Insecure

by Ainslie Paton

  They were fourteen. Dillon hadn’t yet conquered the asthma that made him scrawny and got him picked on and Mace was already more comfortable with his own company, working up his loner persona even then. But they stuck with each other, two misfits, two dreamers.

  This time triumph needed brains, not brawn, and it would be all the sweeter after all the years they’d plotted, speculated and prodded each other to convert fantasy into capability.

  Buster stayed awake until visiting hours were over, and when she slept they went to the canteen and sat amongst the boiled cabbage smells. Mace wrote. Dillon edited, which consisted of him rejecting every answer Mace crafted to the template Anderson had provided. They tried it the other way around. Mace talked and Dillon wrote and it was still no good.

  Dillon pushed his laptop aside. “You’re fried.”

  He was, there was no way around it. Mace couldn’t get his thoughts to settle. He needed sleep and a decent meal, and for Buster to be safely back at St Ags.

  “We’ve got tomorrow. We’ll be fresher then. She’ll have been on the medication for longer, she’ll be better. It’ll be easier,” said Dillon.

  They packed it in. Mace went back to sit with Buster and Dillon went home. But in the morning it was no easier. Buster had a bad night, not able to rest, her breath coming in wet, choked rattles. Mace was hypnotised by them, by the fear they’d stop. He didn’t sleep. He hung on each of her ragged inhales with his fists clenched.

  He wasn’t ready to let Buster go. She wasn’t that old. His mother had been young when she’d had him, young still when she died. Buster’s body was broken, but her memory was intact, her thinking just as sharp as ever. It wasn’t time for her to go.

  Was it cruel to want her to live for longer, locked in the prison of her Parkinson’s? Probably. What did she want? He had only the slimmest idea. He’d always managed to shut her down when she wanted to talk about the future. He’d been so good at ignoring it she’d made the arrangements to move to St Ags without him. She’d simply told him that’s what she wanted because it had become too hard for him to work his two jobs and care for her at home.

  Was he being selfish wanting her to stay with him? She lived in one room in what was effectively a hospice. God’s freaking waiting room. No one at St Ags came home for good. She could do almost nothing for herself anymore except beat him at scrabble, every time.

  But if she could hold on, they were developing new treatments. If he could get the finance, he could afford to renovate a little at home, hire a private nurse maybe, make her more comfortable, have her closer. She could at least live out her days in her own home. They’d talked about this before and ended up with St Ags. This time he’d insist.

  Buster was in no state to talk, and when Dillon arrived, Mace was in no state to work. He did anyway, knowing what his brain was chucking on the page was worse than garbage. Dillon never said a word and that made it worse.

  “Get me one more day.”

  Dillon sucked on a chopstick dunked in leftover soy sauce from the dumplings they’d had for lunch. “Yep.”

  “Seriously, I’ll make myself sleep tonight. I’ll ditch work. I’ve got all of Monday.”

  “Okay.”

  “What, just yep, okay?”

  “What do you want me to say, dude? I don’t think good old AA will give us an extension. I don’t know if you’ll be any more with it tomorrow. Buster is dying, Mace. You know that, and—”

  “She’s not fucking dying. They changed the medication this morning. She’ll be better.”

  “She doesn’t want to get better.”

  Mace shoved against the table and it barked on the floor. “You can’t fucking say that.”

  “Shhh, keep your voice down.” Dillon pushed the table back into place. “You’re scaring the fish.”

  “If you can’t wish the best for her you should go, man.”

  “I love Buster, almost as much as you do. But she’s miserable. You have to be able to see that.”

  “She’s not. She has her books and music, her favourite TV shows.”

  “She can’t dress herself, or walk around freely. She can’t feed herself. When did Buster ever sit still? She was always busy. This can’t be how she wants to live.”

  “But there are new—”

  “Dude.”

  Mace dropped his head into his hands. Fuck.

  “Maybe it’s best this way.”

