The Glitter Game

by Judy Nunn

  ‘Down the end of the hall and up one flight of stairs.’

  He stared at her, aghast. ‘You don’t have a bathroom.’

  ‘Of course not, Dad.’ Maddy smiled condescendingly. ‘It’s called a flatette. Some of them don’t even have a proper kitchen set-up. We’re lucky, we—’

  ‘That’s it, Maddy.’ Robert couldn’t take any more. ‘You’re coming with me right now.’

  ‘I’m not, and you can’t make me.’

  Robert stared at his daughter. Where had he gone wrong?

  ‘I’d only run away again.’ Maddy’s voice was gentler.

  She had everything money could buy, he thought. A comfortable home where her friends were always welcome, successful parents she could be proud of—what more did the girl want?

  ‘I’m seventeen, Dad, I’ll be eighteen in a few months.’ She took her father’s hand. She knew what he was thinking and she felt sorry for him. ‘I want to do things my own way. I’ll be OK. Honest.’

  Robert felt helpless. She was his daughter, there must be something he could do for her. But his hand felt trapped in hers and he wanted to leave. Prolonged physical contact always made him selfconscious.

  ‘I’m going to write you a cheque,’ he said, disengaging his hand to reach for his breast pocket.

  ‘I’ll only tear it up.’

  Robert conceded the battle. Three months, he thought, as he climbed into his Mercedes, she’ll last all of three months.

  Robert was wrong. Maddy lasted much longer than three months.

  One night Maddy came home four hours early from the Indian restaurant where she washed up three nights a week.

  There’d been no bookings, the one family of regulars had eaten and gone and Mrs Predan, the chef-owner, wasn’t feeling well so she decided to close up for the night. ‘Do not be worrying, my dear, I will not be docking your wages,’ she’d said. She was a nice woman. ‘Go home now.’

  So Maddy had gone home, thankful that this was one Thursday night she wouldn’t have to stand over the kitchen sink for an hour scrubbing the turmeric stains out of her fingernails.

  What would she do, she wondered, as she fumbled for her front door key. She could give herself a facial; she had enough Clarins left for one more treatment. No, she decided, remembering her budget, she’d better save that for the NADA audition in six weeks.

  She’d spent her entertainment allowance in one hit when she’d gone to the opening night of Othello at the Old Tote Theatre on Tuesday. The theatre should really be listed under study allowance, she thought, not entertainment. But then study allowance went on voice classes, books, plays and trade magazines.

  It was times like this she regretted not having accepted her father’s offer of a television set. No, bugger it, she told herself proudly as she pushed the door open, she’d made her statement and—

  The room was filled with convulsive animal sounds. Maddy instantly broke into a cold sweat.

  ‘Oh God, help me!’ It was a tortured scream. It was Sal! Sal was having an epileptic fit or a heart attack or …

  Maddy dropped her bag, raced to the bamboo screens and threw them aside.

  Sal was naked, her head lolling over the side of the bed, her eyes rolling in their sockets and her mouth wide open. She was clutching fistfuls of bedding in each hand. Her knees were spread wide, her back was painfully arched and there was a head between her legs.

  The bamboo screens crashed to the floor. There was a split-second pause, then they both looked up at Maddy.

  ‘Shit,’ Sal said and lay back, exhausted.

  Maddy was in a state of shock. She’d never seen a couple making love before. And certainly not two women.

  Jane got up and crossed to the sink. ‘Serves you right, Sal.’ She poured herself a large glass of water. ‘How many times did I say it? You should have told the kid.’

  Strangely enough, Maddy’s relationship with her flatmates improved from then on. The fact that she didn’t gather her belongings together and move out in high dudgeon immediately endeared her to Sal.

  Soon Maddy found herself being whisked out to all the lesbian night spots, bars and private parties, Sal protectively warding off any would-be contenders with a ‘naughty, naughty, hands off, pet, she’s mine’. And to Maddy’s astonishment the hulking, leather-jacketed bull-dyke with the crew cut would shrug and skulk away to search elsewhere for fresh meat.

  It was all very novel to Maddy whose only experience of lesbianism had been one dark night at the convent when a classmate had slid into her bed and placed a hand between her legs.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Maddy had asked, not even aware who it was.

  ‘Open up and I’ll show you a good time,’ the voice urged.

  Oh no! Eunice! ‘Piss off, Eunice,’ Maddy said as she kicked the girl out of bed.

  Eunice was a grubby little creature who boasted about getting off on a bicycle seat and, although Maddy hadn’t quite understood what that meant, it sounded decidedly tacky. If Eunice was what lesbianism had to offer then Maddy wasn’t interested.

  For a short, disturbing while she wondered how she might have reacted if Eunice had been Megan, the Firsts hockey captain she idolised. But not long after the Eunice episode, one of the final year girls was caught with the assistant handyman in the gym equipment storage room. Rumour reported that both of them were stark naked and heavily ‘at it’ and Maddy found the mental image of them so erotic that she supposed she must be heterosexual and she paid no further attention to lesbianism. Now here it was, thrust at her in the form of Sal and Jane.

  After one inoffensive pass, Sal good-naturedly accepted the fact that Maddy didn’t want to convert and even the surly Jane was persuaded to join forces in protecting Maddy’s virginity.

  ‘What do you mean she’s a virgin?’ Jane had exclaimed in astonishment. ‘The kid’s eighteen in a minute.’

  ‘We’re not all sluts who lost it to our cousins at ten, pet.’

  ‘Oh fuck off, Sal.’

