by Rose Hartley
Back home, I lay on the vinyl, kicked off my shoes and opened an envelope with a colourful Centrelink logo on the front. I unfolded the letter within.
They’d looked into my file. On top of not declaring my living arrangements for the past year, I’d apparently been receiving student payments entirely by mistake.
What?
I read the letter again. Input error. I read it and reread it, the words blurring with shock. You’re supposed to complete a Bachelor of Commerce degree in three years. After that, the student payments are meant to stop, but mine hadn’t. Administration oversight. I’d been unfairly receiving payments for seven years.
They were clawing back every dollar.
Seven years.
Ten grand a year.
I felt myself slipping down a rabbit hole, rank and dark, and reached for the nearest bottle of wine. It was empty. I lit a candle and held the letter above the flame until it caught, then dropped it in the sink to burn out. Could I just leave town? I had a caravan and no fixed address, who would find me in Darwin or Perth or Byron Bay and force me to pay back a debt? But no, that was no kind of life. Centrelink and the ATO always catch up with you. Besides, I couldn’t leave Jen to deal with her wedding on her own. Rueben’s face rose in my mind and I tried to push it back out again, because the little shiver that ran through me when I thought of leaving and never seeing Rueben again was somewhat frightening, and very surprising.
Chapter 13
Sunday morning was ugly. The numbers in the Centrelink letter kept going around like a spinning roulette table. I couldn’t even say it out loud to myself. How was anyone supposed to pay that back? My hands flailed about, as if to push the numbers away from my face. Denial was always the answer. A bottle of wine had washed down my cold, dry dinner sandwich the night before and left me with a screaming headache and the vague notion that I was supposed to go dress shopping with Jen.
It’s best not to disappoint your closest friend within twenty-four hours of disappointing your mother, so I let myself in through the back of Jen’s house, took a shower and dressed in the cleanest clothes I had, which was a polyester 1970s maxi dress in a print that would make the most flamboyant Puccilover’s eyes water, and nothing else. The caravan wardrobe was filled with dirty underwear and even my bras were turning grey at the underwire from old sweat. I couldn’t borrow one of Jen’s bras because she was a double-D cup while I was a not-quite-C, and she was funny about lending undies. She’d lent me a pair or two over the years and never wanted them back even when I assured her I had washed them in scalding water.
So I’d be trying on bridesmaid dresses starkers. I just hoped that none of them were made of sheer silk.
Jen was in a low mood again. She shuffled out of her bedroom when she heard me get out of the shower, nodded in greeting and put the coffee on without saying anything.
‘Ready to find a dress?’ I tried to sound as cheerful as I could, but Jen appeared not to hear me. Christ, I never knew how much Jen’s happiness relied on getting laid. At least, I assumed that was the problem. Jono’s reasons for withholding sex were opaque, but it was just one more reason to hate him.
She poured the coffee and silently offered me a croissant. I took one.
‘You want me to warm it up?’ Her voice was rusty.
‘Nah, it’s fine like this.’
After I finished my croissant she wiped up the crumbs on the table.
‘My mother’s really angry’—she shook the crumbs into the bin—‘about the dress.’
‘What dress?’
She looked at me, deadpan.
‘Oh, you mean her wedding dress? The one . . . ?’
‘Yeah, that one.’
I opened my mouth to remind her that she hadn’t minded too much about that, but saw the bags under her eyes and closed it again.
‘Well, if it makes you feel better, my own mother’s angry with me too,’ I said, ‘because I haven’t shaved my legs.’
She pulled me into a tight hug. ‘If my mother disowns me can I come live in your caravan?’
‘Of course. We’ll be a stationary Thelma and Louise.’
The bridal ‘shoppe’ on Glenferrie Road contained racks and racks of white, off-white, super-white and champagne-coloured dresses, all of which were hideous and none of which cost less than four thousand dollars. Jen tried on six and looked all right in most of them, but had it been my wedding, I would have rather worn my polyester fright than spend the equivalent of a trip to Europe on a generic dress I’d never wear again. However, I was slowly learning the value of keeping my opinions to myself. For five minutes, at least.