  He wasn’t ready to lose her, not now, not when he wanted her to see he could be successful after indulging him so long on his various crusades to teach himself, to follow a dream. But that wasn’t going to happen either unless Anderson Abbott was a decent guy. “Let’s just get through this.”

  “Here’s the thing. I spoke to Anderson already. Monday morning is a hard deadline. The Summers-Denby investment committee is making a selection of potential ventures. If we don’t have our stuff done, it won’t go in the investment pack.”

  “What does that mean? That’s just admin. We can print it off ourselves and drive it around to their freaking homes if we have to.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  “So that’s it.”

  Dillon stabbed the chopstick through a foam coffee cup. “That’s it.”

  “That committee must meet again. It can’t be the only time.”

  “I don’t know.” He stabbed a second chopstick through it. “We’d have to be invited to resubmit.”

  “You couldn’t tell me this before.”

  “Mace, you haven’t slept for days, you look like a corpse they should put back in a drawer in the morgue. Buster is dying. I didn’t know what the fuck to tell you.”

  “I’m not giving her up.”

  “If we give them less than the best, that’ll screw us just as surely, maybe worse.”

  “I’m not giving this up.”

  Dillon stabbed a third chopstick through the cup. He kept his eyes down. “We got lucky. We can get lucky again.” He didn’t believe that for one minute and neither did Mace.

  “I’m going home to have a shower, change. I’ll work from here tonight. Come back in the morning and see what I’ve got. If you don’t think it’s good enough, well, I don’t know. I can try to sleep with someone who lives next door to another venture capitalist.”

  “Or maybe just this same woman again.”

  That didn’t seem likely. It was already another lifetime ago. “Will you stay with Buster till I get back?”

  Dillon stood the cup on its tripod legs. “Modern art. Buster would approve. Of course I will.”

  Mace went home. He showered and shaved. He put the washing machine on to wash Buster’s underwear, her nighties and blouses, the things she’d need when she got back to St Ags. He drove back to the hospital where Buster looked brighter. She was watching an old episode of Mad Men with Dillon. She was going to be all right. Even the doctor was pleased.

  When she slept that night her breathing was steadier. He worked from a chair outside her room where there was light and he couldn’t disturb her, but could still see her chest rise and fall.

  He was still on the chair when Dillon woke him. Dillon looked in on Buster, grabbed Mace’s USB and took off. Mace relocated to the chair in Buster’s room and settled in to doze the day away. At lunchtime he helped her eat and remembered to call Nolan. Got lucky and got his voicemail. Told him he had a family emergency. He left a message for Dillon too, wondering if he’d submitted to Anderson Abbott or not, trying not to care.

  In the afternoon he read to Buster. Something he often did, but usually it was magazines or the newspaper. She wanted him to read one of the skinny books that regularly came in the mail and were jammed in their hundreds into the bookshelves at home.

  They should probably be talking about the future, about what he wanted to do and how he needed her to be careful not to get sick again, not to scare him so badly. Plus the book looked cringe-worthy.

  “We should talk, you know about...”

  “You talk.”


  He snorted, his resolve gone. He didn’t know how to tell her not to die without sounding like a stupid kid, like a selfish man. And she was so much better than yesterday, colour in her face, able to eat and stay awake. It could wait, he should simply enjoy being with her.

  He picked up the book, An Affair to Remember. “You want me to read this one?”

  “Please.”

  “The things I do for you.”

  He opened the book at her dog-ear. He made her wheeze with laughter when he stuttered over a love scene that came a few pages on. It wasn’t graphic, didn’t mention a single body part, but his face got hot and he flapped his jaw all the same.

  In the book, the couple had reunited after a steamy affair years ago. There was all this sappy stuff about wasted years and wrong-headedness, but how their love was stronger than the winds of change and the tides of fortune. Fricking heck.

  “How long was their affair?”

  Buster held up two fingers.

  “Two years?”

  “Nights,” she croaked.

  He laughed. “Two nights! How many months ago?”

  She held up a trembling hand.

  “Five months!”

  She shook her head.

