Cake at Midnight

by Jessie L. Star

  But hadn’t she seen how incompatible they were? Her life was rich and full and revolved around her tight friendships and the pure instinctive thrill she got from food. And he had work, the one area of his life where he felt he succeeded. It was a cliché to say that she could do so much better than him, but – damn it! – she could do so much better than him!

  They’d agreed that they were nothing serious, a break from the real lives and relationships that were taking more out of them than they were putting in, but he’d be lying to himself if he said he hadn’t seen that they were becoming more. But when should he have stopped it? That first night? The next morning? When he’d realised that sometimes, ridiculous as it sounded, he just wanted to look at her, to clasp her face between his hands and drink her in?

  The negotiations with Anderson had been his get-out-of-jail-free card, a way of toying with an ending without having to actually end it himself. It was galling, but not entirely unsurprising, that Vanessa had weaselled the information about Theo’s new job out of her fellow headhunter before the ink was even dry on the contract. And, ruthless as she was, he knew she believed that telling Giovanna he was leaving was the right thing to do.

  O’Connor’s words from their confrontation in his office came back to him and he hung his head as he considered that of course Vanessa had recognised the ‘all the perk, none of the work’ game he’d been playing with Giovanna. He’d done almost the same thing with her, after all: commenced a relationship while pretending he hadn’t.

  Ari was still watching him, and his voice was painfully gentle as he said, ‘You don’t have to go, you know.’

  ‘Of course I do!’ Theo snapped. ‘I made a decision, I signed a contract.’

  Ari smiled sadly. ‘Fine.’ He pocketed his phone and gestured round the nearly empty flat, Theo’s few possessions barely having had the chance to be unpacked before they’d been repacked. ‘Everything’s arranged and, luckily for you, airlines don’t weigh emotional baggage.’

  Theo nodded and attempted a smile in return. At least he knew Ari was set. As Theo’d known he would be, Ari had been in much demand after Theo had put the feelers out for him. After a week or so of deliberating on his offers, Ari had chosen to work for a woman called Becca Ashan in the insurance industry, somewhere, he said, he had less chance of running into Herself.

  Noticing a shiny something tucked behind his back, Theo asked, in a parody of his usual long-suffering tone, ‘This is the point where you give me one last self-help book, isn’t it?’

  ‘You know it.’

  With a flourish, Ari presented Theo with an exuberantly wrapped present. Theo took it and, once he’d battled his way through the ribbons and paper, found himself holding a surprisingly thin volume simply entitled How to Escape Without Running.

  He was really starting to sense a theme.

  ‘I’m gonna miss you, Bossman.’

  Theo looked up at the man who’d bounded into his life as his employee and almost immediately re-categorised himself as his greatest friend and then reached across to clap him on the shoulder. ‘You too.’

  They embraced, fiercely and briefly, and Theo realised that he truly understood the expression ‘miss you already’. He was sure, once he was in Singapore, that he’d be too busy to feel the weight of Ari’s absence on top of Giovanna’s. It was the leaving that was the most difficult, not the staying away. God, at least he hoped so, because he wasn’t going to be able to stand feeling like this for much longer.

  19

  The only thing to be said for losing the guy you very, possibly, maybe were in love with to another country at the same time as your best friend’s dad dies is that it puts your own emotional turmoil firmly in perspective. Well, that and it confuses the pain, like having your toe bashed with a hammer at the same time someone slaps you across the face. I wasn’t sure what to be more upset about from one moment to the next.

  The second I’d got home from Theo’s after saying my goodbye, I’d packed a bag and moved to Zoë’s. It made me sick to abandon Aggie’s; the studio was the place my friends and I had always escaped to, but I knew I’d be too aware of Theo just across the hall in the couple of weeks before he left to stay there. I’d never been good with temptation, was always that person moaning about how full they felt, then going for another slice of cake, and Theo was the greatest temptation of them all.

  Even kilometres away in Zoë’s tiny modern flat where there was nary an exposed brick or half-moon window to be seen, I still woke up multiple times a night expecting Theo to be nearby. His absence was like a particularly vicious papercut, constantly throbbing and stinging, even as the days without him slowly began to drag themselves past.

