‘I’ll get onto it,’ he said. ‘No probs.’
‘You really think you can find him? How quickly?’ Holly’s heart fluttered with hope.
‘Couple of days,’ he said. ‘These guys are amateurs. Trust me.’ He licked his lips. ‘There’ll be a few expenses,’ he added.
Holly nodded, gripping her handbag.
In the end, he asked for a hundred dollars. Holly smiled feebly, ignoring the warning signal flashing in her mind. Things seemed to have gone too far for her to turn back. It wasn’t that she liked O’Brien, but a strange sort of intimacy had grown between them during the past forty minutes. She couldn’t imagine starting again with someone else.
And she did trust him, somehow. The depressed way he’d said ‘no probs’—it was very convincing. Holly was certain he had hunted down a thousand men like Andrew in his time. Men avoiding child maintenance payments, men who had faked suicide and left their wives with massive debts, men who had robbed helpless widows and gullible spinsters. (Like Holly?)
So O’Brien lived hard, never re-knotted his tie, and had egg on his notebook. So what? Andrew had dressed like an ad man, wore expensive after-shave, and jogged. And look how he’d turned out.
She opened her handbag. O’Brien leant back in his chair, his hands behind his neck, very casual. The warning signal flashed more brightly. Holly’s hand slid over her wallet, seized her cheque book.
‘It’ll have to be a cheque, I’m afraid,’ she said brightly.
O’Brien’s top lip twitched.
‘Michael O’Brien, wasn’t it?’ she chattered on, pen poised over the cheque.
‘Cash’d be more convenient, if you don’t mind,’ said O’Brien, flashing a smile. ‘Bit of a hassle getting to the bank, little cheques . . .’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Holly. ‘I’m really sorry, but Andrew took all the petty cash, and I can’t draw on this account with a card.’
Hard times had toughened her, she realised. Suddenly she could lie through her teeth without a qualm. And she told herself there was nothing to be guilty about, anyway. The cheque she was about to give O’Brien would take up to four days to clear. By that time her parents’ cheque would have cleared, and there would be money in the account.
O’Brien sighed, shrugged, and gave in.
Feeling efficient and in control, Holly asked for a receipt. Smiling cynically, O’Brien wrote it on a page torn out of his notebook.
As they parted, he said he’d call her. She told him that she didn’t have a phone, and said she’d call him. When?
‘Couple of days,’ he said again, tucking Andrew’s photograph into the pocket of his shirt. ‘No probs.’
Holding tightly to the belief that she had achieved something by hiring O’Brien, Holly bought a sausage roll at a takeaway opposite the Victory and wolfed it down so fast that she scorched her tongue. Then she walked down to the service centre.
The Mazda was parked all alone near the yard gate. It had the air of having been finished with, though in what sense Holly didn’t know. Crossing her fingers, she went to the little office where she’d used the phone. There was no one there, but a door behind the counter was open, and loud music pounded from the workshop beyond.
Holly walked around the office to the workshop. A pair of blue-clad legs protruded from beneath an immaculate old gold Mercedes.
‘Hello?’ Holly called. ‘Hello!’
The mechanic slid out from under the Mercedes and got up without haste. He looked at Holly as if he had never seen her before.
‘The Mazda,’ Holly shouted over the music, stabbing her finger towards the yard gate. ‘The white Mazda?’
With no change of expression the mechanic jerked his head and slouched towards the office.
They met again with the counter between them. The mechanic stared at Holly, then his eyes flicked away in what she thought was a furtive manner.
‘Had a look at her,’ he said, rifling through papers with oil-grimed fingers. ‘Couldn’t do much with her, but.’
Holly felt a clutch around her heart.
‘You mean . . . it still won’t go?’ she asked childishly.
The mechanic looked up, looked quickly down again.
‘Oh, she goes,’ he said, and went on thumbing through the papers. He finally found the one he was looking for and slapped it down in front of Holly. She stared sightlessly at the indecipherable scrawls, looked down to the total at the bottom.
The man couldn’t meet her eyes. He was obviously cheating her. But she had told him to go ahead if . . .
