You Wish

by Lia Weston

  About You Wish

  Sometimes imagination is not enough.

  Thomas Lash grants secret wishes . . . on screen, that is.

  White wedding gone horribly wrong and need to swap the groom? Never went to university but must have a graduation photo? Need to create a fake family for that job interview? Problem solved with expert Photoshopping and Tom’s peculiar ability to know exactly what you desire. Tom never says no, even when giving grieving parents the chance to see what the lives of their lost children might have looked like.

  But where do you draw the line . . . and what happens when the fantasy Tom sees on screen starts to bleed into his real life?

  PRAISE FOR LIA WESTON:

  “Finds the funny side of serious issues” Adelaide Advertiser

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About You Wish

  Title page

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgements

  About Lia Weston

  Also by Lia Weston

  Copyright Page

  To my parents, for aiding and abetting my love of words, and to Kif, although he never learnt how to read.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The whole debacle began when my girlfriend – now my would-run-me-over-in-her-car-and-set-fire-to-the-remains ex-girlfriend – won an Oscar. She has the photos to prove it.

  They were just a joke, initially. Digital manipulation, a steady hand with a stylus – I don’t like to brag but I’m pretty good – and there was her birthday gift: Chloe Wins An Oscar. It was the whole deal – red carpet, fancy gown, crying on stage, getting drunk with Jennifer Lawrence at the afterparty.

  Then one of Chloe’s friends also wanted to win an Oscar, so I made another photo.

  Then another one of Chloe’s friends wanted to marry Sherlock Holmes, so I made her a photo, too. She sent copies to her parents.

  Then a friend of one of Chloe’s friends wanted to be in Rear Window, so I made yet another photo. She forwarded it to her entire address book.

  Then the requests from strangers began, and everyone wanted the same thing: pictures of situations that didn’t exist. Not basic cut-and-paste jobs to spring on social media, but proper photographs, indistinguishable from reality. One commission turned into two, which turned into twenty, until eventually I was producing entire photo albums of people in lives that weren’t actually theirs.

  Now it’s my job. It’s also my company – Ignis Fatuus. We call it IF, for brevity.

  Most people don’t ask what the name actually means.

  That’s probably a good thing.

  Stopwatch running. Breathing apparatus on. Copper Green, Ultramarine flying from my fingertips.

  I pretend my respirator makes me look like Bane from Batman rather than a pest exterminator. I’d go without it if I could, but you’re not supposed to love the smell of paint. Paint sure as hell doesn’t love you.

  I turn my aerosol can upside down and spray to clear the nozzle. No onlookers, no traffic; so far, so good. Two more sheets to go. The last stencils are quick and easy, highlights only. Almost done. I check the time – racing the sunrise and losing, surprise – and unroll the next piece of acetate. Hands still steady though my pulse is accelerating, lining up the registration points. Everything is engineered for speed and precision, essential when it’s illegal. Melbourne: where galleries curate street art exhibitions and the council promotes painted laneways to tourists but you can still get arrested for doing graffiti.

  Code Red mists out in a perfect line. I’m suspended between the particles; nothing else exists. Then my phone rings. Fuck. I scramble to mute the noise. Fuckity fuck fuck.

  ‘Hi, Tommy. Look, I can’t remember – is it seven tonight?’

  I pull the respirator off and stare at the Code Red now splattered over the acetate border like blood spray. ‘Eight.’

  There isn’t a tap nearby. I didn’t bring a damp cloth in case of mistakes because whose girlfriend calls at 6.18 am? Mine does. My girlfriend June, who will have already said her affirmations, eaten a bowl of fruit-free muesli and will now be walking her bedridden neighbour’s beagle.

  Underneath the anchor of my backpack, the edges of the completed sheets ripple as the wind begins to rise. June is still talking.

  ‘I don’t finish at the shelter until five-thirty, so I’ll get ready at your place, okay?’

  I make noises – I have no idea what I’ve just agreed to and don’t care right now – and hang up to survey the damage. Crap. A car pulls up at the far end of the street. I’ll have to leave it, blood spray and all. I throw the cans in my backpack, rip off the acetate sheets, stuff them into my backpack and run.

