Strictly Confidential

by Roxy Jacenko

‘Got it,’ he signed off.

  As we approached the bottom of the staircase I dropped Matt’s hand. Surely he could negotiate the final few stairs himself. He staggered towards the gates, looking more drunken sailor than professional cricketer, then paused and looked up at me with dopey, bloodshot eyes. ‘Shit, J! I left my publishityschedule behind!’ The words came out in a mush of slurred consonants, like a bad Sean Connery impersonation.

  I tried to hurry Matt past the exit turnstiles. ‘That’s okay, Matty,’ I said. ‘You’re almost done for the night. We’ve just got to get you out of here and into a taxi looking vaguely respectable and then I get to keep my job.’

  As I said this, he slumped sideways into a wall. I was beginning to regret my call to the paparazzo.

  ‘Whoa, up you get, bud,’ I encouraged, reaching over to fix his baggy green cap, which was now dangling precariously off one ear, in a vain stab at making him look sober.

  Big mistake.

  As soon as I got close enough to him, Matt grabbed me by my arm and pushed me up against the wall, his beery mouth closing in over mine in a slobbery drunken kiss.

  Oh. My. God.

  ‘Are you mad?’ I cried when he finally came up for air. I shoved at him but he only nuzzled up closer, his tongue sliding back into my mouth.

  This was beyond revolting. I shoved again. Hard. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I cried when he paused for a second time. I ducked and left him pashing the brickwork, which gave me time to back away through the turnstile.

  ‘J?’ he asked, confused.

  ‘Thanks, Flunkey!’ came another voice.

  Now I was confused. Gasping for air, I stumbled further away from Matt and caught sight of the person behind the second voice.

  Fuck. My photographer friend. ‘You didn’t . . . that wasn’t . . . did you?’ I was struggling to find the words to form my sentence when I saw Matt coming back for round two. ‘No, Matt!’ I shouted, grateful for the turnstile between us. ‘Stop!’ I instructed desperately. Both to Matt and the pap.

  Matt stopped in his tracks, looking hurt. ‘J?’

  I held up my hand in a stop signal as if training a dog. ‘Stay there.’

  Without waiting for a response, I ran over to where the pap and his camera had stood just seconds earlier. ‘Where are you?’ I called into the darkness. ‘Hello?’ And then, ‘You better give me those pics right now!’

  Nothing.

  Turning again, I caught sight of him in the streetlights, bounding along the pavement, rapidly putting metres between him and the scene of the crime. He waved his camera in the air in thanks. Bastard. I was going to have to warn Diane. But first, I had Romeo to deal with. I stalked over to where Matt was slumped against the SCG ticket booth. You’re hardly gunna pull a crowd in that state, Matty, I thought wryly to myself. I nudged him half-heartedly with my shoe as I considered the long line of eager taxis across the road. Now, how do you suppose I get one drunk cricketer to cross the road? I wondered. And why did my life so often sound like a bad joke? I reached for my phone while trying not to consider the punchline. It was time to call Diane.

  But before I could phone in my own execution, my loving boyfriend did it for me. A text, sitting neglected in my inbox, greeted me as I slid open my phone. Jazz, it read, I’m done. Will.

  Shit. Dumped by SMS. And before he even had the chance to see the happy snaps of me and Matt. I kicked the ticket booth and howled. ‘I’m done too, Will. I’m done too.’

  It’s funny, I’d dedicated a lot of thought to leaving Wilderstein PR. I would spend hours at my desk dreaming up fantastic feats for terminating our relationship. Was a skywriter too much? I would ponder. A graffitied message on the Opera House a little unlawful? How about a banner on Anzac Bridge? As for the message, well, that was the easy part: OMG. It’s you, not me. I quit, Diane. Pithy, professional but with a personal touch. Sadly, I never had the opportunity to put any of my master plans into action because Diane beat me to the punch.

  The morning after my introduction to the gentleman’s sport of cricket, I made my way to work. While I didn’t expect a hero’s welcome, nor did I expect the reception I got when I arrived. It seemed the tickertape parade hadn’t yet kicked off as I stepped out of the lift at Wilderstein PR and slunk towards my desk. On my way I was careful to avoid all the glances around the office that were carefully avoiding me.

