Sharp Shooter

by Marianne Delacourt

  Knock like a decent girl.’

  I stomped back through the duplex’s neat little yard, vowing never to take Bok with me anywhere again.

  A male face peered around the corner of the front door. ‘Hai?’

  ‘Mr Hara?’

  ‘Hai.’

  ‘I’m Tara Sharp,’ I said. ‘I went to the back door like you said and your . . . wife –’

  Mr Hara threw the door open wide and gave a perfect little bow. He was a petite, smooth-skinned Euro-Japanese gentleman of between twenty and eighty. His aura was canary yellow laced with purple flecks. When he straightened, I could see he’d been laughing silently.

  ‘Mrs Hara is as gentle as a kitty, but you are frightened of her. You did not read her properly, unlike your friend who is eating my dinner. Perhaps he is the one with the abilities. Hai?’

  I felt myself blushing and my competitive streak reared.

  ‘Or perhaps Mrs Hara prefers men to women,’ I replied tartly.

  His expression became very still, blank almost, and I wondered if I’d just ended our very short acquaintance.

  We stood there in silence for much much longer than I was comfortable with, before he finally spoke.

  ‘You are quite right. Mrs Hara does prefer men, especially those who like her cooking,’ he said, then gave another bow and gestured for me to enter.

  I felt a wave of relief. But as I turned to walk down the common-wall corridor of the Hara’s half-duplex, his aura produced more purple speckles, and a little voice in my head started chattering. Had Mr Hara just cleverly manipulated me through my competitive nature?

  A headache nibbled at my temples and I stopped mid stride.

  Mr Hara bumped into me. ‘Missy? What?’

  I grappled with a moment of panic. This type of second-guessing people’s motives because their auras were changing was exactly what was making me nuts. I had to do something about it.

  I took a decisive step forward into Hara’s tiny sitting room.

  Chapter 4

  THE SITTING ROOM was only sparsely furnished – two old armchairs and an expensive LCD TV perched on a sideboard – apart from shelves and shelves of ghastly, luminously glazed china. I could just imagine my mother’s reaction, and it made me want to giggle. The Queen of Wedgewood and Royal Doulton would be appalled.

  Mr Hara jogged my elbow. ‘You like Wembley Ware?’ he asked.

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. How could anyone like anything so kitsch? How could anyone ask anyone if they liked anything so kitsch?

  ‘Very nice,’ I squeaked.

  Mr Hara walked along the shelves telling me about the collection of lurid frogs, gross open-mouthed fish, toadstools complete with gnomes, tomatoes and lettuce leaves, reclining kangaroos and a sinister black cat’s head . . .

  ‘Have you been collecting long?’ I asked politely, hoping my aura wasn’t showing my distaste.

  ‘Not me. Mrs Hara. I buy her one for every birthday. Still many, many pieces to go,’ he said. He grinned at me, like he knew what I was thinking. ‘You want to get on her good side? You find the marron or the platypus plate.’

  ‘I’ll remember that,’ I said, dumping it straight into my mental rubbish bin.

  Mr Hara finished his loop of the shelves and pointed me to a chair before settling into the other one. ‘You bad liar, Missy Sharp. Now you tell me what you see. What colour am I?’

  His question surprised me but I answered it without thinking. ‘Your aura is yellow with some purple specks through it. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘What else?’

  ‘What do you mean “what else”?’

  ‘Eliz’beth not send you to me for no reason.’

  It took me a moment to realise he was talking about Bets. ‘I . . . err . . . read too much into things. I see into conversations. See energy between people – I mean really see it.’ I hung my head. It sounded too kooky to say ‘psychic’.

  Before he could reply, Mrs Hara bustled into the room with soup on a tray, which she placed on her husband’s lap before tucking a napkin under his chin. She left without giving me a glance.

  Mr Hara picked up the spoon and slurped down a mouthful. ‘So, Missy. What you see then?’

  ‘Your wife brought you soup and ignored me.’

  He blew on the spoonful. ‘What you really see? What colour her aura?’

  ‘It’s mottled,’ I said. ‘Purple and grey.’

  ‘What else?’

  I mused on the way Mrs Hara walked, the way she’d put the tray down. ‘She loves you, but . . .’

