by Rose Hartley
When Jen first turned up and sat next to me in our English class, I suspected she was boring. Her face was too smooth and pretty, eyes set too wide – the picture of innocence. More importantly, I didn’t like how her silver pencil case matched her pens. At lunch I decided to psych her out by announcing I was going to flash the gardener. The school’s gardener was only twenty-one and, though his monobrow prevented him from being thoroughly cute, he was the only male under thirty in the entire school and therefore the object of our collective teenage fantasies. My friends and I had memorised his daily rounds, so I knew he’d be passing by the window during art class. Jen turned to me and said – the only words out of her mouth so far – ‘I dare you.’ I was outraged. How could she, the angelic new girl, call my bluff?
An hour later we were sitting by the window, paintbrushes in hand, as the gardener approached to rake the leaves from the path outside. My pride would not allow me to back out. Jen quietly observed as I undid a button, knocked softly to get the gardener’s attention, flipped out a single boob and pressed it to the glass. He turned in alarm at the sight of my pale tit, squashed against the window like a sponge, and hurried away. It was highly likely the man lived in fear of some student’s teenage horniness getting him fired.
‘You did it,’ Jen whispered, and beamed. ‘Awesome.’
I think she was the first person who’d ever expressed pride in my actions. We’ve been inseparable ever since. Outwardly, the only things we have in common are our unbearable families and our taste in music. But we have kindred souls.
Throwing up her hands in laughter when I tore up her great-great grandmother’s wedding gown was, in hindsight, a predictably Jen reaction, though no one but me would know that. Most of the time she lives vicariously through me, pretending to discourage me from behaving badly but secretly relishing the tales I have to tell afterwards. And I always linger on the juicy parts.
Her favourite story is the one where my date and I were busted in the act by three generations of a family, who were having a Mother’s Day picnic in the Botanic Gardens on a sunny afternoon. Turns out Moreton Bay fig trees don’t give quite the level of privacy you think they will. Still, it was worth it for the wink I got from the ninety-year-old grandma in a twin-set as I darted past in an unzipped dress.
After my cider arrived I turned back to find Jen still wringing her hands, alternating between mortification at not knowing about Dan’s break-up and choosing the wrong venue for her engagement party. I was almost grateful when Sean walked through the door, late as usual, and swaggered over to kiss my cheek.
‘Hey, hot stuff.’ He slapped my butt.
‘That’s original,’ I said.
Nobody could believe I was dating Sean. Or, more accurately, nobody could believe that Sean was dating me. Honestly, sometimes I could hardly believe it. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair and eyes, and eyelashes as long as a horse’s. He’d gone to uni with some mutual friends and Jen introduced us not long after he moved into a house a block away from hers. There’d been a teeny tiny scandal at the beginning of our relationship, in the form of his ex-girlfriend, a model named Masha, who’d objected rather crudely when he had chosen, of his own free will, after approximately ten drinks at the Leinster Arms, to trade her in for me.
Sean’s nickname among friends was The Stal, short for stallion, which Sean – and I, at first – thought was because he had a way with women. Recently, however, his friend Con confessed to me that the nickname was conferred on Sean by Masha because when you get in bed with him the race is over before you know it’s begun. I took great offence to that. Sean was, in my view, an excellent boyfriend. He’d hardly complained when I moved into his house without asking a year ago, never expected me to clean or cook – he had a cleaner, and we ordered in most nights – and I still got a little thrill whenever he walked into a bar and every woman’s eyes followed him. In return, I overlooked his tendency towards excessive speed in the bedroom and encouraged him to attend every single Hawks game during the footy season. I was a model girlfriend.
Lately, though, I’d felt uneasy. A few months ago, Sarah Stoll had started working at the same ad agency as Sean, and tonight he was bringing her to the party. Sarah is possibly my least favourite person in the world. She’s been dogging my heels since high school, where in Year Nine she threw a pair of brown-stained underpants over the fence of the neighbouring boys’ school after carefully sewing a label with my name on it into the seam. She isn’t evil, exactly – I once witnessed her rescue a duckling stranded in a swimming pool, so she can’t be a complete psychopath – but she possesses an overdeveloped sense of schadenfreude. Especially when given the opportunity to be the architect of another person’s misfortune. Especially if that person is me.