  It was there, at my desk, that I was reacquainted with the events of last night. Reacquainted, that was, by way of my face smooshed up against Matt Ashley’s mug and spread across a DPS in the Sun’s gossip pages, under the banner BRASH ASH IN PASH AND DASH. Hilarious. The subbies at the Sun had been working overtime on that one. As had the smart-arse who had Blu-Tacked this fine piece of investigative journalism to the screen of my PC. At least the pap had managed to get Matt’s watch in the shot.

  I sat at my desk and idly waited for Diane’s door to fly open and her ghoulish face to appear and order me into her office where she would shriek at me like a banshee. A custom that really was becoming tediously familiar. My groundhog day of being ground into submission. Still, the monotony of routine did nothing to calm the nerves in my stomach. Such a shame I was one of the few non-bulimics in fashion PR; butterflies like this would be a dream for regurgitation, surely. As I contemplated things that make you vomit, Diane appeared from nowhere, as if summoned by my very thoughts.

  This was going to be ugly.

  I stood, ready to follow Diane back to her lair for my disembowelment, but she was having none of that. She clicked her fingers at me and pointed to the floor to indicate I should stay where I was. This was going to be a public showdown. High noon and all that. I instinctively reached for where my gun holster should be.

  ‘Oh. My. God,’ she snarled, acronym abandoned in her fury. ‘Never in my life have I been so humiliated.’

  I didn’t like to point out that it was my face plastered across this morning’s tabloids like a Siamese twin to Gen Y’s answer to Shane Warne.

  ‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ Heads swivelled as people gave up any pretence of not eavesdropping. A few stood for a better view.

  ‘I didn’t kiss Matt Ashley, Diane.’ I knew I had limited time before the ole gunslinger pulled the trigger. I didn’t intend to mince my words.

  She arched an eyebrow so high it nearly flew off her Botoxed forehead.

  ‘I didn’t,’ I persisted. ‘He kissed me. Attacked me, actually. He was drunk. Very drunk. I managed to get him outside for a paparazzi shot for Lacoste and he pinned me to a wall.’

  That eyebrow shot higher. It really was amazing how she got that much movement despite a truckload of botulinum.

  ‘I see,’ was all she said.

  A ringing phone went unanswered somewhere as the whole office stayed glued to our contretemps. Tumbleweed rolled past.

  ‘Pack up your desk, Jasmine,’ she sighed, as though my being there and breathing the same air was draining for her. ‘I can’t have my publicists getting more headlines than my clients.’

  I stared at her incredulously. Had she just fired me? Was I being sacked? My brain raced to catch up. I had never been fired in my life. I didn’t know how to act fired. I was used to being promoted, or congratulated, or made McDonald’s crew member of the month. Hell, I’d never even got a detention at school. I’d had far too earnest and middle-class a work ethic to wind up in detention. I had no prior experience of being fired and I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

  ‘I said I didn’t kiss Matt Ashley!’ I shouted like a petulant two-year-old. ‘Don’t you believe me?’ I gesticulated wildly, throwing one unfortunate arm towards the Sun article like a game-show host pointing to the jackpot. Matt Ashley’s tongue down my throat at 300 dpi resolution was perhaps not the best piece of evidence I could have picked to support my case. Good work, Calamity Jane.

  Diane
sighed her pained sigh again. ‘Of course I believe you,’ she snapped. ‘It’s not like Matt hasn’t accosted one of my publicists before.’

  My mouth fell open.

  ‘But I’m afraid that’s not the point, Jasmine.’

  It wasn’t?!

  ‘The point is Lacoste are displeased with the coverage they’ve received, so heads must roll. Your head.’

  My mouth stayed open. Someone was going to have to Hollywood tape my bottom jaw to its upper counterpart because it was going nowhere on its own.

  Diane sighed one final time. ‘Security will be here soon, Jasmine, to escort you from the premises.’

  And with that, Diane Wilderstein turned on her Bally heel and stalked out of the saloon.

  Following my sacking by Diane, my dumping by my boyfriend, my robbery, and my assault by an A-grade cricketer, I did what any self-respecting girl would do: I cried, I drank and I complained bitterly to anyone who would listen.

