the night before with some people from uni, but I didn’t know he’d brought someone home. I said hi, made a hasty cup of tea and scooted back to my room with the paper. When I emerged an hour or so later she was gone, and Jas didn’t seem to want to say anything about it.
The next week, it was the same.
There was a girl there Saturday morning.
And a different girl there Sunday morning.
All blonde and all tall. Well, maybe there was one bordering on brunette and one you might have called strawberry blonde…but always a different girl.
The weekend after that there weren’t any girls. Not here, anyway, because Jas didn’t even bother to come home.
Things went on like this for weeks. Girls arrived, then disappeared mysteriously early in the morning of the next day. For the short periods of time it was just us in the apartment Jas hid in his room, working furiously. He avoided me. He avoided everyone. He stopped going to croquet, he stopped going to bingo, he even looked as if he’d stopped eating, he got so thin. The ladies pressed new recipes on me, fattening recipes for lasagne and roasts and bread and butter pudding with butterscotch sauce.
I went through stages. At first I was worried—this wasn’t like Jas, not like the Jas I knew, anyway. Why was he suddenly so withdrawn when we’d been getting along so well? I tried to talk to him, but he dodged the questions, avoided me, simply didn’t come home. It carried on and on in the same way. The girls kept coming and would leave around midday. I’d stay holed up in my room until they left.
It was embarrassing, having to go out into the kitchen when there was a 99.9 per cent chance there’d be a half-naked girl in there who always looked too good for that time of the morning. And generally with a smile that even lemon-scented Jif and the scratchy side of the kitchen sponge wouldn’t be able to wipe off her face.
I just didn’t feel comfortable.
After weeks and weeks of this, I started to get a bit shitty. I was sick and tired of being a prisoner in my own room every weekend morning. And things had heated up. Girls came over during the week. And when, one Saturday, a few of my CDs went missing, I moved up from shitty to simply furious. I didn’t talk to Jas for the rest of the week and decided that if things kept up like this he was out.
But things didn’t stay like that at all. Because after that Saturday the girl thing stopped just as abruptly as it had started. Jas didn’t go out with the friends from uni any more, either. The friends I’d never met.
During the week that it all came to a halt Jas took me out for dinner and apologised awkwardly. He said he’d been stressed, that he’d gone a bit crazy, hadn’t known what he was doing, but now knew he’d been acting like an idiot. He promised it wouldn’t happen again.
I didn’t know where to look. I mumbled something in reply and that was that. After that evening we didn’t talk about it again. And a few weeks later things returned to almost normal between us.
For a while, anyway. Because as time passed I started to realise something about myself. A thing that came as a bit of a shock.
I knew I’d overreacted a touch about Jas having all the girls over—and I’d felt as guilty as hell when I’d found the ‘missing’ CDs under my bed a few weeks after Jas had hit the emergency stop button on the chick conveyer belt. In fact, I’d worried and fretted and carried on about the girl thing so much I was behind on my sculpting. Uni was suffering too. I’d already had one extension on an assignment I couldn’t seem to get started, and it didn’t look like as if it was going to be handed in any time soon. I’d simply spent hour after hour during those weeks sitting in the boat shed doing nothing. Staring at the walls. Staring at the floor. Staring at the ceiling.
And I was still doing it. The staring thing. Especially if I could hear the piano.
It wasn’t just that, either. There was the weekend thing too. The thing where I’d wake up at five-thirty or so every Saturday and Sunday morning like clockwork and lie there, wondering if there was a girl in Jas’s room. Praying that there wouldn’t be and being overjoyed when it was true.
I kept on like this for months.
And by the end of the year, just a few weeks before we were due to move out, I was so far behind on my work I realised I was never going to catch up in time to hold my exhibition. Not that I even wanted to any more. Because I’d been slowly realising that there was something wrong with it all. Something not quite right.
I couldn’t relate to what I was doing, where I was going with my sculpture—couldn’t get involved. Up at the apartment I’d hear Jas working away, completely absorbed in his songwriting, frustrating me with every note he played on the piano. I would have given anything, anything to be able to block out the world around me like Jas and my mother seemed to be able to do for hours at a time.