The change room had a French provincial theme. I was perched on the edge of a gold Louis XIV-style chair in the corner, while Jen stood before the mirror in a coffee-coloured lace tube dress with a slight fishtail. The overall effect was a little top-heavy, as her breasts spilled over the sweetheart neckline in an obscene show of cleavage. She looked amazing. Her face was flushed rosy pink and her hair was dishevelled from lifting dress after dress over her head and back off again. She turned carefully away from me, inspecting her backside in the mirror, as she asked, ‘So Dan looked at your mother’s floorboards?’
‘Yeah. This dress is good, Jen.’ I tugged on the train and checked the price tag. ‘Four thousand six hundred. Still ridiculous, but one of the cheapest in here.’
‘Did he say anything?’ Jen asked.
‘What?’
‘I mean, is there anything going on with you and Dan?’
I shrugged. ‘He didn’t say anything to me, but he said something weird to my mum. Can’t remember exactly what, but I think he was telling her he likes me.’
The shop assistant rattled the change room door before flinging it open, gasping at the sight of Jen’s lace-clad figure with faux amazement that matched the faux French-provincial decor.
‘It’s bea-you-tiful,’ she said. She tucked her hands into the sides of Jen’s bosom to adjust the dress in a too-familiar way that would have made me slap her wriggling fingers away, but Jen allowed it. ‘Stunning. This one is the last one of this cut in the shop, the display dress, so it’s fifteen per cent off.’
‘There you go, Jen. How about you get this one?’
‘I have to think about it.’ The shop assistant pressed her lips together at the doubt in Jen’s expression and melted away again, saying she would come back with some more options. Jen’s frown made me remember Jono, and that I shouldn’t be pressing her to buy a dress since I didn’t want her to marry the bastard. If I hadn’t been so busy with my own problems I would have been more occupied with making Jen see the light before she married him and had millions of children.
Children. That was the heart of the problem. Children are an insidious evil in society. They inflict their selfish desires on innocent adults who only want to sleep in until nine in the morning and watch Netflix at night. Children corrupt freethinking individuals and turn them into office slaves who fret about their mortgages and the chemicals in plastic milk bottles. Jen was really excited about having children. She didn’t seem to understand the risks; she was not only excited, she was anxious to have them. She regularly mentioned that she was about to turn thirty and that she always thought she’d have her first child at twenty-eight. If I somehow managed to separate Jen and Jono, I’d have to find her a replacement man fast, and a clucky one at that.
The assistant slipped back into the change room with six more dresses, full-skirted white horrors encrusted with oil-slick shiny beads and tacky sequins.
‘Just give me one minute and I’ll be back to help you button up,’ the assistant said, as she hung the frightful things on the hooks. ‘I’ll just go and find the matching lace straps for the one you’ve got on.’
Gah. Matching lace straps. Wedding dress shopping was the actual worst, but as yet I had no way to end it that didn’t involve Jen purchasing a dress. I had to think fast.
‘So what are you going to do about the sex problem you and Jon
o are having? Maybe you need pre-marital counselling,’ I suggested.
Jen whipped her head around to peer through the gap in the change room door, checking if anyone had heard. ‘Jono says he’s just been tired lately.’
‘You could buy a vibrator. Or you could, you know, not marry him.’
Jen turned red, clashing horribly with the coffee-coloured lace. I suppose I shouldn’t have said that while she was trying on wedding dresses. But when your best friend is about to marry a donkey-brained loser you are obligated to go nuclear. I thought she was going to get angry at me, but instead she fiddled with her train.
‘Do you think this is nylon lace, or polyester? I’d better ask the assistant.’ It was a favourite trick of hers, to hide her anxiety by pretending to be busy.
‘Is one preferable?’
‘I need to call my mother,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘And my sister. I can’t decide on a dress and I don’t trust you to be honest.’
‘You mean you trust me to be honest but you don’t trust my taste.’
‘You’d send me down the aisle in a minidress and boots.’
‘You’d look adorable!’ I insisted. ‘And I only suggested that once, after I saw the price tags.’
