by Tina Clough
Alan came for a brief visit, aware that he had not seen her to speak to all day. “I’m fine thanks, Alan! How are you? Did your exploded pie chart make an impact?” He looked morose and shook his head slowly from side to side.
“The meeting isn’t till next week – but the papers have to go out in plenty of time. I have a feeling they’re going to say something like Please do it the way we are used to, it was much easier to read that way. And I won’t be able to say ‘I deliberately did it this way to force you to think’! It can be very frustrating to deal with boards – people who sit on them often think they know everything – and of course they do call the shots.”
Mia smiled at his grumpy face. “You’ll have to come up with some reason to make them believe they aren’t keeping up with modern business practice, if they can’t accept the change. Maybe you could add a footnote with some trendy management phrases to justify the change?”
“My goodness, I don’t know what I did with my little problems before you came along! Of course that’s what I must do, but it can’t be a footnote, the thing’s already in the mail. Baffle them into submission, ha? Now if I could quote something - I’m sure you can come up with something that sounds authoritative.”
They smiled delightedly at each other, conspirators in the struggle against demands from above. Mia promised to think about it over the weekend and come up with something by Wednesday.
She texted sketchy details about Thomas’ meeting with Miles to John and Lorraine and cleared her desk, did the customary update of her notepad and added a cryptic “check report” as a reminder to herself to find a way to lay her hands on a copy of Josh’s proposal. Calling out a cheerful goodbye to Alan she went outside to wait for Thomas. When he pulled up she got into the car and lent over to kiss him before he pulled out into the traffic. She looked at his profile, which presented the undamaged side of his face, and for some reason a memory of their lovemaking the previous night flashed into her mind. She felt her face go hot and Thomas looked across at her as if he could read her mind. “Anything wrong?”
“Nothing at all! I was just thinking of something.” He flashed another quick glance at her, before changing lanes and turning a busy corner. “Something from last night?”
How did he guess - surely he can’t read my mind? “Well, yes actually. How did you know?” He smiled but kept his eyes on the street ahead. “I’ve had a day of delightful erotic flash-backs myself! It was just a lucky guess.”
Mia laughed – all of this was lovely and funny and not in the slightest bit like anything she had ever experienced before. “I feel as if you can see into my head – a bit disconcerting I must say. I’ll have to keep my thoughts in order.”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure it was just a fluke. But last night was spectacular.”
She smiled at his profile. “It was - marvellous. I think we’re particularly good at it - I never enjoyed anything so much before.” His hand reached out and covered both hers and gave them a little squeeze. “Good.” And that was all he said, but she knew by now that with him a single word could speak volumes.
Without discussion they drove towards Mia’s place. “I’ve nothing but what’s left of the sushi from last night in the fridge. But there’s pasta and pasta sauce in the pantry and lots of bits and pieces. Or should we go shopping on the way?”
“No shopping! I’m not sharing your company with a lot of strangers unless we are threatened with starvation and absolutely have to buy something. Let’s eat pasta and bits and have some time on our own.”
“Should we ring Carl? Won’t he wonder where you are?”
“You’re right, he will wonder. When I go away I always tell him when I’m coming back. He keeps an eye on my place and takes my mail in. He’ll wonder what’s become of me – I’ll call him as soon as we get to your place.”
Mia checked the pantry while Thomas was on the phone to Carl. She heard him say that something unexpected had come up, but that he would be home the next morning and would come round for a coffee. Carl must have said something funny, because Thomas laughed. “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow!”
He turned towards her: “Carl asked if I’d found a woman and stayed at her place for the night! He’s said similar things before and of course I’ve never had anything to tell him, so it’ll be fun to see his face when we walk in and tell him tomorrow morning! If that’s OK with you, of course?”
“Goodness, yes, of course we must tell him.”
Thomas opened his briefcase and took out a bottle of champagne, which he put in the freezer. “We can’t have that for an hour, it’s got to be really cold. What shall we do while we wait? Go to bed?”
“Yes, please!”
An hour and a half later they broke open the champagne and sat down with chips and dip, also from Thomas’s briefcase. Mia laughed at him. “I’m beginning to think you carry a briefcase just to have somewhere respectable looking to carry food in!”
“I nicked some extra supplies from the fridge in the boardroom to save time. Don’t tell anyone – it’s not something I normally do.”
The evening sky was clear and they sat in front of the big window looking out over the lights of the city.
“Would you ever be able to tear yourself away from this, do you think?” Thomas sounded casual, but Mia thought there might be serious intent behind the question. “Not that I object to living in an apartment, if you should ever feel that you wanted us to live together.”
Mia raced through the layers of implications behind this innocent-seeming statement and decided to continue laying her soul bare – telling him she loved him yesterday in the kitchen seemed to have unlocked a talent for emotional risk-taking.