  Mr Hara leaned forward. ‘Yes?’

  I blushed. I didn’t want to say what I’d really seen. I hesitated, trying to think of a way to put it. ‘But she treats you more like a child. Not a husband.’

  I waited for his face to crease in annoyance, or for him to throw his soup at me. Instead he said, ‘You not a psychic, Missy. But you got BIG empathy. Off the scale. You come learn with me here. Maybe you use it, instead of it use you.’

  ‘I don’t want to use it. I just want it to go away.’

  ‘Can’t hide from what you are, Missy. You learn things, get better at it,’ he said. ‘You know about kinesics and proxemics?’

  I shook my head. ‘Are they fungal infections?’ I said with a straight face.

  He did his lamb laugh, then put his soup spoon down and leaned forward out of his chair until his breath was almost glancing across my chest.

  ‘This is proxemics. People got four distances: intimate, personal, social, public. You gotta know which one to use, but you also gotta know why other people choose one or other. We got another way to say it . . . propinquity.’

  ‘Well I got another way to say it too. How about, Get your face out of my cleavage.’

  He lamb-laughed again, then leaned back into his chair and resumed his noisy soup slurping.

  ‘One thing you gotta know first is what culture you dealing with. You got an Italian like Mrs Hara, she like to stand close. You got some Swede, you gotta stand on the other side of the room if you wanna have a conversation. If you got a half and half then you got a problem.’

  ‘So you’re saying body language is all about a person’s culture?’

  ‘No, no, no. I say you gotta watch out for that. Sometimes the rules change.’ His face got a peculiar sort of intensity when he said ‘rules change’, like he was listening for a winning number. ‘Some stuff you just know,’ he added, tapping his finger to his temple. ‘But you can learn as well. Makes the difference between being kooky and being rich.’

  My stomach fluttered. Rich? I’d settle for solvent.

  ‘You study with me, learn enough, you start your own business.’ This time he slid his fingertips together like he was rustling dollar notes.

  ‘But . . .’ I looked around. I guess Wembley Ware tickles some collectors’ fancy, but other than that, Mr Hara’s home was less than modest.

  He read my thoughts instantly. ‘You think this all we got? This just for the tax guy. Mrs Hara owns a chalet in Hokkaido and an apartment in Sydney. Keep them in her name.’

  I stared at him, flabbergasted. I mean, really, could I . . .

  should I, believe the little perv?

  Doubt crept back in to my mind as I watched his aura dance around his body. I didn’t know what it was trying to tell me, so I fell back on the estimation of the straightest person I knew, Bets. Surely she wouldn’t stitch me up with a whacko.

  ‘But how do I repay you for your teaching time? I-I’m unemployed and utterly broke,’ I said, honestly.

  ‘I run a business. Sometime too much work for me. You do one job for free. We quits. You do it good, then I give you more work, cut you in.’

  ‘Cut me in?’

  ‘Percentage.’

  ‘How much percentage?’

  ‘Thirty. Plus expenses.’

  It sounded fair. But then I’d never been a good judge of those things. I once answered a ‘make three
hundred dollars a day from the comfort of your own home’ ad. The job turned out to be phone selling an abdominal exerciser – the Ab Fab. It cost me four hundred dollars in sales training, and I never sold a single damn one.

  But Mr Hara didn’t appear to be hiding any upfront costs, so I stayed, and talked, agreeing in the end to become his student.

  Much later, as I drove us home, Bok relived his gastronomic evening.

  ‘She’s the most amazing cook, T. Really. After the soup, there was gnocchi, veal, artichoke tart, and for dessert there was vanilla gel –’ ‘Shut up,’ I interrupted.

  I had a headache from hunger pangs and from listening to Mr Hara’s peculiar Aussie-Amero-Italio-Japanese accent. Bok’s swooning wasn’t helping one little bit. If he hadn’t been doing me a favour in the first place I would’ve dumped him on the roadside and left him to walk home. Thankfully, he fell into a food coma when we reached the highway, and I had the rest of the drive home to reflect on the strange direction my life had just taken.

  Chapter 5

  MY CLASSES WITH MR Hara started the next week.