Sarah was a copywriter and Sean was an account coordinator on the same team, and a few weeks ago they began exchanging texts after work and on weekends. Sean insisted they were friends and that I was unfairly holding onto old grudges.
‘Hiii.’ Sarah had trailed Sean into the pub. I envisaged her face popping out after an axe through the door. She looked the same as when I last saw her a few months ago, a pretty face painted Oompa Loompa-orange, hair as blonde as a Swede’s, eyes lined as black as a university fresher’s. She’d had eyeliner tattooed on her eyelids when she was nineteen, in fact. In her short gold glittering dress and stiletto heels like steel cigarettes, she was lethal.
Sean put a warm hand around my waist. Sarah immediately began talking shop.
‘Oh, Sean, remind me on Monday, we’ve got to blue-sky that Libra ad.’ She was practically purring as she brushed Sean’s arm with one finger.
‘Yeah, let’s take a helicopter view on it,’ he said, and they both laughed. Were they talking in code, I wondered, because how else did they manage to make adspeak sound like sex talk?
Sarah turned to me. ‘So, Maggie, how’s the life of leisure treating you?’
‘It’s great,’ I said.
‘It should be, with me paying the rent.’ Sean turned to Sarah. ‘She’s been doing commerce for ten years. They had to make a special allowance for her at uni to let her keep going, because there’s a cut-off and she’d flunked too many subjects.’
I’d heard that speech before from my mother, but not from Sean. There was a note of satisfaction in his voice, as if my failures gave him triumph. I stared at him for a moment, startled, then took the bait.
‘Because being an account coordinator at a mid-level ad agency makes you a genius,’ I said.
‘Genius enough to have a job.’
He had a point, but so what? He was my boyfriend. He wasn’t supposed to cut me down in public. That was my mother’s department. Making lists of my failures was her favourite pastime.
‘So, Sean,’ I said, ‘do you still think breasts are genitals?’
‘They are genitals,’ he said.
‘Nope. They still aren’t.’
He turned to Sarah. ‘If I grabbed your boobs at work, you’d be able to do me for sexual harassment. Therefore breasts are genitals.’
‘Do you? Maybe I’d do you, but not for harassment.’ She laughed, showing a set of implausibly white teeth, and put a hand on my arm. ‘I’m only joking, Maggie. Just jokes.’
Through unhappy coincidence, Sarah and I had also wound up at the same residential college, Barff, for the first two years of university, where she once took up-skirt photos of me while I was passed out on the common-room coffee table. For a few years she used to bring the photos out as a party trick to show to any man who expressed the remotest interest in me. So I know what her idea of a joke is.
Sean winked at her. ‘Maybe I should start harassing you.’
An arrow of dread to the stomach. Sean was not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he wasn’t usually mean. Had working with Sarah imbued enough cruelty in him by osmosis to flirt with my sworn enemy in front of me, or did he always have a nasty streak that I hadn’t noticed because we’d never had a reason to argue
?
In general, I have a long fuse. I endured ten years of my mother telling me I should stop acting like a tramp before I told her, with as deadpan a look on my face as I could muster, that she was a lonely, nagging witch who was jealous of my sex life because she’d probably never had an orgasm. That happened a year ago, and she threw me out of home. Luckily, Sean was there with a cute little rented house in Collingwood that I could move right into.
My fuse was burning now, but strangely I didn’t feel like screaming. I felt like sinking my head into a bucket of wine. This was Sarah’s forte: non-confrontational public humiliation, the kind you suck up with your pinot noir. Most people don’t know how to handle it. They just find a seat at the bar and watch their relationship implode from a distance. Not me, though.
‘Wow, your banter is infectious.’ I shook a jaunty finger at Sean and Sarah. ‘In fact, I think it just gave me chlamydia.’
‘Oh, you probably picked that up in high school.’ Sarah smirked. ‘I hear it can go undetected for a long time.’