  ‘It’s not fair!’ I wailed down the phone to Shelley. If she’d not heard this same line from me a thousand times already this week, she would have been forgiven for not being able to make out my words from where I sprawled prostrate in bed, a bag of full-fat, high-carb Black Star pastries by my side and a discarded empty wineglass on the floor, its telltale red-wine tide mark crusted like blood around the dirty rim. There’d been a lot of that going on lately. The bloody discarding of things, that is. (Although that could equally apply to the swigging of wine, I admit.) But it was the bloody discarding of things like me by that vampire Diane that was on my mind.

  ‘All I did was get accosted by a client! People normally get compensation for such things. Not fired!’ I whined.

  ‘You should sue the bitch, dah-ling,’ Shelley said soothingly.

  I didn’t disagree. In what was the closest I was going to get to a balanced diet since my sacking, I guzzled my friend’s unflinching sympathy as hungrily as I guzzled cheap red wine. ‘I would sue,’ I replied, throwing my feet into the air to inspect my chipped toenail polish, ‘but I can’t afford to even google a lawyer, let alone hire one to act on my behalf.’

  Shelley murmured in agreement. She was clearly preoccupied with something more interesting at her end. I couldn’t blame her either. It was days now since I’d been made to pack up my desk at Diane’s and take the long, lonely walk – flanked by security – to the building’s glass-fronted entrance. Days since I’d proudly held my head high (and not just in order to see over the top of the cardboard box full of my worldly belongings that I was clutching). Days since I’d refused to cry, since I’d politely thanked the security guards for their company and since I’d walked stoically away from Wilderstein PR, confident in the utter injustice of it all. And stoic I’d remained. At least until I’d been a safe two blocks away and my arms had no longer been able to hold the weight of my box, when I’d promptly sat it down on the pavement, plonked myself on top and started – to my mortification – to cry.

  ‘I would have cried too, love,’ Luke consoled me when I recounted this to him afterwards, ‘if I’d just tongued a sportsman.’

  Anya’s commiserations had been a little more sensitive. After all, she’d been there, done that and bought the T-shirt herself.

  ‘Oh hon, you’re better off out of Wilderstein PR. Truly,’ she’d assured me.

  This probably would have held more sway if Anya herself had, by now, secured a fabulous, high-paying publicist’s job that involved her poaching all of Diane’s clients and taking them out for dinner where they’d eat ludicrously expensive degustation meals courtesy of her new employer while bonding over the ridiculing of Diane’s peccadilloes. As it was, Anya was still unemployed. The highlight of her fortnight was collecting her measly dole payment from Centrelink then going online to see what, if anything, she could still afford on MyCatwalk.com.

  ‘Remind me again what it is you do as part of your work-for-the-dole services to qualify for unemployment benefits?’ I asked Anya.

  ‘I’m a mentor for underprivileged teens at my local high school,’ she explained without irony. ‘I teach them stuff like how to make their torn jeans work for this season. The distressed look never really went out, you know.’

  I disguised my laugh with a cough. Only a fashion publicist could turn a government support requirement into a sartorial service.

  Still, at least Anya was doing something proactive. I surveyed the mess of pastry crumbs and B-grade 1990s chick-flick DVDs in my orbit. Not to mention the empty cask of wine on my bedside table. That had been a mistake.

  And apparently not the last one I was to make in my post-sacking slump. Nor the biggest.

  Oh no. That honour went to my decision while still in my emotionally fragile, unemployed state to meet up with my now ex-boyfriend, Will, for the traditional post-breakup-exchanging-of-personal-belongings ritual. And what a mistake it was, on par with shoulder pads and mullets and Crocs and harem pants and 1980s perms – none of which should ever have had a moment in fashion history. And yet I went ahead in blissful ignorance and organised to meet Will at Raw Bar Japanese restaurant, just a stone’s throw from Bondi Beach, so that we could be reacquainted with our own stuff and part ways with one another in a mature, adult fashion.

  ‘Hi, babe.’ I greeted Will with a kiss on each cheek, determined to be the bigger person as I slid into my seat in the corner of the restaurant.