  To my annoyance, when I arrived, Bok was there drinking miso and eating meatballs. I ignored his jaunty wave as Mr Hara led me through the kitchen – part of the desensitising process for Mrs Hara.

  Thankfully our lesson wasn’t in the sitting room with the spooky Wembley Ware. Instead, Mr Hara led me to a tiny office at the front of the house crammed with books and curling certificates blue-tacked to the wall, proclaiming his martial arts expertise in aikido, kendo, jujitsu and karate. It was a comfy room, and I set myself the task of being a model student.

  ‘Here, you like chocolate biscuits, Missy?’ said Mr Hara, pulling a packet of Tim Tams from between two large hardbacks, and offering me one.

  Chocolate! ‘Yum,’ I said, and took one.

  He settled into an old studded-leather swivel chair and helped himself to several more. ‘Mrs Hara not like me eating this. Says it makes me fat,’ he said and rubbed his muscled belly.

  I choked down an envious sigh. I had a good metabolism, but not that good.

  ‘Now you tell me some stuff first,’ he said. ‘Then I teach you.’

  ‘Tell you what?’ I asked, getting comfortable on a dilapidated two-seater so that I could suck the chocolate coating off my second Tim Tam.

  ‘How you lose your job?’

  ‘I punched my boss.’

  He stopped munching for a moment, ‘Yes, tell more please.’

  ‘Well, it was complicated. I worked with this guy . . . and we both worked for an advertising consultant. Every time our boss walked into our office this colleague of mine’s aura shrank so small it almost disappeared. He was terrified of her. We never talked about it, but I could see. Anyway, this one time, I forgot to take my gym shoes after work and had to go back to get them. And I heard him in her office.’ I licked my chocolate-stained lips to calm my rising embarrassment. ‘He was screaming as if he was being tortured. Before I knew it, I’d run in and smacked her in the face. Knocked the whip right out of her hand.’ The memory burned the back of my eyeballs.

  Mr Hara began chewing with intensity again; eyes wide, as if he’d reached an exciting part in a movie.

  ‘See, he was tied upside down in her chair – naked butt in the air. Only it was consensual.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Who’d have thought it? The next day she called me in, said she no longer needed two assistants and told me to clear out my desk. I could have argued it, I guess, but I didn’t want to stay after that.’

  To his credit Mr Hara didn’t laugh, or call me an idiot like Bok had. ‘Sure, sure. You just gotta learn to read this stuff better.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Little bit experience, lotta bit of learning.’

  He talked on and on then, about proxemics and gestures, until I started to twitch.

  ‘You getting cuckoo,’ he said, finally. ‘Go sleep on it and come back soon.’

  I filled in the time until my next class with Mr Hara by meeting Bok for coffee, and catching up with Smitty. Bok was on a salary so he paid for the vanilla slices, and Smitty was always good for a chicken and mayo sandwich if I turned up around midday.

  Dearest Smitty. Married. Kids. Well adjusted. Everything Bok and I were not. Smitty’s husband Henry Evans was an overworked GP and one of my favourite people – except when it came to me and Smitty.

  Henny had gone to one of Perth’s most elite boys’ schools and Smitty had gone to the nearby girls’ equivalent with moi. We all caught the same bus home from school and later, uni, until Henny bought his first car, a Holden Statesman, and then we drove with him. His mum still lived in the next street, two houses down from Smitty’s.

  Henny knew every scrape and best-forgotten incident Smitty, Bok and I had ever been involved in – which was fine until the day he and Smitts got married. The day she said ‘Yes, I do’ he started to say ‘No, you don’t go out with Tara to nightclubs.’ ‘No, you don’t go paragliding.’ ‘No, you don’t . . .’ Blah, blah, blah.

  His burgeoning domineering attitude had got right up my nose until Bok persuaded me it was a natural rite of passage, and that Henny would come to his senses when he realised he wasn’t having any fun.

  Smitty had taken the road of least resistance at first. Then she and Henny had their first kid, which pretty much wiped her out for most things anyway. To make it worse, she had twins a couple of years later. Everything had been chaotically hunky dory for them, until Claire – the oldest – developed Crohn’s disease. Claire was gorgeous, like a young, olive-skinned Cate Blanchett, but the pain, exhaustion and hospitalisations she endured, plus the all-round difficulty of having a chronically ill child, took its own kind of toll on the family. I couldn’t begin to understand it, but I loved Smitty for hanging tough.