  Still, I told myself over and over again that it’d only taken me thirty days to get over Dec and I’d had a thing for him for years, so I just had to grit my teeth and hang on. Before I knew it, Theo’d be just a ‘remember when you were in love with the Nod Next-Door?’ in-joke between Zoë and me. I looked forward to that day. As the days after we’d found out about Dec’s dad slogged by, I longed for a day with a joke, full stop.

  It’d been a relief when the body was finally released by the coroner and the funeral was able to be held, although, in a cruel twist of fate, the date we all ended up sitting on hard wooden benches watching Dec’s mum’s shoulders shake with sobs? Yeah, it was the fourteenth, the day Theo left. I guess it at least forestalled any last-minute dash to the airport and embarrassing scenes where I begged Theo to stay. I was too busy trying to hold Dec together with sheer force of will.

  It was hard to phrase the dull, dreary funeral as a ‘celebration of life’, as we’d all struggled to find something to celebrate about that particular life. The best to be said for the day was that we got through it – Dec got through it – and, as each subsequent day passed, things seemed to get a little easier for him to bear. As for me, however . . .

  ‘Is there some point where we’re going to stop tiptoeing around the fact that you’re miserable and address it, or is that just how your face is always going to look now?’

  I started. It was a Sunday evening, exactly thirty days since Theo had left and, while my friends were over and my hands had been busy kneading a mess of flour, sugar, water, salt and yeast into a smooth, pliable dough, my mind had been miles away.

  ‘What’s wrong with my face?’ I asked, attempting to summon up the appropriate note of outrage as I looked at Zoë.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘It looks like you found out they’re reinstating World War Two sugar rationing. Like, deeply upset, but prepared to be a martyr about it.’

  This made me crack a small smile, but it fell away a moment later as I said, ‘It’s thirty days today, you know?’

  ‘God, I just had a PTSD flashback,’ Dec piped up from where he sat on my couch answering emails on his phone. ‘Thirty days since what?’

  Zoë rolled her eyes. ‘Theo left, you moron.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I admitted, thumping the heel of my hand into the dough and stretching it out before me, ‘I totally have resting sad face and I don’t get it. Why don’t I feel better yet? Theo’s been gone longer than whatever we had going on went on, but I still can’t go sit by The Brother at lunch, and I swear the list of stuff that reminds me of him is getting longer not shorter. Aeroplanes, suits, avocados, blonds . . . they all make me gloomy. I’m so sick of it!’

  I looked up as a comprehensive silence followed my speech and saw that Zoë and Dec were staring at me blankly.

  ‘Sorry, Baker,’ Dec said after a few seconds. ‘You’re the emotionally mature one in the group. Zo and I’ve got nothing.’

  I snorted, returning to my dough and continuing to knead it, even though it’d already reached the perfect point of elasticity.

  ‘Except I think that was part of the problem, actually. I wasn’t mature enough for Theo.’ I spoke as if this was something that’d just occurred to me, rather than the conclusion of many sleepless nights’ thought.

 
; They both made noises of protest, but I shook my head.

  ‘Come on, you know I’m right. Theo’s a captain of industry, an award-winning workaholic who I know for a fact actually understands things like how the Dow Jones affects the Australian Dollar. I heard him say that to someone on the phone once: “We’ll see by the morning how the Dow Jones affects the Australian Dollar”. I mean, what the hell? I’ve barely got my head round the interest on my basic savings account! No wonder he was so keen to be shot of me – he must always have felt like he was with a kid when he was with me.’

  ‘Considering all the mind-blowing sex you reported having, I certainly hope not,’ Zoë said bluntly. ‘And stop rewriting history. When you told me what he said about leaving, it sounded like he was as gutted as you were to be ending things, but that he needed to go to Singapore for his career.’

  ‘And if you’re too young then he’s too old,’ Dec added. ‘He’s – what? – twenty-seven? And he acted like he was in his forties at least. If he was just like that at work, then fine, but to bring it home with him and make you feel like you were immature–’ He stopped abruptly.