‘We take cards,’ the man volunteered, not looking at her. ‘Mastercard, Visa . . .’
‘I’ll give you a cheque,’ Holly said coldly, wondering if he or O’Brien would get to the bank first.
‘Nup,’ said the mechanic. ‘No cheques. Card or cash.’
That seemed to be that. In silence Holly signed the paper and gave up the contents of her wallet. She watched as the small bundle of notes disappeared into the cash register.
‘Thought you were getting married today,’ said the mechanic, handing her two dollars seventy-five in change and giving her another fleeting, furtive glance.
‘I decided not to,’ Holly snapped, feeling her neck grow hot.
‘Good on ya,’ said the mechanic. His hand jerked convulsively to his mouth. He ran a greasy knuckle over his lips and turned away.
‘Take her slow, don’t thrash her, don’t flood her,’ he remarked over his shoulder as he slouched through the workshop door.
It took Holly a split second to realise that he was talking about the car.
She called after him, demanding the car key. He told her it was in the Mazda, on the floor on the driver’s side, and it instantly occurred to her, with a stab of bitterness, that she could have taken the car without paying, if only she had known. The thought startled her. Only twenty-four hours ago it wouldn’t have crossed her mind. It was sobering to experience at first hand how quickly the veneer of civilisation cracked under stress. Still, she thought, leaving the office, it would have served that shifty bastard right to get dudded himself for a change.
Walking across the yard, she looked over her shoulder. The mechanic was standing outside the workshop watching her, wiping his hands on a rag. Suddenly she became convinced that he hadn’t fixed the car at all. But the Mazda started on the first try, purring sweetly as if it had been soothed by the touch of the mechanic’s oily fingers.
Holly’s eyes suddenly welled with tears of gratitude. Her car, her only territory now, was whole again. The mechanic’s shiftiness had not been because he had failed to do a good job, then. It must have been because he knew he was overcharging her.
Well, she could almost forgive him that. And she had shown him she was on to him, anyway. That was a comfort.
She adjusted the rear-vision mirror and saw that a large, curling flake of sausage-smeared pastry clung like a scab to the corner of her mouth.
4
That evening, Holly opened the door of the Clover Road house to two dark-suited men—a tall thin silent one with a grey ponytail and a shorter, chunkier one who looked as if he spent a lot of time in the gym. The men had an authoritative manner. They didn’t smile. The shorter one asked for Andrew, and seemed unable to believe that he wasn’t at home. He said they would like to check for themselves, if Holly didn’t mind.
Holly did mind, but somehow the men got in anyway. They just eased firmly past her while she stood gaping at them. The search didn’t take long, because there were only two built-in cupboards in the place, if you didn’t count the kitchen.
Holly assumed her visitors were employed by Len Land, Oriana Spillnek, or perhaps the car lease firm, but they refused to tell her anything. She didn’t like the way they looked at her, or at her small encampment on the living room floor, or at the candle stuck into an empty jar that was her only light. They didn’t exactly sneer, but she was sure they would have if she hadn’t watched them closely.
As they left, the
shorter one said they would make it worth her while if she told them where Andrew was.
The hair prickling on the back of her neck, she said she couldn’t help him.
Later, lying wrapped in her quilt in the dark, echoing house, trying to will herself to sleep while her stomach gurgled, rebelling against a dinner of gherkins and dry breakfast cereal, Holly began to review the impulses and actions that, step by step, had brought her to this pass.
It was hard to know where to start. Had saying ‘Okay’ to Andrew’s sudden marriage proposal been the beginning? Or had her fate been sealed before that, when she had agreed to have coffee with an attractive man she had met in a shopping queue? Or had the fateful moment occurred that Saturday night just over six months ago, when she had decided to leave Perth and flee to Sydney?
No. The real beginning had been a few months before that, when she had ended her engagement to Lloyd Price, her steady boyfriend of seven long years. All their friends had been shocked by the breakup. In an unpredictable, ever-changing world, Holly and Lloyd had made everyone feel safe. They had been together forever—quite like an old married couple, except that Holly lived in a flat above a dry-cleaner’s shop, and Lloyd still lived with his parents, ‘laying solid foundations’, as he put it, in the firm of solicitors he had joined, and prudently investing his savings against the (unspecified) day when he and Holly would marry.
