I shook my head. “Maybe something about a shared road, reputation... I don't know. It didn't make much sense. Sean thought Diane was doing it to piss him off, but it seemed like she was doing it because she was sick of his crap.”
Sarah shifted the box she was carrying to under the other arm, chewing her lip as she thought. “Well, the case is being held in an open court, so we're going to find out eventually,” she said. “Meanwhile, Waterbank’s closed, so Rob's bored and hanging around my house. And, don't get me wrong, I love the big oaf, but I swear to god if he paints another room or rearranges the furniture again, I'm going to kill him.”
I tried to remember the exact words Sean and Diane had said to each other, but I couldn't. There had been too many other things going on for me. “To be honest, I'm getting to the point where I don't really care about what's going on,” I told them. “I'm just curious, because that all that crap was why Pink needed extra security and that caused all of this in the first place, but...” I shook my head. “Whatever. I hope they sue each other into bankruptcy. I'll bring popcorn to their estate auction.”
Gemma had been mostly silent, and as we arrived at my floor, Sarah looked over to her. “You right, Gem?”
Gemma grimaced. “Okay: confession,” she said, “after Sean bought me that coffee this morning I did spend the whole team meeting imagining bumping into him alone in that pub we go to...”
Sarah groaned, and put her free arm around Gemma's shoulders. “We need to get you a boyfriend,” she said as we approached my front door.
I knocked. Footsteps ran over to the door. “Who is it?” Bree called, reminding me she was too short to reach the peephole.
“It's me,” I told her.
Gemma froze. “Oh, no,” she said, looking alarmed. “Bree's here?”
I didn't realise what the problem was straight away, because I had totally forgotten what happened last time Gemma and Bree had been in the same place. It hadn't even occurred to me to leave Gemma at work as a result of it, either. Fuck, I hoped Bree wasn't going to be too upset. She had not been happy about Gemma last time they'd been in a room together.
Gemma clearly hadn't forgotten, because she put the box down and turned to leave, mumbling something about needing to get back to work.
Sarah caught her with one hand. “Oh, no, you don't.”
The door opened and Bree appeared. Embarrassingly, she was still only wearing my t-shirt, but because she was much shorter than me it was probably longer than any of her skirts anyway. Still, it was dead giveaway that she'd been in bed with me, just in case either Sarah or Gemma weren't completely clear about the fact we were sleeping together.
Bree was oblivious to all that. “Oh, hey!” she said to me, and then spotted Sarah. “Sarah, I didn't know you guys were...” She stopped when she noticed Gemma loitering in the background.
They stared at each other for a moment, stunned. Predictably, Gemma went bright red.
Bree looked up at me, and back at Gemma's terrified expression. Then, she darted past me, taking a hold of Gemma's hand. “You've never been here before, have you? You have to see the view from Min's balcony. It's awesome.” She towed Gemma past me and out onto said balcony. Gemma threw a look back over her shoulder that was equal parts surprise and relief.
I watched them as Sarah kicked the box Gemma had set down so it was inside the door, and placed her own down on the floor next to it. I followed suite and then we stood and watched Bree leaning double over the balcony and pointing at landmarks. Gemma looked a bit overwhelmed.
“Should I rescue Gemma?” I wondered.
Sarah shook her head. “Nah, it's good for her. Where do you want these boxes?”
I was about to say in my bedroom, but then I remembered the state that my bedroom was in. Which reminded me... “Oh!” I said to Sarah, “You know how I promised you my old dresses a couple of weeks ago? Bree sorted through them and found the ones that might fit you. Want to have a look?”
She gave me a look that said duh, and so while Bree was busy with Gemma on the balcony, I led Sarah over to the pile of folded clothes for her in the bedroom.
She gave the glass-ridden ones, the bed and my door-less wardrobe a lengthy stare.
“Redecorating,” was my flimsy excuse. I grinned at her as I said it.
From her expression, I think she guessed exactly what happened to the mirror and to the clothes. She didn't say as much, though, she just went straight over to the pile I showed her.
“Wow, you're getting rid of all of them?” she asked, picking up the blouse on the top of the pile and holding it up to the light. “Not that I'm complaining! But wow, it feels like Christmas!”
There wasn't anywhere to put the clothes in my bedroom for Sarah to sort through them, so she took them out into the living room to select the pieces that she liked. While she was doing that, Bree and Gemma came back inside, and Bree bounced all the way up to me.
“Did the mail come yet?” she asked, wrapping her arms around my middle. “What do they do when it gets delivered, do they bring it up, or do you have to go down and get it?”
“Why, what are you expecting?” I asked her suspiciously, remembering her standing over an opened package with my packer cupped in her hands.
“I was just wondering,” she said. “I thought I'd go and grab it for you if they didn't bring it up.”
“You can go and check if you want,” I told her as I draped an arm around her, “but put some actual clothes on first, okay?”
Just as I'd said that, Sarah pulled her top over her head, reaching for one of the work blouses I was giving her.
All three of us gawked at her. She gave us a weird look. “Oh, come on, I'm wearing a bra.” She fussed with the sleeves on the top she was about to try on. “Besides, I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to see how great they are before a have a tonne of kids and ruin them.”