  But Jane was impressed nevertheless and decided that she quite liked the kid. She also decided that the kid needed some general all-round survival lessons. The first was to be a crash course in shoplifting.

  It suddenly became clear to Maddy why the kitchen cupboards were always full of luxury items. She’d wondered how the girls, who never had any cash, existed on smoked salmon, pates and imported cheeses. As far as Maddy had been able to ascertain, the sales of their paintings were few and far between. Both girls were in the final year of their art course at Tech and they augmented their income by hiring themselves out as kitchen hands whenever things got too desperate. Indeed, it was Sal who had introduced Maddy to Mrs Predan.

  Flattered as she was that Jane should go to the trouble of teaching her, Maddy didn’t take well to shoplifting. As she lined up at the checkout counter with a loaf of bread, a carton of milk and a bag of sugar in her basket, she felt herself break into a sweat that she was sure the shopgirl must notice. Just as the girl must notice the bulges in Maddy’s sleeves and pockets where the packets of bacon and cheeses were stuffed.

  Jane had it down to a fine art, with concealed pockets sewn into several special shoplifting garments. Winter was the best season for shoplifting, she told Maddy—all those heavy clothes. She always stocked up on tins and jars in winter.

  Although Jane, like Sal, was only three years older than Maddy, she was a tough, streetwise young woman. Maddy was totally in awe of her and, after three consecutive Saturdays of feeling sick with nerves, she didn’t quite know how to approach Jane with the news that she didn’t want to be included in the shoplifting roster.

  ‘Wimping out, are we?’ It was more or less the reaction Maddy had expected. ‘Chicken, eh?’

  ‘Leave her alone, Jano.’ Sal came to the rescue.

  ‘Well, the kid’s got to pull her weight.’

  ‘She does, you cow. She’s better with her rent than you are. And who the hell brings home the curries every fortnight?’

  It was
true. Mrs Predan’s curries were served to her patrons for two weeks and then the remnants were scraped from the massive pots into a series of plastic bags which Maddy brought home. For several days a fortnight the girls pigged out on lamb, beef or chicken and a choice of korma, kofta, or vindaloo.

  ‘Yeah.’ Jane looked thoughtful. ‘I’d forgotten about the curries. Fair enough.’ And Maddy was let off the shoplifting.

  All in all, it was a good time for Maddy. A learning experience. She adjusted astonishingly quickly to the cockroaches, the mouse droppings and the coin-operated gas meter in the upstairs shared bathroom.

  She was finally growing up, she told herself. No more cotton wool. This was life and she was living it. She’d soon be a struggling young actress and struggling young actresses needed to know about life. She worked hard at her voice classes, she devoured a half a dozen books a week—some from the library and some purchased with her study allowance—and she never once questioned whether or not she would pass her NADA audition. She was on the road to becoming an actress and that was that.

  Besides the expanse of thigh and the ripe young breasts, it was Maddy’s commitment that Jonathan Thomas noticed during the interview and it impressed him. He was further impressed by Maddy’s audition. It was a raw talent, one that needed shaping but it was most certainly talent and her attitude was perfect. Maddy was one of the first selected for admission to The National Academy of Dramatic Art for the year of 1970.

  1970 was indeed the year that shaped Maddy’s destiny. It was the year she went to NADA, and it was the year she met Alex.

  Tiger Men

  The eagerly awaited new novel by Judy Nunn

  ‘This town is full of tiger men,’ Dan said. ‘Just look around you. The merchants, the builders, the bankers, the company men, they’re all out for what they can get. This is a tiger town, Mick, a place at the bottom of the world where God turns a blind eye to pillage and plunder.’

  Van Diemen’s Land was an island of stark contrasts: a harsh penal colony, an English idyll for its landed gentry, and an island so rich in natural resources it was a profiteer’s paradise. Its capital, Hobart Town, had its contrasts too: the wealthy elite in their sandstone mansions, the exploited poor in the notorious slum known as Wapping, and the criminals and villains who haunted the dockside taverns and brothels of Sullivan’s Cove. Hobart Town was no place for the meek.

  Tiger Men is the story of Silas Stanford, a wealthy Englishman; Mick O’Callaghan, an Irishman on the run; and Jefferson Powell, an idealistic American political prisoner. It is also the story of the strong, proud women who loved them, and of the children they bore who rose to power in the cutthroat world of international trade.

  Tiger Men is the sweeping saga of three families who lived through Tasmania’s golden era, who witnessed the birth of Federation and who, in 1915, watched with pride as their sons marched off to fight for King and Country in the Great War.

  Available from November 2011

  Other titles by Judy Nunn

  Araluen

  On a blistering hot day in 1850, brothers George and Richard Ross take their first steps on Australian soil after three long months at sea. All they have is each other.

  A decade on, and they are the owners of successful vineyard, Araluen, nestled in a beautiful valley near Adelaide. Now a successful businessman, George has laid down the roots of a Ross dynasty, born of the New World. But building a family empire – whatever the cost – can have a shattering effect on the generations to come …

  Pacific

  Australian actress Samantha Lindsay is thrilled when she scores her first Hollywood movie role, playing a character loosely based on World War II heroine Mamma Tack.

  But on location in Vanuatu, uncanny parallels between history and fiction emerge and Sam begins a quest for the truth. Just who was the real Mamma Tack?

  Kal

  Kalgoorlie. It grew out of the red dust of the desert over the world’s richest vein of gold … From the heady early days of the gold rush, to the horrors of the First World War in Gallipoli and France, to the shame and confrontation of the post-war riots, Kal tells the story of Australia itself and the people who forged a nation out of a harsh and unforgiving land.

  www.randomhouse.com.au