‘It’s okay,’ she said in a soothing tone. ‘You go get coffees and I’ll dial up Spain and maybe Abu Dhabi to speak to my sister, too. I’ll do a video call.’
She was trying to boot me out of the bridal shoppe, and I was glad to go. I ran down Glenferrie Road with the wind whipping into my face to find a cafe. While the barista filled the order I stared at the brown-brick feature wall behind her, and the hissing of the coffee machine lulled me into a passive state, enough to let the careful veneer of denial fall away. Words from the Centrelink letter came roaring back to me and I almost doubled over, clutching my stomach as the stabbing pain of panic hit.
‘Are you okay?’ the barista asked.
‘Fine,’ I gasped. ‘Indigestion.’ I took the coffees with shaking hands and, once outside, took a minute to gather my breath. No need to burden Jen with my problems.
My coffee run was pointless, though, because as soon as I returned, the shoppe assistant practically assaulted me trying to get the cups out of my hand.
‘No food or drinks in the shoppe!’ she hissed.
Jen looked exhausted and listless. She was on a conference video call with her mother and the sister in Abu Dhabi, holding the phone up to the mirror so they could see the fishtail wonder.
‘It’s too caramel,’ I heard her mother say. ‘It’s draining all the colour from your face. It will just show up brown in the photos, too.’
‘There are others,’ Jen said.
‘Try them on for us.’
Jen rested her phone on the ledge in the change room and presented her back to me to help her unzip.
‘Hi, Mrs Basso,’ I said. ‘Hi, Camille.’
‘Hello, Maggie,’ they chorused. Neither looked or sounded happy at my presence. I did destroy the family heirloom wedding dress, I remembered. Oh, and there was that time I threw up a stomachful of pineapple margaritas into Camille’s closet. In the dark the sweater shelf had felt a little like the bathroom sink. She had plenty of nine-hundred-dollar cashmere sweaters, though, and I only ruined two.
Jen tried on two more dresses before she found The One. It was pure white, not a sequin or bead in sight, with a bell skirt, nipped-in waist and slender shoulder straps. In my opinion it made her look like a Vogue princess, and by the look on her face, Jen agreed. The problem was that it cost seven thousand dollars. Actually, that wouldn’t have been a problem if her mother had liked the dress. Her mother would have paid far more than that for something slinky and bead-encrusted with short sleeves, like the stick-thin models on the runway wear. But it was a traditional white dress with a bell skirt and Mrs Basso said it was unflattering, ‘considering’ Jen’s bosom. That was the word she used, unflattering, a euphemism for ‘it makes you look fat’. But instead of insisting that her daughter choose a slinkier dress, which Mrs Basso desperately wanted to do but knew was against the rules, she complained about the price of the bell-skirted dress.
‘Seven thousand dollars,’ she said. ‘It’s so much. And you didn’t even have your engagement party at the Melbourne Club, so why do you want such an expensive dress?’
‘It’s exactly what I want,’ Jen murmured, turning this way and that, a flush filling her cheeks.
‘I could help pay for it if you don’t want to, Mrs Basso,’ I lied. I was in a sparkly red dress that I’d found on the discount rack. It had a low-cut neck and fringing at the thigh and it was backless, a beautifully slutty number.
‘You could help?’ Mrs Basso spat. ‘You destroyed my grandmother’s dress.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘And that’s why I’d help pay for it. Did Jen tell you about my new career?’ I shook my fringing and hiked up my boobs for the benefit of the video callers.
‘Yeah,’ Jen said. ‘Maggie’s absolutely brilliant, Mum. She’s killing it on the pole in St Kilda. Five hundred dollars an hour.’
‘It’s called exotic dancing now,’ I said. ‘But it’s pretty much the same thing. Hey, do you like this dress, Camille? I’m thinking it’s perfect for the bridesmaids. You and Freesia will look great in it, and it’s thirty per cent off.’
Jen’s sister made a noise that sounded like she was choking.
‘Ooh, I really like it,’ said Jen. ‘Camille, the red will show off your tan so well.’
‘You are not wearing that down the aisle!’ Mrs Basso screeched at her oldest daughter.
