I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. This wasn’t looking good at all, was it? This was not looking good. What the fuck was I going to do? I was running out of ideas.
Ironically, I googled ‘how to cook meth’.
When I heard sharp footsteps up the side of the house and on the decking stairs, I looked towards the window. It was already evening; I hadn’t even noticed.
The back door slid open, and before the person announced themselves, Bree shrieked, “Sarah!” and took off across the room to wrap herself around Sarah’s middle. She pulled back immediately, shouting an exclamation and putting a hand on Sarah’s stomach. “Oh my god!” she said. “You can really feel it now! That must be so awesome, you’re going to be a mum soon! Did you see my Facebook?”
Sarah’s eyes were wide. “Um,” she said, catching up with everything Bree was saying. She left the mum stuff alone. “I’m pretty sure that’s a rhetorical question because I commented on your Facebook,” she pointed out. Then, she looked smug. “Did you see my Instagram?”
Bree looked up at her. “No…?” she said, and then went to get her phone to have a look.
Sarah leant towards me a bit. “Wait for it…” she said neutrally.
There was a shriek. “Oh my god, you had one! Did you like it?” Bree came rushing back in with her phone. I made a ‘gimme’ motion so I had some idea what was going on.
Sarah had uploaded a picture of one of Bree’s tarts to Instagram with the comment ‘Don’t you wish your girlfriend baked tarts like this?’ and the tags #myhousematesdoes #totallyhealthybreakfast. The photo made the tart look even more impressive, and a number of people had commented exactly that and were asking her if ‘her housemate’s gf’ was a pastry chef. Bree looked over the moon. “Look at what everyone’s saying!” she said, positively glowing from the praise.
“Well, it tasted every bit as good as it looked,” Sarah assured her as she dumped her handbag and sat down across from me at the table. “And when a pregnant chick with relentless morning sickness tells you your food tastes good, you know you’ve done something right.”
Bree abandoned her phone, silent for a moment as she looked up at us. We were sitting opposite each other at the table, smiling at her. Her eyes started to swim. “Are you guys hungry?” she asked eventually. “It’s dinner time.”
Sarah and I glanced at each other. “I am,” I told Bree even though my stomach was in knots, and Sarah nodded in equally enthusiastic and false agreement.
Bree spent another couple of moments gazing adoringly at us and then went off to the kitchen.
“Thank you,” I said quietly to Sarah when she’d gone.
Sarah grinned. “Hey, I’m not doing her a favour, it was a good tart,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “Even though eating sweet little European tarts is more your thing that mine…”
Did she just—? I snorted. “Yeah, better stick to Rob’s 100% Australian beef sausages.” I told her, and we laughed a bit over that. It didn’t take very long for either of our smiles to fade, though. She looked pale.
I should tell her what’s going on with Bree’s school fees, I thought, and then for a moment wondered if Sarah would lend me the money. I caught that idea before it went anywhere: no, I told myself forcefully, absolutely not, what are you thinking, Min? Look at her! She’s four months pregnant, sick as a dog, and you’re thinking of getting money off her?
She spoke again before I had the opportunity to say anything at all. “Well, whatever I eat now is probably going to be my last supper,” she confessed, resting heavily against the spine of her chair. When I frowned at her, she said, “Diane booked an appointment to see me at 9am tomorrow. It appeared in my calendar at like 4 o’clock. No description, nothing. No one even called to tell me. I mean,” she made a face, “she did kind of catch me hurling my guts up in the women’s yesterday, but it was early enough in the morning that she probably just thought I was hungover, so I don’t think she’s guessed I’m pregnant or anything…” She looked down at her stomach and held her jumper against it. There was a definite bump, but it wasn’t a dead giveaway.
“You just look bloated,” I reassured her.
She sighed. “Yeah. So, no, I have no idea. What would Diane Frost want to talk to me about?”
We hadn’t figured it out by the time Bree came in with two enormous steaming plates of pasta. Neither Sarah nor I made it very far into them—Sarah wasn’t feeling great and I was too stressed out to eat much—but Bree just went to put it in the fridge for us to have another day.