“Do I want to live with you at some stage? Well, let’s say that you’d have to build razor-wire barricades to keep me away! And we’d have to live in your house, of course. We can’t leave Carl on his own – we must look after him as he gets older.”
“We’ll have to do some serious things to the house in that case! I’ve never got round to getting it done, but it needs the kitchen and both bathrooms ripped out and rebuilt. And maybe a few walls could be taken out too, to make it more open. I’m sure we could get an architect to suggest something clever.”
Mia was trying to remember the layout and failed. “Heavens, I’ve only been inside the place once and it was dark – I’ve no idea what it really looks like, but I’m sure we can do something with it. I remember thinking how lovely the outside was when I came to have coffee with Carl the first time. Isn’t it strange that we really only just met and here we are discussing living arrangements? Other people would think we’re mad.”
“I know – but I can’t help it. I feel we belong together and time has nothing to do with it. But I’m warning you now – the inside of that house is horror movie material. Let’s get someone really good to help us and then you can work it out. You’ve got great sense of style and you can do what you like – I know I’ll enjoy it.”
They left it at that and sat in relaxed silence for a few minutes, watching the slow change of colours in the sky as the last daylight faded. Mia asked something she had been thinking about: “Are both your parents dead too?”
“My father left the family when I was about nine or ten. He wasn’t a good father and he should never have settled down to have children – he was laid back and funny and drank too much. Since I grew up I’ve found out bits and pieces from my mother about how he used to stay out all night, presumably at some woman’s place and then come home full of cheer as if nothing had happened. He was never mean and never hit anyone; he just didn’t really care much.” He made a wry face. “And then he drifted off and came back now and then for a visit, but then that petered out too. When my mother was dying we tried to trace him and found out that he’d died a few years earlier in a road accident. Apparently my mother knew, but for some reason she hadn’t mentioned it to us.”
“How long is it since your mother died then? Do you miss her?”<
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“She died of breast cancer about five years ago. No, wait a minute; I was thirty-two, so it must be eight years ago. She was a lovely mother and we all miss her a lot. Both my brothers are married and have children, but the kids are too young to remember her. Yes, I do miss her – she had a wacky sense of humour and was curious about everything. She was the kind of person you could have the most marvellous varied conversations with. And she was a mean Scrabble player.”
Over their bitsy dinner they talked about Mia’s list of future events and she fetched her notepad from the study.
“After I thought up the two original proof events I’ve jotted down a few things now and again as they’ve occurred to me - the sort of things that could possibly be averted. I haven’t checked them on the Internet, so some of them might already have happened. You can tell me which ones and we will cross them off the list.”
She searched through the pages of notes. “When this weird thing first happened I started an orgy of list-making. There were so many things to try and keep track of, and plan for. And I was terrified that I’d get things wrong and confuse people or expose my pre-knowledge. Here it is, let’s see. The first thing is a terrible tourist bus crash in Waikato, where quite a few people lost their lives and two or three survivors lost an arm for some strange reason – mini-bus I think.”
Thomas shook his head. “There have been many accidents involving tourists, but that’s bigger than anything I can recall. I think I’d remember it if more than one person lost an arm.”
“Mm, yes – I haven’t any idea of the timing and it may be well into the future still. I might be able to dredge up some more detail. I’ve got a feeling there was something wrong with the bus or the driver, no warrant of fitness, bald tyres, no licence or something like that. In any case there was a call for stricter rules for tour operators. This one was Korean, I think, or maybe Taiwanese, and ran his own travel company as well, a sort of one-stop shop.”
“We should be able to do something with that, as you say. What’s next on the list?”
“The next thing is international, it made the headlines for days and weeks. A massacre in a school called Virginia Tech somewhere in the US, probably about six months from now, but maybe even further ahead. The killer was a student, he’d been banished from one course because of his strange behaviour, and the teacher sent him to the school psychologist, but they didn’t do anything. I’m not sure, but I think he might have been of Asian descent – I must think a bit more about that. That one should be easy. And then there was a robbery of a security van in Christchurch, which ended with one guard and at least two bystanders being injured by gunshots, and that’s probably pretty soon, perhaps just before Christmas. I think it happened outside a suburban bank. As I say, once I start thinking and talking about it I might remember more details. And there’s a derailment of a goods train in the Manawatu Gorge after a rock fall, some time at the beginning of the winter next year, perhaps May or June 2007? Several carriages and the engine fell into the river, huge mess and disruption.”
Thomas was stunned. “Good grief! It’s amazing to think that’s just the big things you can think of off the top of your head. If we work this right we could change so much for lots of people. We really have to set up a think tank and get going with all this. John and Lorraine would want to help.”
“Yes, we’ve already discussed it and they want to be involved, and Paul will be keen to help too. But the last thing was something we discussed at the meeting the other night. When I said I didn’t want to make a fortune out of my story, I also said that if I remembered something that we could make a reasonable gain from, without hurting anyone else, then I’d share the information with the group.”