‘Mum, you don’t have to tell me,’ Camille’s tinny voice piped up. ‘Maggie’s crazy.’
‘Oh, you don’t like it?’ Jen said. ‘I like it. So festive! The wedding is close to Christmas, so it makes sense to wear red.’
Mrs Basso was turning purple. ‘Do not put my daughters in that.’
Jen sighed, as if to say, Please, Mummy. ‘What if I wear a slinky dress instead? It would go better with the red bridesmaid dresses, I think. The beading and all that.’
‘Wear the bell-skirt if you like,’ Mrs Basso shrieked. ‘I’ll pay for it. But I’ll have nothing to do with you if you make Camille look like a prostitute. Her husband works at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. If someone at his work sees a picture of her in that, she’ll get arrested and he’ll get sacked. He’s on four hundred thousand!’
‘Okay, fine.’ Jen sighed dramatically. ‘Go try on the navy shift, Maggie. That one will work nicely with the bell-skirt.’
The day was a great success. The navy-blue bridesmaid dresses we eventually ordered were stunning, despite the fact they were sensible shifts, with long French-cuffed sleeves in transparent silk, and Jen was practically crying with happiness over her own dress.
‘If we put your hair in a chignon you’ll look like a French socialite in the navy dress,’ Jen said. She sounded pleased with herself, so I guessed it was a compliment.
‘I just can’t believe how many of those dresses were more hideous than your great-grandmother’s gown,’ I said.
Jen dropped me back at my caravan. She stared at one of the tyres, which was looking flat.
‘By the way, I’m coming to Lisa’s party,’ she said.
I looked blankly at her.
‘Dan’s ex, she invited me to her engagement party too,’ she clarified.
Something in her voice made me pause. ‘Lisa . . . I thought you were better friends with Dan than Lisa.’
‘Mmm.’ She got out her phone. ‘Remember how I said she was competitive?’
‘Yeah. So?
‘She heard you were coming to the party with Dan.’
The text message from Lisa on Jen’s phone was chirpy. Hey hon, I heard your friend Maggie is coming with Dan to my engagement party. Just thought I’d say, you should totally come too! I’d luv to see you. Have been missing you guys. Xx Lisa
‘“Have been missing you guys” . . . who does she me
an?’
Jen shrugged. ‘The friendship group, I guess. Although, I’ve only met her three times, so I doubt it’s me she’s missing.’
‘She means it’s been too long since she got her erotic kicks out of seeing Dan publicly mourn their relationship. Probably. Tell me again why I’d never met Dan before your engagement party?’
‘Because you ignore Biyu’s texts to hang out with her boyfriend’s friends and you refuse to go to barbecues.’
‘Barbecues are God’s punishment for inventing single-use plastics. Well . . . great. We can go together.’
She hugged me. ‘Thanks for today. You really came through for me with my mum and sister.’
‘They didn’t seem very surprised to hear that I’ve become a stripper.’
‘It’s good to meet people’s expectations,’ Jen said.
I hopped out of the car and walked towards my caravan as, a few metres away, Jen’s roller door slid up. She wound down the car window and leant out as she eased the car into her backyard. Her golden hair shone in the sun.
‘And, um, by the way,’ she called out. ‘Sean’s coming to the party too. And he’s bringing Sarah. So you might have been right about those two.’ She made a sympathetic face.
Red blazed across my vision. I kicked the caravan as hard as I could and a dull thud rang out.
‘Fuck!’
My foot hurt.
Chapter 14
I walked to work in the cool morning, wondering how things would be between Rueben and me. I hadn’t seen him since we got up close in the op shop and Agnes had interrupted us. So naturally I entered the office singing Springsteen at the top of my lungs and air-guitaring the ‘Ghost of Tom Joad’ solo while balancing a takeaway coffee on top of my satchel. Rueben had his back to me when I walked in, but joined in singing in his throaty rasp. He had a good voice, which shouldn’t have been surprising since his speaking voice was so sexy.
‘How typical,’ I said, after we’d finished shouting about freedom and Mom and highways. ‘I bet you like Springsteen because his songs make people relate to criminals.’ I sat at my computer and opened up my personal email account and a game of solitaire.