Things had only got worse on the uni front as well. I’d received a conceded pass on my assignment, and was now trying to convince myself that the saying ‘third time lucky’ might just be true, because it certainly didn’t seem as if I was going to pass on this, my second, attempt. It was the worst of times. And then, as if all of the above wasn’t enough to be getting on with, I worked something out.
I’d been sitting there in the boat shed, doing little or nothing as per usual—unless you could call kicking around the bits of scrap metal on the floor doing something—when it came to me. I could hear Jas playing and singing. A new piece I hadn’t heard before, or couldn’t remember. It was perfect, whatever it was, and I knew he must have written it himself. It suited his voice, which I noticed instantly, because a lot of things other people wrote didn’t. He had a strange voice, low and raspy. Very distinctive.
Halfway through his song I became startled and coughed. I’d forgotten something. To breathe, in fact. And I needed to desperately. I felt something strange and brought one hand up to my chest. My heart was going thumpa-thumpa-thump. That’s when it came to me.
I was completely, desperately, totally, devotedly, idiotically in love with Jasper Ash.
I was in love with Jas.
Why I hadn’t realised it before was beyond me. It was so obvious.
The feelings I’d found so hard to control when he’d had girl after girl over for the night. The waking up early every weekend morning. The sitting and listening when I should have been working. The…oh, everything.
It was cringeworthy.
So that’s what I did. I sat for a bit longer. But this time, instead of staring at the walls, staring at the floor, staring at the ceiling, I cringed. Long and hard. And when I was done I wondered just what I was going to do about this. This…love thing. The L thing. It didn’t take me long to realise there wasn’t much I could do.
It was pointless.
In two weeks’ time, Jas and I would be packing our belongings into boxes. In three weeks’ time we’d be moving out. Jas to Sydney and me to my mother’s place in Byron Bay. And there wasn’t any way I could change that. Not my plans anyway, because my mother needed me. She was sick. And I was going to go and look after her.
There wasn’t any way Jas could change his plans to move to Sydney either, because he’d made this great contact. Some guy in the music industry who might be able to get him started in the business. So that was that. To say anything now would be pointless.
Futile.
Basically, an all-round waste of time.
Chapter Three
So, I shut up about it. I hid my feelings.
Oh, probably not very well. I have to say that much. I was probably as transparent as the thinnest of thin rice paper. I probably mooned around the apartment like a lovesick cow. But Jas didn’t seem to notice, or if he did he didn’t say anything, and things continued as usual.
Until our third last day together.
We’d been fairly busy up until then. Of cou
rse everyone in the building had to leave, so we’d spent the last few weeks running around and helping out with the odd spot of packing. Wrapping up endless china cups and knickknacks for the arthritic Miss Tenningtons—why old ladies always seem to own about a hundred china cups and saucers in rose patterns that never match is beyond me—and waving people off as their families came and transported them to, usually, nursing homes.
By our third last day together, our third last day in the apartment, just about everyone we were close to had gone. There was only a handful of people left in the entire building. It was quiet. Too quiet. Even the building seemed to know it was coming to the end of its days, because the day before the lift had stuck between floors—thankfully, there was no one in it—and had refused to budge for twelve hours. It had taken five workmen to get it started again.
It was almost midnight when I got home on that third last day. I’d just finished my last shift at my crappy waitressing job, and though I should have been ecstatic I wasn’t. The day before I’d been notified that I had officially failed my Modern History subject. Again. I had a million boxes to pack. I had to move. My mother was sick. All my friends from my days at Magnolia Lodge were being packed off to nursing homes around the country that they didn’t want to go to. My sculpture had died a slow and painful death. Life wasn’t exactly great.
When I got up to the apartment and opened the door I was surprised to find it was dark inside, even though Jas had said he’d definitely be up late packing. Just as I was about to turn the light on there was a noise—a chair scraping against the balcony tiles. I dropped my hand from the light switch and looked out to see Jas stand up.
‘Hey,’ I called out, wary, a part of me already sensing something was wrong.
‘Come and take a seat,’ Jas said.
I crossed the floor, dropping my bag and keys on the dining table on the way.
‘What’s up?’ I tried to read Jas’s expression as I sat down in the iron chair he’d pulled out for me. Before he could answer, something distracted me. I sniffed. Sniffed again. Spotted the small plastic bag on the balcony ledge, then the papers and the lighter. ‘Is that…?’
It's Not You It's Me Page 2