No one understood how Holly could have made such a rash decision. ‘After all that time!’ people said, as if Holly had left a steady job to join the dole queue just before her long-service leave was due. It seemed to them a mad impulse, and in a way it was, though afterwards Holly realised that trouble had been brewing for quite a while.
The boil-over had happened during the inevitable Sunday lunch at Lloyd’s parents’ place. Holly, who always ate faster than anyone else, and always tried to disguise it, was trying to make a few cooling lamb scraps and half a baked potato last the distance. She was listening absently to Lloyd’s mother telling her about a new way of using up small pieces of soap when she happened to glance at Lloyd and his father, who were amiably discussing their golf handicaps.
She knew perfectly well that Lloyd and his father both ate their Sunday roast dinner in the same way—meat first, potatoes second, pumpkin third and peas (mashed in a small, carefully reserved pool of gravy) last. She had seen the phenomenon often. There had been a time when she had found it endearing. But that day, as she watched the two men mashing their peas in unison, their pleasant, long-nosed faces intent, their snugly cardiganned forearms moving in exactly the same way, their forks making identical little squishy sounds, something in her seemed to snap. It was an actual, physical sensation, accompanied by a small, pinging sound in Holly’s head.
Holly jerked in her chair and for an instant everything swam before her eyes. As her vision cleared, she sat rigidly, fighting the urge to leap to her feet and run. Little chills were streaking up and down her legs, and her knees had started jiggling under the table. She put down her knife and fork and gripped the seat of her chair to hold herself in place.
It was all she could do to wait for the pea ceremony to end, and help serve the apple crumble and low-fat ice cream. She broke out in a sweat as she helped Lloyd’s mother pack the dishwasher while Lloyd and his father took their post-lunch naps in matching chairs in the living room, and racing cars buzzed dully round and round on the TV screen like maddened flies.
But when at last she had made her escape—when Lloyd had driven her home, carefully parked his car outside the dry-cleaner’s shop, remarked, as he always did, that parking was easier here on Sundays as long as you made it by four, and turned to kiss her before she hopped out and trotted back into her weekday box—she said she had something she had to tell him . . .
And there it was, Holly thought now, turning over on the hard floor. At a stroke, she had severed the multiple ties that had bound her to her home, and the life she knew. She had cut herself adrift.
She had explained to her best friend, Angie, and her mother and father, about the fateful Sunday lunch—about the meat, potatoes, pumpkin and peas, and about the cardigans. She had added, for good measure, that Lloyd insisted on reusing teabags so a box of fifty would last twice as long.
Angie looked baffled and said, ‘Oh, right . . .’ Holly’s mother looked worried and said, ‘Well, we’ve all got our little habits, darling.’ Her father thoughtfully chewed his moustache.
They didn’t get it. Possibly they thought Holly was having some kind of breakdown. Holly, on the other hand, knew she had finally come to her senses, and didn’t understand why she hadn’t seen the light years ago. It was all so clear to her now. Like a princess in a fairytale, she had spent seven years in a dream. Now the spell had been broken. Not by a handsome prince’s kiss, but by the squish of one pea too many.
She was free. Life without Lloyd stretched ahead of her, broad and straight and shimmering with possibilities— notably romance, a tall, dark stranger and lots of hot, safe sex. She felt exhilarated, sad, guilty, excited and frightened by turns.
She told her hairdresser she wanted a whole new look, and emerged from the salon with her mouse-brown hair blonded and cut into a gorgeous, tousled, ‘piquant’ style. The style lasted till the first wash, then mysteriously transformed itself into a short bob with a side parting and a bit of wispy fringe, but the blonde look, at least, remained to justify the expense.
Next, beginning as she meant to go on, she bought a very short black skirt, a strapless black corset-style top, high-heeled boots and a red G-string. All were great bargains—less than half-price—and all were fiendishly uncomfortable. It only occurred to Holly afterwards that the two phenomena might be linked.
