by Rose Hartley
Rueben looked as if he wanted to smile at the non sequitur but managed to keep his usual cool. ‘I’m not even going to ask. This is too much.’
I stopped pacing. ‘What do you know about security doors?’
‘Something, I s’pose.’
‘Something?’
‘I know a guy who sells them wholesale.’
‘Would he do me a deal?’
‘No,’ Rueben said, ‘but he might do me a deal.’
‘Can you fit them to my mother’s doors?’
‘I’m not qualified.’
‘But could you do it?’
‘Yeah, probably.’
‘Great. How’s Saturday?’
‘What’s in it for me?’ he asked.
‘C’mon. Do it out of friendship.’
He deadpanned me.
‘Okay, fine, do it and I’ll have sex with you,’ I said.
‘You already want to have sex with me. You propositioned me the first time we met.’
I threw my hands in the air. ‘Jesus, dude, why don’t you want to have sex with me?’
He sighed and rubbed his face. ‘Maggie. I can’t accept sexual favours from you in return for handyman jobs. That’s . . . I dunno, that’s at least workplace harassment, isn’t it?’
I’ll give you a handyman job, I almost said. I put my hands on my hips. ‘Who said anything about sexual favours? I was talking about good old-fashioned dirty sex. Now you’re just embarrassing me. You should do the doors to put me out of my misery. Or have sex with me. Either one is fine.’
He laughed. ‘You have to measure them first, though, get a quote . . . I’ll give you the guy’s number.’
Luckily, my mother’s doors were a fairly standard size and she only wanted a fairly standard type of security door. The doors weren’t cheap but I convinced Mum she’d nabbed a great deal from Rueben’s mate and that we were saving on labour costs by having Rueben fix them to the doorframes. They would be ready by the weekend, and in the meantime, I was eating dry cereal for dinner every night, because it seemed like a bad idea to try breaking into her house again before the security doors were put in. I spent the three intervening evenings reading at the pub around the corner, nursing a lone cider paid for with mouldy coins I found in the panel van’s centre console. At 10.30 I went to the bathroom one last time, cleaned my teeth with a toothbrush I’d stashed in my handbag, and went home to bed. I had not showered in three days, but the less said about that the better.
When Saturday morning rolled around, Mum stood on the verandah with her arms folded, appraising Rueben, taking in his tatts, stubble and poised, wiry body, while I shifted uncomfortably in the silence.
‘I hear you need some extra security, Mrs Cotton,’ he said in that gravelly voice. I nearly shivered at the sound of it. Then he got to work.
My mother watched him with narrowed eyes.
‘How come he knows how to install security doors?’ she whispered to me, her voice masked by the sound of the drill. ‘I thought you said he worked in IT.’
Prison, I nearly said. ‘He’s one of those guys that can do stuff.’
Later, while Mum was making sandwiches, I asked him where he got his skills.
‘It’s just a drill and a screw gun.’ He lifted a hand to wipe his forehead. Rueben made sweat patches look good. ‘Any idiot can buy them at Bunnings and read the instruction booklet.’
I merely stared.
Rueben smiled. ‘You’re like Dora the Explorer discovering opposable thumbs.’
‘How have you even heard of Dora the Explorer?’
‘I have a niece.’
I brought him dry ginger ale and tried to look sexy sucking on an ice cube while he tested the new lock.
‘The band’s been practising for the wedding rehearsal dinner,’ he said, and I was hit with a visceral sadness at the thought of being left out of Jen’s rehearsal dinner and wedding. The best thing to do, I decided, was to act as if the fight had never happened. Even to Rueben.
‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘I’m glad someone will be prepared for this dinner. The planning is doing my head in. I can’t decide if there should be a theme. What’s a good theme? You know, that will liven up the party.’
‘The inevitable heat death of the universe,’ he suggested.
‘Come on.’
‘Moving to Tasmania and getting a mortgage and having a few kids and dying a country death.’
‘What’s a country death?’