Sean laughed uproariously and dropped his arm from my waist.
Sometimes it’s what people don’t say that hurts the most. For Sean to laugh at Sarah’s chlamydia joke but not at mine was like an icepick to the heart.
He and Sarah looked at each other like they were waiting for me to leave. And Sean’s aftershave was making me queasy. I walked away, trying not to succumb to feelings of defeat. I am a proactive person, I told myself. I am not a victim.
The band had finished playing their first set and the handsome guitarist approached the bar, waiting to order. I straightened my shoulders. Sean wasn’t the only one who knew how to flirt outrageously. Or at least, he wasn’t the only one who knew how to say inappropriate things to attractive people. The guitarist was a touch older than me, well into his thirties, with the beginnings of silver in his stubble. He leant against the bar while all around him people talked, gestured, flirted; the still point in a fidgeting room. I took in his size: a compact man, not tall but not short. Inked on his left forearm were those navy-blue ballpoint pen tattoos, while on his right were hummingbirds in full colour. Those were professionally done, and lovely. He had a slight frown on his face, as if his mind was somewhere else.
I gently inserted myself between him and the bar.
‘I’m Maggie.’ I stuck out my hand and he looked at it.
‘Hi Maggie.’ His voice sounded like rocks rattling in a tin.
I took my hand back, undeterred. ‘I need to ask you something. Do you think breasts are genitals?’
See? Two can play at this flirting game.
His expression remained inscrutable as he lowered his lashes, but to his credit he didn’t drop his gaze to my tits.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘I had an argument about it with someone just now.’
‘Huh. No, breasts are secondary sex characteristics, I’d say.’
‘That’s what I said.’ That’s what I’ll say next time, anyway.
The bartender handed him a pale ale without being asked, then raised an eyebrow at me because the words, ‘What would you like?’ were more effort than he could be bothered making. I ordered a cider and took it with both hands. A drop of condensation slid down the glass. The guitarist’s fingers were close to mine and the warm crush of bodies pressing around us was a good excuse to lean into him a little more. He was wearing a simple grey T-shirt and his body looked nice and firm. I turned to search for Sean and Sarah: they were facing each other, barely an inch between them, and neither had noticed that I was talking to a hot guy. Sarah was smiling up at Sean like he’d just told her spray tans were half-price this week. Wait, did Sean just reach out and brush some hair from Sarah’s face? Touching her face was beyond the pale.
I turned back to the bar, drank half the cider in one go and put the glass down, my hand shaking a little.
‘This is a bit forward,’ I said to the hot tattooed guy, ‘but would you be interested in having sex in the bathroom?’
Okay, maybe that was a slight overreaction to a face touch.
He didn’t blink. ‘With you?’
‘Yes.’
There was a pause in which I began to regret my choice of words, but I kept my smile firm and alluring. At least, I hoped I did.
‘Does this have something to do with the breasts or genitals question?’
‘No, this is unrelated.’
‘So you just want to have sex with a stranger?’
A hot stranger. A hot stranger who played a mean slide guitar, who wasn’t my traitorous boyfriend.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
A man behind me leant over my shoulder, breathing bourbon all over me. ‘I’ll have sex with you, love.’
‘Piss off.’ I didn’t turn my head or remove my gaze from the guitarist’s eyes.
He smiled ever so slightly. His eyes had freckles in them, brown specks dotted over green irises, like lily pads on a pond. He took a sip of his drink and stood up straight, making me stumble a little as I lost my leaning post.
‘Good luck with your mission,’ he said, and walked off.
My cheeks burned, but there was relief mixed in with the embarrassment. I might have been in a tiny spot of bother if he’d said yes.
Jen had seen me.
‘Cut it out,’ she hissed, grabbing me by the upper arm and dragging me into a dark corner. ‘Don’t do this again. Not at my engagement party. You. Have. A. Boyfriend.’
‘He’s sleeping with Sarah Stoll.’ I pointed. Sarah was rolling her eyes at something, both hands resting lightly on Sean’s jacket lapels. ‘He’s probably giving her a mussel-rustle every day in the supply closet at work.’