She began going out a lot, and accepted every invitation, but most of her friends were Lloyd’s friends as well, so this meant that the invitations were mostly for coffee, lunch or a movie with her oldest girlfriends. She had dropped off the party A list. Party givers couldn’t ask both Holly and Lloyd, and Lloyd, as the grieving and bewildered dumpee, had the high moral ground. He was the one who needed support. Besides, an extra single man was always welcome in any gathering, whereas an extra single woman, especially one who was possibly mentally unstable, and who had taken to wearing very short skirts, could be seen as a liability.
Things were also bleak on the romance front. After three months, the only tall, dark strangers who had ridden over Holly’s expanded horizon had turned out to be married, gay, too old, too young, hopelessly neurotic, or not interested. The fair strangers, both short and tall, fell into the same categories. Holly’s only determined approaches came from swarthy men with lecherous eyes and a lot of gold chains, who propositioned her in bars or sidled up to her in the street.
Feeling she might be projecting the wrong image, Holly stopped wearing the short skirt and the corset top. The red G-string was no longer an issue as it had snapped and turned into a sort of lacy sporran on its first chafe-ridden outing. She also let her hair grow out.
Nothing she did made any difference. Suitable handsome strangers continued to be impervious to her charms. Her job at the bank remained as pleasant and uneventful as ever. She took to going to her parents’ place for Sunday lunch. Angie and her other friends kept giving her snippets of news about ‘poor old Lloyd’ over the cheese melts and coffee cups.
And one dreary Saturday night, when at eight-thirty she found herself in dressing gown and slippers, reading the home decorating section of a women’s magazine and seriously considering the suggestion that she paint her fridge with ‘zany zebra stripes’ to brighten up her flat, she realised that dramatic action was required.
So she had sold her laptop computer and bought a plane ticket to Sydney. And met Andrew McNish. And agreed to give up her job and marry him. And ended up here, on the floor of an empty house in Springwood.
Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind, her grandmother sometimes said. Well, so it had proved, Holly thought dismally. Then she remembered that at least
she was no longer alone in the storm. She had O’Brien on her side.
One day I’ll laugh about all this, she told herself, and almost believed it.
On Wednesday morning, half crippled from her night on the floor, Holly laboured up to the public phone by the post office and rang O’Brien for a progress report. His phone didn’t answer. On Thursday she rang him twice, with no response. By Friday morning, when still she couldn’t get through to him, she’d had enough.
She was tired of sleeping on bare boards, showering in cold water and poring over the classified ads in the Blue Mountains Gazette by candlelight. (Barista wanted min. 2 yrs exp . . . Farrier, 1st yr apprentice reqrd . . . Maths Tutor . . . Piano Tuner . . . Tuba Player . . . Bantams at point of lay for sale . . . Boost Your Self-Esteem . . . Best Quality Mulch . . . Indulge Your Fantasies! Call Natasha for sexy phone frolics. No Sundays.)
She was tired of applying for jobs without the benefit of email or private phone. She was tired of living on cheese crackers and breakfast cereal, and she never wanted to see a gherkin again. Her face still burned at the memory of trying to sell the goose-shaped biscuit barrel to the kindly woman at the Springwood secondhand shop who had said she was sorry, dear, but it wasn’t their sort of thing, and then asked if she would like to see a social worker. After her last phone call she had exactly thirty-five cents and a New Zealand dollar left in the world, and she was very aware that on Saturday she would no longer have a roof over her head.
Perhaps by now Andrew had spent her money, sold her wedding ring, blown the petty cash. But her determination to find him had not wavered. She had to confront him with what he had done. She wanted to see the expression on his face when he opened his door and found her standing there. If she had to follow him to Darwin, she’d do it.
O’Brien had said he would find him. O’Brien had taken a hundred of her dollars on a promise. Direct action was required.
Holly looked for O’Brien’s card in her wallet and was grimly unsurprised when she couldn’t find it. Rage had engraved his phone number on her memory, so she hadn’t consulted the card since Thursday morning. Either she had lost it since then, or it had disappeared in a puff of smoke. It didn’t matter. She hadn’t really needed to check the address. She remembered it—remembered that shaky writing perfectly.
Love, Honour & O'Brien Page 4