  I babysat for her occasionally now that the kids were older and I wasn’t so afraid of dropping them. For her part, she always supported me whenever I went left field, including this time.

  ‘Mr Hara sounds like a hoot,’ she told me. ‘I say go for it.’

  At my next class, I smuggled a packet of mint slices past Mrs Hara, who was making osso bucco, and Bok, who appeared to be her chief taster with much ecstatic eye-rolling and lip-smacking. Crawler.

  Mr H and I settled into the office to watch some pirated DVDs that captured micro-expressions and micro-rhythms.

  By the end of the mint slices, we had well and truly bonded. He told me his rule of thumb for auras. ‘Bright and light is good. Excepting white. White very bad. Dark colours bad too. And dark spots.’

  Dark spots. I’d had some ex-boyfriends with those.

  He pulled a chart from his drawer. It was laminated, like a bookmark, and had an explanation of what each colour meant. ‘You keep this while you learn. Most people have layers of colours, like rainbow. Usually one colour is most strongest though. Some have just one colour, with flashes of others. Like me. I flash purple.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You check.’

  I scanned down one side of the chart. Bright yellow meant a cheerful, free spirit. The other side of the card was lined with symbols. The speckled symbol meant dominant surges. Then I checked back with the colours. Purple meant strongly spiritual.

  ‘So you’re basically a free spirit with surges of spirituality.’

  ‘Hai. Now, that man you worked with, you remember his aura?’

  I did – skinny little thing that it was. ‘Pink with . . . I’d guess you’d call them swirls.’

  I glanced down at the chart again. Pink was a healthy balance between spiritual and material. Swirls meant uncontrolled emotions. ‘I don’t get it. His aura was balanced, but raging at the same time.’

  ‘Some things do that to a person,’ said Mr Hara, then he reached up to his bookcase and pulled out a book, which he handed to me.

  I sagged. It weighed only a little less than Mona’s engine.

  ‘Sex is one,’ he said.

  ‘So I should have read his au
ra as “horny” not scared!’

  Mr Hara smiled and nodded. ‘All in here. Many, many subtleties, Missy. My chart is just the start – learning to crawl.

  You take this home and study, then you can learn to walk. You get good like me, you run fast.’

  Running fast. I liked the sound of that.

  ‘Hoshi?’ Mrs Hara stood at the door with a steaming hot bowl of soupy veal.

  We both looked guilty.

  ‘What is this?’ she said, her ferocious gaze fixed on the gap left by Mr Hara’s book. A gap now filled by empty chocolate wrappers, no longer compressed by the book’s great weight.

  Her fifty-kilo death stare fell to the book, me and the empty packet of mint slices balanced on my knee – in that order. ‘You!’ she lifted one hefty arm and pointed. ‘You poison my husband!’

  I opened my mouth and it stayed open. I had nothing.

  ‘Bella,’ soothed Mr Hara, and began speaking to her in loving, pacifying Italian. At least that’s what I was hoping as I beat it down the corridor, collected Bok, and ran out into the blessedly Mrs-Hara-free night air.

  Chapter 6

  FOR THREE MONTHS MRS Hara ran spot ‘choc’ checks on us, creeping silently into the room while Hoshi deluged me with everything a person could want to know about kinesics. He had formal titles for things, like Affect Display and Illustrators, which simply meant ways of showing emotion and reinforcing verbal messages.

  Each class, he made me read his and Mrs Hara’s aura, until I knew way more about them than I wanted to. Mrs Hara stood the aura reading with unmartyred hostility. She still wasn’t speaking to me, and when Hoshi escorted me through the kitchen, just stopped short of frisking me, though I could see that it was on her mind.

  While Bok put on weight eating homemade gnocchi, I learned the aura colour chart off by heart, and began to familiarise myself with the meanings of the streaks and swirls and spots and blotches. Mr Hara also taught me how to categorise people’s behaviour when they were talking. There were eight identifying factors, he said, including olfactory (how they smell to each other) and thermal (body heat!), as well as the obvious ones such as eye contact and body-contact distance.