  ‘Hey, Jazzy Lou,’ he responded. He looked pale and a little dishevelled, I noticed with satisfaction. Given I’d spent over two hours waxing my legs, painting my nails, applying makeup, blowdrying my hair and selecting then reselecting my outfit of a fabulous dégradé wool Stella McCartney jumpsuit, I felt I could take the moral high ground here. Career crisis or not, there was no excuse not to look hot.

  ‘Sake?’ Will asked.

  I nodded.

  We busied ourselves with the menu – a vast array of uncooked Asian delicacies. If my relationship was to be served up dead and cold on a slab, then so would be my food. I settled on salmon sashimi, with a side of seaweed salad.

  ‘So, how have you been?’ I asked, keen to deflect the conversation from my own situation.

  ‘Good,’ he replied in the customarily articulate style of the Australian male.

  ‘I brought your stuff.’ I indicated a bag by my feet crammed with T-shirts and CDs and a camera and other odd remnants of our relationship.

  ‘Same,’ he said and pointed to a green recycling bag on the seat next to him.

  I nodded awkwardly.

  ‘So, Matt Ashley, huh?’ Will asked, trying to feign indifference.

  Will must have seen the tabloid pic of Matt Ashley with his tongue down my throat. (I didn’t dwell, here, on exactly how many other people across greater Sydney were likely to have spied it too.)

  ‘OMG! No!’ I cried in horror. ‘Oh no! No way!’

  Polite Japanese waitresses looked over at me nervously. Who is this crazy blonde girl and will she make a mess in our restaurant? their immaculate expressions said.

  ‘No way,’ I repeated for emphasis. ‘Matt Ashley and I . . . that was not . . . that was a mistake.’

  Will raised a sceptical eyebrow and sipped his sake.

  ‘Really,’ I persisted. ‘It wasn’t what it looked like. I mean, yes, Matt did kiss me but it wasn’t wanted. Or reciprocated.’ How many times was I destined to have this conversation? ‘It was just work,’ I added lamely.

  At the mention of work Will’s dark eyes flashed and I knew I’d stepped on a landmine. I popped edamame beans and waited for Will’s explosion.

  ‘Yeah, I know all about your work, Jazzy Lou,’ he started. ‘I heard a lot more about your career than I did about anything else during the whole time we dated.’

  I bit down on my soy bean, hard.

  ‘Only, mostly I heard about it when you were telling me yo
u couldn’t make it to dinner because you were working back. Or you were missing another party because some C-grade celeb needed babysitting. Or you had to skip my birthday because your boss broke a nail.’

  This last comment made me cringe. It was true that I’d missed Will’s birthday dinner, but the reason why eluded me now. Sure, his broken-nail comment was spiteful, but I couldn’t be sure that my no-show wasn’t Diane-related. It certainly sounded plausible.

  ‘In fact,’ Will went on, getting warmed up as our clinically cold meal arrived, ‘I can’t quite believe you found time in your schedule to meet me tonight. Don’t tell me the wheels of Wilderstein PR are turning without you for a whole evening? Surely there’s a product launch or a premiere of something you should be attending?’

  I grimaced into my gohan.

  ‘No? Not got a runway you should be side of stage for?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ I replied, steeling myself. ‘I no longer work for Wilderstein PR.’

  Will threw his head back and laughed heartily. ‘You’re not working for Diane?’ he asked incredulously. ‘But that place is your life, Jazz!’

  I blinked hard as I pretended this didn’t hit home. ‘Not any more,’ I said haughtily. I could feel my impersonation of a functioning, coping member of society growing wobbly. I shouldn’t have come here tonight. Seeking closure on my relationship with Will so soon after my career sought closure from me was just too much to handle. ‘Wilderstein PR was not my life!’ I lied. ‘I don’t need that job and I don’t need you!’

  I grabbed the bag by my feet and thrust it at Will, knocking the bowl of edamame beans everywhere in my haste. The bright, bouncing beans escaped across the table in a flurry of salt and spilled sake. Will looked shocked. The waitresses looked horrified.

  I swiped my own bag of possessions from where it sat glumly beside Will.

  ‘I’ve moved on from Wilderstein PR and I’ve moved on from you,’ I announced. Then I turned on my heel and stalked out into the warm beachside air.