‘Falling off a tractor. Getting bitten by a snake. Eating a diseased rooster.’
‘Getting face cancer from kissing a Tasmanian devil,’ I added.
‘That’s the spirit.’
I sipped my ginger ale. It was flat. ‘I could hang cut-outs of diseased roosters from the ceiling to remind Jen that she’s marrying a rotten cock.’
After he’d attached security doors to the front and back of the house, Rueben disappeared around the side, looking for other possible entry points through which sneaky ex-husbands could wriggle their lazy, worthless selves. Did Mum really believe it was my dad breaking in? She had sounded pretty convinced on the phone. While I was sitting on the verandah waiting for Rueben to return, Mum brought out curried egg sandwiches on a tray.
‘Where did you meet this guy?’ she asked.
‘I told you, at work. He’s our IT guy.’
‘But all those tattoos. Young people these days do such strange things to their bodies. He looks like a criminal.’
‘But a handsome one, right?’ I said.
Mum licked her upper lip. ‘Damn straight.’
I couldn’t help laughing.
‘I suppose you’re sleeping with him, too,’ she said.
‘I wish.’
‘Well. Hide your wallet if you have him around to the caravan, that’s all I’m saying. Although I suppose it’s not necessary, since there’s nothing in your wallet.’ She went inside again.
Rueben and I sat on the verandah eating the egg sandwiches. An awkward silence fell between us – at least, I felt awkward, trying not to stare at his sensational collarbones – and I felt the need to fill it.
‘I have a theory that people who eat their egg whites runny are nasty in bed,’ I said.
‘Why would that be?’ he asked.
‘Runny egg whites are disgusting. If you’re into that, you’re probably into gross stuff in the bedroom too. Like fish-shaped butt plugs and stuff.’
‘Fish-shaped?’
‘Haven’t you noticed that butt plugs are often fish-shaped?’
‘Maybe that’s their natural shape.’
‘I swear they’ve got little plastic scales sometimes.’ I made an O with my fingers. ‘Little round open mouths and bulbous eyes.’
Rueben finished his sandwich and wiped the crumbs on his jeans but didn’t answer.
‘So, how do you like your egg whites?’ I pressed. ‘Personally I could stomach them runny once, for you.’
‘That’s so romantic,’ he said.
We said goodbye to Mum, who was eyeing Rueben with a little less suspicion and a little more admiration, and walked down the path towards our cars. Rueben drove a surprisingly boring black Honda, which I found disappointing.
‘Would have picked you for a Valiant man,’ I said, stretching in the afternoon shade of the plane trees.
‘I’d be a Valiant man, if they weren’t such a bastard to run.’
‘They do break down a bit,’ I admitted. ‘But this doesn’t seem to suit your personality.’
‘Do I have to express my personality through a car? Can’t I just express it through a grey T-shirt and a non-committal stare?’
‘It makes you harder to understand.’
He took a step towards me. ‘Maybe it makes me more fun to get to know.’
Holy shit, he was flirting with me. Finally. My mouth went dry and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, except, ‘Hey, where’s my copy of the key?’
‘I didn’t know you wanted one. You’ll
have to ask your mum to get you a key cut.’
‘I can’t ask her, I don’t want her to know I’m staying at her place.’
‘How is that even possible?’
‘Jen kicked me out, Mum won’t let me move back in. I’ve been going through the window but I’m starting to worry about the neighbours calling the police. I need a key so I can get in the back door without her knowing.’
Rueben looked up at the sky, as if it could explain my idiocy. ‘So you freaked your mother out by breaking in, and now you’re fixing the problem by having her pay for expensive doors to keep you out . . . except you want a key. That’s not only very strange, but also illegal. I can’t give you a key without the homeowner’s permission.’
‘But it’s my mother, and you know me!’
‘Doesn’t matter. Not going back to the can for you.’ The flirtatious look had disappeared. Just as I was making headway.
‘As if they’d put you in jail for it.’