  IF occupies a converted warehouse. You’d miss it if you weren’t looking. Clients take the front entrance; staff come through the back, which takes you through the garden. I guess it’s not really a garden, though there is a tree. The rest is bricks and a table that no one sits at, except Kain when he’s sulking. (You’ll meet him soon enough, I promise. You’ll thank me later for the delay.)

  Felicity is already at reception, where I suspect she permanently lives. Opposite the sleek bank of her desk, the waiting area’s lounges are empty. Soon, however, you’ll see a sample of the people who come to us for help. At least one will be drawn to the row of plants and will poke their fingers in the moss. The others will sit on the soft edges of their cushions, scoping out the other clients, wondering what everyone’s here for, what they’re hiding. They may notice the instrumental background music. They will not notice its binaural undertones.

  I hand over an espresso from Felicity’s favourite cafe.

  She smiles and shakes her head. ‘You know we have a coffee machine now, right? Two, in fact.’

  ‘Sorry.’ I’ve been buying Felicity coffee for years; it’s kind of hard to break the routine.

  Her gaze skims my hoodie and finds the hole in the arm that I keep forgetting to staple back together. ‘Would you like me to get that fixed?’

  ‘No one’ll notice.’

  ‘You have a meeting at ten.’

  ‘I’ll cover it with a folder.’

  ‘Genius.’ There’s the ghost of a wink. Felicity is not really a winker – she tends to shut both eyes – but I appreciate the effort.

  ‘Moooorning.’ Drinker of bone broth and wearer of fair-trade cologne, Rohan has entered the building. Rohan is IF’s head of development and marketing, and IF’s second co-founder. He’s a good guy, despite the bone broth.

  Felicity hands him a stack of correspondence. Rohan and Kain – IF’s third and final co-founder – handle the business and financial side of things. I prefer to stay underground. And that’s why I never get mail.

  Rohan taps the letter edges on the counter. ‘New client this morning, Tom. Need you to work your magic.’ He’s had a haircut, the top sweeping off to the side like a cockatoo crest. This is Ro’s version of edgy.

  ‘What’ve we got?’

  ‘My guess is revenge wedding.’

  Welcome to IF.

  Let’s say you’re getting married. Everyone’s excited, everyone’s spent money, you’ve ignored all the warning signs, and then the whole thing turns to shit. Here, in no particular order, are the top three reasons:


  Reason 1. Someone does a runner.

  Reason 2. Actually, we work better as friends.

  Reason 3. Whoops, I forgot to tell you about my thing for prostitutes.

  After you’ve finished crying or burning things, you may decide that you’d like to right this wrong and have the wedding album of your dreams anyway, because that’s the only place it exists at the moment. That’s when you come to us.

  If you married the wrong person, that’s easy to fix – we just edit your photos. Brides get replaced with ex-girlfriends. Grooms get replaced with Chris Hemsworth. If, however, your betrothed never actually turned up on the day, that makes our job a bit harder. Everything has to be created from scratch: the ceremony, the kiss, your wasted cousin dancing to ‘Love Shack’ at the reception.

  The end result is that IF’s client leaves with photographic evidence of the wedding they wanted instead of the wrecking ball that reality served them. It may sound like a weird way to earn a living, but seriously, after you’ve put together your nineteenth I Married Harry Potter Instead Of That Dickhead Steve wedding album, you get a bit blasé about the whole thing.

  Rohan jogs up the stairs to the mezzanine. His office is on the far right, past the communal area that we don’t use. If you turn left at the top of the stairs instead of right, you can visit Kain’s office – why, I have no idea; perhaps you just feel like punching yourself in the face – or, squeezed next to Kain at the dead end of the corridor, Alex who does our IT. Alex loves visitors, mostly because he doesn’t get any. It doesn’t stop him wearing a suit every day, though, as if he’s expected to be summoned to an MI6 meeting at any moment. Alex is a guy who knows how to iron. He also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Marvel comics and Neil Gaiman’s entire bibliography. Mica once popped in to ask him about our servers, and staggered downstairs two hours later, glassy-eyed and clutching a dog-eared copy of American Gods that I know she still hasn’t read.