  “Five years!” He laughed. That was insane. “I’m not sure you should be allowed to read this stuff. It’s pretty...” He didn’t know what it was, it wasn’t porn, despite the passionate lip-locking, it wasn’t racy, no one even swore. But it was delusional. He flicked back to the cover. Maybe it was meant to be a fantasy, but no, two perfectly normal people in a clinch, pictured inside a floral porthole design; no fangs, no wings.

  Despite the crappy cover art and the wacky set-up, it’d sucked him in good and proper, and as weird as it made him feel, he wanted to keep reading to see if Antonio and Lucinda finally got it on again.

  Antonio was some kind of billionaire who never worked, with boofy hair and a yacht. Lucinda was his secretary. Antonio was a tortured alpha douche predator and Lucinda was a breathy waif with stars in her eyes, not quite a dumb blonde, but close.

  “He’s going to dump her, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Man, that’s twisted. He’s her boss.”

  Buster rolled her lips into her mouth, she was laughing at him.

  He slapped the book on the railing of the bed. “She’s not my actual boss and I’m not naive enough to think she’d wait for me for five months, let alone five freaking years.”

  “Who knows? Maybe.”

  “I bloody well know. It doesn’t work like that in real life.”

  “That’s why...” she coughed.

  “That’s why you like these books, right?” She liked them because they were nothing like the life she’d had. A husband who’d abandoned her with a young baby, the baby who grew up not strong enough and had her own kid too young, then having to raise that kid too. Not much romance in Buster’s life; not much comfort, security, support, or love flowing back her way.

  She nodded and he wished he could build her a Tardis, time travel her, have her meet a man with money and boofy hair who’d kiss her like she was his sun and moon.

  “Keep hoping, Mace.”

  He squinted at her. Did she mean the book? There was no hope for the book, or any reality to Antonio and Lucinda, and Buster was no dummy, she’d worked as a florist for most of her life and volunteered at the local library. She knew about all sorts of books, but yet she chose these flaky romance ones. He shook the book, he had no idea why she liked this junk so much.

  “Lucinda will win him back,” she said.

  “Jesus, why would she want to?”

  “She loves him.”

  “She’s an idiot.”

  “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

  He laughed. So simple. So stupid. These books were grandma crack, addictive and probably not good for you. “Have you read this before?”

  She moved her head, no.

  He flicked through the pile of books and magazines on the dresser. “If you’ve guessed what’s going to happen, maybe I should read something else.”

  “No, finish what you started.”

  He grinned. That was such a Buster thing to say. Keep trying. Finish what you started. Don’t worry what anyone else thinks. Be your own person. The phrases he and Dillon had grown up with. “You want me to keep reading this?”

  She nodded.

  “You just want to make me squirm.”

  She gave a breathy cough.

  So he read on. Antonio dumped Lucinda as predicted. Lucinda cried a lot and quit her job, so now she was both heartbroken and unemployed. Antonio suffered, which meant he walked around in a bad mood shouting at his employees and tearing at his boofy hair.

  “He loves her, Mason.”

  He looked up and grinned at Buster’s use of his full name. “He’s a bad-tempered bastard. He doesn’t deserve her.”

  “Not yet.”

  He turned the page and discovered another year had passed. Antonio was still a crank until the day Lucinda walked back into his life. She was all grown up, sophisticated and independent. She’d inherited money from a rich relative she didn’t know she had, and didn’t need to work anymore. Lucky bitch.

  “This is where you tell me you’ve got a secret Swiss bank account and I’m going to be able to buy a yacht and a vintage Norton motorbike, after I start a business with Dillon.”

  Buster frowned. “No bike.” And no secret fortune either. She wiggled a finger so he read on.

  The new Lucinda managed to reduce Antonio to a quivering wreck by refusing to look at him, though secretly heartbroken, every time they ran into each other—which seemed to Mace to be every second page for no apparent logical reason.

  “These two are ridiculous.”

  “It’s love, silly.”