His face was set. ‘I’m serious, Maggie. You have no idea how straight I’m willing to play it to stay out of there. Don’t ask me to fucking jaywalk.’
He got in his car and drove off without saying goodbye.
Chapter 21
I hovered in the work kitchen, making tea and checking my bank balance on my phone, just to see if it had grown over the weekend. Nope. I dreaded another interaction with Centrelink, but I’d have to call them at some point, since I’d worked the whole of last week for no pay.
‘What’s up, Maggie?’ Agnes asked as she made her instant coffee.
‘Just thinking about, uh, rent,’ I said.
‘Are you having financial trouble?’
I considered whether or not to tell her the truth. ‘Well . . . nah, not really.’
‘You can tell me.’
‘It’s kinda awkward ’cause you’re my boss.’
‘Sure, but I’m not paying you.’
Most of the time, Agnes was in a rush to do something and her voice had a breathy, nervous edge, but when she was relaxed and in the mood for talking, her tone took on a brussels sprouts quality. No nonsense, wholesome, somewhat bland. She was a master in the art of giving orders in a deceptively casual tone so you didn’t resent it, but with just enough authority that she couldn’t be ignored. I felt healthier just by listening to her. After a brief hesitation, I decided that, judging by her voice, she was the right person to fix my life by proxy.
‘So,’ I said, ‘I was kind of using my mother for money for a few years, but recently she got sick of it and cut me out of her will. Said I had to prove I could be independent before she’d ever help me again. Part of the deal was that I couldn’t move in with another boyfriend – I’d been doing that for a while, too – or a friend, or I’d lose the bet. She wants me to support myself, work full-time, get my own place. But instead of getting an apartment and a real job – I mean, a full-time one, like, a paid one . . .’ Whoops, I hoped she didn’t take offence to that ‘real job’ comment. But she didn’t look offended, just kept listening intently. ‘Anyway, instead of that, I started living in a caravan and doing the Centrelink volunteer program.’
‘You’re doing good work here.’
‘Yeah, well, Mum thought I just wanted to stick it to her. But I kinda like it. The job and the caravan, I mean. It’s just that there’s no bathroom or electricity or running water.’ I sighed, maybe a little too dramatically, and leant against the wall, stirring my tea. ‘I thought I could live free and society would make room for me. But it doesn’t. The police keep hassling me because the neighbours don’t like it. And now I’m breaking into my mother’s house at night to use her bathroom and sleep in my old bed, because it’s all too hard, and my best friend isn’t speaking to me, because . . . well, she has reasons.’ Reasons like, I’m as considerate as a tooth cavity.
Agnes sipped her coffee, seemingly in no hurry to dispense wisdom. Finally, she settled her cup back on the sink and wiped her mouth.
‘You’ll sort yourself out,’ she said. She looked at her watch. ‘I have to organise an electrician to fix the wiring in the men’s shelter. How are you going with that fundraising letter?’
‘Uh, good. I think I’ll finish it today.’
‘Great.’ She walked away.
Jeez, Agnes. Thanks for your help.
I opened up the fundraising letter file on my computer. I’d done six drafts but was still reluctant to call it finished. It was going to cost nine hundred dollars to mail the letter out to all our supporters, but what if it didn’t even bring in that much in donations? We had to keep our overheads and administration costs below twenty-five per cent of our income, Agnes had told me, otherwise our donors would get annoyed and stop giving us money. So, if the letters cost nine hundred dollars to mail, they needed to earn . . . four thousand dollars, give or take.
I went over the wording of the letter for the thousandth time, then read through yet another blog about how to write good fundraising copy. ‘Copy’: it had taken a while to figure out what that meant, and when I realised that I was essentially doing the same job as Sarah Stoll, Premium Bitch of Advertising Copy, I had been momentarily disconcerted. Now, though, I was all business. I had learnt to write the word ‘you’ – as in you, the generous donor – instead of ‘we’, the needy charity. I had learnt to write an emotional story about just one potential recipient of the donor’s generosity instead of many, I had learnt to tell the donor exactly what they could achieve with their donation. What interested me most was that you were supposed to ask the donor for an exact amount, specify exactly how that amount could help, and then offer two options to donate higher amounts. As in, give $50 and keep four people warm and fed for the night, give $100 to outfit and train three women for job interviews, give $250 and Maggie will hump you.