While she was out of the room again, I thought I might have a go at just telling Sarah what had happened, at least. She was very resourceful and very pragmatic and would probably have some ideas about how I could raise money. I didn’t get the chance, though, because Bree returned far too quickly and hovered nervously around us, finally bursting out with, “Sarah, can I have a movie night in your house on Friday to celebrate my marks?”
Sarah chuckled. “Next week,” she told Bree, pulling herself stiffly out of her chair and heading towards the bathroom. “Rob’s away this weekend—Daz got some work for them out of town and I told Rob I’d dump him if he tried to fuss around me instead of taking jobs. We need all the money we can get.”
I sighed. It didn’t look like I’d be able to ask any favours from Sarah. It was probably for the best: I didn’t need another reason to not be able to look myself in the mirror.
Bree, on the other hand, was delighted with that answer. She went and lay on the couch closest to the potbelly stove to plan her big movie night while I opened my laptop again and tried to figure out what the fuck I could do to get $11,550. There were lots of blogs on the internet about how to get money fast—most of them were probably scams—and the legit ones involved selling, pawning or renting out assets. The only asset I had was my car, unless you counted my PlayStation which wasn’t worth more than a couple of hundred anyway.
When I’d finally come to the realisation I had exactly zero options left and given up for the night, I shut the screen more loudly than I probably needed to. I winced about that when I saw Bree had fallen asleep on the couch, but I didn’t seem to have disturbed her. She did stir as I carried her to bed and tucked her in, though, opening her eyes and looking at me. She looked so peaceful. “That’s a beautiful smile,” I told her.
She squeezed my hand. “I was just thinking,” she murmured, “sometimes I lie in bed and think that nothing’s going to work out, and there’s no point to anything. But there is a point. Everything is going to be okay. I’m so happy about my marks. Like, if those are the marks I get for half a semester of hard work, can you imagine what they’re going to be like after a full one?”
A lump formed in my throat, and I stroked her cheek with my thumb. “I’m going to stand up and clap for you when they hand you that diploma,” I told her, and then gathered the doona up around her neck and kissed her goodnight.
The living room was so quiet without anyone else; all I could hear was the clock and the crackling of the fire in the potbelly stove. I sat down on the end of the couch that was closest to it, holding out my hands toward it so they warmed.
I was not going to fail to pay that other $11,550. I was not going to see anything happen to Bree’s beautiful smile, I just wasn’t. I just had to think clearly about this.
I was—I counted—$58,000 in debt with $400 in the bank and no income, and I needed to find another $20,000 to get rid of my car and pay those damn school fees when I didn’t even have the $500 I needed for my next car payment.
I froze. Hang on, my fortnightly car payments came out on a Friday, didn’t they? This Friday or…? I took out my phone and checked my banking app for the last debit. To my horror, I realised that it was this coming Friday, in two days’ time. I stared down at my phone. The LED flashed.
Don’t forget you can always ask Mum to help, I reminded myself, eyeing that little light. ‘Fuck that’ was my initial response. I didn’t need to be guilt-tripped for the next tw
o decades about how I’d ripped money out from under my dying Grandma and my poor, sweet mother. I would actually rather start lopping off and selling my own body parts.
Well, it’s either ask Mum or watch Bree’s world crumble around her again, isn’t it? That voice said again, and I groaned and put my head in my hands. Mum complained a lot about money—especially because she’d rather be working full-time than looking after Grandma—but I was never sure how much of that was just because Mum loved to complain. I had sent an awful lot back to her when I was working for Frost, but she never said what she did with it.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised asking Mum was probably my only available option. She’d give me hell for it, of course, probably calling me lazy, and irresponsible, and maybe she’d even throw in some anecdote about how at my age she was raising me all by herself with only the Church and God supporting her. But whatever, that stupid car had been her idea anyway, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t already heard everything she’d say about me.