‘They’re flirting. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘It does. You didn’t hear them earlier. They’re sleeping together, I know it. And look at that!’
‘What?’
‘Look at his pants.’
‘What about them?’
‘There’s a bulge.’
‘That’s because Sarah is rubbing against him. Okay, so maybe he’s attracted to her. It doesn’t mean they’re sleeping together.’
I gave Jen a look.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You think your relationship is about to crash and burn. So what? You can’t help but go down with a flourish of shame?’
‘Ouch, Jen. But yes. Exactly. Sex in the bathroom at The Fainting Chair is a story for the grandkids.’
‘Sex in the bathroom?’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve never done it.’
‘At home. In my private en suite. With my fiancé.’ She pressed her glass to her pink cheeks and sighed. ‘God, I sound like a wanker. I’m just jealous. I’d kill to pull some guy into the bathroom and screw him senseless.’
I gave her what I hoped was a sympathetic look. ‘Jono’s still avoiding the old in–out?’
She whipped her head around to see if anyone had overheard and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘We haven’t done it at all since he’s been back. I mean, he’s away for ten days and back for four, I deserve at least . . .’ She waved a hand. ‘Three boinks. But nada.’
‘If it makes you feel any better, you probably won’t have sex after you’re married either.’
Jono was only the second man that Jen had slept with. Me, I’d lost count. I had a little problem remaining focused. But I hadn’t cheated on Sean. With him, things were serious. At least I thought they were.
Jen and I ordered tequila shots from the barman. I drained mine, ate my lemon slice and adjusted my dress. ‘All right, I won’t drag anyone into the bathroom. But I am going to make Sean see that he’s making a terrible mistake.’
‘How?’ Jen asked.
‘Dunno. Parade by with some guy, make sure he’s seen me.’
‘Seems like an . . . undergraduate technique,’ Jen said.
‘I am an undergraduate, remember? Anyhow. Watch me.’
I headed back to the bar, avoiding the bourbon-breather, who was
still leering. He had booze-ruddied cheeks and wore a wedding ring. Around the other side of the bar, the blond guy with dimples was talking to a guy in a suit. What did Jen say his name was? Dan. I approached breezily.
‘Nice flannie,’ I said.
Dan’s shirt was red and blue plaid flannelette with pockets at the top, and his jeans were old and worn. He looked down at his pockets and smiled.
‘Thanks.’
‘Bit hipster, isn’t it?’ the suit guffawed, elbowing Dan.
‘This is Collingwood, mate, it’s uniform,’ Dan replied.
‘Have you checked out the Elvis paintings?’ the suit asked. ‘I’ve counted three man buns tonight.’ He waited for me to laugh.
I wanted to roll my eyes, but refrained. Men like him tended to break out in honking laughter at the slightest provocation, and I didn’t feel like being the object of fascination for a middle manager who worked on Collins Street. I wanted him to leave so I could talk to Dan, so I tried reverse psychology.
‘Your suit is great. It reminds me of this guy I see in Myer all the time, he’s a total dandy. He has these massive sideburns and wears a necktie and a little dandy cap. He carries his dog with him everywhere. It’s a shih tzu. But personally I think you’d do better with a French bulldog.’ I shoved my glass at him. ‘Would you mind getting me another cider, sweetheart?’
The suit’s face fell a bit, and he muttered something about being delighted to get me a drink.
Dan was smiling into his beer. ‘I’ve seen that dandy guy in the Dumpling House, I think.’
‘Ooh, I tried those dumplings last week. I didn’t feel sick at all afterwards.’
Dan laughed. ‘The waitresses are great, aren’t they? They don’t even pretend not to hate you.’
This was going well. ‘Let’s get another drink,’ I said.
‘What about the guy you just sent off to get one?’
‘He’ll find something to do with it.’ I pulled him towards the bar, far from where the suit was straining to get Surly’s attention, ordered another cider and necked it.
‘I’m a builder,’ Dan said during a quiet moment. ‘What do you do?’