  Instead of heading upstairs, I head under the staircase, past the private client rooms and down the steps to the lower level.

  It was Ro who worked out that there was a market for IF. I used to date his sister, Hailey, who was one of my visual arts classmates. (I say ‘date’, but most of our time was spent either discussing Hailey’s glassblowing projects or talking her down off ledges, punctuated by very sporadic sex.) In contrast to his erratic, beautiful sister, Rohan never took himself too seriously. He was always up for a beer, a laugh and a re-run of 2001: A Space Odyssey. For someone who once went six weeks without washing his jeans, he also had a surprisingly high strike rate with women, including two of his business studies lecturers and his old babysitter.

  What Ro lacks in artistic talent – for real, the dude can’t draw a circle – he makes up for in the ability to spot an opportunity. Once he realised that people would pay for the photos I was making, he was convinced we had the seed of an actual business.

  The main downfall was that we had no capital to set it up. No worries, said Rohan; he knew a guy. (Rohan always knows a guy.) That guy, unfortunately, was Kain. Kain is the type of person who thinks screensavers promote unnecessary frivolity. However, without Kain there would be no warehouse and no IF, so we’re stuck with each other until his wife finally kills him.

  IF’s creative department is in the old cellar. During the renovations we were all down here – Rohan, Kain and me stuck in a windowless room, me trying to find the right graphics programs while Rohan and Kain argued about their five-year plan. (IF actually turned five the other week – I should probably ask how things have worked out.) The first thing Rohan did when the air upstairs cleared was hire Felicity. (‘Can’t have a reception without a receptionist.’) Felicity brought a degree of polish to IF, plus a long list of friends and acquaintances who all wanted our services. As the business was established, everyone else moved upstairs. Except me. Now there are three of us creatives down here. We have bookshelves, collapsed leather couches and an entire wall covered in chalkboard paint. Sometimes I’m tempted not to go home.

  Tarik is face-planted on his keyboard. A protesting whine is coming from the UPS.

  ‘He hasn’t moved since I got in.’ Mica, wearing her favourite skeleton onesie, is on the opposite side of their shared desk. Her screens reflect in her glasses.

  ‘Have you checked for a pulse?’ I bend to see if Tarik is still breathing.

  ‘He’s been snoring, so no.’

  I unplug the UPS.

  Mica takes her coffee from my tray without taking her eyes off her work. ‘You forgot we got a machine, didn’t you?’ Behind me, next to the couches, the new espresso maker emits an audible hum.

  I put a package next to Mica’s keyboard. ‘Happy birthday.’

  Mica frowns. ‘I didn’t say it was my birthday.’

  ‘It only took three years, but I finally remembered I have access to your employment records. Sucked in.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right.’ She picks up the box and examines the lightning bolt wrapping paper. ‘I always forget you’re my boss.’

  Me too. It’s a sore point with Kain, who likes clear delineations in the staff hierarchy. Then he wonders why no one invites him anywhere.

  Mica shreds the lightning bolts to reveal an action figure of Scion-Ray, a demon goddess lizard . . . thingamajig. (The girl at the comic book shop gave me a potted history, which I promptly forgot. I should ask Alex.) I am rewarded with a genuine grin.

  ‘How did –’ Mica stops herself. ‘Man, you’re good.’

  Her attempt to rip open the box is stymied by tamper-proof, finger-proof, childproof packaging.

  ‘Fucking Christ,’ says the birthday girl, and pulls open a drawer.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to keep it in the packaging?’

  ‘Scion-Ray is caged in by no man. Scion-Ray must be free.’ Mica ferrets in the piles of pens and post-its. ‘Also then I can’t play with her.’

  I hand over a Stanley knife from my bag. ‘Buy you a birthday drink after work?’

  ‘Can’t, sorry.’ She jams the blade into the plastic and cardboard.