  “If you mean love is silly, yeah I’m with you.”

  “You’ll learn.”

  “Not from reading this I won’t.”

  They both laughed and he went back to the book. Antonio finally grew a pair and confronted Lucinda. This part was full of sentences Mace could hardly spit out.

  “‘I can’t live without you’,” he spluttered.

  “‘I would give up my fortune, my business, my world if you’d agree simply to smile at me like you once did.’ Freaking heck!”

  And finally, “‘I do not deserve you, my darling, but I will dedicate my life to becoming worthy’,” after which he put his fingers to his open mouth and coughed to indicate he could vomit. “This is a train wreck.”

  “It’s a happy ending.” Buster made an impatient go on gesture.

  On the last page, after way too many useless misunderstandings that might’ve been fixed with a quick discussion, Antonio and Lucinda kissed. There was no tongue. There wasn’t a hint of moisture and definitely no grinding hip action, but it was oddly satisfying in a way he would never admit to a living person. Antonio was less of a desperado with Lucinda and Lucinda stopped being a stuck-up bitch and became, if not a cool chick, at least less of an airhead.

  He looked across at Buster, her eyes were closed and her breath quiet. He didn’t know if she’d managed to stay awake till her happy ending, but he hoped so. He kissed her cheek and she didn’t stir. He went home via the nurse’s station. They were pleased with Buster’s progress on the new drug and urged him to get some sleep. In a day or two they could see about transferring her back to St Ags.

  He drove home, relieved, belatedly remembering there wasn’t a lick of food in the house. The house phone was ringing when he put his key in the door. The hospital; they were very sorry, perhaps she’d been waiting for him to leave, it happened like that sometimes. It was an easy death. Would he be able to come back, they had paperwork for him to sign?

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was getting better. She’d been able to talk and laugh today. He was going to bring her home.

  She’d said it was a happy ending.

  He hung up the ph
one and went to the yard. He didn’t glove up because he wanted the pain to come. He hit the bag until his shirt clung to him, till his knuckles split and bled, and he was a punch away from breaking a hand. He had to hug the leather to stay on his feet.

  He went inside and sat on the floor in the dark hallway to call Dillon. He still didn’t feel anything, but his face was wet and his eyes stung. He could taste salt and bile. He needed to take great gulping breaths and his nose ran. He hugged his knees because there wasn’t enough air, and blood from his hands dripped on the floor.

  And he didn’t feel anything, anything at all.

  16: Seconds

  Jacinta plunged a knife into the canvas and ripped it corner to corner. Why had she come into the room if not to torture herself? Nothing good happened in this room. She’d cried the last time she was here. Cried and let Mace, a virtual stranger, see her tears over stupid paint and idiotic canvas.

  She stared at what she’d done. Grey and black and red so sharp it hurt your eyes to look at it, now ripped in half. A kindergarten kid could’ve done better. She could no more paint her way out of her angst than she’d been able to negotiate it, and she was a fool to try.

  Tom. Malcolm was going to bring Tom into the board meetings. That could only mean one thing, the job she’d planned on having wasn’t as in the bag as she’d thought it was.

  She should’ve found a way to deal with the Kincaid issue differently. Gotten under Malcolm’s claw less obviously. She’d been cocky and arrogant and hadn’t done enough pre-meeting lobbying. It was entirely her fault things had gone the way they did.

  She’d been so busy fucking her one night stand she’d fucked her career.

  That, and the board was a herd of gutless sheep, more interested in their annual payment and the kudos that went with being a non-executive director of Wentworth, than in leading the company with dignity, honour and compassion.

  She dropped the knife and left the room, slamming the door. But there was nowhere else in the apartment she wanted to be either. In her office her phone and PC were quiet. After the mess of work she’d avoided last weekend, this weekend she’d have welcomed it to fill in the gaps, but it was as though she’d already been passed over for Tom; no one wanted to talk to her, no one needed her counsel, or felt the need to aggrandise themselves by demonstrating they were working on the weekend too.