Bree looked up at me with a twinkle in her eye. “I'm totally using that one.”
While Sarah tried on all the clothes and the rest of us found all sorts of great places to look other than straight at her breasts, Gemma came across a picture of Henry and I. She picked it up, gazing at it for a moment, and then looking up at me. It made me feel uncomfortable, I didn't want anyone to think of or remember me like that. I needed to put those in a box somewhere.
“You guys looked really happy here,” she said thoughtfully. “Did you always know? Not about the fact you might actually be a guy, but that you didn't like guys?” I shook my head. She watched my response, and then put the picture frame back down and considered it quietly for a while in the corner of the room.
When Sarah had chosen the pieces she wanted to take home with her, she picked up soft blue blouse that didn't suit her and marched over to Gemma. “Here,” she said. “I think this one would look good on you.”
She was probably right, but when Sarah reached for her buttons, Gemma panicked and looked directly at me. Sarah glanced over her shoulder towards me, and the little smirk on her lips suggested she was just teasing Gemma.
Not to be outdone, I leant casually on the kitchen counter and I was about to say something slightly suggestive, when Bree went for the kill. I had a feeling she was 100% serious, as well.
“Is it true people with freckles have them all over their boobs, too?” she asked us. “I've always wondered that.”
Gemma wrestled the top from Sarah and pretended to strangle her with it. “Now I get why you wanted to be friends with Min,” she said, returning to her usual shade of red. “You just wanted an accomplice to torture me with.”
Since we were done with the clothes, Bree offered everyone lunch. Despite the fact both Sarah and Gemma were probably going to get in trouble for disappearing in the middle of a work day, both of them were happy to stay for food. While Bree was cooking, the three of us went and sat out on the balcony in the late morning sun. Sarah and I had our sleeves rolled up, but Gemma backed all the way into the corner where there was a slither of shadow s
o she didn't get more freckles.
“This view is pretty spectacular,” Sarah said, crossing her ankles on the railing. “Are you going to stay here?”
I laughed once. “Hah. It's nearly $3000 a week if you don't work for Frost,” I said, “which is ironic because the only people who could afford those rates do work for Frost. I've got a week to get out.”
“Where are you moving?” Gemma asked.
I shook my head. “I don't know,” I said. “My final pay is going to be a few thousand, but I have a feeling it has to last me for quite a long time. I haven't really thought about where I'm going to live, yet. I don't really know Sydney that well.”
“The East is nice,” Gemma volunteered. “It's a bit expensive, but it's close to the city for work.”
“I don't even know what I'm going to do for work,” I confessed. “I'll probably follow up with that cafe guy in Broome, but other than that...”
“Well, I saw those paintings inside,” Gemma said. “They're incredible. Especially that Great Barrier Reef one. You should do something arty.”
“That's what Bree says,” I told her. “Honestly, though, I don't know where to start. I don't have any training. I'm sure artists figure out this stuff on their own all the time, but, yeah, I don't know.”
Sarah had been watching Gemma and I speak, looking thoughtful. “What do you think about North Shore?” she asked me. “Would you consider moving there?”
I looked across at her. “Yeah, I guess?”
She grinned. “Because all I'm saying is that I've got three bedrooms and I only use two of them, so...”
I wasn't sure I heard her right. “Pardon?”
“I said move in with me, you dag,” she told me. “You can play Xbox with Rob and stop him from constantly bothering me to do it.” At my silence, she added, “Bring Schoolgirl, too, if you want. The more, the merrier.”
I just stared at her; I didn't know what to say. It was too good to be true. “Really?”
Her smile was genuine. “Yeah.”
“Food!” Bree announced from the doorway, distracting us from the conversation and carrying plates and cutlery out for us to eat with.
As usual, Bree's food wasn't award-winning, but it was at least edible and today's pasta had more than the usual concentration of vegetables and was probably very healthy.
“Definitely bring Schoolgirl with you,” Sarah told me, helping herself to the olives I'd picked out and put on the side of my plate. “I hate cooking. Rob likes it, but he's terrible.”
Gemma and Sarah stayed until after lunch, and then Sarah got an angry text message from someone in her other team. Both of them left after that, Sarah with about five Coles bags full of my old clothes.
“Are you sure about this?” she asked, swinging the bags. “You won't regret it?”
“Definitely not,” I said. “And besides, even if I did, they're just going to your house a bit earlier than everything else, right? Less to pack up.”
Once they'd gone, Bree sat herself down in the hallway with the boxes containing my director's cut of marketing materials to go through them. I watched her from the couch, where I was reclined nursing an overfull stomach. Before she started on the brochures, she fished out my security pass and examined the photo on it. It was me looking really feminine. “Oh, yeah, that's right... I almost forgot.”
And I'd completely forgotten to surrender it like Diane had asked me to. “Shit, I should take that back, can you leave it out?”
Bree looked disappointed, but put it aside and opened the box instead. She liked most of the materials, but there was a period from 2010 where a lot of the things I produced contained very aggressive colours. She held up one of them and made a face. “Like, why?”