  Dec had done an admirable job of not saying ‘I told you so’ ever since his former boss had done a runner. We were still trying to navigate the new rules of our friendship after years in our unhealthy rut and I wasn’t quite sure we’d got it right yet. Dec was almost too keen to put me first now, to blow off dates to hang out with me, or to refuse to ask me even for a glass of water when I was getting one for myself, desperate to show me that things were different now. Still, I was sure he’d settle down. Lord knew Zoë was always ready to point out when we got too weird around each other.

  So, yeah, after a month of being super nice to me, this was as close as he’d come to pointing out how right he’d been when he’d warned me that Theo was destined to make me feel inferior. That wasn’t how Theo had made me feel, however, so I shook my head.

  ‘Not to sound too clichéd, but it wasn’t him, it was me. You know I have a track record of getting too one-sidedly involved. I just . . . I just need to figure out how to want someone who wants me back.’ I rolled the dough into a ball and then punched my fist right into the centre as I added firmly, ‘But not right now. I’ve been waiting for thirty days to be up, like that was magically going to make me be over Theo, but I’ve got to grow up and take some responsibility for feeling better. I’ve got to . . . bake more.’

  ‘More?’ my friends chorused in disbelief as I plopped the dough into a greased bowl and covered it with a tea towel.

  ‘Yes, and less just cakes that I like and more technically challenging things. I think I’m plateauing at work and Céleste must be waiting for me to step up. I’m going to literally work my way through missing Theo.’

  I’d been thinking along these lines for the past week or so, and it felt good to actually say it out loud. It’d been stupid of me to wait for the thirty days to be up, as if that’d really been what’d resolved things between Dec and me, and I was looking forward to taking control of my life.

  ‘Well, I’m all for it,’ Dec announced. ‘Unless it means you don’t make those milly-foil vanilla slice things anymore, in which case I suggest you stick to what you know.’

  ‘It’s mille-feuille,’ I said, ‘and could you not cheapen my moment, please?’

  ‘I agree, this is good,’ Zoë broke in. ‘You can care a bit more about your profession and you–’ she turned to glare at Dec, ‘–can care less. With a bit of time and determination, you might even resemble a person rather than the city-boy cliché you’ve become.’

  Dec made a ‘yap, yap, yap’ gesture with his hand, but it belied the numerous conversations we’d had ever since his dad’s death about what made up who you were as a person. Dec himself had admitted that, in losing Zoë as a friend and cultivating me as his own personal yes-woman, he’d only had the people he worked with to measure himself against in his quest to be nothing like his father. Being defined, at least in part, by what you did was no bad thing, we’d decided, but if that was all you were defined by, you were likely to hit trouble.

  Which was not to discount that Dec liked all the trappings of his job. He enjoyed the schmoozing and the competitiveness, but he knew now he needed to find the boundary between being energised and being worn down by the constant pissing contests between him and his co-workers. And ever since Dec had returned to work from compassionate leave, Zoë and I had proved ourselves experts at shoring up that boundary, always on hand to point out when he was being an insufferable knob.

  *

  It was this same team, my team, that kept me on track with my plan to rise above my self-pity in the days and weeks that followed the thirty day mark. That and the work I was dedicating every spare minute to, exhausting myself so that I had a better chance of sleeping through the night without any old witching-hour throwbacks. And, when I found myself at eighty-eight days since I’d seen Theo, I decided that I was doing okay. Sure, not at the stage where I didn’t instinctively know how long it’d been since I’d seen my old neighbour, but okay.

  ‘Très bien!’ I put my friends on speakerphone and spun in a little circle as I exited the stairwell onto the third floor of Veronica Way.

  ‘We know,’ Dec groaned.

  ‘For me!’ I added.

  ‘We heard,’ Zoë said.

  ‘In all the Christmas Eve craziness, Céleste said très bien to me, specifically about me, it was my très bien,’ I repeated, undeterred.

  My mood had lightened right along with my sun-bleached hair as summer had arrived and my determination to really focus on my work had paid off: Céleste had noticed and appreciated my endeavours. I’d basically received the Aver Award of Pickle, Peach and Plum and, despite their sarcasm, Dec and Zoë got the significance of the much sought-after, hard-won praise.