Thomas looked searchingly at her. “And you’ve changed your mind?”
“Oh no, not at all! Well, obviously I’m not sharing anything with Miles! But I’ve recalled some clues to the winner of the 2006 Melbourne Cup and if I’m right the winner wasn’t expected to even be placed and the odds were very whatever-it-is that odds are – big? good? long?”
“Great! We’re well matched, no interest in the races and don’t know one end of a horse from the other. But I’m sure Lorraine and Paul and maybe John need some extra cash. I have enough, but a bit more is always good.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought too. I can’t remember the names, but the first two horses both had names that had something to do with music, which I remember thinking was funny. I think there was something else linking them too, but I haven’t put my finger on it yet. We had a sweep-stake at work and I didn’t win a thing. I drew the second favourite and got nothing! I’ll park it in the back of my mind and I’m sure more of it will come back to me.”
“You have until the first Tuesday in November or whatever it is, so it’s no panic. Perhaps you’ll pick them straight away once they publish the list of entrants the week before the race. How about we go back to bed now?”
CHAPTER 14
Mia and Thomas went straight from bed to coffee and toast on the balcony; the morning was a reminder of what summer would be like. They had woken up early, made love, gone back to sleep and finally made it out of bed just after nine.
“I can’t believe it’s only September. It seems like summer.” She pushed up the sleeves of her kimono, stretched out a leg and put her foot on Thomas’s lap.
“Hey, stop that! I can’t eat my toast with that sort of disturbance going on.”
Mia glanced at him. “Disturbance? It’s just a friendly foot, not even moving.”
“No, the foot isn’t moving, but something else is. I’m finding it hard enough to concentrate on eating anyway, what with you sitting there covered in nothing but a silky robe with no buttons and parts of it sliding this way and that. But the foot’s just too much!” He lifted her foot, kissed the big toe and put the foot on the floor.
She put her coffee cup on the table and held up her hand, ticking things off on her fingers. “What do we need to do today? First get showered and dressed. Then we go to your place. We must remember to take something nice for morning tea and visit Carl. And we must do some shopping, at least for this place – we’re running out of everything apart from Weetbix and jam.”
Thomas was just about to say something when the phone rang and Mia went in to answer. She instantly recognised the pushy journalist’s voice and braced herself to come up with a response that would end the conversation.
“I don’t understand why you’re calling me again. I already told you I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she said when the woman had introduced herself. She walked through the living area and the tone of her voice caught Thomas’s attention.
The woman was now trying a cajoling approach. “Of course I understand that you don’t want any damaging publicity, but we could do a really interesting piece about what happened to you without revealing your identity. With my sort of column I know how to keep a confidence.”
“But I’ve got nothing to tell you! Nothing exciting has happened to me for a long time. Someone’s been pulling your leg.”
“I don’t think so, because the person who told us has now been warned off by your legal advisors. That must mean there’s truth in the story. It’s entirely up to you, but I can write a piece about it, whether you help us with facts or not. It’s too good not to write up and it would be far better for you to cooperate – then you’d have a say in how it’s presented.”
Thomas was beside her now, saying quietly, “Do you want me to deal with it?” Mia shook her head and mouthed ‘no, thanks’. “I know you can write whatever you like, but you’ve got to remember that if you identify me I’ll deny everything you say. It’s such a ridiculous story - most likely your readers will think you’ve lost your marbles. And if anyone asks me I’ll say that I agree – you must be mad.”
She pressed the off button and looked at Thomas. “Miles has told her that you came to see him and warned him off, and as she rightly said, that means there’s something i
n it. But if we continue to deny everything there isn’t much she can do, is there?” She was slightly unnerved by the woman’s persistence and wanted a solution to finish the whole thing once and for all.
“No, probably not, but she could be a nuisance and make your life miserable. Maybe we should discuss it with the others if they’re available this weekend? Miles could have told her a lot of detail before I warned him off and we can’t discount the possibility that she knows all the names. We must have the same answers, if we get approached.”
Mia’s mobile rang in the car on the way to Eden Terrace and John asked if they could meet for a drink sometime soon to discuss the next instalment. “We were going to ring you anyway,” said Mia. “That journalist rang me again this morning. When are you and Lorraine available, and Paul too, of course?”
“Why don’t you come round to my place tonight, if that suits you. I’ll cook something simple and we can have a relaxed evening. I have to go in to work tomorrow for a few hours so I don’t want to be too late. I’ll check if Paul’s off-duty. Come about seven.”
Thomas parked on the drive. “I don’t use the garage much,” he said and pointed down the drive. At the very end of the long section was a single garage. “It’s pretty close to Carl’s cottage and his garden so I rarely use it. I’d rather let him have his privacy and his peace, so normally I just park here beside the house.” There was no sign of Carl.