I unlocked my phone and looked down at the little red ‘17’ over my messages icon. I hadn’t read any of them since yesterday afternoon. Figuring I should probably read them before calling her, I took a deep breath and opened them.
They started off reasonably benign, talking about romantic winter honeymoons, and had Henry and I considered coming to South Korea in February for the snow season? They got progressively crotchety, though—one of them said very passive-aggressively ‘I would have slept better if I knew my daughter was safe’—and then they slowly escalated and were just a series of ‘Min, are you okay? Why aren’t you answering?” and several voicemail notifications.
I sat back. Three voicemails, I counted, one of them from ten minutes ago.
She knows, I immediately thought, and then reminded myself that she didn’t know about anything I was hiding. She was just worried about me; she always worried about me when I didn’t answer. Even reassuring myself that it was fine, it still took a lot of coaxing to finally have that phone against my ear and the voicemail number dialling.
My heart was pounding.
“Message one,” the automated voice told me, and then Mum’s voice cut in. She sounded really panicky. “Min! Min, why aren’t you answering me? What’s happened? I have this terrible feeling something is off, and so I looked on the news and saw the flu is going around Sydney. Are you okay? Is Henry okay? Is everything alright? Why aren’t you answering my calls, Min? It’s making Grandma very upset, and you know how bad her health is. She’s just sitting here crying. Why are you doing this to us?”
The next one was, “I can’t take this anymore, I can’t lose anyone else, you’re forcing me to call Henry, I have to do it, you haven’t given me a choice!” I grimaced, and the next one began, “Min! Why didn’t you tell me Henry had changed his number? It’s like you don’t want me to talk to him! I don’t understand why you’d do that, Min. That’s a really horrible thing to do to your mother. Now I can’t find out if you’re okay, and I won’t be able to sleep worrying about what’s going on with my daughter and why she won’t answer any of my messages.” The automated voice finished with, “End of list.”
I hung up.
Closing my eyes for a second, I exhaled at length. Every single time I interacted with my mother, it was like she just stuck a plug into me and drained the life out. As much as I would have preferred to just put away my phone and continue to ignore her, I forced myself to quickly send her an apologetic text saying my phone was playing up and I’d email her tomorrow.
Well, that settled that. There was absolutely no way I was going to ask Mum for money now, because how would that go? ‘Hi Mum, yeah, I was just ignoring you because you drive me nuts, can I have $20,000?’. She’d ask for Henry’s new number next time I spoke to her, too. It wouldn’t be long before she figured out what was going on when I couldn’t give it to her. It wouldn’t be long at all.
“Fuck,” I enunciated and then exhaled.
Just to confirm how very screwed I was, I called Henry’s number. It rang to an error message advising me the number had been disconnected. There was no forwarding number offered, and I checked the last text message I got from him in case I’d dismissed it accidentally in the tide of messages from my mother. I hadn’t, the last text was from months ago.
My heart sank. There was really only one reason why he wouldn’t pass on his new number to me, wasn’t there? I looked down at Henry’s contact in my phone—his smiling face, the mobile number I’d called so many times. With what felt like enormous difficulty and great ceremony, I deleted his contact and watched that face disappear before I locked my screen again.
It still felt so weird to be doing that, slowly deleting him out of my life like he’d never been here. Like he wasn’t my whole world for four long years. There wasn’t much left of him in my world now: just a few things he’d given me, his suit, and high scores that I was slowly overwriting in all the games we’d played together.
It seemed so surreal that someone who had been about to propose to me, someone who’d been about to slide a ring onto my finger and ask me to spend the rest of my life with—
—I sat up, realising what I was thinking.
The ring.
TWENTY-TWO
I waited until I was sure Bree was asleep to tiptoe into my room. It was pitch black, and I had to get down on my hands and knees to feel around for my bags without knocking anything over. The zip on my case had never sounded so loud as when I was trying not to wake someone with it, and I pulled it inch by inch, tooth by tooth, open far enough so I could rummage very quietly around inside. I spent ages with my arm bent awkwardly in there, feeling blindly around in all my clothes until my fingertips brushed the pressed velvet ring box.