Which got me thinking. Agnes insisted that the bulk of the Angels’ donors were people living close to poverty themselves.
‘You’d be surprised how many of our donors are on Centrelink benefits,’ she’d said. ‘They don’t have much money but they’re generous with it because they know how it feels to worry about how they’ll get by. They can relate.’
‘Fine,’ I reasoned, ‘but if we can convince a few people with a lot of money to give larger donations, surely that would bring our overheads down and mean less effort for us?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and we’ve tried, in the past. We’ve got through to a few, but to be honest, it’s just not worth the effort. Most of them aren’t interested. They give money to other causes, but not to relieve poverty.’
I was determined to try anyway.
‘Rueben.’ He looked up from his ramen noodles, but slowly, to show he was still annoyed with me for deceiving my mother. ‘Can you find out if it’s possible to buy a list of names and addresses of people in Victoria whose incomes are over a certain amount?’
‘I think it’s possible,’ he said coolly. ‘Are you thinking of targeting certain people in the fundraiser?’
‘Yeah.’
He tapped on a few keys, scrolled a bit, ate a forkful of noodles and put the fork down. ‘There are lists, but it’s expensive,’ he said. ‘Too expensive for us.’
‘How expensive?’
‘For targeted stuff, thousands.’ He showed me the screen.
‘Dammit. Can you hack them?’
‘What?’
‘Can you hack the companies that sell the lists?’
‘No, and I wouldn’t try. They’re heavily protected, and do I have to repeat that I’m not going to jail for you?’
‘I wasn’t being serious.’
‘Sure you weren’t.’
I went over the letter again, thinking. ‘What if I just scatter-gunned people in certain suburbs? Like, Toorak, Hawthorn, Brighton. I could research the five or ten richest suburbs in the state and grab names and addresses from the phone book.’
‘That would take hours. Days, maybe.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not costing the Angels anything, is it? We�
�re volunteers.’
He shrugged. ‘You’re right.’
‘Admit it. Sometimes my ideas aren’t terrible.’
‘Sometimes your ideas aren’t terrible.’
It was time to accept that further tweaking and proofreading would not improve the letter. It was done. I hit print and stretched. The office was quiet. Agnes was out, Josephine was off work for the day, Rueben was busy improving the back end of the website to make it easier for supporters to donate online and for us to collect their email addresses. It turned out we did have about a thousand email addresses, we just never bothered to email our supporters. I opened a spreadsheet with our supporter contact list, added a column for email addresses to collate all the information in the same place, then started a new spreadsheet called ‘5 Richest Suburbs’, ready to plug in names and addresses from the phone book.
A noise at the door drew my attention. It was Bunny, slinking into our office. Her hair was piled on her head in coils, which were arranged around a flower crown of all things, tiny rosebuds made of pink and white ribbons with green wire leaves, and her legs were encased in annoyingly enviable cat-print tights. Bunny rarely entered the office where Rueben and I worked. Her workdays only overlapped with ours on Mondays and Fridays and I tended to avoid her whenever possible, especially since my plan to steal her job occasionally brought on a slight twinge of guilt in my throat. She lingered in the doorway and twirled a red curl at the nape of her neck.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked Rueben.
He looked up. ‘Fine, thanks. Nice flower thing.’
She pushed off from the doorframe and walked over to his desk. ‘Rueben, you are such a sly one, you never mentioned that you’re a musician! I only discovered it from Christine just now.’
‘Right,’ he said.
‘What do you play?’
‘Guitar.’
She was around the other side of his desk now, eyeing his computer screen. ‘What’s this?’
‘The back end of the website.’
‘Amazing.’ She leant over him. ‘I’ve never seen it before!’