  We’d already planned a Christmas Eve picnic for that evening, but, riding high on my success, I decided to try my luck with something slightly more festive. ‘Seeing as how I’m in the mood to sing, why don’t we stop in at that pub on Tabor Street that does carols on the way to the park?’

  ‘No,’ came the firm response from both of them.

  ‘Gio, you have no idea how much Christmas party makeup I’ve applied while carols have played on repeat in the background,’ Zoë said tiredly. ‘I flat-out can’t put up with more goodwill today.’

  ‘And I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to figure out how much I’m supposed to break the secret Santa budget by after I got it wrong last year and looked like a cheapskate,’ Dec said. ‘Then, when we handed out presents at AHC today, I’d gone too high and looked like a show-off. I’m done with Christmas.’

  ‘Scrooges, the pair of you,’ I announced. ‘But, fine, you will just have to have a think of another way you’d like to celebrate the excellence that is me on your way over.’

  ‘I think I preferred you when you were all downtrodden and mopey, you were a lot less demanding,’ Dec muttered, and Zoë and I were both laughing as I hung up and skipped the rest of the way to my flat.

  I was just pulling my key out of my bag when I heard a door open behind me. I swung around, my heart leaping automatically into my throat, only to see my new neighbour, Mrs Sutcliffe, striding out of Theo’s old place.

  ‘Hello,’ I said cheerfully, giving her a wave as I wondered whether there’d ever come a time when the opening of that door wouldn’t give me a minor heart attack.

  Mrs Sutcliffe, regal and standoffish, looked at me for a moment, and then inclined her head in a short nod.

  I think I stifled my laughter well enough that she couldn’t hear it, but, really! What was it about that flat? Were she and I destined to become great mates? Somehow I doubted it, but I could never have foreseen what’d happened with Theo either.

  Pleased that, for just about the first time, I was able to smile when I thought about my old Nod Next-Door, I let myself into my jumbled mess of a flat and breathed in its current tis-the-season smell.

  I fl
icked on a fan as I peeled off my top and shimmied out of my trousers, enjoying the blessed feel of cool air on my overheated skin and the way it rustled the swathes of tinsel I had festooned about the place. Leaving my work clothes in a puddle on the floor, I had a quick shower and then pulled on a white and navy striped dress, humming a festive tune while I had the chance as no doubt Zoë would try to throttle me if I let out so much as one fa-la-la-la-la in her presence. I was just dabbing on some lip balm when I heard a knock.

  Impressed by how quickly Dec and Zoë had made it over to mine, I bounded over to the door, threw it open and boomed, in as much of an over-the-top, hearty voice as I could muster, ‘Merry Christmas to all and to all a–’

  The words died in my throat, trailing off in a sort of choke as the person at the door lifted his head and I was transfixed by a pair of painfully familiar pale green eyes.

  ‘Hey, neighbour,’ he said.

  *

  Even boarding the plane back to Australia, Theo hadn’t been sure turning up at Veronica Way like this was the right thing to do. He’d had a moment of wondering whether coming back at all had been a good plan, as he’d barely stepped back onto native soil before someone had pointed at him and said, ‘You’re that Leventis guy, aren’t you?’

  But seeing Giovanna blew away all the doubt.

  He’d been travelling for coming up to ten hours, but his whole body hummed with energy as he drank her in. Her hair was blonder than it’d been the last time he’d seen her, her curls wilder and her skin burnished a deep honey colour by the summer sun, but she was also just as he’d remembered her.

  In this day and age there were always photos of people you interacted with. Even if you weren’t the one to take them, there was always someone documenting every occasion. So, while Theo’s phone was almost bare of personal images, he knew if you searched for him on the internet there was still a smattering of pictures of him with various people, both socially and work related. But the system had fallen down when it’d come to Giovanna. For her, he’d had nothing to commemorate their time together other than that small pink rose he’d retrieved from under his couch and which he’d found himself carefully packing into a small container to take to Singapore with him.