  ‘Family stuff?’

  ‘No,’ Mica says flatly. ‘Anyway, don’t you have some exhibition thing with Junebug?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ I put a third coffee by Tarik’s head and go to my desk at the far end of the room.

  Mica frees Scion-Ray and positions her to the right of her screen. ‘How is your girl anyway?’

  I remember my messed-up stencil and am instantly annoyed again. I flatten the irritation down. June’s a good person. It was just a phone call; she didn’t know what I was up to. ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘Always fine,’ says Mica. ‘Never good, never great.’

  ‘Fine isn’t bad.’

  ‘It’s also not good.’

  Kain has sent fourteen emails already this morning.

  Meeting at 10.

  Second reminder: Meeting at 10.

  Staff note: Staff must wash their own crockery.

  Third reminder: Meeting at 10.

  Staff note: Please do not bring ‘ethnic’ (yes, his own quotation marks, what a champ) food into the building due to aromatic sensitivities.

  I look at the time stamps. They start at 3 am. Some of us have insomnia; Kain has email.

  I open my current project – yet another jilted groom. (Number 146, to be precise.) My resources are his pre-ceremony photos – taken just before he found out that his fiancée was on a plane to Perth – and her three hundred social media snaps. For anything else we need, there’s IF’s massive image archive. Mica sources most of the shots; others she creates. Every archived picture is tagged and searchable: girlfriend, redhead, paleo, douchebag, etc.

  Jilted Groom is wearing a sequinned vest. I start searching the archive for a bridal dress that will match. (Tags: bride, glitter, yikes.)

  Tarik is still asleep. Mica gets up and draws a portrait of him on the chalkboard wall, drowning in his own drool. Her hood has fallen back, revealing her rainbow-coloured hair.

 
(By the way, if you’re wondering why I haven’t woken Tarik up yet, he’s got an eleven-month old who likes to party between 1 and 5 am, and I’m not a complete prick.)

  An email from June drops into my inbox. Don’t forget tonight. Because I’ve apparently had an aneurysm since she called three hours ago. She and Kain are tag-teaming their reminders. I stab the delete button, then feel bad and Ctrl+Z to bring it back. No worries, I reply, after deleting four considerably longer responses. (Really, what’s the point?)

  Still holding the chalk, Mica wanders over to my bank of screens to peer at the bride. ‘That dress looks like armour.’

  ‘Or an armadillo. I’m sticking with the overall theme.’

  ‘I don’t get why these guys don’t just pick a new wife. Would you want a wedding portrait with the woman who dumped you?’

  ‘Everyone grieves differently,’ I say. ‘Parents change children’s lives, wives change weddings, husbands change wives.’

  ‘Oh, yay, we’ve got an official poem.’ She picks up my empty cup. ‘Better go and make sure the recycling’s correctly sorted.’

  ‘You got that email, too?’

  ‘And the one about ethnic foods. Ergo, curried egg salad for my lunch tomorrow.’

  ‘I didn’t know you like curried eggs.’

  ‘I don’t.’ She leans on my chair and gives my groom a considering look. ‘I wonder what he did to make her leave.’

  I point to the sequinned vest. ‘This is my first clue.’

  After a solid hour of cutting, shading, blending and pixel-by-pixel editing, I’ve almost gone blind, but the initial work is looking good. Jilted Groom and Runaway Bride now pose under jacaranda canopies, smooch in the back of a car (a cream 1967 Jaguar 420; he was very specific about that) and feed some swans, which, thanks to the magic of photo editing, are not attacking them.

  This is what people want for wedding pictures – roses, churches, pubs and hilltops. It’s often tempting to make it more interesting, such as having them frolicking in a swamp or fleeing a burning building.

  I get up to stretch. On the wall opposite the chalkboard Mica puts up any new additions to the image archive. There’s a fresh batch this morning. Babies, varying degrees of cuteness. A bunch of girls waving sparklers. A dude on a horse. A brunette, jogging, glancing over her shoulder. She smiles at the camera without surprise. I recognise something about her face. I think she looks like someone I went to school with.