“All the major companies were using really bold colours when I made that,” I told her. “I wanted to strike a balance between classic and progressive, and giving the diamond and the text lime green shadows achieved that, I think.”
She made a face. “You sound like you're writing an essay,” she told me, and then went back to the materials.
“I could write an essay on those,” I said as I watched her go through them. “People at Frost never really understood that I don't just close my eyes and point to the colour palette. A lot of planning goes into the layouts and the colours and it's part of the sales and marketing process. People are subconsciously affected by colour, so it's important to get it right for the right impact.”
Bree listened to me, looking down at a poster she'd unrolled. “Did they teach you that in your degree?”
I shrugged. “Not really. Marketing departments usually hire designers for that. There's no design subjects in the undergraduate marketing degree.”
“And you didn't study art in school?”
Not unless you counted shutting myself in the graphics lab to escape the fuck-heads in my grade. “Only by myself.”
Bree considered that, and then went back to the materials.
She'd been staring at the same one for a little while when she began, “You know how you had a really bad time in high school?” I made a non-committal noise. “Well, you know the treatment for, like, arachnophobia is slowly introducing people to spiders? And for acrophobia, they take you slowly further and further up until you get used to it and it's fine?”
I squinted at her. “Are you suggesting that I should slowly re-introduce myself to high school until I become un-fucked up over what happened to me when I was a teenager?”
“Well, when you put it like that it sounds silly, but yes? Maybe if you went back to one and saw everything can actually be fine you would feel better? I could go with you, we could go to Cloverfield. Today, maybe?”
Really? There was no way. I'd spent six years when I was in one wishing I was anywhere but there, and I wasn't going to voluntarily put myself in locations that were going to trigger really awful memories for me. “That's a really nice idea, Bree, but it's not going to happen,” I said more firmly than I'd intended. “I've only just started to get over all that stuff now and it's been nearly eight years.”
She looked unexpectedly crestfallen. “Oh,” she said, getting back to the boxes. “Okay.”
She'd only been looking again for a minute or two when she made an excited noise and held Mike aloft from one of the boxes. “Who's this?” she asked me, flicking the souvenir's horribly misshapen head so it wildly nodded.
“Michelangelo.”
She laughed about the name. “He's so cute!”
She had to be kidding me. “He is definitely not cute. He's so ugly the vendor sold him to my friend at half-price, and then she gave him to me as a joke.”
Bree looked really stricken by that. “That's awful,” she told me, and then cradled him. “Can you imagine what it would feel like to be sold at half-price because no one wants you?”
“Bree. He's a plastic figurine. I'm pretty sure he's doing fine without therapy.”
She didn't get to elaborate, because there was a knock on the door.
She looked across at me with a blank expression. “Why would they come back so quickly?” she asked, and then since she was already in the hallway, she put Mike down and pushed herself to stand up.
“It might be room service,” I said. “I don't think they've been all week.”
“Or it might be the mail!” Bree suggested, and pulled open the door with a big smile on her face.
As soon as she saw whoever it was, her smile disappeared. She stood in the doorway for a moment, looking like she was torn between shouting and crying, but she didn't do either. Without saying anything at all, she slammed the door and then went running into the bathroom and shut herself in there.
I sat up on the couch, stunned. “Bree?” I called to her as whoever it was knocked insistently on the door again.
I hadn't even got up off the couch before I heard a guy's voice yell, “Bree! Stop fucking running away, you're not fucking five years old anymore! For fuck's sake open the door, I need to talk to you!”<
br />
Andrej.
THIRTY-THREE
Andrej was still yelling, “Open the fucking door, Bree!” when I pulled it right open. He looked from where he'd been expecting Bree's face to be up to mine, and the words slowed on his lips. He looked very surprised to see me. “You're not at work.”
“Sorry,” I said flatly, probably sounding just as unapologetic as I felt. “Guess you'll have to come back and rob me later.”
He wasn't as neat and preened as he had been yesterday; he was bleary-eyed, dishevelled, and still wearing the same clothes. There was something unstrung about him, too. It made me uncomfortable, especially since his eyes flew straight to the injuries he'd caused me.
“That looks painful,” he said about my eye. It was an observation and nothing more, and if I hadn't already had my hackles up over how he was speaking to Bree, that would definitely have been the clincher.
I was in no mood for his bullshit. “What do you want, Andrej?”
He took a breath. “I need to speak to Bree.”
“Yeah. I think the whole floor got that much. Why?”
He looked a bit guarded. “It's kind of private,” he said, shifting his weight.
“Then I guess you'll have to wait until she wants to speak to you,” I said dismissively, and went to shut the door.
He stepped out in his sneaker and stopped the door open. “Look, I'm sorry I punched you, okay!” he said, as if that was the only reason I wasn’t letting him in. “You tore up seven grand, so you can understand why, plus I didn't know you're a girl!”
That was unexpected. I stopped pushing on the door, and I must have looked surprised, because he said less defensively, “It had your sex on the list of charges. Look, I won't tell Mum and Dad, but I need to speak to Bree.”
Under My Skin Page 79