I very slowly eased my closed fist out and snuck back out into the living room, taking the box over with me to the warm pot belly stove. I sat there, looking down at it cradled in my palm.
I didn’t want to open it.
Come on, Min, I told myself. This is the answer you’re looking for. Henry paid $27,000 for it. That’s $11,550 for the school fees, $8000 to offload your car, and a big chunk off your credit card. This is what you need.
That was sound logic and all, but I still didn’t want to open it. Maybe there’s another way, I thought, maybe I should wait and see.
Yeah, maybe a missing great aunt will die with me as her only heir and I’ll inherit millions, I thought sarcastically, rolling my eyes at myself. I didn’t have time to wait and see, anyway, I had a car payment due in two days. Seriously, I thought, it’s really sad to lose it, sure, but what else are you going to do with it?
Keep it because Henry gave it to me, I answered myself immediately and then opened the box. As soon as I saw the familiar design, and as soon as I saw the inscription, ‘...to my best friend and soulmate: will you be my wife?’, I nearly snapped it shut again.
I swallowed against the lump in my throat. I needed to be pragmatic about this. Henry wasn’t talking to me anymore. He’d always said he might find it too painful to stay friends, and he’d certainly seemed pretty upset when he’d refused to have dinner with me at the restaurant. He hadn’t tried to contact me since then, and now he’d changed his number. He’d moved on, I needed to get that into my thick skull. There was no point in keeping this ring shut up inside a box indefinitely to remember him by when it had the capacity to change two lives.
Henry probably wouldn’t even want me to keep it if it could help me, I realised. He’d tell me to sell it; he even had told me I could sell it when he first gave it to me. He’d definitely tell me not to worry, and to just do what I needed to do.
And then he’d go away and feel secretly awful about the fact I’d done it, I thought, and knew it was true. Well, I reasoned, he can’t feel awful about something he doesn’t know about, can he? He wasn’t talking to me, so he wasn’t going to find out. No damage done. Well, apart from how crap I felt about having to do it.
Since there wasn’
t going to be a feel-good way I could do this, I just resolved to do it and accept it would suck. Selling a ring given to you by someone you loved would never not suck. I’d decided to do it first thing in the morning so I could get it out the way and not have it hanging over me.
I tried everything on Wiki How to calm down before I went to bed: deep breathing, counting to ten, watching cartoons to distract me. It was one of those times I really wished I’d stashed a bottle of red somewhere, though, because the ‘calming properties of chamomile’ turned out to be a lie.
In the end, I just decided to go to bed and sleep it off. After I slipped under the covers, though, I lay there wide awake for ages.
At 3am after I checked the time, I found myself going through my phone gallery again, torturing myself with pictures of Henry. It was particularly painful looking at that picture of us from when we’d just hooked up; Henry looked so bright-faced, and that smile of his was so big. I remembered taking that photo; we’d talked all night beforehand. He’d confessed he was terrified that I’d move back to Melbourne. ‘Terrified enough to move back with me if I go?’ I’d joked, and, straight-faced, he’d said immediately, ‘Yes’.
The memory made me smile. Then, when I realised I was smiling, I sighed and let it fall. It felt like so long ago. Gazing up at the dark ceiling, I wondered where he was and what he was doing now.
He’s sleeping, I told myself dryly. Like every other normal person. It’s 3am. I put my phone aside and tried to join them all.
I slept like absolute shit. The one benefit of that was being up at the crack of dawn when Sarah left for work, though. It gave me a great alibi about being out of the house too early for Bree to come with me: dropping Sarah off. I suppose I could’ve probably just told Bree I needed to run some errands by myself, but Bree would have asked what they were. Maybe she would have accepted whatever I told her, but I couldn’t run the risk that she wouldn’t. I didn’t want her to worry, I just wanted her to focus on her good marks and look forward to even better ones.
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